Sukumar Muralidharan
Early in July, with Israeli forces rampaging through Gaza, killing, maiming and destroying with gay abandon, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman had a moment of revelation. A sightseeing trip through the rain forests of Peru was just the stimulus needed to see distant events with a new and blinding clarity. And as he reflected on the violence in West Asia from the vantage point of Peru’s tropical splendour, what occurred most strikingly was the sheer lack of purpose of it all. Violence was inherent in nature, but it was always underlined by a grand purpose of species preservation. The subtle equations of nature are preserved in the struggle between species for living space and the nourishment that the elements provide. A delicate balance between predator species and their prey is often sustained by the dynamics of evolutionary biology. But this balance requires that species behave rationally and respect their inherent instincts for self-preservation.
What was on display in Palestine however, was completely contrary to rationality. Israel had evacuated the Gaza strip, wrote Friedman, but the Palestinian Islamic resistance, Hamas, chose not to use the opportunity to build “a nest for its young there -- a decent state and society, with jobs”. Instead, it decided on the path of obduracy and violence, launching “hundreds of rockets into Israel”. The Palestinians could instantly “have a state on the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem”, said Friedman, “if they and the Arab League clearly recognised Israel, normalised relations and renounced violence”. But they were intent, regrettably, on little else than the destruction of Israel, even if it also meant self-obliteration. “Species that behave that way in the rain forest”, Friedman concluded ominously, inevitably “become extinct”.
Wish-fulfilment is often a powerful, though unconscious, motivation for writers. Friedman’s unquestioning Zionist loyalty has never been a secret and his column written in Peru seemed rather eagerly to anticipate a moment in history, that for Israel has been the only possible solution to the conflict in Palestine: the extinction of the Palestinians as a national community and their dispersal into distant corners of the Arab world as a people devoid of a specific historical identity. The Zionist construction of history first denied the existence of the Palestinians and then grudgingly came around to recognising them as an irritant, a people whose claims to the land they had lived in for centuries did not have any of the sanctity of divine investiture that the Jews enjoyed. The annals of Zionism are replete with statements by its champions – David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir, Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon, Yitzhak Rabin, right down to Ehud Olmert – advocating the “transfer” of the Palestinian people as the only viable solution to what was called the “demographic problem” of Israel. And just to ensure that the conditions were appropriate for the departure of the Palestinians – always prefixed with the proviso that it would be “voluntary” -- Zionism was prepared to make their lives under occupation a veritable hell.
Israel’s newest war on Gaza began on June 28, just over nine months after an evacuation of the territory was accomplished to much internal discord and a torrent of global praise for what were deemed the Zionist state’s peaceful intentions. The immediate provocation for the invasion was a Palestinian attack on a military picket in which two Israeli soldiers were killed and one captured. It is important to note that the target of the Palestinian attack was a military post, instrumental in enforcing the illegal Israeli blockade of Gaza. Since the Palestinian national elections of February, the blockade has in its ruthlessness, managed to wed the lethal efficiency of U.S.-made weaponry to the savagery of medieval siege warfare. Effectively, the 1.5 million residents of Gaza have been deprived of the basic necessities of life since February, while being targeted with random and indiscriminate military strikes. The bombing of the Gaza beachfront on June 9, which killed seven innocent civilians and left the traumatised ten year-old, Huda Ghalia, as the sole survivor in a family of eight, may have shocked the world because of the media coverage it garnered. But Huda Ghalia’s trauma and tragedy have been played out repeatedly in the Palestinian lands since at least the last six years of the second intifada, which by the Palestinian’s avowal, will be their final uprising against colonialism.
By any applicable criterion of international law, the Israeli military outpost, engaged in illegal siege warfare against the population of Gaza, was a legitimate target. And the Israeli soldier captured on the occasion, Corporal Gilad Shalit, would be a prisoner of war, entitled to all the rights the status entailed. That indeed has been the burden of the Palestinian militants’ argument: that the release of the captured Israeli soldier is a matter to be negotiated by the Israeli government.
Israel has instead embarked upon a military rampage that has shocked the world. Gaza’s only electricity generating station was destroyed on the first day of the offensive. Roads and bridges essential to the movement of the civilian population and the sustenance of their livelihoods, soon followed, victims of high-technology ordnance manufactured in the U.S. On July 2, the London-based human rights group, Amnesty International observed after careful consideration, that the “deliberate attacks by Israeli forces against civilian property and infrastructure in the Gaza Strip violate international humanitarian law and constitute war crimes”. Israel was obliged under international law, to “take urgent measures to remedy the long-term damage it has caused and immediately restore the supply -- at its own cost -- of electricity and water to the Palestinian population in the affected areas”.
Effectively demolishing the argument that Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza was a demonstration of its peaceful intent, Amnesty observed: “High numbers of Palestinian bystanders, including women and children, have been killed and injured by Israeli artillery shelling and air strikes in recent weeks and months”. And with greater subtlety, the human rights group laid to rest the myth that Israeli military actions have been a legitimate response to Palestinian provocations. The situation, said Amnesty, “looks set to worsen in light of the end of the unilateral cease-fire which the armed wing of Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups had been observing since last year”.
If the situation that prevailed was one of a “unilateral ceasefire by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups”, what then could Friedman and others of his ilk mean by their constant harping on the “hundreds of rockets that are fired into Israel”? The answer is not far to seek. The rockets that are fired are essentially home-made weapons – no more sophisticated than firecrackers – that have had minimal military impact. Their significance indeed, has been little more than symbolic. Even as the organised political forces in Palestine declared a ceasefire in the expectation that Israel would reciprocate, individuals outside the control of these groups have kept up their symbolic gestures of defiance. Their argument is very simple: Israel has never been in the business of reciprocity and it would be foolish to expect the Zionist establishment to reverse course now.
The Israeli response, as always, has been disproportionate and indiscriminate. According to an assessment of the situation by the U.N. Office of the Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs, between November and December 2005, the Palestinians launched an estimated 283 home-made rockets into Israel. None of these caused any casualties. In supposed retaliation – though the more credible argument would be that theirs was the original provocation – the Israel Defence Force (IDF) conducted 124 air-strikes and fired 544 artillery shells into Gaza. And all these actions had seriously lethal implications. The number of Palestinians killed in Gaza since the so-called Israeli withdrawal, has been, in proportionate terms, considerably more than in the worst days of the occupation.
In December 2005, belying all claims of a withdrawal, Israel declared parts of northern Gaza a “no-go” area, where its forces would feel free to fire and kill without warning. Palestinian fishermen setting out to sea are routinely fired upon by the IDF in incidents involving loss of life. And routes of entry and exit from Gaza are under the ironhanded control of the IDF. The consequence of withdrawal in other words, has been little else than to convert Gaza from a site of brutal military occupation into the world’s largest unsupervised prison.
This was exactly how things were meant to be. Friedman and others of his stripe who argue that the Gaza withdrawal was a gesture of peace, are guilty of the worst form of disingenuousness. Indeed, the moment it was announced, the Israeli gameplan was denounced as a dilatory tactic to deny the Palestinians true sovereignty and retain indefinite control over the strategically more important West Bank. Such indeed was plainly stated by the then Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon’s principal political aide, Dov Weisglass. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz on October 8, 2004, Weisglass effectively laid out the hidden agenda of the Gaza withdrawal. By late-2003, as he recounted matters, Israel was deep in a quagmire. The bloody confrontation with the Palestinians had dragged on three years at considerable damage to Israel’s international image. The US was still firmly committed, but time was not on Israel’s side. The economy was stagnant and domestic dissent was growing. It was just a matter of time before international opinion, already considerably alienated, crossed the crucial threshold and began to think of sanctions against Israel as a distinct possibility.
In the circumstances, the Gaza withdrawal was a tactical master-stroke, which presented a semblance of real concessions to the Palestinians, while preserving Israel’s core strategic interests in the West Bank. The peace negotiations, Weisglass chortled, had been cast away, into an indefinite limbo. Referring to an exchange of letters between Sharon and U.S. President George Bush early in 2004, Weisglass described how the US had with little demur, endorsed Israel’s essential interests in the West Bank.
Though intended as an overture towards the restive constituency of settlers that saw the Gaza withdrawal as a treasonous ceding of Israel’s divine patrimony, Weisglass’s long and candid exposition of Israel’s agenda for Palestinian statehood attracted considerable international attention. Rather than offering the Palestinians the possibility of an honourable peace, the purpose as plainly stated, was to put the “peace process into formalin”, i.e., to preserve a dead organism as a laboratory specimen to be displayed whenever it suited Israel’s interests.
With its occupation forces having pulled out, Israel has felt at liberty to wildly escalate its retribution for real and imagined acts of defiance. The only difference is that, at least until the June 28 invasion, the violence was administered by fighter aircraft and helicopters from the safety of the skies. If the Palestinians have refused to be cowed down, that is only a tribute to the undying character of their struggle, which a morally anaesthetised world would happily bury in oblivion, if it were not for the visible brutality that Israel continues to visit on innocent civilians.
If the criteria for “humanitarian intervention” employed when the western powers launched successive wars of dismemberment against Yugoslavia in the 1990s were to be applied today, Israel would long since have been placed under international guardianship and its political leaders indicted for war crimes. On June 6, the U.N. Human Rights Council adopted a resolution condemning Israel's military operations in Palestine as a clear breach of international humanitarian law. The newly established body of the U.N. resolved by a margin of 29 against 11, with five abstentions, that it would send a fact-finding mission to Gaza.
From an Indian viewpoint, what is perhaps most significant about this resolution is simply the fact that India voted in its favour. After years of shameless kowtowing before the U.S.-Israeli agenda of depriving the Palestinians of their basic political rights and identity, India has awoken now to the responsibilities it owes to people elsewhere, struggling for their freedom from colonialism. This is a major gain, but it has been vitiated by commentary in the bourgeois media – reminiscent of the BJP Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh’s infamous statement after a visit to Israel – that India’s support for Palestinian national rights is a concession to “vote bank politics” at home. This variety of political idiocy clearly needs to be combated and defeated, if the commonsense and morality of India’s foreign policy is to be retrieved from the slough that it has been plunged into, by the recent ardour for courting the U.S.-Israel neo-imperial axis.
July 11, 2006
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Mandal II and the Media
Sukumar Muralidharan
A recently concluded survey of the British media found that of the senior journalists with decisive influence over news priorities and editorial policy, a significant majority is drawn from a narrow, privately-schooled, Oxbridge-educated elite. Indeed, as British society becomes more diverse and the political system grapples with the challenge of inclusion, the media – if a comparison were to be made with similar data from the mid-1980s – has tended to become an enclave of class privilege. In the words of a report in the Guardian, the dominance of the upper crust is strong enough to ensure that it is “difficult for those from other backgrounds to get a foothold”.
