Despite all the energy that has been spent in its dissection, “identity” remains an elusive entity – both as concept and practice. Historians argue unendingly over when the notion became an ingredient in political mobilisation, and political scientists wonder about its unique power to move masses to great acts of destruction.
The power of “identity” has waxed and waned over much of modern history and its current trajectory cannot be accurately predicted. In the last quarter-century though, “identity” has been an important, even an incendiary presence in world politics. It may be currently on low ebb, but all the portents suggest that “identity” could soon again rear its head with renewed malevolence.
As an aspect of life as really lived, “identity” is heavily infused with affect and emotion, and not easily addressed through rational processes of thought. “Who am I?” is a question that every thinking adult asks himself at least once in a lifetime. Perhaps because it involves the quest for an anchorage that will outlast finite individuals, the search for “identity” often remains unfulfilled.
Apart from the finitude of human existence, every individual has to cope with the constant awareness that the putative god of his beliefs has created only a limited expanse on planet earth for his habitation. The primary question of identity – “who am I?” – is typically conjoined with another one: “where do I belong?”
This is a quest in part for a physical milieu, a territorial expanse on god’s finite earth, where an individual can assert a rightful claim, mandated by his creator. And to establish this divinely ordained right, he also has to be sure that all who share his living space, share and honour his sense of identity too. “Where do I belong?” is a question not merely about the physical milieu, but also about the social network within the individual subsists.
Nationality provides an answer, contingent and deeply flawed, to both these deep questions of “identity”. And in the manner that it has been constructed, nationhood also comes with the affirmation of a strong territorial claim. A “nation” is in other words, the exclusive territorial domain of persons who share an “identity”, however that may be constructed.
The fusion of identity – understood as a primordial sense of belonging together -- with an exclusive territoriality conforms to the construction of the “nation” as a quasi-religious ideal, rather than a living entity continually being created and recreated by breathing, struggling and finite humans, trying their best to live in solidarity and mutual understanding. People who emerged out of colonialism in the latter half of the 20th century and constituted themselves into “nations”, swore an implicit oath, that they would allow no room for the identity battles that had blighted Europe’s pioneer nations for a century-and-a-half, and led to two so-called “world wars”. Both world wars were fought to resolve issues of identity and territorial conquest and involved deaths in the millions. But despite their appellation, neither involved the willing consent of more than a minuscule fraction of the world’s population.
Nationalism had already revealed its face as predatory imperialism by the time India began its career as an independent nation. The threat that newly independent nations faced as decolonization gained momentum following World War II, was of an inward collapse of nationalism and its transformation into a doctrine of exclusion and differential rights in highly diverse and plural societies. Despite the traumas of partition though, India began its life in freedom with the explicit resolve that it would not allow the baneful amalgam of identity and territoriality to blight the existence of its citizens.
That pledge has of course been repeatedly breached, though never with quite the same tragic and potentially fateful repercussions, as in the Ayodhya moment. For close to a decade, “Ayodhya” ceased being a physical location and a locus of popular faith. It became instead, a metaphor for all that could possibly go wrong in a post-colonial State, all that could threaten the coexistence of cultural diversities on the basis of a civic compact.
This book deals with that fevered phase of Indian politics from a variety of perspectives. It brings together the contributions of distinguished scholars, who joined the war of ideas that Ayodhya spawned. Written in the heat of battle, these contributions succeeded in opening up new vistas and enlarging the strategic options available to those committed to defeating the menace that stalked the land with little challenge from mainstream politics.
Ayodhya was the moment in independent India’s history, when a fresh identity was actively sought for a nation troubled by a history of colonialism and a bloody partition. Alongside the ghosts of history yet to be laid to rest, immediate worries from the sphere of politics were emerging. The early promise of the “developmental State”, which assured all citizens of equal opportunity and a chance for material advancement in the space of a generation or two, had been belied. Though there had been some efforts at retrieving State authority after a profound crisis in the mid-1960s, the conceit that the activist State could improve the lot of the poor by directing the use of resources from a high perch, was done in by an elite rebellion and a succession of economic crises through the 1970s.
The “Ayodhya” moment in Indian history begins in the early-1980s and the fever mounts and convulses the entire body politic in the years that follow, arriving at a final catharsis late in 1992.
Ayodhya then becomes a simmering menace, a background issue in every subsequent electoral contest, consigned there by deliberate design. After enacting its tableau of destruction, the political party that had made the issue its own, was following a different tack. It took an electoral debacle in 1993, almost exactly coinciding with the first anniversary of the demolition at Ayodhya, to cause this shift of strategy. That was when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which had grown enormously in national vote share all through the years of Ayodhya, grasped the galling reality, that the “identity” it was seeking to graft onto the diverse people who called themselves “Indians”, repelled just as surely as it attracted. The numerical balance, far from working to the advantage of the party that was invoking the faith of a putative “majority”, was rapidly turning adverse to its electoral calculations.
Ideological purity in the quest of the new Indian identity, defined as “Hindutva”, was swiftly abandoned. The BJP now determined that it was better served by an active courtship of regional parties, which shared none of its belief in a unitary cultural inheritance that the whole nation must necessarily subscribe to. This was a compulsion born out of electoral politics, since the BJP’s appeal outside the Hindi-speaking region remained limited, despite the effort to construct a broader coalition of social forces on the strength of its seemingly irresistible appeal to “Hindutva”.
Despite the restraints imposed by the policy of cohabitation, the BJP did try on various occasions to push through its unilateral agenda on Ayodhya. The most fateful such attempt was in the early months of 2002, when a campaign was crafted in the time-worn pattern, of mobilising the faithful in diverse parts of the country and getting them to converge at Ayodhya to claim the hallowed spot as the inalienable patrimony of the Hindu faith. The fervour was conspicuously lacking this time around, despite the deliberate effort to fuse the mobilisation with the growing backlash against “Islamic terrorism”, which began with the attacks on U.S. territory on September 11, 2001.
This involved importing the terms, the concepts and the entire discourse of the global superpower into the native idiom, making the so-called “war on terror” one of India’s central concerns. The years since the Ayodhya demolition had been a period of awakening for the Indian middle-class, now freshly aware of its undeniable destiny as a serious player on the world arena. Primordial bonds of Hindutva were momentarily forgotten, as the main elite preoccupation shifted to the negotiation of honourable terms of entry into global councils, if not as an accredited superpower, then at least as a reliable understudy to one. This required, in place of the primordial bonds that were actively sought just years before, a common commitment to civic virtue as the source of unity.
It was this civic pretence of the globalising Indian elite which collapsed with the last great atrocity of the Ayodhya campaign through March 2002, as rioters ruled the streets in Gujarat, killing, maiming and destroying at will, as the agencies of the State sat back in mute witness and officials tasked with enforcing the law partook gleefully in the pogrom.
Many of the essays in this volume originated as lectures in the months and years after the demolition that shook the nation. They continued as public interventions by concerned scholars – historians, economists and political scientists – who saw the Ayodhya campaign as a betrayal of all the values, scientific norms, and social commitments they had lived by. Some of them, written in the days after the Gujarat pogrom, bear reference to this greatest threat to the idea of secular India since the Ayodhya demolition.
From a scholarly point of view, these essays represent significant new explorations into the social and political processes through which “identity” is crafted. The term “Hindu” which seems so obvious in terms of its application to the religious majority in India today, is in reality, an identity that has evolved over time through the use of multiple symbols and campaigns.
Among the many challenges that secularism as a principle and a practice in India faced, was its supposed indifference to native cultural idioms. Ayodhya was nothing if not a campaign of outrageous inversions and logical effrontery. Thus, the BJP, which in every other party’s estimation, embodied the menace of communalism, was in its own self-image, a resolute votary of secularism -- only it purported to be the true and unspoiled face of secularism, unlike all other parties, which had chosen the term as a façade to disguise their hostility to the unique cultural inheritance of the Indian nation.
Secularism against primordial culture – that was the first of the challenges that the principle has to face. The received notion that social identities are as old as history has a powerful influence. Scholarly works that draw attention – as the historian E.J. Hobsbawm has done -- to the “shifting, fuzzy and ambiguous” nature of the criteria utilised in identity fixation, and lay bare the “artefact, invention and social engineering” that underlie the crystallisation of modern political identities, invariably elicit a reaction of outrage or disbelief. Certain claims of identity are considered so intrinsic to social existence, that any interrogation of their foundations would be dismissed without so much as a pretence at reasoned argument. It is this seemingly axiomatic, self-evident character of the “Hindu” appellation, and its apparent centrality to the existence of the vast majority in India, that contributed in great measure to the ideological appeal of the BJP.
The essays here draw out how the term “Hindu” referred for long, to an ascriptive identity and was used purely as a territorial marker, devoid of significant religious or cultural content. The constitution of Hinduism as a religion indeed, takes place in medieval times though arguably on an incomplete basis. The “Hindu community” is projected as a political entity, a viable collective with identifiable and shared beliefs and customs, only in modern times. This was one among many strands of thinking that propelled political mobilisation during India’s freedom struggle. As during medieval times, this assertion of a new religious orthodoxy, led to multiple social fissures and vigorous movements of resistance against the totalising and hegemonising tendencies it laid bare.
The hegemonic identity that Hindutva sought to craft was itself suggestive of origins in an ill-remembered chapter of 20th century history. And in its successful portrayal of a religious minority -- which had suffered systematised and institutionalised discrimination since independence -- as the beneficiary of undue official favour, the Hindutva political formations successfully emulated another feature of the brutal fascist interlude in Europe.
Despite the lapse of many years since they were written, the relevance of these essays remains undiminished, since the political pathogens that engendered that phase of crisis and struggle have not been banished. They have only mutated and acquired another form.
The battle to reconquer the birthplace of a founding hero of the Hindu faith lost its resonance once the offending monument that had supposedly usurped the hallowed space was effaced. A last effort to rekindle the fervour, ended in the bloodbath of Gujarat in 2002, and though this has seemingly brought the BJP local electoral advantages that it continues to milk till today, it suffered an intolerable degree of public odium both globally and on the broader political arena.
Hindutva political formations have ever since the days of Ayodhya, had wavering electoral fortunes, now winning, now losing. But in no national election has it won substantially more than a quarter of the votes cast nationwide. With all the alliances it has struck, mostly based on political convenience, its total share of the national vote has never remotely approached 40 percent. It assumed power in 1998 after an election which every other political formation did its best to lose. Unable to manage an alliance of diverse parties with nothing other than political convenience to bind them, it went into another mid-term electoral contest in just over a year. By then it had rearranged its strategic alliances and also created a nationwide mood of triumphalism after a successful military campaign against the efforts by Pakistan to rearrange the political topography of Jammu and Kashmir.
Towards the end of its first full term in national authority, the party of incendiary identity politics faced an opposition in disarray and a public mood of seeming euphoria -- orchestrated by a compliant corporate media -- over India’s successful debut in world councils as an emerging superpower. That cocky confidence was seriously dented through the election campaign and decisively demolished when the votes were counted. The next nation-wide general elections brought the Hindutva party an even more severe drubbing. On a superficial viewing, it might seem that the circumstances in national politics are greatly more settled, that identity politics has lost its currency and been subsumed under a new civic compact.
A nation, above all, has to be cohesive and to provide all its inhabitants with an equal sense of belonging. The moment an older social formation, such as an imperial colony, transforms itself into a “nation”, there is an implicit recognition that rules of status and hierarchy no longer apply. In their place, will come a new definition of how people associate among themselves, purely on the basis of a shared sense of identifying themselves with the highest ideals of nationhood.
Early constructions of the “nation” in the wake of the French Revolution, saw it as a solidarity of individuals based on an identity of political beliefs. But an alternative construct of the “nation” as an identity of primordial belonging was never far from the surface. Indeed, this construction has often overwhelmed the more generous understanding based on belief and commitment.
Yet, primordialism is never quite primordial; and traditions are rarely traditional. Identities are invented, as are traditions. The past is never dead. Indeed, as famously stated by an American novelist, it is not even past. It is constantly being created and recreated in the light of contemporary concerns. And identities are invented and reinvented as different social groups contend for power and influence in the modern political arena.
A nation remains viable so long as it is able to negotiate a viable civic compact between its diverse groups. But economic adversity invariably has a tendency to strain the best crafted civic compact. And the most enlightened civic compact that a modern liberal-democratic state has been able to put in place, is fundamentally premised upon the principle of respecting and safeguarding “cultural autonomy”. In periods of expanding economic opportunity, “identity” questions remain subdued since there is seemingly room for everybody to seek his place in the sun. “Identity” in fact remains unimportant, since the nation looks capable of credibly delivering on its promises of equality and opportunity.
In junctures of shrinking economic opportunity, “identity” is often offered by national states as an alternative anchorage for citizens to cling onto, when the promise of equality seems evasive. But this ceases to be a credible assurance, when “identity” is the basis for inequality – as with the religious minorities in India. National states often prove unable to influence deeper processes at work within civil society and to correct deep-seated patterns of discrimination. And majoritarian political groups can whip up their own brand of political turmoil by portraying “cultural autonomy” as an effort by privileged minorities to stay outside the mainstream of the nation while partaking of all its benefits.
An excavation of historical facts that strips away layers of ideological debris, would perhaps reveal that the basic concept of “cultural nationalism”, evolved in a negative dialectic with the popular, revolutionary striving for the democratic reform of the state. Lenin warned prior to the First World War, that the doctrine of “national cultural autonomy” was a distraction from the real task of consistently reforming the state in a democratic fashion – at least to the limits possible in a capitalist order – since that alone could ensure peace among the nationalities. Lenin used the term “nationalities” in a manner that was closely akin to ethnic groups, but his intent was clear. If the “State” was to be preserved against the fissiparous potentialities of “national” identities, it would need to be reformed in a thoroughly democratic fashion.
War and the willing participation in it of the putatively socialist parties of Europe – with the distinguished exception of the Bolsheviks – meant that “cultural nationalism” prevailed over the revolutionary democratic impulse. This is a history though, that does not begin with the First World War. Its antecedents could well be traced back a century and more.
Since it commenced its career as a full-blown idea in India, the politics of identity has mutated rapidly, from a state of bipolar opposition between two religious communities to one of proliferating multipolarity. It seemed for a while that the effort to knit together a country of diverse faiths, plural identities and syncretist traditions under the banner of Hindutva, would yield rich political dividends. But for those attuned to underlying social realities, it may have been apparent that these gains would be ephemeral.
The unitary “nation”, which both the Congress and the BJP promoted as a governing notion in their distinctive ways, has today become a wild congeries of conflicting interests. And the “State” which was supposed to embody the “nation” and its spirit, stands reduced to a shell. The coercive power of the State continues to play a vital role in confining the scope of dissent within clearly defined bounds, but there are large zones of the public domain where the State has ceded its monopoly of legitimate violence to locally dominant group. For the vast majority of the people of India, the apparatus of the State today is an alien presence, and the procedures of governance which were supposed to establish a framework of equal opportunity, are seen to serve no purpose other than the defence of privilege.
Hindutva, in its effort to construct a hegemonic identity for all Indians, unleashed a multitude of little identities. Conceptually, political thinking has responded to the proliferation of identities by devising the doctrine of casteism, which is considered quite distinct of communalism. Part of the rationale for this conceptual separation is the immediacy of recent political experience. The menace of Hindutva mobilisation, conveniently represented under the shorthand description of “mandir politics” began to acquire its most menacing proportions towards the end of the 1980s. Launched in full force in 1990, the ideology of “Mandal politics” which asserted quite a different viewpoint – that Hinduism, far from providing a common basis for action to retrieve the spirit of nationalism, was in fact a dagger in the soul of democracy – blunted the appeal of the mandir campaign.
The opposition seemed for a while to be fundamental – a Mandal versus mandir polarisation was undeniably one of the principal forces driving politics in the first half of the current decade. But the Mandal proponents turned out to be a fractious crew, yielding ground steadily to the advocates of the mandir.
The lower caste coalitions that cut at the foundations of Hindutva have proven all too prone to fission. And many of the breakaway groups, which remain anchored in specific configurations of caste loyalties in their pockets of influence, have made common cause with the BJP in a supposed quest of good governance.
When the polarisation was at its sharpest between Mandal and mandir, there may have been a case for viewing casteism and communalism as analogous principles that by a fortuitous twist, happened to be espoused by opposing social groups. Mandal seemed for a while to provide an opportunity for a broad-ranging coalition of the underprivileged castes that would infuse a new momentum into participative democracy. But in subsequent years, it has fallen away in another variety of sectarianism, that is easily portrayed as different only in degree rather than kind from communalism.
Yet there are basic differences. As a marker of social differentiation, the religious divide pervades all of national life, whereas a caste grouping, construed strictly in the sense of the endogamous grouping or the jati is a localised phenomenon. A caste conflict in one region remains confined there – it may have repercussions in other parts of the linguistic culture area, but scarcely beyond. Inter-religious strife in any one region, in contrast, strikes up malignant resonances in others. The experience of the Ayodhya campaign was all about how the violence against the religious minority in one part of the country could engender a contagion effect, spreading rapidly to others. But Gujarat in 2002 was about how a horrific pogrom remained a localised affair, engendering if anything, only a deep revulsion and a determination to prevent similar violence in other parts of the country.
Yet fundamental asymmetries in the use of State power to redress injustices remain. The Indian State has for too long tolerated the application of violence by agents in civil society against the minorities and those excluded from the high table of the “nation”. This has led to the widespread belief that the “nation” understood in terms of a civic compact, belongs to a relatively few, that its civic institutions do not work for the protection and benefit of the powerless.
The “global war on terror” has brought new threats. In the days of Ayodhya, ethnic and religious groups suffered discrimination and exclusion since they were held guilty of disregarding the primordial identity that made the Indian nation what it is. The stigma cast on these groups is now different in kind: from being in denial of what made India unique as a nation, they are now deemed to be in disregard – for cultural and historical reasons -- of the civic compact appropriate to the citizens of a rapidly emerging superpower. Hence, their proclivity to engage in terrorism, wanton acts of destruction targeted at the vital nodes of civic life in urban India. Needless to say, the State, that sat back in blissful indifference through the horrific violence of the Ayodhya days, is now known to apply the most draconian laws against terrorism, with little regard for due process.
A necessary basis for upholding the secular character of the State would be its ability to preserve its monopoly of legitimate violence in matters concerning the relations between religious communities, and of course, castes.
Secularism celebrates diversity, pluralism and tolerance, while nationalism as it has been handed down since its origins in the French Revolution, privileges homogeneity, conformance and solidarity against all who fail to meet the definitions of belonging.
Secularism in India is sui generis -- it is not a principle that has been institutionalised in politics but one that has to be fought for, a principle that is in continuous process of definition and refinement. It is a fight in which all resources have to be summoned from history, politics and the social sciences. The essays in this volume seek in some degree to do precisely that. They may not exhaust all the creative responses that came forth from the secular ranks to the challenge of communal politics, but they present a very representative cross-section. And though crafted in response to the very specific challenges that were posed over the last two decades, they will remain valuable resources for the struggles that lie ahead.
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Getting Real About Peace with Pakistan
Perhaps it is the environment of the Non-Aligned Summit that induces mood swings of great amplitude in India’s top political leadership. Perhaps there are other forces at work, quietly and unobtrusively, compelling shifts of strategy and direction in the engagement between India and her troubled western neighbour.
When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari in Yekaterinburg, Russia, on the sidelines of a regional summit in June, he made little effort to be polite. All he had to talk to Pakistan about, was the use of her soil by militant groups engaged in terrorist violence against India, he said, to great consternation, verging on outrage in Pakistan over his suspension of normal diplomatic niceties.
Though expectations were low, the Indian Prime Minister managed to turn his mid-July meeting with his Pakistani counterpart on the sidelines of the Non-Aligned Summit in Egypt, into a virtual feast of concord. Landing back in India, Manmohan Singh has found the glow fading rapidly, as he has confronted outraged cries of betrayal by the main opposition party and a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm within his own fold.