These findings from distant shores were published at roughly the same time that a decision by the Indian government to set aside a fixed proportion of seats in the higher education system for classes of citizens disadvantaged by history, had ignited a debate on the quality of representation afforded by the institutions of Indian democracy. Among the institutions that came in for an examination – even if rather hesitantly and fleetingly – was the media. A survey prompted by the controversy, found that in a sample of 315 journalists in the national capital with the authority to determine media agendas, not one belonged to either a Scheduled Caste or Tribe. No fewer than 49 per cent of the sample was drawn from the Brahminical strata. And if all caste Hindu groups were to be considered in addition to the so-called dwija or twice-born, their share in the total is no less 88 per cent.
Where Scheduled Castes and Tribes are concerned, the argument over affirmative action was settled as part of the nationalist compact which brought India its independence. That the media should remain innocent of any participation from these classes, well into India’s sixth decade as a sovereign, self-governing nation, should surely be occasion for introspection by a social institution that has pretensions to objectivity and fairness in its self-assigned role of determining national priorities. Curiously though, the main English-language newspapers in the country had little space or time for this particular survey on the social origin of journalists.
It is a far from settled point that where one comes from determines what one is. That notion of determinacy is completely antithetical to all conceptions of individual liberty. It could be a valid proposition though, that a psychology of conformity could operate within large aggregates of individuals. Particular individuals could well transcend the limitations imposed by the circumstances of their origin and their accumulation of lived experience. In large groups though, personal commitments and convictions may well get submerged in the overriding pressure to do what is accepted.
To talk about the media today is to deal with complexity and multiple meanings. Variously perceived and described, the media is today a source of information and entertainment, as also the midwife of a union between the two. For a growing number, it increasingly serves as a forum of self-expression. In most studies of the modern media as a social reality, a self-serving myth, continues to hold sway. The media in this portrayal is the institutional bearer of the social right to free speech. This is a happy scenario, except for a minor quibble: the media derives its profits not from delivering information of value to an audience or from serving as a forum for a democratic exchange of views, but from delivering an audience of value to the corporate advertiser. The media arena is not a competitive marketplace where information and ideas are allowed a free run so that the best among them rise to the surface. Rather, it is a carefully controlled environment to ensure the most favourable circumstances for advertisers to sell their wares to carefully screened and selected audiences.
Evidently, perceptions of media neutrality and integrity often lie in the eyes (and ears) of the beholder. The notion that the mass media as an entity merits a distinct field of study originates with the proliferation of the print industry in the early 20th century, followed by the pervasive spread of broadcasting in the years after World War II. The early approach focused on media content and the impact this would have on public perceptions. The role of the media would also invariably come in for scrutiny when certain alarming or disintegrative tendencies, such as an upsurge in violent crime, became manifest in society. These would typically be accompanied by suggestions that the media should play a constructive and ameliorative role, though it has never been clear how best this function is discharged: through reporting things as they are, taking a moral position, or simply avoiding the subject altogether.
Similar is the dilemma that arises when dealing with the functioning of the media in a context of social conflict. Is the function of accurate reporting uppermost, even if it is disconnected from moral judgments? Or is an ethical posture inherent even in the most dispassionate account of any event or sequence of events? Does a well-considered effort at ascribing responsibility for a state of inequality, which does not hesitate to name winners and losers, aggravate an already inflamed situation? Or does it, by focusing attention on the sources of injustice, impel society at large to grapple with the viruses within its fold and root them out?
If any convincing answers have been devised to these questions, they are yet to be elucidated. Neither are they evident in the existing practice of the media. Publishing media content that is in conformity with a placid and uncontested paradigm of social evolution would be acceptable conduct, because it serves elite interests and safeguards their social preeminence. Anything that departs from this idiom would be behaviour warranting stricture and quite possibly, sanction.
This brings up the issue of the relationship between the media as a commercial institution and the public that it caters to. In turn, this requires that at least two other models of media behaviour be considered. The first of these could be called, taking Dennis McQuail’s widely cited formulation, the “ritualist” model, which emphasises not “the transmission of information across space” but the “maintenance of society in time” and the “representation of shared beliefs”. And then there is the “publicity” model which approaches the media less as a source of information than as a device of drawing and retaining visual (or aural) attention. This in turn, serves the direct economic objective of increasing revenue earned from an audience. This model emphasises that “mass communication is liable not to be communication at all, in the sense of an ordered transfer of meaning”. Rather, it is more about “spectatorship” in which the “fact of attention often matters more than the quality of attention”.
In 1990, when the Indian media faced its first significant challenge on the question of affirmative action for the “socially and educationally backward classes” (SEBC’s), it responded by invoking the sacred trope of a seamless Indian national identity and denouncing the divisiveness of caste. “Class” is the term used in the clause of the Indian constitution that enables the State to undertake schemes of protective discrimination, as also in the 1980 report of the Mandal Commission which coined the term “other backward classes” to distinguish its target group from existing beneficiaries of affirmative action. But “class” has invariably translated in official pronouncements into “caste”, raising fears that the ghosts of a primitive, ascriptive social order were rising again to haunt India’s halting but brave efforts at modernisation.
In its tone, editorial comment in the English language press – which exerts an influence far exceeding its reach in India – then tended to the view that all was going well until the government of the day gave into an opportunistic whim. Editorially, the Indian Express (August 9, 1990) condemned the decision as “ruinous” and gloomily forecast a “further deterioration of the state apparatus and heightened social tensions” as the first consequence of a “crassly opportunistic” move. The Times of India (TOI) similarly, commented (August 9, 1990) that the Mandal recommendations on job reservations in the central government, threatened to undo “at one stroke” all that had been achieved over four decades of independence, in building a “modern, egalitarian order”. Reservations, the TOI continued, would “enshrine casteism, undermine meritocracy and excellence, and work against the creation of a pan-Indian identity”.
Notions of progress, it has been said, are remarkably congenial to those ascending the scale of income and wealth. But no matter, the TOI was willing to concede that the backward classes could be helped to improve their “competitiveness” – again, that favoured term of the upwardly mobile – through the provision of “abundant educational, health, nutritional and other social welfare benefits”.
Having identified the augmentation of “competitiveness” within the backward classes as a national priority, the media then lapsed into a phase of inattention. When “structural adjustment” kicked in as official economic policy in 1991, the Indian media joined in eagerly with the chorus of acclaim. The withdrawal of the State from domains where its interventions were not essential, the media confidently forecast, would enable it to more effectively meet the basic needs of a wider mass of the population. In its turn, the easing of the onerous burden of taxes that the more affluent had to bear, would reignite the spark of entrepreneurship, since individual self-aggrandisement was the most effective incentive available for productive economic activity. As the size of the national product increased, the diminution in rates of taxation would more than pay for itself in buoyant tax revenues, empowering the State with ample means to address its basic welfare commitments.
As the decade of the 1990s wore on, it became increasingly evident that these initial prognoses were disastrously askew. The limitless self-aggrandisement of individuals was very much a reality and the media found considerable satisfaction recently in reporting that in a world where the celebration of wealth had become the reigning cult, India had perhaps the fastest growing number of billionaires. But few have concerned themselves with the inconvenient facts that India has also had a rapid growth in economic inequality, perhaps next only to the U.S. and China. The correlation with the rapid fading out of the social sectors from governmental attention is yet to be drawn. But future scholars will probably make the effort to draw the necessary links between growing inequality in India – as both cause and consequence – and the precipitate drop in governmental welfare expenditure.
A 1996-97 report by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) documented how educational infrastructure in the country was in an advanced state of decay. It was allowed to sink into oblivion with scarcely an acknowledgment from the media. In 2002, the Supreme Court directed in response to a set of very energetic petitions from concerned citizens, that the right to food was a basic entitlement the State had to protect. As a first step, it directed all state governments to introduce midday meal programmes in schools. Financial stringency would not be permitted to stand as an alibi for failure. The state governments had to “cut the flab” and the central government was obliged to help meet shortfalls in resource availability. Since then, there have been patchy and sporadic efforts to comply with the judicial directive, intended to serve the dual purposes of enhancing both nutritional standards and school enrollment levels. These have been far from adequate and periodic social audits, have put together a valuable documentation of governmental failure in meeting basic social obligations. These again have failed to excite the media very much.
The reasons are not far to seek. Beginning from around the mid-1990s, the global media began to acknowledge the undeniable fact that the cult of individual affluence also meant that celebrity narcissism would be the wave of the future. The interests and aspirations of the socially disadvantaged were of little consequence, since editorial content had to be moulded in accordance with the perceptions of the rich and the powerful. Editorial distinction may lie in the inclusion of diverse sections of the population in the priorities of the media. But commercial success lay in adapting editorial content to advertiser needs, in shifting content towards fashion, lifestyle and entertainment.
It took the resurrection of Mandal, this time in the shape of reservations for backward classes in institutions of higher education funded by the Central Government, to reawaken media interest in the gigantic defaults of social welfare policy through the 1990s. Initial editorial comment tended to be fairly uniform in its emphases. By providing preferential access to higher education, the government had effectively reversed priorities, said the media. Defending against the perpetuation of inherited disabilities was undoubtedly a national priority, but these needed to start with the basics of the learning process. Higher learning should be reserved as a domain where merit alone prevailed, where selection processes were entirely free of extraneous concerns. This national priority would not conflict with others, such as the redressal of the iniquities of history, if opportunities for all sections were to be equalised through a universal and non-discriminatory system of school education.
The patronising flavour in these editorial recommendations was not missed, their inherent suggestion that the backward classes were yet to prove themselves worthy of the professions, since they were yet to pass the threshold of school education. Rather than hammer home this theme and risk a further alienation of public sentiments, the media then chose a line of retreat. In an early editorial, the TOI argued (May 31, 2006), that the available data base for public policy on affirmative action was seriously flawed. This made a “caste census” in India a “necessary evil”. Later, the same newspaper (June 14, 2006) deprecated the fact that ad hoc decisions had for long held the field when “the need of the hour” was a “coherent justification” and a “clear roadmap for future policy on reservations”. Since several of the classes that had reservation benefits through earlier generations had graduated out of backwardness, there was a case for a continuing process of review of the list of beneficiaries. And the quantum of reservations itself needed to be revisited, since a “blind application of the maximum permitted reservation .. speaks very poorly of government policy”.
The Indian Express though remained fundamentally unreconciled to the notion, arguing that reservations threatened to fatally erode India’s potential to contribute to the global knowledge economy, where its competitive advantages were well established. In a June 5 editorial, it poured scorn on the political opportunism of ambitious individuals that had ostensibly triggered off the furore. It warned that the “space for liberal policymaking (had) been won after a long political fight”. In the course of this struggle, the more “intelligent leaders” of Indian politics, had realised that “quality and efficiency, in most fields, cannot simply be mandated by fiat”. This hard fought gain, the IE bemoaned, was at risk of being squandered in the pursuit of political advantage by ambitious individuals.
The Economic Times which clearly would have preferred not to address the issue, belatedly awoke to the merits of an alternative to the reservations process that has for long been established practice in Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Editorially, it urged the Central Government to “universalise” the JNU admissions model, “which awards booster points for various kinds of backwardness..”. “Scarcity accentuates social fissures”, it warned, and any a priori segregation of seats for particular classes would deepen the sense of grievance among those who did not have the privilege to call themselves “backward”.
Editorially, The Hindu (May 25) urged that three imperatives be borne in mind in implementing reservations. The commitment that discrimination in favour of the backward classes would not diminish opportunities for others, needed to be operationalised. This meant that the central government, “must get serious about strengthening (the) physical and academic infrastructure” of the institutions that it was directly responsible for. “Funds”, the newspaper commented in defiance of the parlous arithmetic of the central budget, “should not be hard to come by, given the buoyancy in revenues”. Second, the newspaper urged that in “the larger interests of the nation”, certain institutions “need to be retained as islands of excellence, their entrance standards uncompromised even by socially desirable goals”. And finally, the central government should steer clear of the political trap that several states had fallen into, of viewing affirmative action as merely the institution of quotas. A far more serious approach towards basic education was essential if the ultimate purposes of protective discrimination were to be met.
The concern for basic education of course, was awakened within the national media only when the disadvantaged staked a claim to a place in the bastions of higher academic excellence, which were ostensibly the arena that would prepare the best of India’s youth to take on the challenges of globalisation. Editorially, the media tended in relation to its reaction to Mandal I, to adopt a more restrained tone of comment with the second visitation. But editorial comment is perhaps the lesser role that the media plays in moments of deep social turmoil. By far the more decisive influence is exerted by the tone and content of its news coverage. And in this respect, some of the biases that were blatantly in evidence during Mandal I have resurfaced, though with noticeably greater restraint. Perhaps nothing illustrates this better than the life and death of an individual who came to be seen in many ways, as a symbol of the agitation against Mandal I.
Rajeev Goswami died on February 24, 2004 aged 33, his passing marked by a few cursory mentions in the media. The image conveyed to the world on his death was drawn not from recent times, but from that moment in 1990 when he set himself afire in spectacular and violent rage at Mandal I. That fateful moment lived with Rajeev Goswami till the end. The cause of his death was internal organ failure arising from burn injuries suffered in 1990.
His injuries lived with him, but the message that Rajeev Goswami sought to convey proved transient. Parties across the board, after a period of connivance with the anti-Mandal demonstrations, began an anxious project of accommodation with the backward class assertion that Mandal epitomised. The Supreme Court put its own imprimatur of constitutional validity on the Mandal recommendations in November 1992. And by then, the media itself had turned its back on the incendiary rhetoric of the agitation.
The Rajeev Goswami tragedy had many dimensions, some of which were encapsulated in official statistics. Since he made his emblematic political statement, employment in the central government has fallen from 3.4 million to 3.3 million. New recruitment has taken place, only to replace retiring employees or others voluntarily leaving government service. Assuming rather generously, that there is an annual attrition rate of 5 per cent in central government employment, the jobs at stake in a regime of 27 per cent reservations for backward classes would number around 40,000. This is literally a drop in the ocean in relation to the tens of millions who enter the work force every year, most of whom fall back on some form of unorganised sector work.
Was Rajeev Goswami's sacrifice only about safeguarding the claims of “merit” to an infinitesimally small enclave of secure employment? Or was it about a larger cause? If the quantitative parameters alone are considered, the sacrifice was obviously not worth it. And that is not a retrospective judgment, since there were any number of voices counselling moderation on precisely these grounds, at the time the anti-Mandal agitation was most virulent. Whatever else, all those who participated in the violent disturbances in 1990 cannot plead lack of knowledge as an alibi -- least of all the media which instigated the agitators with unbridled rhetoric.
From the first stirrings of unrest on the street in August 1990 till Rajeev Goswami's paroxysm of rage on September 19, official spokesmen sought at several junctures to calm the student disturbances. The number of job opportunities that Mandal I would directly impinge upon, they said, was limited. The purpose of the recommendations was not to underline caste exclusions in Indian society, but to dissolve these by empowering sections that had drawn an unlucky number in life's lottery.
The message failed to win a receptive audience in sections that were rampaging through the streets of various north Indian towns. For this, the media bears a large part of the responsibility. The Indian Express, edited then by an individual who was later a member of the Union Cabinet, delivered its judgment mid-August, pronouncing the anti-Mandal agitation a clear “defence of the national interest”. Far from counselling restraint and a measure of sobriety in assessing reservations as official policy, it exhorted the agitationists to “spread and intensify” the disturbances.
Late-August, the same newspaper was denouncing the official effort to mitigate the sense of grievance within the student community. Central Government jobs may be just a small fraction of total employment in the country, but that was not the issue, said an analyst in its columns. What was of concern was the huge preponderance of central government jobs within “organised sector” employment.
The burden of the official rationalisation was that “organised sector” employment was not the only area of interest. There was a whole “unorganised” world outside, that needed to be accommodated in the formal structures of bureaucratic power. But with the media unequivocally behind it by this time, the anti-Mandal agitation was conspicuously displaying its contempt for the unorganised sector. Students from Delhi's elite colleges were trooping to the dhobi-ghats on the Yamuna riverfront to exercise their laundry skills in full view of the national media; others chose strategic street corners to sit with shoe-shine kits to offer their services to any passer-by.
An elitist contempt for all the livelihood recourses of the “unorganised sector” was evident in this pattern of public demonstration. By this time it was evident that “Mandal” had tapped into the populist vein essential for the sustenance of any mass movement. “Anti-Mandal” meanwhile had lost its moral compass, making too explicit a statement of disdain for the vast majority of the country's population. Inevitably, the momentum of the agitation was beginning to die out within a month of the policy announcement by the central government. Rajeev Goswami's suicidal violence on September 19, 1990, brought it back to life.
Rajeev Goswami survived that attempt, though not its long-term effects. He was the first to tempt death in the anti-Mandal cause. But the first to actually die was Surinder Singh Chauhan. This self-immolation happened a week after Rajeev Goswami's abortive attempt. Chauhan's death throes were recorded on film by a mysterious photographer who happened to be on the spot just at that time, equipped with a camera. This photograph was prominently displayed by most national newspapers, in violation of the well-accepted media convention, that photographs of the act of suicide are not to be published for fear that they could set off copycat attempts.
The image of Chauhan's self-immolation was conveyed to the newspapers by a confederate of Rajeev Goswami. On September 19, 1990, when Rajeev Goswami brought the anti-Mandal agitation out of its stasis, he was accompanied in his project by a colleague called Laxman Singh Tomar, who ostensibly suffered serious injuries, but survived. Tomar was the source for all the photographs published in the national English-language media of Chauhan's suicide by fire. The media was aware of this curious twist in the anti-Mandal agitation, as is evident from the fine print reporting of the event. But the media chose to wilfully disregard all the conventions about responsible reporting in that charged conjuncture.
In the retrospective judgment of the Indian Express, Rajeev Goswami was initially the symbol of the anti-Mandal agitation, but finally its fall guy. He failed to see that the older artifacts of merit and excellence were thin disguises for inherited privilege; that the inclusion of diverse sections of a plural society in all spheres of national endeavour was a desirable end in itself, one that contributed significantly to boosting achievement. Yet, this moment of revelation came to the media without any of the attendant inconveniences of accountability. It took little wisdom though, to conclude that Rajeev Goswami was finally, the victim of conniving politics and media irresponsibility. That the sordid drama of 1990 has not been reenacted in the context of Mandal II is testimony to a growing sense of social responsibility within the media. But the fact that some of the troublesome old tendencies persist, is evidence that the awakening is yet incomplete and perhaps, far too slow.
July 5, 2006
A recently concluded survey of the British media found that of the senior journalists with decisive influence over news priorities and editorial policy, a significant majority is drawn from a narrow, privately-schooled, Oxbridge-educated elite. Indeed, as British society becomes more diverse and the political system grapples with the challenge of inclusion, the media – if a comparison were to be made with similar data from the mid-1980s – has tended to become an enclave of class privilege. In the words of a report in the Guardian, the dominance of the upper crust is strong enough to ensure that it is “difficult for those from other backgrounds to get a foothold”.
These findings from distant shores were published at roughly the same time that a decision by the Indian government to set aside a fixed proportion of seats in the higher education system for classes of citizens disadvantaged by history, had ignited a debate on the quality of representation afforded by the institutions of Indian democracy. Among the institutions that came in for an examination – even if rather hesitantly and fleetingly – was the media. A survey prompted by the controversy, found that in a sample of 315 journalists in the national capital with the authority to determine media agendas, not one belonged to either a Scheduled Caste or Tribe. No fewer than 49 per cent of the sample was drawn from the Brahminical strata. And if all caste Hindu groups were to be considered in addition to the so-called dwija or twice-born, their share in the total is no less 88 per cent.
Where Scheduled Castes and Tribes are concerned, the argument over affirmative action was settled as part of the nationalist compact which brought India its independence. That the media should remain innocent of any participation from these classes, well into India’s sixth decade as a sovereign, self-governing nation, should surely be occasion for introspection by a social institution that has pretensions to objectivity and fairness in its self-assigned role of determining national priorities. Curiously though, the main English-language newspapers in the country had little space or time for this particular survey on the social origin of journalists.
It is a far from settled point that where one comes from determines what one is. That notion of determinacy is completely antithetical to all conceptions of individual liberty. It could be a valid proposition though, that a psychology of conformity could operate within large aggregates of individuals. Particular individuals could well transcend the limitations imposed by the circumstances of their origin and their accumulation of lived experience. In large groups though, personal commitments and convictions may well get submerged in the overriding pressure to do what is accepted.
To talk about the media today is to deal with complexity and multiple meanings. Variously perceived and described, the media is today a source of information and entertainment, as also the midwife of a union between the two. For a growing number, it increasingly serves as a forum of self-expression. In most studies of the modern media as a social reality, a self-serving myth, continues to hold sway. The media in this portrayal is the institutional bearer of the social right to free speech. This is a happy scenario, except for a minor quibble: the media derives its profits not from delivering information of value to an audience or from serving as a forum for a democratic exchange of views, but from delivering an audience of value to the corporate advertiser. The media arena is not a competitive marketplace where information and ideas are allowed a free run so that the best among them rise to the surface. Rather, it is a carefully controlled environment to ensure the most favourable circumstances for advertisers to sell their wares to carefully screened and selected audiences.