The art of diplomacy is built in part, on turning a delicate phrase to obscure the true intentions of both sides. But it has taken a special clumsiness in language to make a good outcome appear a near disaster. A key formulation of the Joint Statement that came out of the Prime Ministerial meeting at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Shaikh, is the supposed removal of the linkage between the “Composite Dialogue” the two nations have been engaged in, and their own battles against terrorism.
The “Composite Dialogue” has had a fitful career since it began more than a decade ago, but there is no disguising the fact that it has failed to address even the more tractable among the disputes that have bedevilled relations between India and Pakistan. That it has nevertheless acquired a mystique quite independent of its actual yield of political dividends, is a consequence of a peculiar kind of mindset in Indian thinking on Pakistan. Dialogue has become an end in itself and a reward for Pakistan showing sufficient seriousness in tackling militant groups using its soil for attacks on India.
The unstated premise here is that terrorism is India’s special concern and Pakistan’s special responsibility. And if Pakistan faced up to its responsibilities, India would be magnanimous enough to talk, though with little assurance of yielding any ground.
With this spurious linkage removed, Pakistan will now presumably continue to combat terrorism even if the rewards it obtains in terms of the returns on the composite dialogue are meagre. And the Sharm el-Shaikh statement does record significant forward steps, as well as a convergence of perceptions between the two countries in bringing to justice the perpetrators of last November’s terrorist outrage in Mumbai
There is in other words, a perfectly reasonable construction that can be placed on this aspect of the Sharm el-Shaikh joint statement, which undermines all claims that it constitutes a betrayal of India’s long-standing position. The political hysteria rather seems to be born of a quite different cause, indeed, with an aspect of it that mentions what has for long been unmentionable in Indian strategic circles.
An official statement issued after a high-level political engagement between national governments, cannot afford to leave stray sentences around, unattached by either logic or syntax with its main body. For this reason, it is difficult to give any credence to editorial comment, which has tended to portray the reference to the trouble in Balochistan province of Pakistan, as something devoid of long-term consequence. Immediately after affirming that the two governments would “share real time, credible and actionable information on any future terrorist events”, the statement records the Pakistan Prime Minister as having “mentioned” that certain “threats” existed in Balochistan and other areas. The implication, clearly, is that India could do something about these.
To nobody’s surprise, this one line in the statement has shocked and horrified the Indian intelligence community. Beyond all the simulated outrage over the supposed delinking of the composite dialogue from action against terrorism, this is the line that could have fateful political consequences in the years ahead.
The template for high-level political engagement between India and Pakistan has for years seemingly been cast in stone. India has held fast to the course of blaming Pakistan for every terrorist outrage that occurs on its soil. And Pakistan has said quite simply, that credible movement forward in the “core issue” of Kashmir would bring about a miraculous cessation of terrorist activity in India. Never before has the lethal political contest between the countries’ intelligence agencies, seeking to outdo the other in the pain it can inflict, been mentioned in a political communiqué. The Sharm el-Shaikh declaration alters that reality.
When India and Pakistan agreed, on the sidelines of the Havana Non-Aligned Summit of 2006, on a joint institutional mechanism to combat terrorism, there were scarcely concealed grimaces within the intelligence agencies, which saw the prospect of information sharing with counterparts across the border, as a fatal infringement of their autonomy. That mechanism has had expectedly, a rather dismal track record ever since. The Sharm el-Shaikh statement resurrects that process and idea and explicitly acknowledges that terrorism is both a shared concern and responsibility. That really is its long-term significance. Whether long-term dividends will flow from this new approach however, depends decisively on how far intelligence agencies on both sides of the bristling border can be compelled to accept new norms of political accountability.
When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari in Yekaterinburg, Russia, on the sidelines of a regional summit in June, he made little effort to be polite. All he had to talk to Pakistan about, was the use of her soil by militant groups engaged in terrorist violence against India, he said, to great consternation, verging on outrage in Pakistan over his suspension of normal diplomatic niceties.
Though expectations were low, the Indian Prime Minister managed to turn his mid-July meeting with his Pakistani counterpart on the sidelines of the Non-Aligned Summit in Egypt, into a virtual feast of concord. Landing back in India, Manmohan Singh has found the glow fading rapidly, as he has confronted outraged cries of betrayal by the main opposition party and a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm within his own fold.
The art of diplomacy is built in part, on turning a delicate phrase to obscure the true intentions of both sides. But it has taken a special clumsiness in language to make a good outcome appear a near disaster. A key formulation of the Joint Statement that came out of the Prime Ministerial meeting at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Shaikh, is the supposed removal of the linkage between the “Composite Dialogue” the two nations have been engaged in, and their own battles against terrorism.
The “Composite Dialogue” has had a fitful career since it began more than a decade ago, but there is no disguising the fact that it has failed to address even the more tractable among the disputes that have bedevilled relations between India and Pakistan. That it has nevertheless acquired a mystique quite independent of its actual yield of political dividends, is a consequence of a peculiar kind of mindset in Indian thinking on Pakistan. Dialogue has become an end in itself and a reward for Pakistan showing sufficient seriousness in tackling militant groups using its soil for attacks on India.
The unstated premise here is that terrorism is India’s special concern and Pakistan’s special responsibility. And if Pakistan faced up to its responsibilities, India would be magnanimous enough to talk, though with little assurance of yielding any ground.
With this spurious linkage removed, Pakistan will now presumably continue to combat terrorism even if the rewards it obtains in terms of the returns on the composite dialogue are meagre. And the Sharm el-Shaikh statement does record significant forward steps, as well as a convergence of perceptions between the two countries in bringing to justice the perpetrators of last November’s terrorist outrage in Mumbai
There is in other words, a perfectly reasonable construction that can be placed on this aspect of the Sharm el-Shaikh joint statement, which undermines all claims that it constitutes a betrayal of India’s long-standing position. The political hysteria rather seems to be born of a quite different cause, indeed, with an aspect of it that mentions what has for long been unmentionable in Indian strategic circles.
An official statement issued after a high-level political engagement between national governments, cannot afford to leave stray sentences around, unattached by either logic or syntax with its main body. For this reason, it is difficult to give any credence to editorial comment, which has tended to portray the reference to the trouble in Balochistan province of Pakistan, as something devoid of long-term consequence. Immediately after affirming that the two governments would “share real time, credible and actionable information on any future terrorist events”, the statement records the Pakistan Prime Minister as having “mentioned” that certain “threats” existed in Balochistan and other areas. The implication, clearly, is that India could do something about these.
To nobody’s surprise, this one line in the statement has shocked and horrified the Indian intelligence community. Beyond all the simulated outrage over the supposed delinking of the composite dialogue from action against terrorism, this is the line that could have fateful political consequences in the years ahead.
The template for high-level political engagement between India and Pakistan has for years seemingly been cast in stone. India has held fast to the course of blaming Pakistan for every terrorist outrage that occurs on its soil. And Pakistan has said quite simply, that credible movement forward in the “core issue” of Kashmir would bring about a miraculous cessation of terrorist activity in India. Never before has the lethal political contest between the countries’ intelligence agencies, seeking to outdo the other in the pain it can inflict, been mentioned in a political communiqué. The Sharm el-Shaikh declaration alters that reality.
When India and Pakistan agreed, on the sidelines of the Havana Non-Aligned Summit of 2006, on a joint institutional mechanism to combat terrorism, there were scarcely concealed grimaces within the intelligence agencies, which saw the prospect of information sharing with counterparts across the border, as a fatal infringement of their autonomy. That mechanism has had expectedly, a rather dismal track record ever since. The Sharm el-Shaikh statement resurrects that process and idea and explicitly acknowledges that terrorism is both a shared concern and responsibility. That really is its long-term significance. Whether long-term dividends will flow from this new approach however, depends decisively on how far intelligence agencies on both sides of the bristling border can be compelled to accept new norms of political accountability.
A new U.S. line on Palestine - don't bet on it
In perhaps one respect, U.S. President Barack Obama’s recent speech at Cairo lived up to its advance billing as a historic overture to the Islamic world. Hidden within its characteristic eloquence, were frequent admissions of error by the U.S., hitherto the unquestionable bearer of the mantle of righteousness. Obama fortunately is grounded in reality, rather than theological faith. That crucial difference already has made for some changes in the U.S. approach to the question of Palestine.
Beyond bogus analogies with the 1930s and dire imprecations about the futility of “appeasement”, what the Zionists and the U.S. right-wing found least acceptable about Obama’s speech was probably its use of the term “Palestine” at no fewer than two junctures. U.S. presidents in the past have in occasional moods of compassion, acknowledged the problem of “refugees”, though of no particular cultural or political stripe. They have in more recent times, grudgingly accepted that a people known as the “Palestinians” exist, with the undeniable right to constitute themselves into a state. Seldom has a U.S. president mentioned “Palestine” as a historical, a cultural and a putative political entity. And Obama’s reference to this identity was explicit: “Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel's right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine's”.
But where would this identity find the territorial space to overcome years of denial, where could it possibly establish itself and grow, when historic Palestine is now claimed by another people as its god-given right? The historian and political commentator Tony Judt describes Zionism today as “an uncompromising ethno-religious real estate pact with a partisan God, a pact that justifies any and all actions against real or imagined threats, critics, and enemies”. And indeed, to enforce this real estate pact, the partisan God has to lean on the support – financial, military and moral – of a superpower blinded by prejudice.
It was this prejudice that was expressed by Obama’s predecessor in a speech to the Israeli Knesset last May, marking the 60-year anniversary of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the creation of the Jewish state. “Israel's population may be just over 7 million”, said George Bush: “But when you confront terror and evil, you are 307 million strong, because America stands with you”. That was where all reason ceased: the seemingly unbreakable identification of Palestinians with terrorism.
The basic principles of the peace in Palestine were laid out in the “roadmap” to a permanent two-state solution, agreed between all major stakeholders in April 2003. Though a markedly asymmetric document, which expects the Palestinians to live up to virtually impossible criteria, Israel has baulked at accepting it, since it clearly requires the dismantling of all settlements built in occupied territories since March 2001 and the freezing of all further growth, including what is euphemistically referred to as “natural growth”.
Expectedly, within a year of the roadmap being agreed, it was amended through an “exchange of letters” between Bush and the then Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon. The headline news about this round of correspondence between the two soulmates in the struggle against “terrorism” was the Israeli plan to supposedly disengage from Gaza. But its true purpose was to secure the U.S.-Israeli compact on two points: that Palestinians were yet to establish their credentials as a partner for peace and that West Bank territory seized in the 1967 war of aggression would be sliced and carved up by Israel in a manner of its choosing.
In an unguarded moment following this exchange of letters, Sharon’s top aide, Dov Weissglass, spelt out what the purpose of the disengagement from Gaza was: to put the peace process in “formaldehyde” and take the prospect of a Palestinian state permanently off the bargaining table.
With Obama now stating categorically, though with seeming design, that the U.S. “does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements”, a question naturally arises about his attitude towards the ones that already exist as “facts on the ground”. Yet even with this element of ambiguity introduced with obvious regard for Israeli sensitivities, the arch-Zionist administration of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has brusquely dismissed the U.S. posture. Indeed, Netanyahu’s principal focus, ever since the Obama presidency began, has been to change the subject and solicit U.S. interest in a military strike to decapitate Iran’s supposed nuclear weapons programme.
Israel is counting on the endorsement for its plans against the Islamic Republic, of its secret allies in the Arab world – the conservative oil sheikhdoms, Jordan and the newly-elected Lebanese ruling coalition – which are all deeply worried about the growing strategic clout of Iran. Yet the U.S. is uneasily aware that its own recent misadventures have contributed to this outcome, and that a military engagement with Iran would recoil on it very badly, perhaps dooming it to certain failure in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover, in the moral sense, it would be yet another vivid demonstration of U.S. double-standards and contempt for the Arab and Islamic world, that the fading superpower can ill afford.
In his infamous interview explicating what the hidden purpose of the 2004 Bush-Sharon exchange of letters was, Dov Weissglass remarked that the endorsement of the sole superpower was all Israel needed to go its own way in unilaterally determining future frontiers in Palestine. The point was reaffirmed by Ehud Olmert, Prime Minister of Israel during Bush’s visit of May 2008: what the superpower says, goes. Somehow, that arrogant presumption has failed to survive the global tide of revulsion that Israel’s successive assaults on the Palestinians have engendered. Global public opinion though could be denied and fobbed off, but not the shockwaves of the global financial meltdown, which have crippled and perhaps, permanently incapacitated the sole superpower.
Yet, the more things change, the more they remain the same. When Denis Mitchell, the U.S. President’s special envoy for Palestine, visited Israel shortly after Obama’s Cairo speech, he was at pains to emphasise that despite all the seeming changes in the idiom, the U.S. remained bound by the Bush-Sharon exchange of letters. Evidence, if any were needed, that despite the bad odour that surrounds them, the Israel lobby and the neo-conservatives who have contrived a geostrategic mess of unprecedented proportions, still retain a degree of influence within the U.S.
Beyond bogus analogies with the 1930s and dire imprecations about the futility of “appeasement”, what the Zionists and the U.S. right-wing found least acceptable about Obama’s speech was probably its use of the term “Palestine” at no fewer than two junctures. U.S. presidents in the past have in occasional moods of compassion, acknowledged the problem of “refugees”, though of no particular cultural or political stripe. They have in more recent times, grudgingly accepted that a people known as the “Palestinians” exist, with the undeniable right to constitute themselves into a state. Seldom has a U.S. president mentioned “Palestine” as a historical, a cultural and a putative political entity. And Obama’s reference to this identity was explicit: “Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel's right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine's”.
But where would this identity find the territorial space to overcome years of denial, where could it possibly establish itself and grow, when historic Palestine is now claimed by another people as its god-given right? The historian and political commentator Tony Judt describes Zionism today as “an uncompromising ethno-religious real estate pact with a partisan God, a pact that justifies any and all actions against real or imagined threats, critics, and enemies”. And indeed, to enforce this real estate pact, the partisan God has to lean on the support – financial, military and moral – of a superpower blinded by prejudice.
It was this prejudice that was expressed by Obama’s predecessor in a speech to the Israeli Knesset last May, marking the 60-year anniversary of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the creation of the Jewish state. “Israel's population may be just over 7 million”, said George Bush: “But when you confront terror and evil, you are 307 million strong, because America stands with you”. That was where all reason ceased: the seemingly unbreakable identification of Palestinians with terrorism.
The basic principles of the peace in Palestine were laid out in the “roadmap” to a permanent two-state solution, agreed between all major stakeholders in April 2003. Though a markedly asymmetric document, which expects the Palestinians to live up to virtually impossible criteria, Israel has baulked at accepting it, since it clearly requires the dismantling of all settlements built in occupied territories since March 2001 and the freezing of all further growth, including what is euphemistically referred to as “natural growth”.
Expectedly, within a year of the roadmap being agreed, it was amended through an “exchange of letters” between Bush and the then Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon. The headline news about this round of correspondence between the two soulmates in the struggle against “terrorism” was the Israeli plan to supposedly disengage from Gaza. But its true purpose was to secure the U.S.-Israeli compact on two points: that Palestinians were yet to establish their credentials as a partner for peace and that West Bank territory seized in the 1967 war of aggression would be sliced and carved up by Israel in a manner of its choosing.
In an unguarded moment following this exchange of letters, Sharon’s top aide, Dov Weissglass, spelt out what the purpose of the disengagement from Gaza was: to put the peace process in “formaldehyde” and take the prospect of a Palestinian state permanently off the bargaining table.
With Obama now stating categorically, though with seeming design, that the U.S. “does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements”, a question naturally arises about his attitude towards the ones that already exist as “facts on the ground”. Yet even with this element of ambiguity introduced with obvious regard for Israeli sensitivities, the arch-Zionist administration of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has brusquely dismissed the U.S. posture. Indeed, Netanyahu’s principal focus, ever since the Obama presidency began, has been to change the subject and solicit U.S. interest in a military strike to decapitate Iran’s supposed nuclear weapons programme.
Israel is counting on the endorsement for its plans against the Islamic Republic, of its secret allies in the Arab world – the conservative oil sheikhdoms, Jordan and the newly-elected Lebanese ruling coalition – which are all deeply worried about the growing strategic clout of Iran. Yet the U.S. is uneasily aware that its own recent misadventures have contributed to this outcome, and that a military engagement with Iran would recoil on it very badly, perhaps dooming it to certain failure in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover, in the moral sense, it would be yet another vivid demonstration of U.S. double-standards and contempt for the Arab and Islamic world, that the fading superpower can ill afford.
In his infamous interview explicating what the hidden purpose of the 2004 Bush-Sharon exchange of letters was, Dov Weissglass remarked that the endorsement of the sole superpower was all Israel needed to go its own way in unilaterally determining future frontiers in Palestine. The point was reaffirmed by Ehud Olmert, Prime Minister of Israel during Bush’s visit of May 2008: what the superpower says, goes. Somehow, that arrogant presumption has failed to survive the global tide of revulsion that Israel’s successive assaults on the Palestinians have engendered. Global public opinion though could be denied and fobbed off, but not the shockwaves of the global financial meltdown, which have crippled and perhaps, permanently incapacitated the sole superpower.
Yet, the more things change, the more they remain the same. When Denis Mitchell, the U.S. President’s special envoy for Palestine, visited Israel shortly after Obama’s Cairo speech, he was at pains to emphasise that despite all the seeming changes in the idiom, the U.S. remained bound by the Bush-Sharon exchange of letters. Evidence, if any were needed, that despite the bad odour that surrounds them, the Israel lobby and the neo-conservatives who have contrived a geostrategic mess of unprecedented proportions, still retain a degree of influence within the U.S.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Why "human development" is finally about ... well humans
Khadija Haq and Richard Ponzio (editors), Pioneering the Human Development Revolution, An Intellectual Biography of Mahbub ul Haq, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2008, pp xvi + 266, Rs 595, ISBN 019569513-5.
V.V. Bhatt, Perspectives on Development, Memoirs of a Development Economist, Academic Foundation, New Delhi, pp 135, Rs 595, ISBN 13: 978-81-7188-683-8.
These are disparate books, united by the common feature that they incorporate in varying degrees, a series of reflections on aspects of the “development” process. One is told through the retrospective assessment of the life and work of a man acknowledged as a global leader of thought on the issue. The other is a first-person narration, anecdotal and loosely assembled, by an individual who over four decades, witnessed development policy in its formulation and implementation, from a vantage position within the financial sector.
“Development” became a global concern following World War II and the liberation of vast numbers of people from the fetters of colonialism. A quantitatively defined notion to begin with, development acquired in the following years, a distinct political facet. In between stood the human dimension. It is this conceptual evolution that is captured in the lifespan of Mahbub ul Haq, whose story is narrated by close associates in one of these volumes, published to coincide with the ten-year anniversary of his death.
What was the intellectual trajectory that brought an avid proponent of “growth” in its barest and most arid statistical form, to the realisation that living, laughing and most often, suffering humanity was the rightful focus and centre of all economic policy? How did Haq’s experiences mould his restless search for new conceptual avenues to explore in the struggle against poverty and all its degrading effects? And how did he fashion his relentless advocacy for a fundamental shift in the idiom of thought on economic policy? To answer these questions is to re-enact the voyage of discovery of one of the most important public intellectuals to have emerged from the South Asian region. And it is a voyage that is with great understanding and empathy, reconstructed in this volume edited by Khadija Haq – Mahbub ul Haq’s widow -- and Richard Ponzio, a long-time collaborator.
What is it about the aggregate measure of economic “growth” that makes it a very poor indicator of welfare? The answer today is obvious: that we need to worry not merely about the quantum of growth but also about how this increment in overall social product is distributed. This realisation dawned on Haq after he had crafted three five-year plans for the Pakistan government and seen them through with gratifyingly positive results. By the late-1960s, though, he began to realise that the years of achievement were beginning to “crumble”, not because “the pace of growth in the gross national product had been insufficient, but in spite of an enviable record of growth”.
This was the moment of awakening that led to Haq’s famous speech in April 1968, a moment in South Asian history that has justly become famous. In claiming that 22 families were reaping all the benefits from Pakistan’s economic growth, Haq was speaking out against the very government he was serving then in a senior economic policy position. The speech was also a serious auto-critique, since Haq had been responsible for most of the policies that had contributed to this undesirable outcome. We learn from the Haq-Ponzia volume, that the “22 families” speech was based on rigorous research and documentation, though one of the contributors suggests that it was perhaps methodologically a little flawed. The point nonetheless was made: that the seriously skewed distribution of gains from Pakistan’s economic growth, was threatening to undermine the whole process of planned development.