Evidently, perceptions of media neutrality and integrity often lie in the eyes (and ears) of the beholder. The notion that the mass media as an entity merits a distinct field of study originates with the proliferation of the print industry in the early 20th century, followed by the pervasive spread of broadcasting in the years after World War II. The early approach focused on media content and the impact this would have on public perceptions. The role of the media would also invariably come in for scrutiny when certain alarming or disintegrative tendencies, such as an upsurge in violent crime, became manifest in society. These would typically be accompanied by suggestions that the media should play a constructive and ameliorative role, though it has never been clear how best this function is discharged: through reporting things as they are, taking a moral position, or simply avoiding the subject altogether.
Similar is the dilemma that arises when dealing with the functioning of the media in a context of social conflict. Is the function of accurate reporting uppermost, even if it is disconnected from moral judgments? Or is an ethical posture inherent even in the most dispassionate account of any event or sequence of events? Does a well-considered effort at ascribing responsibility for a state of inequality, which does not hesitate to name winners and losers, aggravate an already inflamed situation? Or does it, by focusing attention on the sources of injustice, impel society at large to grapple with the viruses within its fold and root them out?
If any convincing answers have been devised to these questions, they are yet to be elucidated. Neither are they evident in the existing practice of the media. Publishing media content that is in conformity with a placid and uncontested paradigm of social evolution would be acceptable conduct, because it serves elite interests and safeguards their social preeminence. Anything that departs from this idiom would be behaviour warranting stricture and quite possibly, sanction.
This brings up the issue of the relationship between the media as a commercial institution and the public that it caters to. In turn, this requires that at least two other models of media behaviour be considered. The first of these could be called, taking Dennis McQuail’s widely cited formulation, the “ritualist” model, which emphasises not “the transmission of information across space” but the “maintenance of society in time” and the “representation of shared beliefs”. And then there is the “publicity” model which approaches the media less as a source of information than as a device of drawing and retaining visual (or aural) attention. This in turn, serves the direct economic objective of increasing revenue earned from an audience. This model emphasises that “mass communication is liable not to be communication at all, in the sense of an ordered transfer of meaning”. Rather, it is more about “spectatorship” in which the “fact of attention often matters more than the quality of attention”.
In 1990, when the Indian media faced its first significant challenge on the question of affirmative action for the “socially and educationally backward classes” (SEBC’s), it responded by invoking the sacred trope of a seamless Indian national identity and denouncing the divisiveness of caste. “Class” is the term used in the clause of the Indian constitution that enables the State to undertake schemes of protective discrimination, as also in the 1980 report of the Mandal Commission which coined the term “other backward classes” to distinguish its target group from existing beneficiaries of affirmative action. But “class” has invariably translated in official pronouncements into “caste”, raising fears that the ghosts of a primitive, ascriptive social order were rising again to haunt India’s halting but brave efforts at modernisation.
In its tone, editorial comment in the English language press – which exerts an influence far exceeding its reach in India – then tended to the view that all was going well until the government of the day gave into an opportunistic whim. Editorially, the Indian Express (August 9, 1990) condemned the decision as “ruinous” and gloomily forecast a “further deterioration of the state apparatus and heightened social tensions” as the first consequence of a “crassly opportunistic” move. The Times of India (TOI) similarly, commented (August 9, 1990) that the Mandal recommendations on job reservations in the central government, threatened to undo “at one stroke” all that had been achieved over four decades of independence, in building a “modern, egalitarian order”. Reservations, the TOI continued, would “enshrine casteism, undermine meritocracy and excellence, and work against the creation of a pan-Indian identity”.
Notions of progress, it has been said, are remarkably congenial to those ascending the scale of income and wealth. But no matter, the TOI was willing to concede that the backward classes could be helped to improve their “competitiveness” – again, that favoured term of the upwardly mobile – through the provision of “abundant educational, health, nutritional and other social welfare benefits”.
Having identified the augmentation of “competitiveness” within the backward classes as a national priority, the media then lapsed into a phase of inattention. When “structural adjustment” kicked in as official economic policy in 1991, the Indian media joined in eagerly with the chorus of acclaim. The withdrawal of the State from domains where its interventions were not essential, the media confidently forecast, would enable it to more effectively meet the basic needs of a wider mass of the population. In its turn, the easing of the onerous burden of taxes that the more affluent had to bear, would reignite the spark of entrepreneurship, since individual self-aggrandisement was the most effective incentive available for productive economic activity. As the size of the national product increased, the diminution in rates of taxation would more than pay for itself in buoyant tax revenues, empowering the State with ample means to address its basic welfare commitments.
As the decade of the 1990s wore on, it became increasingly evident that these initial prognoses were disastrously askew. The limitless self-aggrandisement of individuals was very much a reality and the media found considerable satisfaction recently in reporting that in a world where the celebration of wealth had become the reigning cult, India had perhaps the fastest growing number of billionaires. But few have concerned themselves with the inconvenient facts that India has also had a rapid growth in economic inequality, perhaps next only to the U.S. and China. The correlation with the rapid fading out of the social sectors from governmental attention is yet to be drawn. But future scholars will probably make the effort to draw the necessary links between growing inequality in India – as both cause and consequence – and the precipitate drop in governmental welfare expenditure.
A 1996-97 report by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) documented how educational infrastructure in the country was in an advanced state of decay. It was allowed to sink into oblivion with scarcely an acknowledgment from the media. In 2002, the Supreme Court directed in response to a set of very energetic petitions from concerned citizens, that the right to food was a basic entitlement the State had to protect. As a first step, it directed all state governments to introduce midday meal programmes in schools. Financial stringency would not be permitted to stand as an alibi for failure. The state governments had to “cut the flab” and the central government was obliged to help meet shortfalls in resource availability. Since then, there have been patchy and sporadic efforts to comply with the judicial directive, intended to serve the dual purposes of enhancing both nutritional standards and school enrollment levels. These have been far from adequate and periodic social audits, have put together a valuable documentation of governmental failure in meeting basic social obligations. These again have failed to excite the media very much.
The reasons are not far to seek. Beginning from around the mid-1990s, the global media began to acknowledge the undeniable fact that the cult of individual affluence also meant that celebrity narcissism would be the wave of the future. The interests and aspirations of the socially disadvantaged were of little consequence, since editorial content had to be moulded in accordance with the perceptions of the rich and the powerful. Editorial distinction may lie in the inclusion of diverse sections of the population in the priorities of the media. But commercial success lay in adapting editorial content to advertiser needs, in shifting content towards fashion, lifestyle and entertainment.
It took the resurrection of Mandal, this time in the shape of reservations for backward classes in institutions of higher education funded by the Central Government, to reawaken media interest in the gigantic defaults of social welfare policy through the 1990s. Initial editorial comment tended to be fairly uniform in its emphases. By providing preferential access to higher education, the government had effectively reversed priorities, said the media. Defending against the perpetuation of inherited disabilities was undoubtedly a national priority, but these needed to start with the basics of the learning process. Higher learning should be reserved as a domain where merit alone prevailed, where selection processes were entirely free of extraneous concerns. This national priority would not conflict with others, such as the redressal of the iniquities of history, if opportunities for all sections were to be equalised through a universal and non-discriminatory system of school education.
The patronising flavour in these editorial recommendations was not missed, their inherent suggestion that the backward classes were yet to prove themselves worthy of the professions, since they were yet to pass the threshold of school education. Rather than hammer home this theme and risk a further alienation of public sentiments, the media then chose a line of retreat. In an early editorial, the TOI argued (May 31, 2006), that the available data base for public policy on affirmative action was seriously flawed. This made a “caste census” in India a “necessary evil”. Later, the same newspaper (June 14, 2006) deprecated the fact that ad hoc decisions had for long held the field when “the need of the hour” was a “coherent justification” and a “clear roadmap for future policy on reservations”. Since several of the classes that had reservation benefits through earlier generations had graduated out of backwardness, there was a case for a continuing process of review of the list of beneficiaries. And the quantum of reservations itself needed to be revisited, since a “blind application of the maximum permitted reservation .. speaks very poorly of government policy”.
The Indian Express though remained fundamentally unreconciled to the notion, arguing that reservations threatened to fatally erode India’s potential to contribute to the global knowledge economy, where its competitive advantages were well established. In a June 5 editorial, it poured scorn on the political opportunism of ambitious individuals that had ostensibly triggered off the furore. It warned that the “space for liberal policymaking (had) been won after a long political fight”. In the course of this struggle, the more “intelligent leaders” of Indian politics, had realised that “quality and efficiency, in most fields, cannot simply be mandated by fiat”. This hard fought gain, the IE bemoaned, was at risk of being squandered in the pursuit of political advantage by ambitious individuals.
The Economic Times which clearly would have preferred not to address the issue, belatedly awoke to the merits of an alternative to the reservations process that has for long been established practice in Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Editorially, it urged the Central Government to “universalise” the JNU admissions model, “which awards booster points for various kinds of backwardness..”. “Scarcity accentuates social fissures”, it warned, and any a priori segregation of seats for particular classes would deepen the sense of grievance among those who did not have the privilege to call themselves “backward”.
Editorially, The Hindu (May 25) urged that three imperatives be borne in mind in implementing reservations. The commitment that discrimination in favour of the backward classes would not diminish opportunities for others, needed to be operationalised. This meant that the central government, “must get serious about strengthening (the) physical and academic infrastructure” of the institutions that it was directly responsible for. “Funds”, the newspaper commented in defiance of the parlous arithmetic of the central budget, “should not be hard to come by, given the buoyancy in revenues”. Second, the newspaper urged that in “the larger interests of the nation”, certain institutions “need to be retained as islands of excellence, their entrance standards uncompromised even by socially desirable goals”. And finally, the central government should steer clear of the political trap that several states had fallen into, of viewing affirmative action as merely the institution of quotas. A far more serious approach towards basic education was essential if the ultimate purposes of protective discrimination were to be met.
The concern for basic education of course, was awakened within the national media only when the disadvantaged staked a claim to a place in the bastions of higher academic excellence, which were ostensibly the arena that would prepare the best of India’s youth to take on the challenges of globalisation. Editorially, the media tended in relation to its reaction to Mandal I, to adopt a more restrained tone of comment with the second visitation. But editorial comment is perhaps the lesser role that the media plays in moments of deep social turmoil. By far the more decisive influence is exerted by the tone and content of its news coverage. And in this respect, some of the biases that were blatantly in evidence during Mandal I have resurfaced, though with noticeably greater restraint. Perhaps nothing illustrates this better than the life and death of an individual who came to be seen in many ways, as a symbol of the agitation against Mandal I.