This was a conjuncture when, just around two decades since their shared independence from colonialism, both India and Pakistan were going through a phase of radicalisation in conceptual thinking. Major commercial banks in India were nationalised in 1969 and as we learn from Bhatt’s volume, this was followed by efforts to curb “what was called the concentration of economic power of large business houses”. As with Haq in Pakistan, the economist R.K. Hazari – like Bhatt a Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India – provided the theoretical and empirical research for this policy orientation. And as with Haq in Pakistan, Hazari’s study was rigorous in many respects, though Bhatt found the policy conclusions it pointed to, “populist” and even rather disagreeable.
The chroniclers of Haq’s intellectual evolution do not pause to pronounce their own judgment, though they do record that the “22 families” speech became rather unfortunately, the precursor to a phase of ferocious political polemic without quite so serious an effort at institutional reform. Haq had -- perhaps unwittingly -- unleashed the kind of political forces that he could not be comfortable with. With the collapse of the Ayub Khan regime in 1970, Haq left Pakistan to take up an assignment with the World Bank as chief of the Policy Planning Department. He responded to a call from his homeland in the mid-1970s and briefly considered taking up a policy role again. But he was trapped in irreconcilable differences with the radical Finance Minister, Mubashir Hassan and chose to return to the World Bank, rather than take on Hassan’s intent to effect a total redistribution of wealth.
Back at the World Bank, Haq contributed significantly to the “poverty orientation” that the institution adopted during Robert McNamara’s tenure as president. Though the World Bank by this time had outgrown the traditional assumption that poverty reduction would be an axiomatic outcome of a high and rapid growth trajectory, there was an influential stream of thought within, which argued for a minimal departure from the orthodoxy. There were ways of tailoring the growth process to optimise the impact on poverty, this argument went. And growth strategies needed to be mindful of the need to maximise employment opportunities, enabling the poor to draw optimal benefit out of available jobs. A significant dent on poverty would follow this slight recalibration of economic strategies.
Haq and his collaborators thought that this approach still took too much for granted. The essence of poverty, they argued, was a dearth of human capital. And the basic characteristic of a poor economy was an absence of social infrastructure. Devoid of these essential underpinnings, the poor would risk being swept aside by any growth strategy, even one ostensibly tailored to their needs.
This debate conducted within the policy circles of the World Bank, as also in the wider academic terrain, presages the “capabilities” approach to development, which focuses on the enhancement of human skills, abilities, aptitudes, attitudes – capabilities in the broadest sense -- rather than merely increasing the production of “commodities”. Amartya Sen, India’s Nobel laureate economist and a close friend and ideological ally of Haq’s, was to lay down the basics of the approach in a series of lectures at the University of Amsterdam in 1982, published formally as a monograph under the title “Commodities and Capabilities” in 1985. In the following years, Sen and Haq began a phase of fruitful collaboration, in evolving the concept of “human development”.
By this time though, the World Bank was overtaken by tasks of seemingly greater urgency, which had less to do with “development” than with keeping the world financial system functioning. Developing countries had binged out on the easy availability of credit from the recycling of dollar surpluses earned by petroleum exporting countries through the 1970s. By the early-1980s, these countries had begun to choke on that legacy of riotous living. Interest rates, driven up sharply by the curious mix of fiscal voodoo and monetary orthodoxy inaugurated by the U.S. in 1981, had begun to bleed the export and repayment capacity of all these nations. Driven to the verge of panic by the prospect of a catastrophic collapse of the global economy, the World Bank shifted its attention from poverty reduction to “structural adjustment”.
Though “structural adjustment” as a policy approach defies easy summation, it is fair to characterise it as a strategy of weaning out of the economic process those deemed incapable of participation. “Getting the prices right” is considered the key component of structural adjustment, since any deviation from what would be the “natural” level of prices, would trigger a process of competitive bargaining, culminating in an inflationary spiral of prices.
Haq had thought of a process of empowering the poor and making them participants in the development process. He worked – ever since leaving the World Bank in 1980 to rejoin the Pakistan government in an honoured position – to make that a reality. He achieved significant positive results, as by consistently emphasising the merits of education and arguing that all options should be used in bringing every child within the educational system. In this pursuit, he argued the case for state funding of the mosque schools -- which today have acquired the terribly negative connotation of being the “madrassas” that breed terrorism – but in his time were regarded as the sensible way of bringing civil society and the state together in the common endeavour of education for the masses.
Haq was, according to this volume launched in his honour, always a supporter of “economic liberalisation”. Unfortunately, the volume does not quite draw the linkages between “economic liberalisation” and human development as a policy priority. Economic liberalisation undoubtedly, is an attractive philosophy. It has an etymological relationship with the notion of “liberty”. And it would be completely exceptionable as policy if it were not thoroughly inattentive, in its implementation, to the inequalities that make the breaking down of all barriers between countries and classes and regions, a losing bargain for the poor.
The revolution spoken of in Haq’s intellectual biography remains yet unfinished. Indeed, whatever progress has been made towards the goals of the revolution in policy thinking that he pioneered, stands in grave danger of being reversed by the prevalent circumstances in the world economy, conveniently encapsulated in the term “global meltdown”. This is a term which fails to convey a true image of the scale of human suffering that it has unleashed and could further unleash.
The headline news about the current economic meltdown is the number of jobs that are being lost. Each job loss is a diminution from the pool of human welfare, which damages the cause of human development that much more. And economic policy makers with all their tools of analysis, are yet to come up with a credible response. So what are the tools that are available for the analysis of human development and its correlation with overall growth rates?
Judging from Bhatt’s account, these tools are not very well developed, since he still seems rather dependent, to a debilitating degree, on concepts such as “capital” and “labour” – notions in economic theory that deny active human agency. Distilling out a central message from his experience in India’s financial institutions and senior policy positions, Bhatt suggests that the original sin of Indian development policy was the initiation of “certain negative processes, inimical to the vigorous functioning of private enterprise”. In other words, the supposed inauguration of the “licence-permit raj” as it is fashionably called, really is where the problem originates.
Bhatt indeed, believes that the “liberalisation” of the early-1990s has brought India closer to its true growth potential. That surely is a judgment that will not survive the current economic meltdown.
Poverty is not a numbers game, nor is it a statistical phenomenon. For millions, poverty is a numbing reality that kills hope and destroys human possibilities. Counting the poor has become a policy preoccupation in recent decades and most so since the World Bank took custody of the global anti-poverty campaign.
Even within those inclined to take a mechanical view of poverty, there has been an argument about broadening the definition of the term. There has yet been no credible effort within policy circles to humanise the term, to invest it with a sense of affect, to recognise that those who are targeted for benevolence by international aid agencies, also need to be recognised as individuals who are agents of their own destiny.
It needs to be asked if the processes of “development” conceived of here are about the poor regaining the rights and freedoms that have long been denied them, or of the enlightened few in the world community ascending to a state of grace by “lifting” people out of poverty – as the physical metaphor popularised by the World Bank would have it. Marginalisation is not just about physical deprivation, but of vast numbers of people being denied the right and the freedom to participate in the life of a community and a nation. The challenge of development is not merely about characterising the poor as the inert category of “labour” or about targeting them for specially benevolent attention. It is about recognising their humanity and defeating all social forces that deny them this basic entitlement.
V.V. Bhatt, Perspectives on Development, Memoirs of a Development Economist, Academic Foundation, New Delhi, pp 135, Rs 595, ISBN 13: 978-81-7188-683-8.
These are disparate books, united by the common feature that they incorporate in varying degrees, a series of reflections on aspects of the “development” process. One is told through the retrospective assessment of the life and work of a man acknowledged as a global leader of thought on the issue. The other is a first-person narration, anecdotal and loosely assembled, by an individual who over four decades, witnessed development policy in its formulation and implementation, from a vantage position within the financial sector.
“Development” became a global concern following World War II and the liberation of vast numbers of people from the fetters of colonialism. A quantitatively defined notion to begin with, development acquired in the following years, a distinct political facet. In between stood the human dimension. It is this conceptual evolution that is captured in the lifespan of Mahbub ul Haq, whose story is narrated by close associates in one of these volumes, published to coincide with the ten-year anniversary of his death.
What was the intellectual trajectory that brought an avid proponent of “growth” in its barest and most arid statistical form, to the realisation that living, laughing and most often, suffering humanity was the rightful focus and centre of all economic policy? How did Haq’s experiences mould his restless search for new conceptual avenues to explore in the struggle against poverty and all its degrading effects? And how did he fashion his relentless advocacy for a fundamental shift in the idiom of thought on economic policy? To answer these questions is to re-enact the voyage of discovery of one of the most important public intellectuals to have emerged from the South Asian region. And it is a voyage that is with great understanding and empathy, reconstructed in this volume edited by Khadija Haq – Mahbub ul Haq’s widow -- and Richard Ponzio, a long-time collaborator.
What is it about the aggregate measure of economic “growth” that makes it a very poor indicator of welfare? The answer today is obvious: that we need to worry not merely about the quantum of growth but also about how this increment in overall social product is distributed. This realisation dawned on Haq after he had crafted three five-year plans for the Pakistan government and seen them through with gratifyingly positive results. By the late-1960s, though, he began to realise that the years of achievement were beginning to “crumble”, not because “the pace of growth in the gross national product had been insufficient, but in spite of an enviable record of growth”.
This was the moment of awakening that led to Haq’s famous speech in April 1968, a moment in South Asian history that has justly become famous. In claiming that 22 families were reaping all the benefits from Pakistan’s economic growth, Haq was speaking out against the very government he was serving then in a senior economic policy position. The speech was also a serious auto-critique, since Haq had been responsible for most of the policies that had contributed to this undesirable outcome. We learn from the Haq-Ponzia volume, that the “22 families” speech was based on rigorous research and documentation, though one of the contributors suggests that it was perhaps methodologically a little flawed. The point nonetheless was made: that the seriously skewed distribution of gains from Pakistan’s economic growth, was threatening to undermine the whole process of planned development.
This was a conjuncture when, just around two decades since their shared independence from colonialism, both India and Pakistan were going through a phase of radicalisation in conceptual thinking. Major commercial banks in India were nationalised in 1969 and as we learn from Bhatt’s volume, this was followed by efforts to curb “what was called the concentration of economic power of large business houses”. As with Haq in Pakistan, the economist R.K. Hazari – like Bhatt a Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India – provided the theoretical and empirical research for this policy orientation. And as with Haq in Pakistan, Hazari’s study was rigorous in many respects, though Bhatt found the policy conclusions it pointed to, “populist” and even rather disagreeable.
The chroniclers of Haq’s intellectual evolution do not pause to pronounce their own judgment, though they do record that the “22 families” speech became rather unfortunately, the precursor to a phase of ferocious political polemic without quite so serious an effort at institutional reform. Haq had -- perhaps unwittingly -- unleashed the kind of political forces that he could not be comfortable with. With the collapse of the Ayub Khan regime in 1970, Haq left Pakistan to take up an assignment with the World Bank as chief of the Policy Planning Department. He responded to a call from his homeland in the mid-1970s and briefly considered taking up a policy role again. But he was trapped in irreconcilable differences with the radical Finance Minister, Mubashir Hassan and chose to return to the World Bank, rather than take on Hassan’s intent to effect a total redistribution of wealth.
Back at the World Bank, Haq contributed significantly to the “poverty orientation” that the institution adopted during Robert McNamara’s tenure as president. Though the World Bank by this time had outgrown the traditional assumption that poverty reduction would be an axiomatic outcome of a high and rapid growth trajectory, there was an influential stream of thought within, which argued for a minimal departure from the orthodoxy. There were ways of tailoring the growth process to optimise the impact on poverty, this argument went. And growth strategies needed to be mindful of the need to maximise employment opportunities, enabling the poor to draw optimal benefit out of available jobs. A significant dent on poverty would follow this slight recalibration of economic strategies.
Haq and his collaborators thought that this approach still took too much for granted. The essence of poverty, they argued, was a dearth of human capital. And the basic characteristic of a poor economy was an absence of social infrastructure. Devoid of these essential underpinnings, the poor would risk being swept aside by any growth strategy, even one ostensibly tailored to their needs.
This debate conducted within the policy circles of the World Bank, as also in the wider academic terrain, presages the “capabilities” approach to development, which focuses on the enhancement of human skills, abilities, aptitudes, attitudes – capabilities in the broadest sense -- rather than merely increasing the production of “commodities”. Amartya Sen, India’s Nobel laureate economist and a close friend and ideological ally of Haq’s, was to lay down the basics of the approach in a series of lectures at the University of Amsterdam in 1982, published formally as a monograph under the title “Commodities and Capabilities” in 1985. In the following years, Sen and Haq began a phase of fruitful collaboration, in evolving the concept of “human development”.
By this time though, the World Bank was overtaken by tasks of seemingly greater urgency, which had less to do with “development” than with keeping the world financial system functioning. Developing countries had binged out on the easy availability of credit from the recycling of dollar surpluses earned by petroleum exporting countries through the 1970s. By the early-1980s, these countries had begun to choke on that legacy of riotous living. Interest rates, driven up sharply by the curious mix of fiscal voodoo and monetary orthodoxy inaugurated by the U.S. in 1981, had begun to bleed the export and repayment capacity of all these nations. Driven to the verge of panic by the prospect of a catastrophic collapse of the global economy, the World Bank shifted its attention from poverty reduction to “structural adjustment”.
Though “structural adjustment” as a policy approach defies easy summation, it is fair to characterise it as a strategy of weaning out of the economic process those deemed incapable of participation. “Getting the prices right” is considered the key component of structural adjustment, since any deviation from what would be the “natural” level of prices, would trigger a process of competitive bargaining, culminating in an inflationary spiral of prices.
Haq had thought of a process of empowering the poor and making them participants in the development process. He worked – ever since leaving the World Bank in 1980 to rejoin the Pakistan government in an honoured position – to make that a reality. He achieved significant positive results, as by consistently emphasising the merits of education and arguing that all options should be used in bringing every child within the educational system. In this pursuit, he argued the case for state funding of the mosque schools -- which today have acquired the terribly negative connotation of being the “madrassas” that breed terrorism – but in his time were regarded as the sensible way of bringing civil society and the state together in the common endeavour of education for the masses.
Haq was, according to this volume launched in his honour, always a supporter of “economic liberalisation”. Unfortunately, the volume does not quite draw the linkages between “economic liberalisation” and human development as a policy priority. Economic liberalisation undoubtedly, is an attractive philosophy. It has an etymological relationship with the notion of “liberty”. And it would be completely exceptionable as policy if it were not thoroughly inattentive, in its implementation, to the inequalities that make the breaking down of all barriers between countries and classes and regions, a losing bargain for the poor.
The revolution spoken of in Haq’s intellectual biography remains yet unfinished. Indeed, whatever progress has been made towards the goals of the revolution in policy thinking that he pioneered, stands in grave danger of being reversed by the prevalent circumstances in the world economy, conveniently encapsulated in the term “global meltdown”. This is a term which fails to convey a true image of the scale of human suffering that it has unleashed and could further unleash.
The headline news about the current economic meltdown is the number of jobs that are being lost. Each job loss is a diminution from the pool of human welfare, which damages the cause of human development that much more. And economic policy makers with all their tools of analysis, are yet to come up with a credible response. So what are the tools that are available for the analysis of human development and its correlation with overall growth rates?
Judging from Bhatt’s account, these tools are not very well developed, since he still seems rather dependent, to a debilitating degree, on concepts such as “capital” and “labour” – notions in economic theory that deny active human agency. Distilling out a central message from his experience in India’s financial institutions and senior policy positions, Bhatt suggests that the original sin of Indian development policy was the initiation of “certain negative processes, inimical to the vigorous functioning of private enterprise”. In other words, the supposed inauguration of the “licence-permit raj” as it is fashionably called, really is where the problem originates.
Bhatt indeed, believes that the “liberalisation” of the early-1990s has brought India closer to its true growth potential. That surely is a judgment that will not survive the current economic meltdown.
Poverty is not a numbers game, nor is it a statistical phenomenon. For millions, poverty is a numbing reality that kills hope and destroys human possibilities. Counting the poor has become a policy preoccupation in recent decades and most so since the World Bank took custody of the global anti-poverty campaign.
Even within those inclined to take a mechanical view of poverty, there has been an argument about broadening the definition of the term. There has yet been no credible effort within policy circles to humanise the term, to invest it with a sense of affect, to recognise that those who are targeted for benevolence by international aid agencies, also need to be recognised as individuals who are agents of their own destiny.
It needs to be asked if the processes of “development” conceived of here are about the poor regaining the rights and freedoms that have long been denied them, or of the enlightened few in the world community ascending to a state of grace by “lifting” people out of poverty – as the physical metaphor popularised by the World Bank would have it. Marginalisation is not just about physical deprivation, but of vast numbers of people being denied the right and the freedom to participate in the life of a community and a nation. The challenge of development is not merely about characterising the poor as the inert category of “labour” or about targeting them for specially benevolent attention. It is about recognising their humanity and defeating all social forces that deny them this basic entitlement.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Impunity and Legal Cases -- A fragment from a report on press freedom in Sri Lanka
Impunity continues to be the norm where attacks on journalists in Sri Lanka are concerned. Since the murder of Dharmaratnam Sivaram “Taraki” in April 2005, there have been at least 14 other cases of journalists and media workers reported murdered. The International Mission was unable to identify any one case among these that had been brought to the stage of prosecution. The authorities are also yet to identify, let alone apprehend or bring to trial, the perpetrators of recent abduction attempts and armed attacks on journalists, in particular in the cases of Namal Perera in the heart of Colombo and Radhika Devakumar in Batticaloa.
The International Mission was told that little progress had been made in the investigations into the “disappearances” of two journalists -- S. Ramachandran and V. Nimalarajah -- in the Jaffna peninsula . Hopes are now receding that they will ever be found alive.
No accountability for verbal abuse and physical intimidation
Apart from these specific cases, a signal seems to have been sent from the highest political level that verbal abuse of media workers as well as physical intimidation and attacks are fair tactics. Labour Minister Mervyn Silva, a close political ally of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, has been a singularly conspicuous figure in this respect. Following a December 2007 incident when he stormed into the premises of the state-owned broadcaster, the Sri Lanka Rupavahini Corporation (SLRC), and roughed up the director of news supposedly for his failure to cover an event he had addressed, Silva has had several bruising encounters with the media community. He has in particular targeted personnel of the Maharajah TV group, which broadcasts in three languages and controls the top-rated Sinhala channel, Sirasa. The minister’s ire may have been aroused by the strong stand that Sirasa TV took after the SLRC incident, in demanding some form of accountability from him.
Silva has indicated at three public functions where he has since been present, that Sirasa TV personnel would be unwelcome to cover his public engagements. At the most recent such incident on August 4, 2008, the minister attacked a Sirasa TV crew at the venue of a public function. Sirasa TV has filed a fundamental rights case against the minister, as too has one of the aggrieved staff members. Silva meanwhile led a demonstration outside the offices of the TV station, demanding that its broadcast licence be revoked. At the first hearing of the case against him, on August 21, the minister was granted bail and emerged from the court premises reportedly hurling abuse at the TV channel. He has since persisted in using explicit language associating the channel with the Tamil insurgency movement in the north of the country.
On November 16, the Colombo High Court indicted Silva and some of his political associates for the crimes of illegal assembly, assault and robbery. The International Mission welcomes this judicial intervention and calls on the Sri Lankan leadership to enforce some measure of political accountability till the judicial process is completed.
Terrorism law to persecute journalists
One of the most worrying aspects of the evolving legal environment for the media in the country is the use of terrorism legislation to prosecute journalists.