Rajeev Goswami died on February 24, 2004 aged 33, his passing marked by a few cursory mentions in the media. The image conveyed to the world on his death was drawn not from recent times, but from that moment in 1990 when he set himself afire in spectacular and violent rage at Mandal I. That fateful moment lived with Rajeev Goswami till the end. The cause of his death was internal organ failure arising from burn injuries suffered in 1990.
His injuries lived with him, but the message that Rajeev Goswami sought to convey proved transient. Parties across the board, after a period of connivance with the anti-Mandal demonstrations, began an anxious project of accommodation with the backward class assertion that Mandal epitomised. The Supreme Court put its own imprimatur of constitutional validity on the Mandal recommendations in November 1992. And by then, the media itself had turned its back on the incendiary rhetoric of the agitation.
The Rajeev Goswami tragedy had many dimensions, some of which were encapsulated in official statistics. Since he made his emblematic political statement, employment in the central government has fallen from 3.4 million to 3.3 million. New recruitment has taken place, only to replace retiring employees or others voluntarily leaving government service. Assuming rather generously, that there is an annual attrition rate of 5 per cent in central government employment, the jobs at stake in a regime of 27 per cent reservations for backward classes would number around 40,000. This is literally a drop in the ocean in relation to the tens of millions who enter the work force every year, most of whom fall back on some form of unorganised sector work.
Was Rajeev Goswami's sacrifice only about safeguarding the claims of “merit” to an infinitesimally small enclave of secure employment? Or was it about a larger cause? If the quantitative parameters alone are considered, the sacrifice was obviously not worth it. And that is not a retrospective judgment, since there were any number of voices counselling moderation on precisely these grounds, at the time the anti-Mandal agitation was most virulent. Whatever else, all those who participated in the violent disturbances in 1990 cannot plead lack of knowledge as an alibi -- least of all the media which instigated the agitators with unbridled rhetoric.
From the first stirrings of unrest on the street in August 1990 till Rajeev Goswami's paroxysm of rage on September 19, official spokesmen sought at several junctures to calm the student disturbances. The number of job opportunities that Mandal I would directly impinge upon, they said, was limited. The purpose of the recommendations was not to underline caste exclusions in Indian society, but to dissolve these by empowering sections that had drawn an unlucky number in life's lottery.
The message failed to win a receptive audience in sections that were rampaging through the streets of various north Indian towns. For this, the media bears a large part of the responsibility. The Indian Express, edited then by an individual who was later a member of the Union Cabinet, delivered its judgment mid-August, pronouncing the anti-Mandal agitation a clear “defence of the national interest”. Far from counselling restraint and a measure of sobriety in assessing reservations as official policy, it exhorted the agitationists to “spread and intensify” the disturbances.
Late-August, the same newspaper was denouncing the official effort to mitigate the sense of grievance within the student community. Central Government jobs may be just a small fraction of total employment in the country, but that was not the issue, said an analyst in its columns. What was of concern was the huge preponderance of central government jobs within “organised sector” employment.
The burden of the official rationalisation was that “organised sector” employment was not the only area of interest. There was a whole “unorganised” world outside, that needed to be accommodated in the formal structures of bureaucratic power. But with the media unequivocally behind it by this time, the anti-Mandal agitation was conspicuously displaying its contempt for the unorganised sector. Students from Delhi's elite colleges were trooping to the dhobi-ghats on the Yamuna riverfront to exercise their laundry skills in full view of the national media; others chose strategic street corners to sit with shoe-shine kits to offer their services to any passer-by.
An elitist contempt for all the livelihood recourses of the “unorganised sector” was evident in this pattern of public demonstration. By this time it was evident that “Mandal” had tapped into the populist vein essential for the sustenance of any mass movement. “Anti-Mandal” meanwhile had lost its moral compass, making too explicit a statement of disdain for the vast majority of the country's population. Inevitably, the momentum of the agitation was beginning to die out within a month of the policy announcement by the central government. Rajeev Goswami's suicidal violence on September 19, 1990, brought it back to life.
Rajeev Goswami survived that attempt, though not its long-term effects. He was the first to tempt death in the anti-Mandal cause. But the first to actually die was Surinder Singh Chauhan. This self-immolation happened a week after Rajeev Goswami's abortive attempt. Chauhan's death throes were recorded on film by a mysterious photographer who happened to be on the spot just at that time, equipped with a camera. This photograph was prominently displayed by most national newspapers, in violation of the well-accepted media convention, that photographs of the act of suicide are not to be published for fear that they could set off copycat attempts.
The image of Chauhan's self-immolation was conveyed to the newspapers by a confederate of Rajeev Goswami. On September 19, 1990, when Rajeev Goswami brought the anti-Mandal agitation out of its stasis, he was accompanied in his project by a colleague called Laxman Singh Tomar, who ostensibly suffered serious injuries, but survived. Tomar was the source for all the photographs published in the national English-language media of Chauhan's suicide by fire. The media was aware of this curious twist in the anti-Mandal agitation, as is evident from the fine print reporting of the event. But the media chose to wilfully disregard all the conventions about responsible reporting in that charged conjuncture.
In the retrospective judgment of the Indian Express, Rajeev Goswami was initially the symbol of the anti-Mandal agitation, but finally its fall guy. He failed to see that the older artifacts of merit and excellence were thin disguises for inherited privilege; that the inclusion of diverse sections of a plural society in all spheres of national endeavour was a desirable end in itself, one that contributed significantly to boosting achievement. Yet, this moment of revelation came to the media without any of the attendant inconveniences of accountability. It took little wisdom though, to conclude that Rajeev Goswami was finally, the victim of conniving politics and media irresponsibility. That the sordid drama of 1990 has not been reenacted in the context of Mandal II is testimony to a growing sense of social responsibility within the media. But the fact that some of the troublesome old tendencies persist, is evidence that the awakening is yet incomplete and perhaps, far too slow.
July 5, 2006
Sunday, July 09, 2006
Israel: A Genocidal State by Origin and Intent (An Article from June 19, 2006)
ISRAEL: A GENOCIDAL STATE BY INTENT AND ORIGIN
It would be a gross error to condone as an accident, Israel’s June 9 shelling of a beach in Gaza city, which killed seven innocent civilians and left the traumatised ten year-old, Huda Ghalia, as the sole survivor in a family of eight. Just as it has proven a costly mistake for the world to accept Israel’s explanation and self-exculpation in the case of the 1996 Qana massacre, when hundreds of women and children in a U.N. refugee camp in southern Lebanon were killed in a sustained and indiscriminate barrage of artillery and aerial bombing.
Yet the record of global insensitivity to Israel’s atrocities on the Palestinian people, with literally hundreds of similar crimes in the past being overlooked, leaves no room for optimism. Conniving western governments and supine third world elites have shown altogether too great an eagerness to accept Israel’s claim that the thousands of Palestinians killed for the crime of resisting the unending occupation of their land, can all be tarred with the same brush, of being either terrorists or their accomplices.
The successive Israeli massacres carried out over many decades of occupation, have not been random or unconnected events, since they are all joined in the original intent with which the Jewish state was created, which was nothing less than the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The world community has for long stood mute witness to all the overt expressions of this genocidal intent. The global conspiracy of silence after the Gaza beach massacre is further testament to the complicity of world governments in an unending sequence of crimes against humanity.
Unapologetic as ever, Israel commissioned a military inquiry into the Gaza incident, and came up with the perfectly ridiculous claim that the killing of Palestinian civilians was a a self-inflicted tragedy, caused by a mine that the Islamic resistance movement Hamas had, with evil intent, concealed under the sands of the beach. It was a fact, said the official inquiry, that the Israeli army had been shelling parts of Gaza city just before the massacre on the beach. True also, that the Israeli navy had been patrolling the Gaza waters and unleashing random volleys of high explosives in the direction of the seafront. But the shrapnel that had been recovered from the site of the atrocity, the Israeli government claimed, did not match with the ammunition used in these operations. The only conclusion that seemed warranted in the circumstances, was that Hamas had conspired to kill its own, for the transient pleasure of embarrassing Israel.
The entire charade of accountability by the criminal Zionist state was exposed within a matter of hours by respected international observers. And the Hamas government of Palestine responded to the Jewish state’s crime with a swift condemnation and a vow to resume military operations after an 18-month long suspension. A military response that would “shake the earth” was promised. The unbridled rhetoric would have come as no surprise to the world community, which has been immersed in Israeli propaganda about Hamas as an embodiment of theological evil. There was of course, a more inconvenient fact that the Hamas response brought back to public attention: that far from being the agents of bestial cruelty on innocent civilians, the Palestinian resistance had been observing a ceasefire for all of 18 months. Despite several provocations from the Israeli side, including the charade of its withdrawal from Gaza and its loudly proclaimed intent to redraw the map of Palestine to ensure that Israel remained a state with a “stable Jewish majority”, the ceasefire was maintained. But these inconvenient facts were soon submerged in the theological discourse that Israel has so successfully deployed to wipe the Palestinian people out of existence.
Visiting his patrons in Washington DC in May, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert addressed the U.S. Congress and to a standing ovation, and reiterated the mythology that stands at the foundation of the Zionist enterprise: that the Jewish people have a divinely ordained right to the entire land of Palestine. He refused to countenance any situation in which he, as the leader of the Jewish nation, would cede any part of the “land of our forefathers”. “I believed, and to this day still believe, in our people's eternal and historic right to this entire land”, said Olmert.
The clear and undeniable purpose of these locutions is the delegitimisation of the Palestinian people’s right to the land they have lived in for a virtual eternity, and the raising of a dispersed Jewish community’s claims to the status of divine writ. But if the matter had been determined in a divine court of law, it would not be out of place to wonder, why Olmert was still intent on making a pretence of interest in mundane earthly processes of negotiation.
This was the other major motif of Olmert’s speech to the U.S. Congress: that Israel would be compelled by earthly circumstances, to draw its borders unilaterally, thereby committing an unpardonable offence against the divine will. It was Israel’s fervent desire to achieve this abridgment of divine purpose “hand in hand with a Palestinian partner”. But it had been the unfortunate experience of all the supposedly good faith negotiations that Israel had entered into, that a credible partner for peace on the Palestinian side has failed to emerge.