On March 6, 2008, B. Jasiharan and his wife V. Vallarmathy were arrested from the office of the E-Kwality printing press which also housed the offices of the www.outreachsl.com website. The following day, J.S. Tissainayagam, the editor of the website, went to the premises of the Terrorism Investigation Division (TID) of the Sri Lankan police, to inquire into the detention of the two. Tissainayagam himself was taken into custody along with a colleague, K. Wijayasinghe, who had accompanied him to the TID offices. Ranga and Udayan, a cameraman and videographer for the website, were arrested the same day.
The arrests were confirmed unofficially late that night, after repeated inquiries from Tissainayagam’s family, with the summary explanation that all the detainees were LTTE cadre against whom credible cases of terrorism could be made out. Early the next morning, Tissainayagam’s home was raided by TID officials, who searched it thoroughly without a warrant, and seized a NorthEastern Monthly Magazine that Tissainayagam used to edit. This Magazine ceased to be printed after June 2007.
At 10 p.m., Tissainayagam’s wife Ronnate, was allowed briefly to visit and talk to him, though under the watchful eyes of two TID officials, who have been present at all subsequent visits. Family members of all three detainees who have sought to visit and arrange legal assistance, have often been threatened. On March 11 and 12, Jasiharan’s sister was reportedly jostled and manhandled as she left home. On the second occasion she was pushed into a white van – a symbol of abductions and lawlessness in Sri Lanka – and held captive briefly, during which time she was warned that her whole family could be picked up by the TID.
Wijayasinghe, Ranga and Udayan were released without charge on March 19, the day that Tissainayagam filed a Fundamental Rights Case in the Supreme Court.
The prosecution has continually run foul of the law in its handling of the case and yet managed to avoid any form of stricture. The detention order for Tissainayagam was issued only on March 27, the day the Supreme Court, hearing a fundamental rights application filed on his behalf, asked for it. A lawyer representing Jasiharan petitioned the court on May 27, claiming that his client had been tortured and demanding a medical examination.
Emergency Regulations in force in Sri Lanka allow the detention of anybody for up to 90 days without judicial authorisation. But following that the detainee has necessarily to be produced before a judicial officer for further extension of custody. In the case of Tissainayagam, Vallarmathy and Jasiharan, the TID ignored repeated petitions that they be produced in court, citing certain “administrative difficulties”.
On June 30, when the accused were produced in court after over 110 days in detention, the magistrate ruled, without assigning any clear reason, that they should be kept in the custody of the TID while investigations continued. An urgent request for medical attention in the case of Tissainayagam, who was suffering from a serious eye condition, was admitted. But an appeal for bail for all three accused was rejected.
An indictment against all three defendants was filed before the High Court of Colombo on August 13. Charges were formally laid under Sri Lanka’s Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) – a draconian law that has remained on the statute books despite being introduced in 1979 as an ostensibly temporary measure – on August 25. The charges against Tissainayagam were: bringing discredit to the government, inciting racial and ethnic animosities, through material published in the North East Herald, and raising funds through non-governmental sources in pursuit of terrorist objectives. The charges against Jasiharan was aiding and abetting Tissainayagam and Vallarmathy was charged with the offence of aiding and abetting her husband Jasiharan to further terrorism.
On September 9, the charge of “bringing discredit to the government” was deleted and Tissainayagam and Jasiharan were charged, for the ostensibly criminal offences of editing and printing the magazine.
The evidence produced by the prosecution included two articles published in the Northeastern Monthly. The first of these which was run as an editorial without a byline in the July 2006 issue stated that “the inability to protect its citizens within the areas it controls has caused Sri Lanka international embarrassment”. It posed the question of what the future would be of Tamils in government-controlled areas of the northeast of Sri Lanka. “It is fairly obvious”, the editorial argued, “that the government is not going to offer them any protection (since in fact) it is the state security forces that are the main perpetrator of the killings”.
The second article, published under Tissainayagam’s initials in November 2006, drew attention to the deteriorating humanitarian situation in the eastern provincial town of Vaharai, which had allegedly been subjected to a sustained campaign of artillery and aerial bombardment as Sri Lankan forces sought to recapture it from Tamil Tiger rebels. Tissainayagam commented that the government was not doing this “without design”. “By trapping the Tamil population in Vaharai”, he argued, the government hoped to create a “human shield” that would prevent any Tamil Tiger offensives further south. “At the same time, starving and bombing Tamil civilians in Vaharai (would) create disaffection between them and the LTTE leading to friction and ill-will. Such internal quarrels (would) act as insulator for the government in the highly vulnerable East”.
Apart from these two articles, the prosecution placed as evidence before the court, the alleged confessions made by Tissainayagam and Jasiharan while under police custody and the personal affidavits of 15 officials of the TID. Two judicial medical officers (JMOs), who had examined Jasiharan for evidence of torture, were listed as witnesses in his case.
Informed observers believe that there is a deep political vendetta behind Tissainayagam’s arrest and prosecution, arising from critical commentary he published in February 2008 on the shoddy processes of information gathering adopted by an officially constituted body called the Committee to Inquire into Allegations of Abductions and Recruitments of Children for Use in Armed Conflict. Comprising Sri Lanka’s Minister for Human Rights and the Secretary in its Ministry of Justice, the report of the Committee was presented at a meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Council in February, refuting the widespread belief that Tamil militias aligned with the government of Sri Lanka in the north and the east were recruiting child soldiers in large numbers.
Tissainayagam’s commentary recorded that the report was based on a visit to Batticaloa lasting four hours by the Secretary in the Justice Ministry and that its basis in reality was quite weak. The article reportedly caused a certain degree of embarrassment to Sri Lanka’s Human Rights Minister, who was then visiting Geneva to present his report before the U.N. Human Rights Council.
In dealing with the charges laid against Tissainayagam and his co-defendants, the defence initially sought to dismiss the charges on the grounds that they pertained to a period of time when the PTA was not operative. It was agreed following the ceasefire agreement between the government and the Tamil Tigers in February 2002, that PTA would no longer be operative. Since the ceasefire was formally abrogated only in January 2008, the charges against Tissainayagam and his co-defendants amounted to a retroactive application of the PTA to a period when it was not operative.
By late-October, the prosecution finished its presentation of arguments. At this writing, the court was hearing evidence led by the defence on whether the evidence against Tissainayagam was admissible under law. With all said and done, there is little doubt that the prosecution of Tissainayagam, Jasiharan and Vallarmathy stands as a direct threat to media freedom.
Minister aggrieved by investigative report, lays charges of extortion
Arthur Wamanan, a reporter at The Sunday Leader, was detained by Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the Colombo police in October 2007, on charges of extortion levelled by Mano Wijeratne, Sri Lanka’s Minister for Enterprise Development.
The Sunday Leader had on October 21, 2007, carried an article by Wamanan which reported that Wijeratne’s wife had while on an overseas tour, incurred roaming charges on her telephone amounting to roughly Sri Lankan Rupees (SLR) 87,000, which his ministry had borne, despite it being an inadmissible perk under government rules. On October 19, well before sending his story to press, Wamanan had called Wijeratne from a phone registered in his mother’s name, to obtain his account of the story.
On the day the story was published, the minister filed a case of extortion against Wamanan, accusing him of having demanded a sum of SLR 5 million as the price of not publishing the story. He cited the call records on his cell-phone as evidence. On October 23, minister Wijeratne attacked Wamanan by name in the Sri Lankan parliament. The CID arrested Wamanan the following day, briefly detaining his mother too.
At the first bail hearing, the city magistrate observed: “Media are there to report on what is happening in society. Just because some people are embarrassed by a news report, the media must not be subjected to restriction”.
The prosecution then argued that Wamanan, a 21-year old Tamil youth just beginning his career in journalism, did not deserve bail on account of his ethnicity.
Wamanan was granted bail, but the case against him continues. The CID has reportedly referred the phone used by the accused to its computer analysis section and at the most recent hearing on November 7, 2008, pleaded for more time to furnish details before the court.
Interrogation of journalists and the implicit threat of legal action
The mission has also learnt that top officials of Sirasa TV channel have repeatedly been called in for questioning by the CID of the Sri Lanka police in recent months. Typically, these sessions follow some incident of terrorist strikes and the mode of coverage that the channel adopts. All channels are obliged to observe a government diktat that the body parts of victims are not to be shown in coverage of terrorist incidents. Sirasa TV has reportedly been observing this diktat scrupulously, though channels that are favourably inclined to the government, including the state-owned broadcaster, often get away with lurid coverage accompanied by highly emotionally charged commentary.
Yet according to Sirasa TV, only their top personnel have been often questioned on the material used in coverage of terrorist incidents.
In June 2008, the office of the web-based news portal www.lankaenews.com, was visited by officials of the CID who interrogated the editor and news-editor for close to three hours on certain news stories they had covered, and asked particularly, that they name sources. This news portal was one among eight media organisations that were on May 31, identified by an “editorial” posted on the website of the Ministry of Defence, as “anti-national” and “treacherous”. Just over two weeks later, the Ministry posted another editorial proposing that all news stories having a bearing on national security would need pre-publication clearance from a specially empowered body.
Though these guidelines have not been formally notified, they create a climate of intimidation that permits officials of the security and intelligence agencies to walk into media offices when they please, or to summon journalists for interrogation on any whim.
The International Mission was told that little progress had been made in the investigations into the “disappearances” of two journalists -- S. Ramachandran and V. Nimalarajah -- in the Jaffna peninsula . Hopes are now receding that they will ever be found alive.
No accountability for verbal abuse and physical intimidation
Apart from these specific cases, a signal seems to have been sent from the highest political level that verbal abuse of media workers as well as physical intimidation and attacks are fair tactics. Labour Minister Mervyn Silva, a close political ally of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, has been a singularly conspicuous figure in this respect. Following a December 2007 incident when he stormed into the premises of the state-owned broadcaster, the Sri Lanka Rupavahini Corporation (SLRC), and roughed up the director of news supposedly for his failure to cover an event he had addressed, Silva has had several bruising encounters with the media community. He has in particular targeted personnel of the Maharajah TV group, which broadcasts in three languages and controls the top-rated Sinhala channel, Sirasa. The minister’s ire may have been aroused by the strong stand that Sirasa TV took after the SLRC incident, in demanding some form of accountability from him.
Silva has indicated at three public functions where he has since been present, that Sirasa TV personnel would be unwelcome to cover his public engagements. At the most recent such incident on August 4, 2008, the minister attacked a Sirasa TV crew at the venue of a public function. Sirasa TV has filed a fundamental rights case against the minister, as too has one of the aggrieved staff members. Silva meanwhile led a demonstration outside the offices of the TV station, demanding that its broadcast licence be revoked. At the first hearing of the case against him, on August 21, the minister was granted bail and emerged from the court premises reportedly hurling abuse at the TV channel. He has since persisted in using explicit language associating the channel with the Tamil insurgency movement in the north of the country.
On November 16, the Colombo High Court indicted Silva and some of his political associates for the crimes of illegal assembly, assault and robbery. The International Mission welcomes this judicial intervention and calls on the Sri Lankan leadership to enforce some measure of political accountability till the judicial process is completed.
Terrorism law to persecute journalists
One of the most worrying aspects of the evolving legal environment for the media in the country is the use of terrorism legislation to prosecute journalists.
On March 6, 2008, B. Jasiharan and his wife V. Vallarmathy were arrested from the office of the E-Kwality printing press which also housed the offices of the www.outreachsl.com website. The following day, J.S. Tissainayagam, the editor of the website, went to the premises of the Terrorism Investigation Division (TID) of the Sri Lankan police, to inquire into the detention of the two. Tissainayagam himself was taken into custody along with a colleague, K. Wijayasinghe, who had accompanied him to the TID offices. Ranga and Udayan, a cameraman and videographer for the website, were arrested the same day.
The arrests were confirmed unofficially late that night, after repeated inquiries from Tissainayagam’s family, with the summary explanation that all the detainees were LTTE cadre against whom credible cases of terrorism could be made out. Early the next morning, Tissainayagam’s home was raided by TID officials, who searched it thoroughly without a warrant, and seized a NorthEastern Monthly Magazine that Tissainayagam used to edit. This Magazine ceased to be printed after June 2007.
At 10 p.m., Tissainayagam’s wife Ronnate, was allowed briefly to visit and talk to him, though under the watchful eyes of two TID officials, who have been present at all subsequent visits. Family members of all three detainees who have sought to visit and arrange legal assistance, have often been threatened. On March 11 and 12, Jasiharan’s sister was reportedly jostled and manhandled as she left home. On the second occasion she was pushed into a white van – a symbol of abductions and lawlessness in Sri Lanka – and held captive briefly, during which time she was warned that her whole family could be picked up by the TID.
Wijayasinghe, Ranga and Udayan were released without charge on March 19, the day that Tissainayagam filed a Fundamental Rights Case in the Supreme Court.
The prosecution has continually run foul of the law in its handling of the case and yet managed to avoid any form of stricture. The detention order for Tissainayagam was issued only on March 27, the day the Supreme Court, hearing a fundamental rights application filed on his behalf, asked for it. A lawyer representing Jasiharan petitioned the court on May 27, claiming that his client had been tortured and demanding a medical examination.
Emergency Regulations in force in Sri Lanka allow the detention of anybody for up to 90 days without judicial authorisation. But following that the detainee has necessarily to be produced before a judicial officer for further extension of custody. In the case of Tissainayagam, Vallarmathy and Jasiharan, the TID ignored repeated petitions that they be produced in court, citing certain “administrative difficulties”.
On June 30, when the accused were produced in court after over 110 days in detention, the magistrate ruled, without assigning any clear reason, that they should be kept in the custody of the TID while investigations continued. An urgent request for medical attention in the case of Tissainayagam, who was suffering from a serious eye condition, was admitted. But an appeal for bail for all three accused was rejected.
An indictment against all three defendants was filed before the High Court of Colombo on August 13. Charges were formally laid under Sri Lanka’s Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) – a draconian law that has remained on the statute books despite being introduced in 1979 as an ostensibly temporary measure – on August 25. The charges against Tissainayagam were: bringing discredit to the government, inciting racial and ethnic animosities, through material published in the North East Herald, and raising funds through non-governmental sources in pursuit of terrorist objectives. The charges against Jasiharan was aiding and abetting Tissainayagam and Vallarmathy was charged with the offence of aiding and abetting her husband Jasiharan to further terrorism.
On September 9, the charge of “bringing discredit to the government” was deleted and Tissainayagam and Jasiharan were charged, for the ostensibly criminal offences of editing and printing the magazine.
The evidence produced by the prosecution included two articles published in the Northeastern Monthly. The first of these which was run as an editorial without a byline in the July 2006 issue stated that “the inability to protect its citizens within the areas it controls has caused Sri Lanka international embarrassment”. It posed the question of what the future would be of Tamils in government-controlled areas of the northeast of Sri Lanka. “It is fairly obvious”, the editorial argued, “that the government is not going to offer them any protection (since in fact) it is the state security forces that are the main perpetrator of the killings”.
The second article, published under Tissainayagam’s initials in November 2006, drew attention to the deteriorating humanitarian situation in the eastern provincial town of Vaharai, which had allegedly been subjected to a sustained campaign of artillery and aerial bombardment as Sri Lankan forces sought to recapture it from Tamil Tiger rebels. Tissainayagam commented that the government was not doing this “without design”. “By trapping the Tamil population in Vaharai”, he argued, the government hoped to create a “human shield” that would prevent any Tamil Tiger offensives further south. “At the same time, starving and bombing Tamil civilians in Vaharai (would) create disaffection between them and the LTTE leading to friction and ill-will. Such internal quarrels (would) act as insulator for the government in the highly vulnerable East”.
Apart from these two articles, the prosecution placed as evidence before the court, the alleged confessions made by Tissainayagam and Jasiharan while under police custody and the personal affidavits of 15 officials of the TID. Two judicial medical officers (JMOs), who had examined Jasiharan for evidence of torture, were listed as witnesses in his case.
Informed observers believe that there is a deep political vendetta behind Tissainayagam’s arrest and prosecution, arising from critical commentary he published in February 2008 on the shoddy processes of information gathering adopted by an officially constituted body called the Committee to Inquire into Allegations of Abductions and Recruitments of Children for Use in Armed Conflict. Comprising Sri Lanka’s Minister for Human Rights and the Secretary in its Ministry of Justice, the report of the Committee was presented at a meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Council in February, refuting the widespread belief that Tamil militias aligned with the government of Sri Lanka in the north and the east were recruiting child soldiers in large numbers.
Tissainayagam’s commentary recorded that the report was based on a visit to Batticaloa lasting four hours by the Secretary in the Justice Ministry and that its basis in reality was quite weak. The article reportedly caused a certain degree of embarrassment to Sri Lanka’s Human Rights Minister, who was then visiting Geneva to present his report before the U.N. Human Rights Council.
In dealing with the charges laid against Tissainayagam and his co-defendants, the defence initially sought to dismiss the charges on the grounds that they pertained to a period of time when the PTA was not operative. It was agreed following the ceasefire agreement between the government and the Tamil Tigers in February 2002, that PTA would no longer be operative. Since the ceasefire was formally abrogated only in January 2008, the charges against Tissainayagam and his co-defendants amounted to a retroactive application of the PTA to a period when it was not operative.
By late-October, the prosecution finished its presentation of arguments. At this writing, the court was hearing evidence led by the defence on whether the evidence against Tissainayagam was admissible under law. With all said and done, there is little doubt that the prosecution of Tissainayagam, Jasiharan and Vallarmathy stands as a direct threat to media freedom.
Minister aggrieved by investigative report, lays charges of extortion
Arthur Wamanan, a reporter at The Sunday Leader, was detained by Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the Colombo police in October 2007, on charges of extortion levelled by Mano Wijeratne, Sri Lanka’s Minister for Enterprise Development.
The Sunday Leader had on October 21, 2007, carried an article by Wamanan which reported that Wijeratne’s wife had while on an overseas tour, incurred roaming charges on her telephone amounting to roughly Sri Lankan Rupees (SLR) 87,000, which his ministry had borne, despite it being an inadmissible perk under government rules. On October 19, well before sending his story to press, Wamanan had called Wijeratne from a phone registered in his mother’s name, to obtain his account of the story.
On the day the story was published, the minister filed a case of extortion against Wamanan, accusing him of having demanded a sum of SLR 5 million as the price of not publishing the story. He cited the call records on his cell-phone as evidence. On October 23, minister Wijeratne attacked Wamanan by name in the Sri Lankan parliament. The CID arrested Wamanan the following day, briefly detaining his mother too.
At the first bail hearing, the city magistrate observed: “Media are there to report on what is happening in society. Just because some people are embarrassed by a news report, the media must not be subjected to restriction”.
The prosecution then argued that Wamanan, a 21-year old Tamil youth just beginning his career in journalism, did not deserve bail on account of his ethnicity.
Wamanan was granted bail, but the case against him continues. The CID has reportedly referred the phone used by the accused to its computer analysis section and at the most recent hearing on November 7, 2008, pleaded for more time to furnish details before the court.
Interrogation of journalists and the implicit threat of legal action
The mission has also learnt that top officials of Sirasa TV channel have repeatedly been called in for questioning by the CID of the Sri Lanka police in recent months. Typically, these sessions follow some incident of terrorist strikes and the mode of coverage that the channel adopts. All channels are obliged to observe a government diktat that the body parts of victims are not to be shown in coverage of terrorist incidents. Sirasa TV has reportedly been observing this diktat scrupulously, though channels that are favourably inclined to the government, including the state-owned broadcaster, often get away with lurid coverage accompanied by highly emotionally charged commentary.
Yet according to Sirasa TV, only their top personnel have been often questioned on the material used in coverage of terrorist incidents.
In June 2008, the office of the web-based news portal www.lankaenews.com, was visited by officials of the CID who interrogated the editor and news-editor for close to three hours on certain news stories they had covered, and asked particularly, that they name sources. This news portal was one among eight media organisations that were on May 31, identified by an “editorial” posted on the website of the Ministry of Defence, as “anti-national” and “treacherous”. Just over two weeks later, the Ministry posted another editorial proposing that all news stories having a bearing on national security would need pre-publication clearance from a specially empowered body.
Though these guidelines have not been formally notified, they create a climate of intimidation that permits officials of the security and intelligence agencies to walk into media offices when they please, or to summon journalists for interrogation on any whim.