Israel does not, unfortunately, have a partner who will share the burden of breaching the divine writ that the Jewish people should eternally hold all of Palestine. But there is little that is divine about the fate that the Jewish state has chosen to visit upon the people of Palestine. Five months after Hamas won a landslide victory in parliamentary elections -- which were strongly advocated by Israel and the U.S. and certified as free and fair by all credible international observers -- Israel’s brutal policy of “closure”, which is little else than a variant of medieval siege warfare, continues to exact a heavy toll of civilian life in occupied Palestine. Taxes collected by the Israeli occupying forces have been withheld from the legitimate government. International aid has dried up, driven by the Israeli propaganda that Hamas as a terrorist organisation does not merit the patronage of the civilised world.
A consequence of this international programme of ostracism coordinated by Israel, has been that the Palestinian Authority, built up through the years when the late Yasser Arafat was led into one dead-end after another in a futile quest for peace with Israel, was starved of funds, plunging civic life in the occupied territories into an unprecedented crisis.
The demonisation of Hamas is all too reminiscent of the manner in which Israel first engaged, then neutralised, and finally finished off Yasser Arafat as a leader of the Palestinian national struggle. Ever since the Oslo peace accord was concluded in 1993, Israel made a pretence of engaging Arafat in negotiations, finally abandoning the charade with the Camp David summit hosted by U.S. President Bill Clinton in 2000. It then successfully floated the fiction that the rejection of its supposedly generous offer was an indication of bad faith on the Palestinian part, which justified the recourse to the harshest military means to quell the resistance to its occupation.
Arafat had to be isolated and finally done away with, because he would not yield on the fundamental demands of the Palestinian national struggle: Israel’s withdrawal to the 1967 borders, the restoration of Arab sovereignty over all of East Jerusalem, and the recognition, at least in principle, of the right of all the refugees created by successive waves of Israeli ethnic cleansing, to return to their homes. These are precisely the points that Hamas today insists on as irreducible demands, which cannot be bartered away by any representative body of the Palestinian people. Contrary to the fiction assiduously propagated by Israel, Hamas has long since recognised Israel’s right to exist, but within the international borders that prevailed prior to the six-day war of 1967. The success that Israel has had in tarnishing Hamas’ record, strongly recalls the effrontery with which it misrepresented the historic change effected by Arafat in the Palestinian national charter in 1988, committing the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) he led to a two-state solution which would explicitly recognise Israel’s right to exist within the 1967 boundaries.
While Arafat was alive, he served as an effective buffer against the Israeli game-plan to instigate a split within Palestinian ranks and quite possibly, foment a fratricidal battle for supremacy between the PLO and Hamas. Mahmoud Abbas, alias Abu Mazen, his successor as leader of Al Fatah, the dominant faction within the PLO, has not been quite so scrupulous about respecting the need for unity within the Palestinian struggle. In October 1995, Abu Mazen was responsible for sealing a plan for a final settlement with Israel. Negotiated with Yossi Beilin, then a member of the Israeli cabinet, the plan has been described by people in the know, as a “shameful document” which effectively left all illegal Israeli settlements on occupied territories intact, and in place of restoring Arab sovereignty over East Jerusalem, designated a village quite remote from the city as the future Palestinian capital. The Beilin-Abu Mazen plan was, perhaps, accepted by Arafat. But when he found that Israel intended to stick to the terms of that blueprint, and if anything, only alter it further to Palestinian disadvantage, he chose the honourable course of walking away from the charade of the peace negotiations.
Obviously chafing since Hamas’ landslide victory in January, Abu Mazen has now hit upon the tactical ploy of calling a referendum which would seek to determine the majority opinion among the Palestinian people on the future of their national struggle. Drafted by highly respected freedom fighters, currently languishing in Israeli jails, the so-called “prisoners’ plan” calls for recognising Israel’s right to exist within 1967 boundaries. Though not averse to the principle, Hamas has opposed the referendum plan, which it views as an unnecessary concession to a racist outlaw state that is yet to recognise the Palestinian people’s right to exist. Moreover, Hamas has rightly judged that the referendum embodies a disingenuous design by Abu Mazen and his backers in the west, to overturn the results of the January parliamentary elections and establish an entirely new principle of political legitimacy in occupied Palestine.
Israel and its cronies in the west, meanwhile, are doing their utmost to skew the political balance in favour of Abu Mazen. Affecting a deep sense of concern over the humanitarian crisis the closure policy has engendered, western governments have begun seeking a channel of aid disbursement that would push the legitimately elected Hamas government to the sidelines and lend more strength to Abu Mazen. And Israel has quite brazenly announced that it intends to ship significant quantities of arms and ammunition to forces loyal to Abu Mazen, ostensibly to meet the threat posed by Hamas terrorism. Till his dying days, Arafat successfully resisted the pressure from Israel to undertake the dirty work of policing its occupation and repressing his own people. Abu Mazen may not prove quite so steadfast. The closure policy has ensured that life for the Palestinian people today is a grim struggle for survival. As the fabric of civic life frays, tensions within Palestinian society are boiling over, threatening the entire West Asian region with unpredictable consequences. Never before has the need been quite so acute for freedom-loving people all around the world to intervene, bypassing the conniving governments of the west and the submissive and spineless governments of the third world.
June 19, 2006
It would be a gross error to condone as an accident, Israel’s June 9 shelling of a beach in Gaza city, which killed seven innocent civilians and left the traumatised ten year-old, Huda Ghalia, as the sole survivor in a family of eight. Just as it has proven a costly mistake for the world to accept Israel’s explanation and self-exculpation in the case of the 1996 Qana massacre, when hundreds of women and children in a U.N. refugee camp in southern Lebanon were killed in a sustained and indiscriminate barrage of artillery and aerial bombing.
Yet the record of global insensitivity to Israel’s atrocities on the Palestinian people, with literally hundreds of similar crimes in the past being overlooked, leaves no room for optimism. Conniving western governments and supine third world elites have shown altogether too great an eagerness to accept Israel’s claim that the thousands of Palestinians killed for the crime of resisting the unending occupation of their land, can all be tarred with the same brush, of being either terrorists or their accomplices.
The successive Israeli massacres carried out over many decades of occupation, have not been random or unconnected events, since they are all joined in the original intent with which the Jewish state was created, which was nothing less than the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The world community has for long stood mute witness to all the overt expressions of this genocidal intent. The global conspiracy of silence after the Gaza beach massacre is further testament to the complicity of world governments in an unending sequence of crimes against humanity.
Unapologetic as ever, Israel commissioned a military inquiry into the Gaza incident, and came up with the perfectly ridiculous claim that the killing of Palestinian civilians was a a self-inflicted tragedy, caused by a mine that the Islamic resistance movement Hamas had, with evil intent, concealed under the sands of the beach. It was a fact, said the official inquiry, that the Israeli army had been shelling parts of Gaza city just before the massacre on the beach. True also, that the Israeli navy had been patrolling the Gaza waters and unleashing random volleys of high explosives in the direction of the seafront. But the shrapnel that had been recovered from the site of the atrocity, the Israeli government claimed, did not match with the ammunition used in these operations. The only conclusion that seemed warranted in the circumstances, was that Hamas had conspired to kill its own, for the transient pleasure of embarrassing Israel.
The entire charade of accountability by the criminal Zionist state was exposed within a matter of hours by respected international observers. And the Hamas government of Palestine responded to the Jewish state’s crime with a swift condemnation and a vow to resume military operations after an 18-month long suspension. A military response that would “shake the earth” was promised. The unbridled rhetoric would have come as no surprise to the world community, which has been immersed in Israeli propaganda about Hamas as an embodiment of theological evil. There was of course, a more inconvenient fact that the Hamas response brought back to public attention: that far from being the agents of bestial cruelty on innocent civilians, the Palestinian resistance had been observing a ceasefire for all of 18 months. Despite several provocations from the Israeli side, including the charade of its withdrawal from Gaza and its loudly proclaimed intent to redraw the map of Palestine to ensure that Israel remained a state with a “stable Jewish majority”, the ceasefire was maintained. But these inconvenient facts were soon submerged in the theological discourse that Israel has so successfully deployed to wipe the Palestinian people out of existence.
Visiting his patrons in Washington DC in May, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert addressed the U.S. Congress and to a standing ovation, and reiterated the mythology that stands at the foundation of the Zionist enterprise: that the Jewish people have a divinely ordained right to the entire land of Palestine. He refused to countenance any situation in which he, as the leader of the Jewish nation, would cede any part of the “land of our forefathers”. “I believed, and to this day still believe, in our people's eternal and historic right to this entire land”, said Olmert.
The clear and undeniable purpose of these locutions is the delegitimisation of the Palestinian people’s right to the land they have lived in for a virtual eternity, and the raising of a dispersed Jewish community’s claims to the status of divine writ. But if the matter had been determined in a divine court of law, it would not be out of place to wonder, why Olmert was still intent on making a pretence of interest in mundane earthly processes of negotiation.
This was the other major motif of Olmert’s speech to the U.S. Congress: that Israel would be compelled by earthly circumstances, to draw its borders unilaterally, thereby committing an unpardonable offence against the divine will. It was Israel’s fervent desire to achieve this abridgment of divine purpose “hand in hand with a Palestinian partner”. But it had been the unfortunate experience of all the supposedly good faith negotiations that Israel had entered into, that a credible partner for peace on the Palestinian side has failed to emerge.
Israel does not, unfortunately, have a partner who will share the burden of breaching the divine writ that the Jewish people should eternally hold all of Palestine. But there is little that is divine about the fate that the Jewish state has chosen to visit upon the people of Palestine. Five months after Hamas won a landslide victory in parliamentary elections -- which were strongly advocated by Israel and the U.S. and certified as free and fair by all credible international observers -- Israel’s brutal policy of “closure”, which is little else than a variant of medieval siege warfare, continues to exact a heavy toll of civilian life in occupied Palestine. Taxes collected by the Israeli occupying forces have been withheld from the legitimate government. International aid has dried up, driven by the Israeli propaganda that Hamas as a terrorist organisation does not merit the patronage of the civilised world.
A consequence of this international programme of ostracism coordinated by Israel, has been that the Palestinian Authority, built up through the years when the late Yasser Arafat was led into one dead-end after another in a futile quest for peace with Israel, was starved of funds, plunging civic life in the occupied territories into an unprecedented crisis.
The demonisation of Hamas is all too reminiscent of the manner in which Israel first engaged, then neutralised, and finally finished off Yasser Arafat as a leader of the Palestinian national struggle. Ever since the Oslo peace accord was concluded in 1993, Israel made a pretence of engaging Arafat in negotiations, finally abandoning the charade with the Camp David summit hosted by U.S. President Bill Clinton in 2000. It then successfully floated the fiction that the rejection of its supposedly generous offer was an indication of bad faith on the Palestinian part, which justified the recourse to the harshest military means to quell the resistance to its occupation.
Arafat had to be isolated and finally done away with, because he would not yield on the fundamental demands of the Palestinian national struggle: Israel’s withdrawal to the 1967 borders, the restoration of Arab sovereignty over all of East Jerusalem, and the recognition, at least in principle, of the right of all the refugees created by successive waves of Israeli ethnic cleansing, to return to their homes. These are precisely the points that Hamas today insists on as irreducible demands, which cannot be bartered away by any representative body of the Palestinian people. Contrary to the fiction assiduously propagated by Israel, Hamas has long since recognised Israel’s right to exist, but within the international borders that prevailed prior to the six-day war of 1967. The success that Israel has had in tarnishing Hamas’ record, strongly recalls the effrontery with which it misrepresented the historic change effected by Arafat in the Palestinian national charter in 1988, committing the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) he led to a two-state solution which would explicitly recognise Israel’s right to exist within the 1967 boundaries.
While Arafat was alive, he served as an effective buffer against the Israeli game-plan to instigate a split within Palestinian ranks and quite possibly, foment a fratricidal battle for supremacy between the PLO and Hamas. Mahmoud Abbas, alias Abu Mazen, his successor as leader of Al Fatah, the dominant faction within the PLO, has not been quite so scrupulous about respecting the need for unity within the Palestinian struggle. In October 1995, Abu Mazen was responsible for sealing a plan for a final settlement with Israel. Negotiated with Yossi Beilin, then a member of the Israeli cabinet, the plan has been described by people in the know, as a “shameful document” which effectively left all illegal Israeli settlements on occupied territories intact, and in place of restoring Arab sovereignty over East Jerusalem, designated a village quite remote from the city as the future Palestinian capital. The Beilin-Abu Mazen plan was, perhaps, accepted by Arafat. But when he found that Israel intended to stick to the terms of that blueprint, and if anything, only alter it further to Palestinian disadvantage, he chose the honourable course of walking away from the charade of the peace negotiations.
Obviously chafing since Hamas’ landslide victory in January, Abu Mazen has now hit upon the tactical ploy of calling a referendum which would seek to determine the majority opinion among the Palestinian people on the future of their national struggle. Drafted by highly respected freedom fighters, currently languishing in Israeli jails, the so-called “prisoners’ plan” calls for recognising Israel’s right to exist within 1967 boundaries. Though not averse to the principle, Hamas has opposed the referendum plan, which it views as an unnecessary concession to a racist outlaw state that is yet to recognise the Palestinian people’s right to exist. Moreover, Hamas has rightly judged that the referendum embodies a disingenuous design by Abu Mazen and his backers in the west, to overturn the results of the January parliamentary elections and establish an entirely new principle of political legitimacy in occupied Palestine.
Israel and its cronies in the west, meanwhile, are doing their utmost to skew the political balance in favour of Abu Mazen. Affecting a deep sense of concern over the humanitarian crisis the closure policy has engendered, western governments have begun seeking a channel of aid disbursement that would push the legitimately elected Hamas government to the sidelines and lend more strength to Abu Mazen. And Israel has quite brazenly announced that it intends to ship significant quantities of arms and ammunition to forces loyal to Abu Mazen, ostensibly to meet the threat posed by Hamas terrorism. Till his dying days, Arafat successfully resisted the pressure from Israel to undertake the dirty work of policing its occupation and repressing his own people. Abu Mazen may not prove quite so steadfast. The closure policy has ensured that life for the Palestinian people today is a grim struggle for survival. As the fabric of civic life frays, tensions within Palestinian society are boiling over, threatening the entire West Asian region with unpredictable consequences. Never before has the need been quite so acute for freedom-loving people all around the world to intervene, bypassing the conniving governments of the west and the submissive and spineless governments of the third world.
June 19, 2006
Friday, May 05, 2006
Indian Agriculture and its Unending Crisis
INDIAN AGRICULTURE AND ITS UNENDING CRISIS
Sukumar Muralidharan
April 23, 2006
As a decade in the life of a nation, the 1990s could attract a variety of descriptions. For one thing, it was the decade of liberalisation, when India, after a seeming eternity of hesitation, finally decided to engage with the global economy. For another, it was when the Indian middle class, thwarted in its ambitions for generations, carried through its revolution of rising aspirations. And it was also a period of the unabashed celebration of the good life, when older notions of austerity and social responsibility, nurtured in the Gandhian strain of the Indian freedom struggle, were thrown overboard.
With all this, the 1990s could also be remembered as the decade when agriculture fell off the radar screen. Two points in time when the Indian economy was severely buffeted by weather adversities, capture the essence of this transition. In 1987, when the monsoon failed to an unprecedented degree, the economy as a whole went into recession. Agricultural output fell by over 2 percent and with industry and services also feeling the impact, the overall growth rate slumped. The next time around when the monsoon turned in a performance quite so disastrous was 2002. And yet, even as agricultural output shrank by as much as 7 percent, industry and services maintained their brisk rates of growth. The overall impact of the drought on the economy, at least in terms of growth rates, was relatively subdued.
Prior to the decade of globalisation, the financial press through the month of April seemingly had its priorities clear. With the winter crop of grain being harvested, attention would be focused on market arrivals in the mandis of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, for pointers about the security of essential supplies over the year ahead.
Today, though, the concerns of the financial press are confined, as at any other time of the year, to the level of the stock market. Indeed, April 2006 was a historic month for the Indian stock markets, with the sensitive share price index on the Bombay Stock Exchange, the Sensex, touching 12,000, after a steep climb from the landmark level of 11,000 it had touched just days before. The new record meant that market capitalisation in Indian stocks was, for the first time, of the same magnitude as GDP. This was, in the estimation of the financial press, occasion for joyous celebration. It was state of the art economics, they pointed out, that market capitalisation should be at the same level as the country’s GDP. This was the story in the advanced capitalist economies and it would be the story in India too. Globalisation and the Indian middle class’s revolution of rising aspirations, had transformed the stock market, with its 40 million investors, into a higher national priority than agriculture, with its 600 million people. That was fair going if inherent values, as denominated in monetary terms, were to be considered. Even as the stock markets touched their unprecedented heights, agriculture, the sole source of livelihood for over 55 percent of the country, was plunging towards the 20 percent mark in terms of its contribution to India’s GDP.
As the rabi harvest for the current year gets underway, there is little reason to believe that the wheat crop will be any less than anticipated. Yet, even before procurement began, the Union Government had announced plans to import wheat from Australia for supplying the country’s southern markets. These markets could be more cheaply supplied with imported wheat, says the government. Farmers, needless to say, are unimpressed, and see in the import decision and especially its timing, an effort to cut back wheat procurement operations. The price at which imports have been contracted is much higher than the procurement price for Indian wheat. And if the background to this decision is kept in mind, which is the export of almost 20 million tonnes of wheat from the country’s overflowing granaries since 2002 – at a price below that reserved for the population below the poverty line – then the numerous anomalies in policy approaches to agriculture would become still clearer.
Matters would have been murky enough if they had ceased there. But a mere three weeks into the procurement season, the Government announced a decision to import an additional 3 million tonnes of wheat. When concluded, this would be the biggest food import contract since the Green Revolution, as it is called, supposedly established India as a country that had no cause to worry about food security any longer.
The rapid decline in agricultural fortunes would in most circumstances, except in cases of policy-induced myopia, be serious cause for worry. Through the decade of globalisation, the per capita availability of foodgrain showed a persistent decline for the first time since the 1960s. And this recent phase of agricultural decline has been more alarming since the earlier episode had identifiable climatic adversities that could be held responsible. And despite all the climatic fluctuations through the 1990s, it is nobody’s case that the erosion of Indian agricultural output has had anything to do with natural phenomena, or with unavoidable causes.
Indeed, manmade causes have more to do with the adversities that agriculture today faces. Since structural reforms began in the Indian economy, there has been a steep decline in the proportion of the central government’s budgetary outlays that go into agriculture. This has also been the case with industry, energy, and other sectors. But in certain sectors like industry – though uncertainly so in energy -- budgetary cutbacks could be made good by private initiatives. This in any case is a decided impossibility when it comes to agriculture. Indeed, gross capital formation in agriculture after a gradual decline over the years, began to fall rapidly in the 1990s. And most expert analysis is agreed on the fact that this decline is primarily on account of the fall in public investment in agriculture.
Through the 1990s, the reigning mantra of economic policy was that public investment in sectors where there was no alternative to the energetic economic leadership of the State, would not suffer. The burden of adjustment rather, would fall on unproductive public expenditures, like unmerited subsidies and the establishment costs of the vast government bureaucracy. But this political program for obvious reasons, has been impossible to carry through. Agricultural subsidies have if anything, only increased in the period of structural adjustment, to the extent that the reigning slogan now within official circles is that the priority should shift from unproductive subsidies to productive investments. But there are obviously politically influential farm lobbies that benefit from the subsidies paid out and any effort to ensure a transition to productive investments that benefit a larger cross-section of the agricultural population, would have to run the gauntlet of their resistance.
To take the component parts of food subsidies, there is first, the difference to reckon with, between the price at which the Food Corporation of India procures grain from the farmer during the harvest and the price at which it issues grain to the public distribution system. Then there is the cost of operations, stockholding and transportation that the FCI bears. For much of the 1990s, stock levels were far in excess of prescribed norms. Figures compiled in a recent study commissioned by the Ministry of Finance of the government of India, tell a compelling story. As of January 1, 2002, stocks of wheat and rice with the government and its agencies were over three times the prescribed level – in the case of wheat, almost four times. The volume has been drawn down in subsequent years, until now the seeming embarrassment of riches has been transformed into a deficit. But this has been achieved only by exporting grain at a price below that reserved for “below poverty line” (BPL) families in India. A part of the food subsidy, in other words, is going towards subsidising the consumption of Indian grain abroad.
The report on subsidies makes note of the phenomenon of rising food stocks coexisting with endemic hunger and “reported starvation deaths” in the country. It notes that the price reserved for BPL families, of both wheat and rice, has risen cumulatively by over 60 per cent since 1997-98, against an increase in the consumer price index of only 26 per cent. And despite this rapid increase in the issue price of foodgrain, the aggregate food subsidy burden has increased tenfold since 1990-91 – from a figure of Rs 2,450 crore to over Rs 25,000 crore.
The reasons are twofold: firstly, the costs of stockholding have increased enormously; and secondly, the procurement price paid to the farmer has multiplied several-fold. Increasingly, the food subsidy has lost its function of safeguarding food security and become a system of underwriting an unnecessary and wholly irrational accumulation of food stocks with official procurement agencies, and of keeping the politically voluble farm lobby quiescent, especially in the grain surplus areas.