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
Why we need to resist Indian media's scare-mongering tactics (a letter to the editor of the Times of India)
Sir,
The article you front-paged as top story in your Delhi edition on January 7 is deeply objectionable on several counts ("Expanding Talibanistan is closer to Wagah than Lucknow to Delhi", ToI, Jan 7 2009, page 1; available at this writing at: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/The_advance_of_Taliban/articleshow/3943942.cms.)
To begin with, the headline is seriously challenged in a syntactic sense, apart from being logically ridiculous. In essence, it means nothing more – or less – than proclaiming that Amritsar is closer to Lahore than to Delhi. That, if I may say so, is no scoop.
Could you ever imagine the New York Times running a headline that read: "The expanding republic of Hispania is closer to Houston than Seattle is to New York"? Maybe you could, but most reasonable people would find it rather ludicrous.
Besides, the article is written with total inattention to acknowledged facts about the recent history of the South Asian neighbourhood. The reporter says at one stage that "seven years after US (sic) drove the Taliban and al-Qaida from Afghanistan, the world's most potent terror group has not only recouped but could be within hitting (sic) distance of forming their own state.."
Your reporter is badly mixed up, evidently seeing all of Afghanistan in the cities of Kabul and Kandahar. There was indeed an illusion created that the Taliban had been driven out of power seven years ago, but it was evident then to all with basic knowledge in these matters, that the Islamic militia had merely melted away into the countryside and would regroup, in the absence of a really smart political strategy by Afghanistan's new masters.
All this has been part of the debate and dialogue in strategic circles for at least four years. These issues were certainly debated, though perhaps without the requisite seriousness in the U.S. presidential election campaign of 2004.
There is neither any great revelation in your reporter's story, nor anything by way of a "news flash". This makes the placement of your story top and centre in your January 7 edition rather mystifying.
Finally, your reporter is ignorant of basic contemporary facts, as in the follow-on story ("Taliban no longer a distant threat", page 17, available at this writing at the URL identified above). This story says: "They (the Taliban) have also run through the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), helped by an inept government of Islamic religious parties".
Typically, as with much of the Indian media today, you are disinclined to let a few facts stand in the way of a denunciation of so-called "Islamic religious parties". Unfortunately though, it is fairly common knowledge that the government in the NWFP is a coalition between the Awami National Party (ANP) and the Pakistan Peoples' Party (PPP), neither of which could even remotely be described as "Islamic" or "religious". The ANP is directly descended from the political formations that the revered "Frontier Gandhi", Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, promoted and actively associated himself with. Indeed, within the Pakistani ideological spectrum, the ANP and the PPP are if anything, secular in terms of their politics and centre-left and populist in terms of their economics.
Whoever has briefed your reporter on this story was either monumentally ignorant or, more likely, willing to bet on the gullibility of today's so-called strategic affairs commentators. You have unfortunately, played along by publishing this story top and centre, underlining how the Indian media today has nothing but the grossest contempt for the intelligence of its audience.
In these difficult times, the readers of your newspaper surely deserve better than this variety of scare-mongering. When the need is for a well-informed public dialogue on the urgent problems we all confront, you seem intent on promoting ignorance.
Yours etc. etc.
Sukumar Muralidharan
The article you front-paged as top story in your Delhi edition on January 7 is deeply objectionable on several counts ("Expanding Talibanistan is closer to Wagah than Lucknow to Delhi", ToI, Jan 7 2009, page 1; available at this writing at: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/The_advance_of_Taliban/articleshow/3943942.cms.)
To begin with, the headline is seriously challenged in a syntactic sense, apart from being logically ridiculous. In essence, it means nothing more – or less – than proclaiming that Amritsar is closer to Lahore than to Delhi. That, if I may say so, is no scoop.
Could you ever imagine the New York Times running a headline that read: "The expanding republic of Hispania is closer to Houston than Seattle is to New York"? Maybe you could, but most reasonable people would find it rather ludicrous.
Besides, the article is written with total inattention to acknowledged facts about the recent history of the South Asian neighbourhood. The reporter says at one stage that "seven years after US (sic) drove the Taliban and al-Qaida from Afghanistan, the world's most potent terror group has not only recouped but could be within hitting (sic) distance of forming their own state.."
Your reporter is badly mixed up, evidently seeing all of Afghanistan in the cities of Kabul and Kandahar. There was indeed an illusion created that the Taliban had been driven out of power seven years ago, but it was evident then to all with basic knowledge in these matters, that the Islamic militia had merely melted away into the countryside and would regroup, in the absence of a really smart political strategy by Afghanistan's new masters.
All this has been part of the debate and dialogue in strategic circles for at least four years. These issues were certainly debated, though perhaps without the requisite seriousness in the U.S. presidential election campaign of 2004.
There is neither any great revelation in your reporter's story, nor anything by way of a "news flash". This makes the placement of your story top and centre in your January 7 edition rather mystifying.
Finally, your reporter is ignorant of basic contemporary facts, as in the follow-on story ("Taliban no longer a distant threat", page 17, available at this writing at the URL identified above). This story says: "They (the Taliban) have also run through the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), helped by an inept government of Islamic religious parties".
Typically, as with much of the Indian media today, you are disinclined to let a few facts stand in the way of a denunciation of so-called "Islamic religious parties". Unfortunately though, it is fairly common knowledge that the government in the NWFP is a coalition between the Awami National Party (ANP) and the Pakistan Peoples' Party (PPP), neither of which could even remotely be described as "Islamic" or "religious". The ANP is directly descended from the political formations that the revered "Frontier Gandhi", Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, promoted and actively associated himself with. Indeed, within the Pakistani ideological spectrum, the ANP and the PPP are if anything, secular in terms of their politics and centre-left and populist in terms of their economics.
Whoever has briefed your reporter on this story was either monumentally ignorant or, more likely, willing to bet on the gullibility of today's so-called strategic affairs commentators. You have unfortunately, played along by publishing this story top and centre, underlining how the Indian media today has nothing but the grossest contempt for the intelligence of its audience.
In these difficult times, the readers of your newspaper surely deserve better than this variety of scare-mongering. When the need is for a well-informed public dialogue on the urgent problems we all confront, you seem intent on promoting ignorance.
Yours etc. etc.
Sukumar Muralidharan
Friday, December 26, 2008
The media in a time of terror
AMPLIFYING CHAOS, SOWING DISCORD
Terrorism has been a frequent visitor to Indian shores over the last two decades and more. Earlier visitations have been instantaneous blows that have stunned and staggered, though they have allowed for a quick recovery of morale as civic processes kick in and people who cannot afford the luxury of disengagement from daily routines, resume their normal activity.
Mumbai 7/11 – to use the media shorthand for the 11 July 2006 suburban train bombings that killed close to 200 -- was one such occasion. Yet when it came to Mumbai 26/11, resilience was no longer a virtue to celebrate. The incursion of armed desperados who sprayed death and destruction in vital nodes of the city’s life, before commandeering three buildings on November 26, has become a case study in the tactical confusion that India’s security apparatus is prone to. It also illustrates how the media can respond to emergency situations in a fashion that multiplies public anxieties and creates the conditions for imprudent and ill-considered strategic responses.
Though a seemingly trivial point, it is important to understand a reversal in the format of date identification between 7/11 and 26/11. Consistency in usage is not so important as getting the suffix right, so that it rhymes and resonates with 9/11, the universal shorthand for the terrorist attacks in the U.S. that inaugurated a phase of global insecurity and instability.
This is not to deny the uniqueness of Mumbai 26/11. Unlike all earlier terrorist atrocities, 26/11 was a slow haemorrhage of public confidence, a long-drawn bloodbath that claimed lives and at the same time tested the country’s response capabilities, sapped its self-confidence and imprisoned it in prolonged contemplation of a tableau of destruction.
When the gunfire began at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) – India’s most famous Victorian gothic structure, where millions figuratively tread everyday – it was reported as an outbreak of gang warfare. Only one among the English news channels had the story till well over an hour after it began. Most of India would have slept untroubled through that night. But anybody from the 80 million cable TV households who switched on at an early hour the next morning, irrespective of the channel first tuned into, would have been instantly transfixed. Riveted by the real-life drama, plunged into the depths of emotional trauma by the shooting war erupting in a locale normally associated with calm and unembarrassed displays of wealth, audience susceptibility was greatly multiplied.
The scenes unfolding in Mumbai heightened the Indian public’s mute awareness of its absolute lack of influence in deeply consequential security decisions. With the media orchestrating this national catharsis, the public mood was quickly transformed into convulsive rage against the politicians who supposedly held all the power and had yet allowed an atrocity of such enormity to occur. And it was just a short transition from raging against the politicians, to raging against the political system that had ensconced them in authority.
Perhaps the media was getting jaded by the coverage of election campaigns that rarely rose above the mundane; perhaps it was fearful that a serious interrogation of the security and intelligence apparatus would be negatively perceived; perhaps it was collectively disoriented at the sight of Mumbai’s two most prestigious hotels being gutted from within by faceless marauders.
There was also, perhaps, a genetic predisposition within the media to go overboard at the spectacle of the most exclusive quarters of India’s most affluent city becoming a battleground. The success of the media is premised upon its ability to mirror perceptions of high purchasing power strata, which are the main focus of advertiser interest. The tone of the media coverage was in this sense, brutally honest in bringing out into the open the subliminal disdain that those accustomed to privilege have, for the scruffy world of competitive politics.
In many ways, the media revealed more about itself through 60-hours of feverish and frenetic coverage, than about the terrorist atrocity that was being perpetrated in Mumbai. On the evening of November 28, as the siege approached the 48-hour mark, the local police ordered all channels to cease live coverage of the ongoing security operations. The police had been particularly irked by a Hindi news channel that established live telephonic contact with one of the marauders in the Jewish community centre, the third building to be commandeered. The news-anchor then proceeded to harangue the gunmen, denouncing them as desperate criminals and swearing that they would never escape India’s avenging fury.
The morality lesson for the invaders was abruptly interrupted by a commercial break, which was unusual for those feverish 60 hours when all channels dispensed with advertising. Resuming a few minutes later, the channel seemed to have turned the page, though without any effort at explanation. All arguments with the invading terrorists were forgotten. Later reports which have neither been confirmed or denied by either side, spoke of the police authorities leaning heavily on the channel to cease its conversations with the marauders.
The ban on live coverage was quickly rescinded. With the siege of Mumbai itself being broken soon afterwards, the news channels went into a mode of retrospection, though offering nothing more edifying than more vituperation against politics.
Politics was not slow with its riposte, though a little clumsy to begin with. A few days after the siege was broken, the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting issued a notice demanding an explanation from the channel that had vainly sought to impart a morality lesson to the terrorists. The channel head pleaded injured innocence, claiming that his broadcast had not in any way given undue publicity to the terrorists but had to the contrary, had the wholly salutary effect of fortifying public resolve.
Two themes seemed to contend for attention in the political reaction to the media coverage of Mumbai’s horror. First was the concern that relentless live coverage may well have limited the scope and effectiveness of the security operations. A second theme that emerged in the post facto examination of the media coverage of Mumbai was the effect it had on the public mood. It fuelled anxieties and created an environment in which the appearance of drastic action, rather than prudence, became the priority. And because of the intense competition among the news channels to firmly ascribe responsibility for the outrage, the government was seemingly stampeded into considering a rather limited range of strategic options.
The Committee on Petitions in the Rajya Sabha took up the first of these themes in a report submitted during the brief sitting of Parliament in December. Responding to a petition on the alleged misuse of the right to free speech by the electronic and print media, the Committee urged that some form of statutory regulations be introduced on the media “in the larger interest of society”. The petition had been under consideration since 2006, but had evidently gained urgency in the light of the Mumbai horror. The growing competition within the media made “self-regulation” a difficult ideal to realise. The Committee drew pointed attention to the repeated attempts in the past to introduce a broadcast regulatory authority and a “content code” for the electronic media and affirmed the need to reconsider these on a priority basis.
Sections of the media were quick to push back against this line of thinking. India’s largest English language newspaper, which has strong interests in the broadcast sector, fielded a former chief of staff of the Indian Army, to refute any notion that the live coverage of the Mumbai operations could have compromised their efficacy. Drawing on his years as a military commander, General V.N. Sharma pronounced that individuals and forces engaged in armed combat or search and destroy operations, are unlikely to waste any time with following news broadcasts. On the other hand, the live media coverage had the positive impact of taking the horror into all homes and building up public pressure for swift and accountable action by the authorities.
The second and deeper concern was underlined by K.G. Balakrishnan, the Chief Justice of India. “The symbolic impact of terrorist attacks”, he said at a public function in Delhi, has been “considerably amplified by the role of pervasive media coverage”. The “proliferation of 24-hour TV news channels and the digital medium” ensured that “disturbing images and statements reach a very wide audience”. This manner of “unrestrained coverage” may have the effect of “provoking anger amongst the masses” and fuelling “an irrational desire for retribution”. “Furthermore, the trauma resulting from the terrorist attacks may be used as a justification for undue curtailment of individual rights and liberties”.
A week after the intruders were eliminated, India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting sent out an “advisory” asking all news channels to refrain from repeatedly airing footage of the Mumbai attacks. Averse as always to any official diktat, the news channels responded with a unanimous rejection. But the Ministry was not about to give in. Heads of prominent news channels were called in for a number of further meetings, at which the Ministry evidently invoked the possibility that it could act unilaterally under the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act. Fighting now to retrieve the credibility of the principle of “self-regulation”, channels that have grouped themselves into the News Broadcasters’ Association (NBA), on December 18, issued a set of “guidelines for telecast of news during emergency situations”.
Drawn up by a grievance redressal committee constituted by the NBA and chaired by a former chief justice of India, J.S. Verma, the guidelines uphold “public interest” as the vital touchstone. They commend the virtues of factual accuracy and objectivity, disavow any broadcast that may provide a platform for terrorists to propagate their views, and rule out any live programming that may hamper the efficacy of security operations or put at risk those involved in a hostage situation. Visually disturbing sequences that could cause trauma among victims and their relatives are to be avoided. And archival footage that may reawaken the sense of trauma or agitation in viewers’ minds should be broadcast only when necessary, after clearly identifying the date and time of its recording.
Despite the eminence of its authorship, the new emergency code was seen among most critics as just another exercise in formulaic thinking. It was as recently as August 2008, that the NBA had come out with a comprehensive set of guidelines on self-regulation, which were conspicuous only in their breach during the Mumbai crisis. The Ministry obviously remains unconvinced and is reportedly now thinking of mandatorily requiring news channels to carry pre-authorised content during designated emergency situations. The proposal is at a very early stage of discussion and it is unclear whether its intent is to completely supplant autonomous content generated by the news channels, or to be an additional input. Either way, the media industry is distinctly uncomfortable.
The debate remains incomplete. Even conceding the post-modernist conceit that all information is subjective, a civilised public dialogue is only possible if there is an effort to reach beyond the limitations of subjectivity. If the media is the main platform for this dialogue, then its minimal responsibility would be to reflect an authentic cross-section of the perceptions that have a bearing on the issue at hand. The print media goes through a 24-hour cycle of discovery, verification and analysis before it reports its perceptions of fact. The electronic media, especially since the 24-hour news channel became a reality in India, breathlessly records every random observation as fact, creating a clutter of information that confuses rather than informs.
There are also questions about the range of voices that people want to hear when they seek to cope with a national trauma. Are residents of Mumbai’s more exclusive neighbourhoods to have the run of the airwaves, their anger stoked by eager news anchors prepared to buy into the fiction that social merit is proportionate to taxes paid? Or is a more diverse public dialogue possible?
In its coverage of the Mumbai attacks, the Indian media seems to have seriously engaged with diversity of a very different sort, considering the multiple dissonances that have emerged on basic points of fact. This speaks as much about the quality of the relationship between the media and the public, as about the nature of the governance compact and the degree of accountability that the security and intelligence agencies seem inclined to accept. The media in this sense, amplified the tactical incoherence of the official response to an unprecedented tragedy.
To mention merely a few instances: early on the afternoon of November 27, well before the siege of Mumbai had reached the 24-hour mark, the Director-General of Police in Maharashtra announced that the Taj Mahal hotel had been emptied of all threats. The following day, the chief of the Indian Army’s Southern Command announced around midday, that the Taj Mahal had just one remnant gunman hiding out in its old wing. The new wing had been thoroughly “cleansed” and the sole hangout would swiftly be neutralised, he predicted. Gun battles raged on for hours afterwards and it was only early the next morning that the last of the marauders was put out of commission.
There were also periodic broadcasts that the gunmen had seized hostages and were engaged in negotiating a ransom for their release, when the reality was quite the contrary. Early in the encounter, a story was floated that huge quantities of the lethal explosive, RDX, had been uncovered from sites in close vicinity of the Taj Mahal hotel. This story remained the exclusive property of one of the English news-channels, but was quietly put to rest as the commando operation progressed. It resurfaced in another guise though, with the claim that the gunmen had huge quantities of the explosive and could possibly raze all three buildings, burying commandos engaged in combat in a graveyard of rubble.
After the clean-up was completed, the RDX theory in its mutant form, was decisively scotched by the head of the elite commando force, the National Security Guard (NSG), in full glare of the country’s numerous media channels. But even in its death throes, the theory proved to have some fervent adherents. Within two days of the final shot being fired in the siege of Mumbai, it was reprised, with attributions to anonymous sources. The two luxury hotels that had been commandeered, the new narrative went, had been seeded with lethal RDX bombs. These had providentially, been detected and defused just in time. The intent of the gunmen otherwise, was to set off those explosives and to escape under the cover of the resultant chaos and confusion.
There were numerous stories that the media managed to float on how the attackers beached on Indian shores. To begin with, three distinct places in Mumbai were identified as locations where the gunmen had come ashore, though the rubber dinghy they had used for landing had ostensibly been spotted and eyewitnesses to their arrival had spoken to the news channels.
Beyond this, considerable uncertainty was sowed over the mode of arrival. There was first, a story of four decapitated bodies being found, all of the crew of the fishing trawler that had been hijacked by the terrorists, possibly off the coast of Porbandar. Within hours, the number of victims of this particular episode was scaled back to one. The captain of the fishing trawler, it was surmised, had piloted the raiders to within sight of the Mumbai shore and then been killed. Concurrently, speculation was being fuelled that elements of the crew may have cooperated with the raiders. The investigation, it was put out, was looking with great interest at fishing boat operators recently incarcerated in Pakistani jails for breaching territorial boundaries, who had perhaps been indoctrinated by Pakistani intelligence.
The identity of the captured attacker -- the only one caught on film in reasonable clarity, thanks to a news photographer who reached Mumbai’s principal railway terminus just when the first shootout began – was again cause of great confusion. Taken alive after a beachfront shootout on November 26, there were different versions of his name afloat till a week later. First accounts spoke of him as fluent in English and well-educated. A subsequent account told of him being of indigent family origins, with education well short of primary schooling. There were reports that he had been gravely injured and had begged for life-saving medical attention at the hospital he was taken to, and then a clarification by the dean of the medical college attached to the same hospital, that he was unharmed except for minor bruises. Finally, contrary to the account in one section of the media that he was being held in an “undisclosed location”, the medical expert testifying to the captured terrorist’s condition was identified by both name and affiliation.
On December 2, India’s external affairs minister, Pranab Mukherjee, playing host to the Secretary-General of the Arab League, spoke of a range of options that were under consideration to deal with the aftermath of Mumbai. Though he specified none and indicated no preferences, Mukherjee’s statement was interpreted in diametrically opposed fashion by two of the country’s biggest English-language newspapers: one headlined its story “India open to military action against Pakistan”, while the other said quite definitively, “Pranab rules out military action”.
The latter attitude though, was a minimal strain in the media in the aftermath of Mumbai, since Pakistan-bashing was the only constant element in the competitive clamour for attention. The question the Indian media faces is not a trivial one. Is it going to be an exclusive forum for the more extreme voices? Or can it find a sensible way forward, even in a conjuncture as trying as Mumbai 26/11, to promote a genuine social dialogue that is attentive to the true risks and benefits of any particular strategic course?
Though difficult in trying times such as now, can the media hear voices from across the border? Would it have any use for instance, for the following observations from the December 2 editorial in Dawn, one of the most restrained and sober voices in the Pakistan media: “…what cannot be condoned is the behaviour of the Indian media, that taking its cue from the politicians — and from a culture of nationalism that is especially apparent where Islamabad is concerned — came down hard on Pakistan, often conjuring up fantastical descriptions of the way the siege of Mumbai was laid. Not only does this put pressure on the Indian government to keep up its accusations and resist moves for a cooperative stance, it also damages people-to-people ties, for after all, the media is meant to speak for the common man”.
Beginning on November 29, Karachi, where the Mumbai marauders ostensibly set off from, was gripped by ethnic rioting on a scale never before seen. None of the known players in Karachi’s volatile political milieu owned responsibility for the violence. As The Daily Times of Islamabad, another newspaper known for relative sobriety, commented in its December 2 editorial, the Prime Minister of Pakistan had asked for intelligence on the incidents and “at least one TV channel (had) reported that an intelligence report sent to the prime minister has held India responsible for the mayhem”.
As the pitch rose of the diplomatic and political exchanges, the media on both sides began playing their accustomed role of amplifying the discord. The difference with earlier phases of mutual hostility, perhaps, was that the media on each side was now the specific target of attack by commentators and government spokespersons on the other side. This has been accompanied by ad hominem attacks – as by the anchor-person of the Times Now TV news channel in India – on human rights defenders who believe that the response to terrorism cannot be confined within the militarist mindset and needs necessarily to be attentive to civil liberties and social justice.
The Mumbai attacks came just as India was beginning to grapple with certain agonising questions about the fundamentals of its approach to terrorism. The Batla House encounter of September 19 in Delhi’s south-eastern suburb of Jamia Nagar, was a catalyst for several of these questions to be aired with rare freedom. The subsequent discovery of a terrorist ring involving supposed preachers of the Hindu faith and serving and retired officers of the Indian army, then broke old moulds of thinking on terrorism, suggesting that a workable approach to the problem needed to look in different directions.
Needless to say, all these questions have been suppressed with the Mumbai attacks. The dominant media project now is to integrate the Mumbai attacks into the master-narrative on terrorism that was being constructed till Batla House and the Hindutva terror ring cropped up as dissonant elements. The directions that the project will take are apparent in a recent piece written by a media analyst well-known for his feverishly speculative commentary. The figure around which this new narrative evolves is seemingly Mohammad Sadiq Sheikh, in police custody since September and accused of being the mastermind of serial bombings in Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Delhi. Sadiq Sheikh is putatively among the founders of the Indian Mujahedin, which has claimed responsibility for all these attacks and it now transpires, has had intimate links with the Lashkar-e-Taiba insurgent group in Pakistan’s side of Kashmir and with Pakistan’s Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
When Safdar Nagori, the general secretary of a shadowy body of uncertain provenance called the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), was arrested in March 2008, the same analyst had commented that “SIMI cadre have been involved in almost every Islamist terror strike since (2000), ranging from the Mumbai serial bombings of 2003 and 2006 to attacks in Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Delhi”.
Despite the seeming certainty behind this pronouncement, obviously inspired by driblets of information leaked by the intelligence agencies, a tribunal constituted to review the extension of the ban on SIMI, held on August 5, that there was no evidence connecting SIMI with terrorism. The Central Government on that occasion, secured a face-saving stay on the application of this ruling by the Supreme Court. Media comment was muted and the public, still under the pall of fear spread by the Jaipur, Bangalore and Ahmedabad bombings, remained indifferent to finer points of legality.
The pursuit of the terrorists behind the recent wave of bomb attacks in India, picked up momentum with the mid-August arrest of Abu Bashar Qasmi, a 25-year old cleric, snatched from his home in Azamgarh district of Uttar Pradesh by four men who came visiting on the pretext of exploring a matrimonial alliance. Taken immediately to Gujarat, he was identified by the state police as the man behind July’s Ahmedabad attacks. He also reportedly, confessed to an undefined role in the Jaipur bombing.
On August 24, the Rajasthan police announced the arrest of Shahbaz Husain, a computer software expert who ran a small business in Lucknow. Press reports later blazoned the claim of the Rajasthan Police that sophisticated electronic chips and circuits of bombs resembling those used in Surat had been found in Shahbaz’s premises.
With Shahbaz’s firm implication in terrorism, an elaborate chain of linkages began to be drawn between the various blasts. Nagori, Shahbaz and Qasmi were all reportedly, members of a secretive cell that underwent explosives training in camps as far afield as Kerala and the jungles of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. Brooding over the whole conspiracy was the presence of Mohammad Altaf Subhan -- later identified as Abdul Subhan Quereshi, and variously described by the alternative names, Taufeeq and Tauqeer, by which he was allegedly known in jihadi circles -- a computer hardware specialist missing from his home in Mumbai’s distant suburb of Mira Road, since 2006.
Subhan was supposedly the technical brain behind the ingeniously designed bombs and the e-mail messages --replete with graphics and intense Islamic religious symbolism -- that had been sent out celebrating each terrorist strike in the heart of urban India. When Delhi was gutted by three simultaneous bombings in September, Subhan was the name on every investigating agency’s lips.
Working its way through the chain that connected Subhan with Qasmi and Shahbaz, the Delhi police quickly identified the other links in the terrorism plot, all from Uttar Pradesh. Acting in concert with their Gujarat counterparts, the Delhi police secured access to Qasmi for a round of interrogation.
In the six days between the Delhi blasts and the Batla House encounter, the script was radically rewritten. As the encounter at Batla House began, concurrent media commentary had it that the interrogation of Qasmi had led to the identification of the tenement and that the prize catch, Subhan, was holed out there. When the dust settled, Subhan remained as elusive as ever and Qasmi it transpired, had nothing to do with the Batla House raid. The Delhi Police still claimed it had cracked not merely the Delhi bombings, but also the Jaipur and Ahmedabad attacks. One of the two youths killed in the Batla House encounter, Bashir, alias Atif Amin became, in the new narrative, the master terrorist.
The final twist in the story came on September 24, with the arrest of five in Mumbai. In just a matter of days, the Nagori-Qasmi-Shahbaz chain of culpability, was history. The Mumbai Police now definitively identified 31-year old Sadiq Sheikh, a resident of the Cheetah Camp slum sprawl near the city’s north-eastern suburb of Chembur, as the inspiration and the mentor for all the terrorist actions of the preceding months.
As the project of knitting Sadiq Sheikh into the narrative of the Mumbai attacks proceeds, various new dramatis personae should be expected to emerge. The old cast of characters clearly has been dispensed with. Subhan alias Tauqeer, always a shadowy figure has now been firmly banished. And so long as the media fails to ask the hard questions that it should, more names will crop up only to disappear as mysteriously, from the future construction of this narrative.
“Made for media” investigations into terrorist atrocities are clearly betraying the cause of justice and creating a new culture of lawlessness within the country’s police agencies. They are also creating a climate of fear among the country’s main religious minority. The hesitant quest for a new approach to terrorism, which had began with the Batla House encounters and the inquiries into the Hindutva terrorism ring, has now perhaps been scotched because of the enormous public anxiety created by the Mumbai attacks. If it is capable of occasional introspection, the Indian media should really ask itself if things could have been different, given a little sobriety and responsibility on its part.
Terrorism has been a frequent visitor to Indian shores over the last two decades and more. Earlier visitations have been instantaneous blows that have stunned and staggered, though they have allowed for a quick recovery of morale as civic processes kick in and people who cannot afford the luxury of disengagement from daily routines, resume their normal activity.
Mumbai 7/11 – to use the media shorthand for the 11 July 2006 suburban train bombings that killed close to 200 -- was one such occasion. Yet when it came to Mumbai 26/11, resilience was no longer a virtue to celebrate. The incursion of armed desperados who sprayed death and destruction in vital nodes of the city’s life, before commandeering three buildings on November 26, has become a case study in the tactical confusion that India’s security apparatus is prone to. It also illustrates how the media can respond to emergency situations in a fashion that multiplies public anxieties and creates the conditions for imprudent and ill-considered strategic responses.
Though a seemingly trivial point, it is important to understand a reversal in the format of date identification between 7/11 and 26/11. Consistency in usage is not so important as getting the suffix right, so that it rhymes and resonates with 9/11, the universal shorthand for the terrorist attacks in the U.S. that inaugurated a phase of global insecurity and instability.
This is not to deny the uniqueness of Mumbai 26/11. Unlike all earlier terrorist atrocities, 26/11 was a slow haemorrhage of public confidence, a long-drawn bloodbath that claimed lives and at the same time tested the country’s response capabilities, sapped its self-confidence and imprisoned it in prolonged contemplation of a tableau of destruction.
When the gunfire began at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) – India’s most famous Victorian gothic structure, where millions figuratively tread everyday – it was reported as an outbreak of gang warfare. Only one among the English news channels had the story till well over an hour after it began. Most of India would have slept untroubled through that night. But anybody from the 80 million cable TV households who switched on at an early hour the next morning, irrespective of the channel first tuned into, would have been instantly transfixed. Riveted by the real-life drama, plunged into the depths of emotional trauma by the shooting war erupting in a locale normally associated with calm and unembarrassed displays of wealth, audience susceptibility was greatly multiplied.
The scenes unfolding in Mumbai heightened the Indian public’s mute awareness of its absolute lack of influence in deeply consequential security decisions. With the media orchestrating this national catharsis, the public mood was quickly transformed into convulsive rage against the politicians who supposedly held all the power and had yet allowed an atrocity of such enormity to occur. And it was just a short transition from raging against the politicians, to raging against the political system that had ensconced them in authority.
Perhaps the media was getting jaded by the coverage of election campaigns that rarely rose above the mundane; perhaps it was fearful that a serious interrogation of the security and intelligence apparatus would be negatively perceived; perhaps it was collectively disoriented at the sight of Mumbai’s two most prestigious hotels being gutted from within by faceless marauders.
There was also, perhaps, a genetic predisposition within the media to go overboard at the spectacle of the most exclusive quarters of India’s most affluent city becoming a battleground. The success of the media is premised upon its ability to mirror perceptions of high purchasing power strata, which are the main focus of advertiser interest. The tone of the media coverage was in this sense, brutally honest in bringing out into the open the subliminal disdain that those accustomed to privilege have, for the scruffy world of competitive politics.
In many ways, the media revealed more about itself through 60-hours of feverish and frenetic coverage, than about the terrorist atrocity that was being perpetrated in Mumbai. On the evening of November 28, as the siege approached the 48-hour mark, the local police ordered all channels to cease live coverage of the ongoing security operations. The police had been particularly irked by a Hindi news channel that established live telephonic contact with one of the marauders in the Jewish community centre, the third building to be commandeered. The news-anchor then proceeded to harangue the gunmen, denouncing them as desperate criminals and swearing that they would never escape India’s avenging fury.
The morality lesson for the invaders was abruptly interrupted by a commercial break, which was unusual for those feverish 60 hours when all channels dispensed with advertising. Resuming a few minutes later, the channel seemed to have turned the page, though without any effort at explanation. All arguments with the invading terrorists were forgotten. Later reports which have neither been confirmed or denied by either side, spoke of the police authorities leaning heavily on the channel to cease its conversations with the marauders.
The ban on live coverage was quickly rescinded. With the siege of Mumbai itself being broken soon afterwards, the news channels went into a mode of retrospection, though offering nothing more edifying than more vituperation against politics.
Politics was not slow with its riposte, though a little clumsy to begin with. A few days after the siege was broken, the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting issued a notice demanding an explanation from the channel that had vainly sought to impart a morality lesson to the terrorists. The channel head pleaded injured innocence, claiming that his broadcast had not in any way given undue publicity to the terrorists but had to the contrary, had the wholly salutary effect of fortifying public resolve.
Two themes seemed to contend for attention in the political reaction to the media coverage of Mumbai’s horror. First was the concern that relentless live coverage may well have limited the scope and effectiveness of the security operations. A second theme that emerged in the post facto examination of the media coverage of Mumbai was the effect it had on the public mood. It fuelled anxieties and created an environment in which the appearance of drastic action, rather than prudence, became the priority. And because of the intense competition among the news channels to firmly ascribe responsibility for the outrage, the government was seemingly stampeded into considering a rather limited range of strategic options.
The Committee on Petitions in the Rajya Sabha took up the first of these themes in a report submitted during the brief sitting of Parliament in December. Responding to a petition on the alleged misuse of the right to free speech by the electronic and print media, the Committee urged that some form of statutory regulations be introduced on the media “in the larger interest of society”. The petition had been under consideration since 2006, but had evidently gained urgency in the light of the Mumbai horror. The growing competition within the media made “self-regulation” a difficult ideal to realise. The Committee drew pointed attention to the repeated attempts in the past to introduce a broadcast regulatory authority and a “content code” for the electronic media and affirmed the need to reconsider these on a priority basis.
Sections of the media were quick to push back against this line of thinking. India’s largest English language newspaper, which has strong interests in the broadcast sector, fielded a former chief of staff of the Indian Army, to refute any notion that the live coverage of the Mumbai operations could have compromised their efficacy. Drawing on his years as a military commander, General V.N. Sharma pronounced that individuals and forces engaged in armed combat or search and destroy operations, are unlikely to waste any time with following news broadcasts. On the other hand, the live media coverage had the positive impact of taking the horror into all homes and building up public pressure for swift and accountable action by the authorities.
The second and deeper concern was underlined by K.G. Balakrishnan, the Chief Justice of India. “The symbolic impact of terrorist attacks”, he said at a public function in Delhi, has been “considerably amplified by the role of pervasive media coverage”. The “proliferation of 24-hour TV news channels and the digital medium” ensured that “disturbing images and statements reach a very wide audience”. This manner of “unrestrained coverage” may have the effect of “provoking anger amongst the masses” and fuelling “an irrational desire for retribution”. “Furthermore, the trauma resulting from the terrorist attacks may be used as a justification for undue curtailment of individual rights and liberties”.
A week after the intruders were eliminated, India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting sent out an “advisory” asking all news channels to refrain from repeatedly airing footage of the Mumbai attacks. Averse as always to any official diktat, the news channels responded with a unanimous rejection. But the Ministry was not about to give in. Heads of prominent news channels were called in for a number of further meetings, at which the Ministry evidently invoked the possibility that it could act unilaterally under the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act. Fighting now to retrieve the credibility of the principle of “self-regulation”, channels that have grouped themselves into the News Broadcasters’ Association (NBA), on December 18, issued a set of “guidelines for telecast of news during emergency situations”.
Drawn up by a grievance redressal committee constituted by the NBA and chaired by a former chief justice of India, J.S. Verma, the guidelines uphold “public interest” as the vital touchstone. They commend the virtues of factual accuracy and objectivity, disavow any broadcast that may provide a platform for terrorists to propagate their views, and rule out any live programming that may hamper the efficacy of security operations or put at risk those involved in a hostage situation. Visually disturbing sequences that could cause trauma among victims and their relatives are to be avoided. And archival footage that may reawaken the sense of trauma or agitation in viewers’ minds should be broadcast only when necessary, after clearly identifying the date and time of its recording.
Despite the eminence of its authorship, the new emergency code was seen among most critics as just another exercise in formulaic thinking. It was as recently as August 2008, that the NBA had come out with a comprehensive set of guidelines on self-regulation, which were conspicuous only in their breach during the Mumbai crisis. The Ministry obviously remains unconvinced and is reportedly now thinking of mandatorily requiring news channels to carry pre-authorised content during designated emergency situations. The proposal is at a very early stage of discussion and it is unclear whether its intent is to completely supplant autonomous content generated by the news channels, or to be an additional input. Either way, the media industry is distinctly uncomfortable.
The debate remains incomplete. Even conceding the post-modernist conceit that all information is subjective, a civilised public dialogue is only possible if there is an effort to reach beyond the limitations of subjectivity. If the media is the main platform for this dialogue, then its minimal responsibility would be to reflect an authentic cross-section of the perceptions that have a bearing on the issue at hand. The print media goes through a 24-hour cycle of discovery, verification and analysis before it reports its perceptions of fact. The electronic media, especially since the 24-hour news channel became a reality in India, breathlessly records every random observation as fact, creating a clutter of information that confuses rather than informs.
There are also questions about the range of voices that people want to hear when they seek to cope with a national trauma. Are residents of Mumbai’s more exclusive neighbourhoods to have the run of the airwaves, their anger stoked by eager news anchors prepared to buy into the fiction that social merit is proportionate to taxes paid? Or is a more diverse public dialogue possible?
In its coverage of the Mumbai attacks, the Indian media seems to have seriously engaged with diversity of a very different sort, considering the multiple dissonances that have emerged on basic points of fact. This speaks as much about the quality of the relationship between the media and the public, as about the nature of the governance compact and the degree of accountability that the security and intelligence agencies seem inclined to accept. The media in this sense, amplified the tactical incoherence of the official response to an unprecedented tragedy.
To mention merely a few instances: early on the afternoon of November 27, well before the siege of Mumbai had reached the 24-hour mark, the Director-General of Police in Maharashtra announced that the Taj Mahal hotel had been emptied of all threats. The following day, the chief of the Indian Army’s Southern Command announced around midday, that the Taj Mahal had just one remnant gunman hiding out in its old wing. The new wing had been thoroughly “cleansed” and the sole hangout would swiftly be neutralised, he predicted. Gun battles raged on for hours afterwards and it was only early the next morning that the last of the marauders was put out of commission.
There were also periodic broadcasts that the gunmen had seized hostages and were engaged in negotiating a ransom for their release, when the reality was quite the contrary. Early in the encounter, a story was floated that huge quantities of the lethal explosive, RDX, had been uncovered from sites in close vicinity of the Taj Mahal hotel. This story remained the exclusive property of one of the English news-channels, but was quietly put to rest as the commando operation progressed. It resurfaced in another guise though, with the claim that the gunmen had huge quantities of the explosive and could possibly raze all three buildings, burying commandos engaged in combat in a graveyard of rubble.
After the clean-up was completed, the RDX theory in its mutant form, was decisively scotched by the head of the elite commando force, the National Security Guard (NSG), in full glare of the country’s numerous media channels. But even in its death throes, the theory proved to have some fervent adherents. Within two days of the final shot being fired in the siege of Mumbai, it was reprised, with attributions to anonymous sources. The two luxury hotels that had been commandeered, the new narrative went, had been seeded with lethal RDX bombs. These had providentially, been detected and defused just in time. The intent of the gunmen otherwise, was to set off those explosives and to escape under the cover of the resultant chaos and confusion.
There were numerous stories that the media managed to float on how the attackers beached on Indian shores. To begin with, three distinct places in Mumbai were identified as locations where the gunmen had come ashore, though the rubber dinghy they had used for landing had ostensibly been spotted and eyewitnesses to their arrival had spoken to the news channels.
Beyond this, considerable uncertainty was sowed over the mode of arrival. There was first, a story of four decapitated bodies being found, all of the crew of the fishing trawler that had been hijacked by the terrorists, possibly off the coast of Porbandar. Within hours, the number of victims of this particular episode was scaled back to one. The captain of the fishing trawler, it was surmised, had piloted the raiders to within sight of the Mumbai shore and then been killed. Concurrently, speculation was being fuelled that elements of the crew may have cooperated with the raiders. The investigation, it was put out, was looking with great interest at fishing boat operators recently incarcerated in Pakistani jails for breaching territorial boundaries, who had perhaps been indoctrinated by Pakistani intelligence.
The identity of the captured attacker -- the only one caught on film in reasonable clarity, thanks to a news photographer who reached Mumbai’s principal railway terminus just when the first shootout began – was again cause of great confusion. Taken alive after a beachfront shootout on November 26, there were different versions of his name afloat till a week later. First accounts spoke of him as fluent in English and well-educated. A subsequent account told of him being of indigent family origins, with education well short of primary schooling. There were reports that he had been gravely injured and had begged for life-saving medical attention at the hospital he was taken to, and then a clarification by the dean of the medical college attached to the same hospital, that he was unharmed except for minor bruises. Finally, contrary to the account in one section of the media that he was being held in an “undisclosed location”, the medical expert testifying to the captured terrorist’s condition was identified by both name and affiliation.
On December 2, India’s external affairs minister, Pranab Mukherjee, playing host to the Secretary-General of the Arab League, spoke of a range of options that were under consideration to deal with the aftermath of Mumbai. Though he specified none and indicated no preferences, Mukherjee’s statement was interpreted in diametrically opposed fashion by two of the country’s biggest English-language newspapers: one headlined its story “India open to military action against Pakistan”, while the other said quite definitively, “Pranab rules out military action”.
The latter attitude though, was a minimal strain in the media in the aftermath of Mumbai, since Pakistan-bashing was the only constant element in the competitive clamour for attention. The question the Indian media faces is not a trivial one. Is it going to be an exclusive forum for the more extreme voices? Or can it find a sensible way forward, even in a conjuncture as trying as Mumbai 26/11, to promote a genuine social dialogue that is attentive to the true risks and benefits of any particular strategic course?
Though difficult in trying times such as now, can the media hear voices from across the border? Would it have any use for instance, for the following observations from the December 2 editorial in Dawn, one of the most restrained and sober voices in the Pakistan media: “…what cannot be condoned is the behaviour of the Indian media, that taking its cue from the politicians — and from a culture of nationalism that is especially apparent where Islamabad is concerned — came down hard on Pakistan, often conjuring up fantastical descriptions of the way the siege of Mumbai was laid. Not only does this put pressure on the Indian government to keep up its accusations and resist moves for a cooperative stance, it also damages people-to-people ties, for after all, the media is meant to speak for the common man”.
Beginning on November 29, Karachi, where the Mumbai marauders ostensibly set off from, was gripped by ethnic rioting on a scale never before seen. None of the known players in Karachi’s volatile political milieu owned responsibility for the violence. As The Daily Times of Islamabad, another newspaper known for relative sobriety, commented in its December 2 editorial, the Prime Minister of Pakistan had asked for intelligence on the incidents and “at least one TV channel (had) reported that an intelligence report sent to the prime minister has held India responsible for the mayhem”.
As the pitch rose of the diplomatic and political exchanges, the media on both sides began playing their accustomed role of amplifying the discord. The difference with earlier phases of mutual hostility, perhaps, was that the media on each side was now the specific target of attack by commentators and government spokespersons on the other side. This has been accompanied by ad hominem attacks – as by the anchor-person of the Times Now TV news channel in India – on human rights defenders who believe that the response to terrorism cannot be confined within the militarist mindset and needs necessarily to be attentive to civil liberties and social justice.
The Mumbai attacks came just as India was beginning to grapple with certain agonising questions about the fundamentals of its approach to terrorism. The Batla House encounter of September 19 in Delhi’s south-eastern suburb of Jamia Nagar, was a catalyst for several of these questions to be aired with rare freedom. The subsequent discovery of a terrorist ring involving supposed preachers of the Hindu faith and serving and retired officers of the Indian army, then broke old moulds of thinking on terrorism, suggesting that a workable approach to the problem needed to look in different directions.
Needless to say, all these questions have been suppressed with the Mumbai attacks. The dominant media project now is to integrate the Mumbai attacks into the master-narrative on terrorism that was being constructed till Batla House and the Hindutva terror ring cropped up as dissonant elements. The directions that the project will take are apparent in a recent piece written by a media analyst well-known for his feverishly speculative commentary. The figure around which this new narrative evolves is seemingly Mohammad Sadiq Sheikh, in police custody since September and accused of being the mastermind of serial bombings in Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Delhi. Sadiq Sheikh is putatively among the founders of the Indian Mujahedin, which has claimed responsibility for all these attacks and it now transpires, has had intimate links with the Lashkar-e-Taiba insurgent group in Pakistan’s side of Kashmir and with Pakistan’s Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
When Safdar Nagori, the general secretary of a shadowy body of uncertain provenance called the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), was arrested in March 2008, the same analyst had commented that “SIMI cadre have been involved in almost every Islamist terror strike since (2000), ranging from the Mumbai serial bombings of 2003 and 2006 to attacks in Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Delhi”.
Despite the seeming certainty behind this pronouncement, obviously inspired by driblets of information leaked by the intelligence agencies, a tribunal constituted to review the extension of the ban on SIMI, held on August 5, that there was no evidence connecting SIMI with terrorism. The Central Government on that occasion, secured a face-saving stay on the application of this ruling by the Supreme Court. Media comment was muted and the public, still under the pall of fear spread by the Jaipur, Bangalore and Ahmedabad bombings, remained indifferent to finer points of legality.
The pursuit of the terrorists behind the recent wave of bomb attacks in India, picked up momentum with the mid-August arrest of Abu Bashar Qasmi, a 25-year old cleric, snatched from his home in Azamgarh district of Uttar Pradesh by four men who came visiting on the pretext of exploring a matrimonial alliance. Taken immediately to Gujarat, he was identified by the state police as the man behind July’s Ahmedabad attacks. He also reportedly, confessed to an undefined role in the Jaipur bombing.
On August 24, the Rajasthan police announced the arrest of Shahbaz Husain, a computer software expert who ran a small business in Lucknow. Press reports later blazoned the claim of the Rajasthan Police that sophisticated electronic chips and circuits of bombs resembling those used in Surat had been found in Shahbaz’s premises.
With Shahbaz’s firm implication in terrorism, an elaborate chain of linkages began to be drawn between the various blasts. Nagori, Shahbaz and Qasmi were all reportedly, members of a secretive cell that underwent explosives training in camps as far afield as Kerala and the jungles of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. Brooding over the whole conspiracy was the presence of Mohammad Altaf Subhan -- later identified as Abdul Subhan Quereshi, and variously described by the alternative names, Taufeeq and Tauqeer, by which he was allegedly known in jihadi circles -- a computer hardware specialist missing from his home in Mumbai’s distant suburb of Mira Road, since 2006.
Subhan was supposedly the technical brain behind the ingeniously designed bombs and the e-mail messages --replete with graphics and intense Islamic religious symbolism -- that had been sent out celebrating each terrorist strike in the heart of urban India. When Delhi was gutted by three simultaneous bombings in September, Subhan was the name on every investigating agency’s lips.
Working its way through the chain that connected Subhan with Qasmi and Shahbaz, the Delhi police quickly identified the other links in the terrorism plot, all from Uttar Pradesh. Acting in concert with their Gujarat counterparts, the Delhi police secured access to Qasmi for a round of interrogation.
In the six days between the Delhi blasts and the Batla House encounter, the script was radically rewritten. As the encounter at Batla House began, concurrent media commentary had it that the interrogation of Qasmi had led to the identification of the tenement and that the prize catch, Subhan, was holed out there. When the dust settled, Subhan remained as elusive as ever and Qasmi it transpired, had nothing to do with the Batla House raid. The Delhi Police still claimed it had cracked not merely the Delhi bombings, but also the Jaipur and Ahmedabad attacks. One of the two youths killed in the Batla House encounter, Bashir, alias Atif Amin became, in the new narrative, the master terrorist.
The final twist in the story came on September 24, with the arrest of five in Mumbai. In just a matter of days, the Nagori-Qasmi-Shahbaz chain of culpability, was history. The Mumbai Police now definitively identified 31-year old Sadiq Sheikh, a resident of the Cheetah Camp slum sprawl near the city’s north-eastern suburb of Chembur, as the inspiration and the mentor for all the terrorist actions of the preceding months.
As the project of knitting Sadiq Sheikh into the narrative of the Mumbai attacks proceeds, various new dramatis personae should be expected to emerge. The old cast of characters clearly has been dispensed with. Subhan alias Tauqeer, always a shadowy figure has now been firmly banished. And so long as the media fails to ask the hard questions that it should, more names will crop up only to disappear as mysteriously, from the future construction of this narrative.
“Made for media” investigations into terrorist atrocities are clearly betraying the cause of justice and creating a new culture of lawlessness within the country’s police agencies. They are also creating a climate of fear among the country’s main religious minority. The hesitant quest for a new approach to terrorism, which had began with the Batla House encounters and the inquiries into the Hindutva terrorism ring, has now perhaps been scotched because of the enormous public anxiety created by the Mumbai attacks. If it is capable of occasional introspection, the Indian media should really ask itself if things could have been different, given a little sobriety and responsibility on its part.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
New layers of bureaucratic complexity without accountability
When India’s Parliament resumed its sitting in December, the two principal political formations had just fought each other to a stalemate in five state assembly elections. The BJP’s effort to milk the Mumbai tragedies for electoral advantage had conspicuously failed. The defeat in Delhi, where concerns over urban terrorism and chaos should have been acute, was especially galling. But the magnitude of the Congress victories in Delhi and Rajasthan – not to mention Mizoram, which is a litle remote from the main theatre of political contestation – was not of sufficient magnitude for it to really claim gloating rights.
Taking the signal that it needed to get over the partisan rancour that normally follows every terrorist strike, Parliament acted with alacrity and with an elaborate decorum. The outcome was a rapid resolution of the issues that have bitterly divided government and opposition benches over the last many years and the creation of an agency specially empowered to tackle terrorism.
Heightened public concern ensured that the sensibilities of the states, which enjoy exclusive jurisdiction over law and order under the constitutional division of powers, would not be an impediment. The National Investigation Agency that will be created under the new laws, will have an intrusive jurisdiction into law and order matters all over. And when all the self-congratulation is done, it needs to be asked whether it would improve efficiencies in investigation and lend a sense of purpose to the prosecutorial process, or merely add another layer of complexity to a muddled bureaucratic apparatus.
The NIA is quite the centrepiece of the new legislation. It would be a police force created and administered by the Central government, which would endow all personnel above the rank of sub-inspector with powers throughout Indian territory. This conferment of powers would be at the sole discretion of the Centre, though the trigger to activate that process is nominally in the hands of the states.
In plain terms, a police station that records evidence under the relevant section of the Code of Criminal Procedure, shall send the statement on to the state government on any suspicion that the offence indicated could fall within the schedule of the NIA Act. The state government shall then forward this information to the Centre, which would on the basis of this and all other inputs, decide within 15 days on invoking the power of the NIA. Once the NIA enters the investigation, the authority of state government agencies would stand extinguished. All relevant records and material shall accordingly, be transferred to the NIA.
The Terrorism and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act of 1987 (TADA) and the Prevention of Terrorism Act of 2002 (POTA), allowed both the state and centre to establish special courts for trying relevant crimes. The NIA Act reserves this as an exclusive power of the centre, though the Chief Justice of the concerned state would be consulted on personnel choices.
A special court established under the NIA Act could hold hearings in camera and conduct summary trials when charges involve imprisonment for a period of upto three years. Its hearings would be conducted on a day-to-day basis and would enjoy precedence over all other cases. A judgment it renders could be appealed in the relevant High Court, which would hear it in a bench of two judges and dispose of it “as far as possible” within three months.
The key concession made by the new legislation to the civil rights discourse is in disallowing confessions made to the police as evidence in trial. But the amendments that have been introduced in the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act of 1967, bring in another undesirable feature of POTA, which is to reverse the burden of proof when fingerprints of the accused are found at the site of a terrorist act, or weapons and material used in the attack are found in his possession. This raises numerous troubling ghosts from the past, when police personnel involved in blatantly illegal acts have planted incriminating evidence to obscure the magnitude of their misdeeds.
The creation of the NIA runs contrary to the specific recommendations of the Administrative Reforms Commission, which had in a recent report, proposed a special wing within the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to deal with terrorism. Though originally created to deal with corruption in central government establishments, the CBI has by convention also become the agency to go to for lending a façade of probity to politically sensitive criminal investigations. The process of transferring a matter to CBI jurisdiction is relatively simple, involving the discretion solely of the state government. It is another matter that it has often proven fractious, since bureaucratic rivalries and political partisanship are never far below the surface.
The language of the NIA act specifies that state agencies “shall” undertake certain actions in defined situations. Whether this amounts to a categorical imperative or merely to a “best endeavour” demand, is a matter that legal experts will have to sort out. Yet even if the matter is settled in law, it is not apparent that its translation into actual practice will be smooth. Bureaucratic indecision and the infirmities of judgment could still be formidable obstacles.
Given their deeply ingrained operational procedures, police forces all over the country have been known in cases involving high levels of public anxiety, to follow a policy of ruthlessly eliminating risks, to hold suspects in detention for indefinite periods of time, and to allow prejudice to guide them rather than the demands of the law. It was not the formal wording of TADA and POTA that made them instruments of oppression, but the wholly muddled operational procedures followed by those empowered by these laws.
Apart from all its other provisions, the new legislation allows for the detention of terrorism suspects for upto 180 days, while the case against them is investigated. Perhaps the emphasis should have been the opposite: to allow for fewer days of detention than the 90 allowed under ordinary law. It is only under some such compulsion of accountability that public agencies are known to undertake a thorough reform of their operational procedures as a matter of priority.
Taking the signal that it needed to get over the partisan rancour that normally follows every terrorist strike, Parliament acted with alacrity and with an elaborate decorum. The outcome was a rapid resolution of the issues that have bitterly divided government and opposition benches over the last many years and the creation of an agency specially empowered to tackle terrorism.
Heightened public concern ensured that the sensibilities of the states, which enjoy exclusive jurisdiction over law and order under the constitutional division of powers, would not be an impediment. The National Investigation Agency that will be created under the new laws, will have an intrusive jurisdiction into law and order matters all over. And when all the self-congratulation is done, it needs to be asked whether it would improve efficiencies in investigation and lend a sense of purpose to the prosecutorial process, or merely add another layer of complexity to a muddled bureaucratic apparatus.
The NIA is quite the centrepiece of the new legislation. It would be a police force created and administered by the Central government, which would endow all personnel above the rank of sub-inspector with powers throughout Indian territory. This conferment of powers would be at the sole discretion of the Centre, though the trigger to activate that process is nominally in the hands of the states.
In plain terms, a police station that records evidence under the relevant section of the Code of Criminal Procedure, shall send the statement on to the state government on any suspicion that the offence indicated could fall within the schedule of the NIA Act. The state government shall then forward this information to the Centre, which would on the basis of this and all other inputs, decide within 15 days on invoking the power of the NIA. Once the NIA enters the investigation, the authority of state government agencies would stand extinguished. All relevant records and material shall accordingly, be transferred to the NIA.
The Terrorism and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act of 1987 (TADA) and the Prevention of Terrorism Act of 2002 (POTA), allowed both the state and centre to establish special courts for trying relevant crimes. The NIA Act reserves this as an exclusive power of the centre, though the Chief Justice of the concerned state would be consulted on personnel choices.
A special court established under the NIA Act could hold hearings in camera and conduct summary trials when charges involve imprisonment for a period of upto three years. Its hearings would be conducted on a day-to-day basis and would enjoy precedence over all other cases. A judgment it renders could be appealed in the relevant High Court, which would hear it in a bench of two judges and dispose of it “as far as possible” within three months.
The key concession made by the new legislation to the civil rights discourse is in disallowing confessions made to the police as evidence in trial. But the amendments that have been introduced in the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act of 1967, bring in another undesirable feature of POTA, which is to reverse the burden of proof when fingerprints of the accused are found at the site of a terrorist act, or weapons and material used in the attack are found in his possession. This raises numerous troubling ghosts from the past, when police personnel involved in blatantly illegal acts have planted incriminating evidence to obscure the magnitude of their misdeeds.
The creation of the NIA runs contrary to the specific recommendations of the Administrative Reforms Commission, which had in a recent report, proposed a special wing within the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to deal with terrorism. Though originally created to deal with corruption in central government establishments, the CBI has by convention also become the agency to go to for lending a façade of probity to politically sensitive criminal investigations. The process of transferring a matter to CBI jurisdiction is relatively simple, involving the discretion solely of the state government. It is another matter that it has often proven fractious, since bureaucratic rivalries and political partisanship are never far below the surface.
The language of the NIA act specifies that state agencies “shall” undertake certain actions in defined situations. Whether this amounts to a categorical imperative or merely to a “best endeavour” demand, is a matter that legal experts will have to sort out. Yet even if the matter is settled in law, it is not apparent that its translation into actual practice will be smooth. Bureaucratic indecision and the infirmities of judgment could still be formidable obstacles.
Given their deeply ingrained operational procedures, police forces all over the country have been known in cases involving high levels of public anxiety, to follow a policy of ruthlessly eliminating risks, to hold suspects in detention for indefinite periods of time, and to allow prejudice to guide them rather than the demands of the law. It was not the formal wording of TADA and POTA that made them instruments of oppression, but the wholly muddled operational procedures followed by those empowered by these laws.
Apart from all its other provisions, the new legislation allows for the detention of terrorism suspects for upto 180 days, while the case against them is investigated. Perhaps the emphasis should have been the opposite: to allow for fewer days of detention than the 90 allowed under ordinary law. It is only under some such compulsion of accountability that public agencies are known to undertake a thorough reform of their operational procedures as a matter of priority.
Flat and Arid: Thomas Friedman's World-View
Thomas Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Why the world needs a green revolution – and how we can renew our global future, Allen Lane, London, 2008, pp 438, 20 pounds (Rs 595); ISBN 978-1-846-14129-4.
Much contemporary wisdom, it seems, originates on dining table napkins. Fiscal policy was influenced rather inordinately and for much too long, by the mythical conception called the “Laffer curve”. That was a serious misfortune and not just for the country of origin of that theoretical artifice. And it had its origin on a dining-table napkin, where the economist Arthur Laffer sketched out what he believed, was a new way of looking at the relationship between tax rates and the resultant revenue yield.
A whole generation later, Thomas Friedman, over a vigorous lunch-time discussion with the editor of Foreign Policy magazine, sketched out what he thought was a compelling inverse relationship: between the price of oil and human freedom. The higher the price went, he argued, the bleaker was the world outlook for the fundamental practices of liberty. This most recent wisdom to dawn from modest origins on a dining-table napkin, could be called the “Friedman Curve”, though the author of this book is perhaps much too modest to claim that eponymous honour.
The point that Friedman makes seemingly has a strong empirical grounding. When oil was hovering around the $ 25 a barrel level, he recalls, U.S. President George Bush could claim to see a friendly soul in his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. But when oil topped $ 100, the hidden, dark depths of Putin’s soul emerged: his urge to bend every other institution of the Russian polity, including the media, to his will, and his latent hostility towards western liberalism.
Similarly, when oil was selling at a modest and reasonable level, Iran elected the reform-minded cleric Mohammad Khatami as president, one of whose stated intentions was to launch a new phase of détente with the west. But as the oil price climbed, the reformist strain was reduced to a marginal existence, culminating in the election of the fiery former Islamic vigilante, Mahmood Ahmedinejad, as Iranian president in 2005.
Three years ago, Friedman turned Copernicus on his head, by pronouncing that “the earth is flat”. He has since then, rehearsed most of the arguments he now advances, in his column for The New York Times. But reading through this latest book of his, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that Friedman is so deeply mired in the notion of “flatness” that he cannot see the multiple complexities of the contemporary world in more than two dimensions.
To just reverse the gaze that Friedman directs at the rest of the world: between Khatami and Ahmedinejad, Iran went through a phase of engagement with the west that began with a significant act of historical accountability, even atonement, by the U.S. In 1998, the U.S. administration of President Bill Clinton declassified papers relating to the 1953 intelligence operation that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, and foisted on the country a quarter-century of the quirky autocrat who called himself the Shah of Iran. That act of accountability was meant to sweep away the debris of the past and open up new possibilities of rapprochement between the U.S. and Iran.
Needless to say, the right-wing in the U.S. political spectrum took a dim view of this mea culpa, which it said, was corrosive of the entire U.S. foreign policy process. And with the right-wing restoration of 2001, Bush effectively choked off all new channels with Iran.
Similar hostile actions towards Russia, notably in the unilateral abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missiles treaty, could account for the relative hardening of attitudes towards the U.S. in that country. Now it is perfectly conceivable that without the rapid increase in oil prices seen over the last seven years, neither Russia nor Iran would have been in a position to challenge some of the U.S.’s more arbitrary diktats. Yet, it is a peculiarity of Friedman’s flattened perspective, that he consistently equates a country’s policy attitude towards the U.S. with its respect for human freedom, without ever turning his gaze towards the bullying, hectoring stridency of the U.S. engagement with the world under the Bush administration.
One of Friedman’s moments of revelation in recent times, was when engaged in conversation with an Indian software tycoon, who told him that the Indian industry’s success was a consequence of the “level playing field” they were given by the economic policy reforms of the 1990s. That remark was transformed into the epochal wisdom of the “flat earth”. The world, said Friedman, was increasingly being knit together by a constant striving for similar values and lifestyle paradigms, under virtually identical rules on economy organisation.
That very rosy forecast has been transformed into a more recent mood of alarm. Friedman now frets that the world, though flat is also getting too hot and crowded; that the consequences of flatness, of everybody believing that the American way of life was their rightful aspiration, could well be catastrophic. Now abreast of findings on global warming, Friedman asks the question that has been laid down as a challenge to the conventional development paradigm by numerous proponents of an alternative path, from economists of a gentle persuasion such as E.F. Schumacher to political radicals such as Fidel Castro. What would happen if India and China, not to mention all the other countries with high levels of aspiration in terms of lifestyle paradigms, were actually to achieve U.S. standards?
The answer quite clearly, is catastrophe. Resource exhaustion was the principal worry a generation back, though climate science has today established with reasonable certainty that the ecological balances that make life on earth what it is, will snap well before that stage is reached.
Friedman’s concerns clearly, have been awakened by an amalgam of the political and the ecological. On one side, he worries that the U.S. addiction to fossil fuels is subsidising the world’s greatest despots: from Saudi Arabia to Venezuela to Russia, they all rank in Friedman’s scale at roughly the same moral level. With the whole world emulating the U.S. since there is no other model available, the coffers of the autocrats of oil are assured of never running low. This could likely precipitate a political crisis for the U.S., ruining its efforts to bring liberty to the world. And it would culminate in ecological holocaust for the entire globe.
Is Friedman then, out to save the world or to retrieve American leadership? Seemingly both, since the well-being of the planet is bound in his perception, with the good-sense and the benign sense of purpose that only the U.S. can bring.
The way forward then, is to embrace a “green strategy” in energy, which would of course have ramifications in virtually every other domain of human endeavour – housing, transportation and numerous others. Friedman recalls with some degree of triumphalism, that the energy efficiency standards that were introduced in the U.S. after the first oil shock of 1973-74 “not only weakened (the oil exporters’ cartel) OPEC but also helped to unravel the Soviet Union”. But then, the virtual repeal of these efficiency norms when prosperity returned to the U.S. in the 1990s, shifted the geopolitical balance yet again.
A relentless sense of U.S. exceptionalism and primacy stalks this book, permeating the strategies that Friedman has in mind for mitigating the planetary ills he lists. With all the mixed record of implementation of the Kyoto protocols on global warming, world governments still remain engaged with the task of working out an agreed, common strategy. By December 2009, the global community is committed to agreeing on a treaty that will supplant Kyoto, addressing the key weaknesses in both its conception and implementation. Friedman remains indifferent to this project, since he does not see very much utility in global treaties. Rather, he would like to see the U.S. set off on a green crusade of its own, transforming itself within a generation into the most ecologically friendly nation in the world. The rest of the world, already inured to the idea that their well-being lies in emulating the U.S., would then voluntarily follow the same path, since “a truly green America … would be more valuable than fifty Kyoto Protocols. Emulation is always more effective than compulsion”.
Friedman’s strategies embrace a wide range of options, but they are derived in essence from what he portrays as the vast innovative capacity of the American people, their ability to contribute in many diverse ways to “nation-building at home”. The ideas are there; they just need to be tapped. The multiple missions that the U.S. needs immediately to embark on, include the replacement of fossil fuels (evocatively referred to as "fuels from hell") with renewable sources like wind and sun ("fuels from heaven"). This would require, for a country where lifestyles are built on wheels, the rapid adoption of electric engines by the automobile industry.
A technical hitch arises right here. A switch to electric automobiles would not in itself make much of a dent on the problem of climate change, since the car batteries would still need to be powered by an electricity grid that runs on fossil fuels. It may well aggravate the problem by bringing in one additional stage of energy conversion into transportation – from fossil fuel to electricity and then into motive power -- with all its problems of efficiency loss.
To get around this problem, the electricity grid itself would need to make the transition to renewable sources. And that problem appears fairly intractable, since there is no way that wind and the sun – which are intermittent and relatively low on energy density – can power an electricity grid that dispenses concentrated energy at virtually all times of the day. This has been part of the common sense thinking on alternative development paradigms for at least two generations. Friedman, obviously, does not get it, since he is obsessed above all, with preserving the American way of life and global leadership.
The “bottom-line” as he puts it, is that “America needs an energy technology bubble just like the information technology bubble”. This would require that the government make it “an absolute no-brainer to invest in renewable energy”. The reference to a “bubble” is interesting, since Friedman’s book arrives in the market at precisely the time when the adverse effects of the housing bubble burst are beginning to kick in.
Contrary to all his dark forebodings about the autocrats of oil seeking to destabilise U.S. leadership with their windfall earnings, he concedes that “sovereign wealth funds” based in these countries “have played a very healthy, stabilising role in the 2008 American subprime mortgage crisis”. One could well ask: what then is the problem? If the autocrats of oil are finally doing the U.S. a favour by recycling all the superprofits they make into Wall Street, what really does Friedman have to complain about?
The worry, it seems is long-term, since “over time” it is difficult to believe that the “economic clout” of the autocrats “will not get translated politically”. But Friedman seems to omit one matter of crucial detail: that the money has always been held in dollar assets and in many ways has served to keep the U.S. economy afloat.
Here is where Friedman’s most illustrious predecessor as a dispenser of napkin wisdom kicks in. The “Laffer curve” originated in a particular economic conjuncture in 1974. The U.S. was in desperate economic difficulties. The Arab world, with Egypt and Syria in the lead, had just been beaten back in a war fought to reclaim territories seized by Israel in the 1967 war of conquest. The oil-rich elements within the Arab world had joined the campaign for the liberation of Palestine by imposing an oil export embargo on nations seen to be supporting Israel’s occupation. Prices of oil spiralled upwards.
The U.S. was then in a conjuncture of declining manufacturing competitiveness and uncertainty about the future global role of its currency. The dollar had been delinked from gold convertibility and was in free float, seemingly unable with inflation rampant, to find its true level. At the same time, the federal government found itself over-extended on the fiscal front. Tax rates had been steeply raised to support welfare programmes launched in 1960s, and the Vietnam war, though winding down, was still claiming large outlays.
Times were difficult, calling for extraordinary measures. And Arthur Laffer in a moment of epiphany saw the pathway out of the morass. Tax revenues are not proportional to rates, he said, since rates that are seen as excessive have the effect of diminishing the instinct to innovate and produce. Low rates in fact, may be the key, since they would restore entrepreneurial incentives, contributing to a significant increase in social output. When output itself is growing rapidly, even sharply lower tax rates would yield higher revenues.
When this wisdom known as “supply-side economics” became official policy with Ronald Reagan’s revolution against good sense in 1981, the U.S. slipped rapidly into a massive external payments deficit. The economy from then on, was kept afloat by infusions of funds from abroad. The dollar came unofficially, to be premised upon the “oil standard”. Borrowed funds became the basis of economic growth for the U.S. First it was the federal government, then the corporate sector and finally, the household sector, that took on this debt.
Friedman’s insistence on a “green technology” bubble in this context is arresting. By definition, a bubble is known to form when values of assets – such as shares and real estate – far outrun their true long-term utility. A bubble is typically a consequence of concerted action by a large number of people with power to move finances into particular sectors, which boosts asset values in those sectors and induces more investors to enter. A bubble creates assets that do not improve overall national productivity. Though there have been some claims that the information technology bubble of the 1990s did contribute to productivity growth, the consensus view emerging today appears to be that it did not.
A “green technology” bubble would in these respects, be a worthwhile successor to all its predecessors, in sucking in volumes of global savings into the U.S., for no discernibly useful purpose. This does not mean of course, that the rest of the world can remain unmindful about the imperatives of a greener future. The options available have been much talked about and even hesitantly tried out in many parts of the developing world. If anything, they have been abandoned because of the power of the conventional wisdom, that emulating the U.S. is the only way to go. As a recent reviewer put it, Friedman represents the advance guard of the conventional wisdom, exploring pathways where the “group-think” of the U.S. establishment will reach in relatively quick time. His work offers abundant reason why the developing world should awaken to the compelling reality of today’s crisis-wracked world: that emulating the U.S. is perhaps the surest pathway to collective suicide.
Much contemporary wisdom, it seems, originates on dining table napkins. Fiscal policy was influenced rather inordinately and for much too long, by the mythical conception called the “Laffer curve”. That was a serious misfortune and not just for the country of origin of that theoretical artifice. And it had its origin on a dining-table napkin, where the economist Arthur Laffer sketched out what he believed, was a new way of looking at the relationship between tax rates and the resultant revenue yield.
A whole generation later, Thomas Friedman, over a vigorous lunch-time discussion with the editor of Foreign Policy magazine, sketched out what he thought was a compelling inverse relationship: between the price of oil and human freedom. The higher the price went, he argued, the bleaker was the world outlook for the fundamental practices of liberty. This most recent wisdom to dawn from modest origins on a dining-table napkin, could be called the “Friedman Curve”, though the author of this book is perhaps much too modest to claim that eponymous honour.
The point that Friedman makes seemingly has a strong empirical grounding. When oil was hovering around the $ 25 a barrel level, he recalls, U.S. President George Bush could claim to see a friendly soul in his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. But when oil topped $ 100, the hidden, dark depths of Putin’s soul emerged: his urge to bend every other institution of the Russian polity, including the media, to his will, and his latent hostility towards western liberalism.
Similarly, when oil was selling at a modest and reasonable level, Iran elected the reform-minded cleric Mohammad Khatami as president, one of whose stated intentions was to launch a new phase of détente with the west. But as the oil price climbed, the reformist strain was reduced to a marginal existence, culminating in the election of the fiery former Islamic vigilante, Mahmood Ahmedinejad, as Iranian president in 2005.
Three years ago, Friedman turned Copernicus on his head, by pronouncing that “the earth is flat”. He has since then, rehearsed most of the arguments he now advances, in his column for The New York Times. But reading through this latest book of his, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that Friedman is so deeply mired in the notion of “flatness” that he cannot see the multiple complexities of the contemporary world in more than two dimensions.
To just reverse the gaze that Friedman directs at the rest of the world: between Khatami and Ahmedinejad, Iran went through a phase of engagement with the west that began with a significant act of historical accountability, even atonement, by the U.S. In 1998, the U.S. administration of President Bill Clinton declassified papers relating to the 1953 intelligence operation that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, and foisted on the country a quarter-century of the quirky autocrat who called himself the Shah of Iran. That act of accountability was meant to sweep away the debris of the past and open up new possibilities of rapprochement between the U.S. and Iran.
Needless to say, the right-wing in the U.S. political spectrum took a dim view of this mea culpa, which it said, was corrosive of the entire U.S. foreign policy process. And with the right-wing restoration of 2001, Bush effectively choked off all new channels with Iran.
Similar hostile actions towards Russia, notably in the unilateral abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missiles treaty, could account for the relative hardening of attitudes towards the U.S. in that country. Now it is perfectly conceivable that without the rapid increase in oil prices seen over the last seven years, neither Russia nor Iran would have been in a position to challenge some of the U.S.’s more arbitrary diktats. Yet, it is a peculiarity of Friedman’s flattened perspective, that he consistently equates a country’s policy attitude towards the U.S. with its respect for human freedom, without ever turning his gaze towards the bullying, hectoring stridency of the U.S. engagement with the world under the Bush administration.
One of Friedman’s moments of revelation in recent times, was when engaged in conversation with an Indian software tycoon, who told him that the Indian industry’s success was a consequence of the “level playing field” they were given by the economic policy reforms of the 1990s. That remark was transformed into the epochal wisdom of the “flat earth”. The world, said Friedman, was increasingly being knit together by a constant striving for similar values and lifestyle paradigms, under virtually identical rules on economy organisation.
That very rosy forecast has been transformed into a more recent mood of alarm. Friedman now frets that the world, though flat is also getting too hot and crowded; that the consequences of flatness, of everybody believing that the American way of life was their rightful aspiration, could well be catastrophic. Now abreast of findings on global warming, Friedman asks the question that has been laid down as a challenge to the conventional development paradigm by numerous proponents of an alternative path, from economists of a gentle persuasion such as E.F. Schumacher to political radicals such as Fidel Castro. What would happen if India and China, not to mention all the other countries with high levels of aspiration in terms of lifestyle paradigms, were actually to achieve U.S. standards?
The answer quite clearly, is catastrophe. Resource exhaustion was the principal worry a generation back, though climate science has today established with reasonable certainty that the ecological balances that make life on earth what it is, will snap well before that stage is reached.
Friedman’s concerns clearly, have been awakened by an amalgam of the political and the ecological. On one side, he worries that the U.S. addiction to fossil fuels is subsidising the world’s greatest despots: from Saudi Arabia to Venezuela to Russia, they all rank in Friedman’s scale at roughly the same moral level. With the whole world emulating the U.S. since there is no other model available, the coffers of the autocrats of oil are assured of never running low. This could likely precipitate a political crisis for the U.S., ruining its efforts to bring liberty to the world. And it would culminate in ecological holocaust for the entire globe.
Is Friedman then, out to save the world or to retrieve American leadership? Seemingly both, since the well-being of the planet is bound in his perception, with the good-sense and the benign sense of purpose that only the U.S. can bring.
The way forward then, is to embrace a “green strategy” in energy, which would of course have ramifications in virtually every other domain of human endeavour – housing, transportation and numerous others. Friedman recalls with some degree of triumphalism, that the energy efficiency standards that were introduced in the U.S. after the first oil shock of 1973-74 “not only weakened (the oil exporters’ cartel) OPEC but also helped to unravel the Soviet Union”. But then, the virtual repeal of these efficiency norms when prosperity returned to the U.S. in the 1990s, shifted the geopolitical balance yet again.
A relentless sense of U.S. exceptionalism and primacy stalks this book, permeating the strategies that Friedman has in mind for mitigating the planetary ills he lists. With all the mixed record of implementation of the Kyoto protocols on global warming, world governments still remain engaged with the task of working out an agreed, common strategy. By December 2009, the global community is committed to agreeing on a treaty that will supplant Kyoto, addressing the key weaknesses in both its conception and implementation. Friedman remains indifferent to this project, since he does not see very much utility in global treaties. Rather, he would like to see the U.S. set off on a green crusade of its own, transforming itself within a generation into the most ecologically friendly nation in the world. The rest of the world, already inured to the idea that their well-being lies in emulating the U.S., would then voluntarily follow the same path, since “a truly green America … would be more valuable than fifty Kyoto Protocols. Emulation is always more effective than compulsion”.
Friedman’s strategies embrace a wide range of options, but they are derived in essence from what he portrays as the vast innovative capacity of the American people, their ability to contribute in many diverse ways to “nation-building at home”. The ideas are there; they just need to be tapped. The multiple missions that the U.S. needs immediately to embark on, include the replacement of fossil fuels (evocatively referred to as "fuels from hell") with renewable sources like wind and sun ("fuels from heaven"). This would require, for a country where lifestyles are built on wheels, the rapid adoption of electric engines by the automobile industry.
A technical hitch arises right here. A switch to electric automobiles would not in itself make much of a dent on the problem of climate change, since the car batteries would still need to be powered by an electricity grid that runs on fossil fuels. It may well aggravate the problem by bringing in one additional stage of energy conversion into transportation – from fossil fuel to electricity and then into motive power -- with all its problems of efficiency loss.
To get around this problem, the electricity grid itself would need to make the transition to renewable sources. And that problem appears fairly intractable, since there is no way that wind and the sun – which are intermittent and relatively low on energy density – can power an electricity grid that dispenses concentrated energy at virtually all times of the day. This has been part of the common sense thinking on alternative development paradigms for at least two generations. Friedman, obviously, does not get it, since he is obsessed above all, with preserving the American way of life and global leadership.
The “bottom-line” as he puts it, is that “America needs an energy technology bubble just like the information technology bubble”. This would require that the government make it “an absolute no-brainer to invest in renewable energy”. The reference to a “bubble” is interesting, since Friedman’s book arrives in the market at precisely the time when the adverse effects of the housing bubble burst are beginning to kick in.
Contrary to all his dark forebodings about the autocrats of oil seeking to destabilise U.S. leadership with their windfall earnings, he concedes that “sovereign wealth funds” based in these countries “have played a very healthy, stabilising role in the 2008 American subprime mortgage crisis”. One could well ask: what then is the problem? If the autocrats of oil are finally doing the U.S. a favour by recycling all the superprofits they make into Wall Street, what really does Friedman have to complain about?
The worry, it seems is long-term, since “over time” it is difficult to believe that the “economic clout” of the autocrats “will not get translated politically”. But Friedman seems to omit one matter of crucial detail: that the money has always been held in dollar assets and in many ways has served to keep the U.S. economy afloat.
Here is where Friedman’s most illustrious predecessor as a dispenser of napkin wisdom kicks in. The “Laffer curve” originated in a particular economic conjuncture in 1974. The U.S. was in desperate economic difficulties. The Arab world, with Egypt and Syria in the lead, had just been beaten back in a war fought to reclaim territories seized by Israel in the 1967 war of conquest. The oil-rich elements within the Arab world had joined the campaign for the liberation of Palestine by imposing an oil export embargo on nations seen to be supporting Israel’s occupation. Prices of oil spiralled upwards.
The U.S. was then in a conjuncture of declining manufacturing competitiveness and uncertainty about the future global role of its currency. The dollar had been delinked from gold convertibility and was in free float, seemingly unable with inflation rampant, to find its true level. At the same time, the federal government found itself over-extended on the fiscal front. Tax rates had been steeply raised to support welfare programmes launched in 1960s, and the Vietnam war, though winding down, was still claiming large outlays.
Times were difficult, calling for extraordinary measures. And Arthur Laffer in a moment of epiphany saw the pathway out of the morass. Tax revenues are not proportional to rates, he said, since rates that are seen as excessive have the effect of diminishing the instinct to innovate and produce. Low rates in fact, may be the key, since they would restore entrepreneurial incentives, contributing to a significant increase in social output. When output itself is growing rapidly, even sharply lower tax rates would yield higher revenues.
When this wisdom known as “supply-side economics” became official policy with Ronald Reagan’s revolution against good sense in 1981, the U.S. slipped rapidly into a massive external payments deficit. The economy from then on, was kept afloat by infusions of funds from abroad. The dollar came unofficially, to be premised upon the “oil standard”. Borrowed funds became the basis of economic growth for the U.S. First it was the federal government, then the corporate sector and finally, the household sector, that took on this debt.
Friedman’s insistence on a “green technology” bubble in this context is arresting. By definition, a bubble is known to form when values of assets – such as shares and real estate – far outrun their true long-term utility. A bubble is typically a consequence of concerted action by a large number of people with power to move finances into particular sectors, which boosts asset values in those sectors and induces more investors to enter. A bubble creates assets that do not improve overall national productivity. Though there have been some claims that the information technology bubble of the 1990s did contribute to productivity growth, the consensus view emerging today appears to be that it did not.
A “green technology” bubble would in these respects, be a worthwhile successor to all its predecessors, in sucking in volumes of global savings into the U.S., for no discernibly useful purpose. This does not mean of course, that the rest of the world can remain unmindful about the imperatives of a greener future. The options available have been much talked about and even hesitantly tried out in many parts of the developing world. If anything, they have been abandoned because of the power of the conventional wisdom, that emulating the U.S. is the only way to go. As a recent reviewer put it, Friedman represents the advance guard of the conventional wisdom, exploring pathways where the “group-think” of the U.S. establishment will reach in relatively quick time. His work offers abundant reason why the developing world should awaken to the compelling reality of today’s crisis-wracked world: that emulating the U.S. is perhaps the surest pathway to collective suicide.
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