The rapid increase in procurement prices has been partly justified as a necessary compensation for the sharp curtailment of the fertiliser subsidy, which has contributed to a steep escalation in the price paid by the farmer for this essential input. But the situation here still remains anomalous. According to a recent calculation, if import parity prices were to be used as the benchmark, only an average of about 56 per cent of the total fertiliser subsidy borne by the government is the farmers’ share. The rest is a subsidy for the fertiliser industry.
Official policy, in its reach towards the agricultural sector, is becoming increasingly limited. And the 1990s have also been a period when farmers were once again subject to a gradual but inexorable process of marginalisation. After the robust period of integration with the institutions of the mainstream economy, beginning with the nationalization of the country’s main banks in 1969, this was a serious setback for the millions dependent on agriculture for their livelihood.
Figures tabulated by the National Sample Survey Organisation, show that cultivator households till as late as 1971, were drawing at least 68 percent of their credit requirements from the non-institutional sector – in other words, the local mahajans and moneylenders who would charge extortionate rates and not hesitate to seize their land and other assets in case of a default on repayment, even one induced by severe climatic stress. The picture began to change from the time that the banks nationalization occurred, to the extent that by 1981, the share of the non-institutional sources in total agrarian credit had fallen to 36.8 percent. Over the next decade, the figure fell still more, to 30.6 percent. But once the philosophy of liberalization kicked in, the farm sector became a relatively low priority for profit-oriented financial institutions. In consequence, the share of the non-institutional sources of credit in total agricultural lending, had increased to 39 percent by 2002.
It is possible to make the case that the more accurate measure to use for assessing the adequacy of credit flows to agriculture would be to take these in proportion to GDP. With the share of agriculture in GDP having fallen progressively over the years, it should occasion no surprise that the flow of institutional credit to the sector too, should diminish. But this does not take into account the fact that 60 percent of the country still depends on agriculture for its livelihood. With the shrinking of its access to institutional sources of support – whether budgetary or through the credit system – the agrarian sector becomes more vulnerable to transient parameters, such as weather fluctuations, pest infestation, or natural disasters. The consequence has been a huge increase in agricultural indebtedness, which the most recent survey of the NSSO testifies to in an abstract sense, and the spate of suicides by debt-ridden farmers bears witness to in a rather more intimate and alarming way.
Sukumar Muralidharan
April 23, 2006
As a decade in the life of a nation, the 1990s could attract a variety of descriptions. For one thing, it was the decade of liberalisation, when India, after a seeming eternity of hesitation, finally decided to engage with the global economy. For another, it was when the Indian middle class, thwarted in its ambitions for generations, carried through its revolution of rising aspirations. And it was also a period of the unabashed celebration of the good life, when older notions of austerity and social responsibility, nurtured in the Gandhian strain of the Indian freedom struggle, were thrown overboard.
With all this, the 1990s could also be remembered as the decade when agriculture fell off the radar screen. Two points in time when the Indian economy was severely buffeted by weather adversities, capture the essence of this transition. In 1987, when the monsoon failed to an unprecedented degree, the economy as a whole went into recession. Agricultural output fell by over 2 percent and with industry and services also feeling the impact, the overall growth rate slumped. The next time around when the monsoon turned in a performance quite so disastrous was 2002. And yet, even as agricultural output shrank by as much as 7 percent, industry and services maintained their brisk rates of growth. The overall impact of the drought on the economy, at least in terms of growth rates, was relatively subdued.
Prior to the decade of globalisation, the financial press through the month of April seemingly had its priorities clear. With the winter crop of grain being harvested, attention would be focused on market arrivals in the mandis of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, for pointers about the security of essential supplies over the year ahead.
Today, though, the concerns of the financial press are confined, as at any other time of the year, to the level of the stock market. Indeed, April 2006 was a historic month for the Indian stock markets, with the sensitive share price index on the Bombay Stock Exchange, the Sensex, touching 12,000, after a steep climb from the landmark level of 11,000 it had touched just days before. The new record meant that market capitalisation in Indian stocks was, for the first time, of the same magnitude as GDP. This was, in the estimation of the financial press, occasion for joyous celebration. It was state of the art economics, they pointed out, that market capitalisation should be at the same level as the country’s GDP. This was the story in the advanced capitalist economies and it would be the story in India too. Globalisation and the Indian middle class’s revolution of rising aspirations, had transformed the stock market, with its 40 million investors, into a higher national priority than agriculture, with its 600 million people. That was fair going if inherent values, as denominated in monetary terms, were to be considered. Even as the stock markets touched their unprecedented heights, agriculture, the sole source of livelihood for over 55 percent of the country, was plunging towards the 20 percent mark in terms of its contribution to India’s GDP.
As the rabi harvest for the current year gets underway, there is little reason to believe that the wheat crop will be any less than anticipated. Yet, even before procurement began, the Union Government had announced plans to import wheat from Australia for supplying the country’s southern markets. These markets could be more cheaply supplied with imported wheat, says the government. Farmers, needless to say, are unimpressed, and see in the import decision and especially its timing, an effort to cut back wheat procurement operations. The price at which imports have been contracted is much higher than the procurement price for Indian wheat. And if the background to this decision is kept in mind, which is the export of almost 20 million tonnes of wheat from the country’s overflowing granaries since 2002 – at a price below that reserved for the population below the poverty line – then the numerous anomalies in policy approaches to agriculture would become still clearer.
Matters would have been murky enough if they had ceased there. But a mere three weeks into the procurement season, the Government announced a decision to import an additional 3 million tonnes of wheat. When concluded, this would be the biggest food import contract since the Green Revolution, as it is called, supposedly established India as a country that had no cause to worry about food security any longer.
The rapid decline in agricultural fortunes would in most circumstances, except in cases of policy-induced myopia, be serious cause for worry. Through the decade of globalisation, the per capita availability of foodgrain showed a persistent decline for the first time since the 1960s. And this recent phase of agricultural decline has been more alarming since the earlier episode had identifiable climatic adversities that could be held responsible. And despite all the climatic fluctuations through the 1990s, it is nobody’s case that the erosion of Indian agricultural output has had anything to do with natural phenomena, or with unavoidable causes.
Indeed, manmade causes have more to do with the adversities that agriculture today faces. Since structural reforms began in the Indian economy, there has been a steep decline in the proportion of the central government’s budgetary outlays that go into agriculture. This has also been the case with industry, energy, and other sectors. But in certain sectors like industry – though uncertainly so in energy -- budgetary cutbacks could be made good by private initiatives. This in any case is a decided impossibility when it comes to agriculture. Indeed, gross capital formation in agriculture after a gradual decline over the years, began to fall rapidly in the 1990s. And most expert analysis is agreed on the fact that this decline is primarily on account of the fall in public investment in agriculture.
Through the 1990s, the reigning mantra of economic policy was that public investment in sectors where there was no alternative to the energetic economic leadership of the State, would not suffer. The burden of adjustment rather, would fall on unproductive public expenditures, like unmerited subsidies and the establishment costs of the vast government bureaucracy. But this political program for obvious reasons, has been impossible to carry through. Agricultural subsidies have if anything, only increased in the period of structural adjustment, to the extent that the reigning slogan now within official circles is that the priority should shift from unproductive subsidies to productive investments. But there are obviously politically influential farm lobbies that benefit from the subsidies paid out and any effort to ensure a transition to productive investments that benefit a larger cross-section of the agricultural population, would have to run the gauntlet of their resistance.
To take the component parts of food subsidies, there is first, the difference to reckon with, between the price at which the Food Corporation of India procures grain from the farmer during the harvest and the price at which it issues grain to the public distribution system. Then there is the cost of operations, stockholding and transportation that the FCI bears. For much of the 1990s, stock levels were far in excess of prescribed norms. Figures compiled in a recent study commissioned by the Ministry of Finance of the government of India, tell a compelling story. As of January 1, 2002, stocks of wheat and rice with the government and its agencies were over three times the prescribed level – in the case of wheat, almost four times. The volume has been drawn down in subsequent years, until now the seeming embarrassment of riches has been transformed into a deficit. But this has been achieved only by exporting grain at a price below that reserved for “below poverty line” (BPL) families in India. A part of the food subsidy, in other words, is going towards subsidising the consumption of Indian grain abroad.
The report on subsidies makes note of the phenomenon of rising food stocks coexisting with endemic hunger and “reported starvation deaths” in the country. It notes that the price reserved for BPL families, of both wheat and rice, has risen cumulatively by over 60 per cent since 1997-98, against an increase in the consumer price index of only 26 per cent. And despite this rapid increase in the issue price of foodgrain, the aggregate food subsidy burden has increased tenfold since 1990-91 – from a figure of Rs 2,450 crore to over Rs 25,000 crore.
The reasons are twofold: firstly, the costs of stockholding have increased enormously; and secondly, the procurement price paid to the farmer has multiplied several-fold. Increasingly, the food subsidy has lost its function of safeguarding food security and become a system of underwriting an unnecessary and wholly irrational accumulation of food stocks with official procurement agencies, and of keeping the politically voluble farm lobby quiescent, especially in the grain surplus areas.
The rapid increase in procurement prices has been partly justified as a necessary compensation for the sharp curtailment of the fertiliser subsidy, which has contributed to a steep escalation in the price paid by the farmer for this essential input. But the situation here still remains anomalous. According to a recent calculation, if import parity prices were to be used as the benchmark, only an average of about 56 per cent of the total fertiliser subsidy borne by the government is the farmers’ share. The rest is a subsidy for the fertiliser industry.
Official policy, in its reach towards the agricultural sector, is becoming increasingly limited. And the 1990s have also been a period when farmers were once again subject to a gradual but inexorable process of marginalisation. After the robust period of integration with the institutions of the mainstream economy, beginning with the nationalization of the country’s main banks in 1969, this was a serious setback for the millions dependent on agriculture for their livelihood.
Figures tabulated by the National Sample Survey Organisation, show that cultivator households till as late as 1971, were drawing at least 68 percent of their credit requirements from the non-institutional sector – in other words, the local mahajans and moneylenders who would charge extortionate rates and not hesitate to seize their land and other assets in case of a default on repayment, even one induced by severe climatic stress. The picture began to change from the time that the banks nationalization occurred, to the extent that by 1981, the share of the non-institutional sources in total agrarian credit had fallen to 36.8 percent. Over the next decade, the figure fell still more, to 30.6 percent. But once the philosophy of liberalization kicked in, the farm sector became a relatively low priority for profit-oriented financial institutions. In consequence, the share of the non-institutional sources of credit in total agricultural lending, had increased to 39 percent by 2002.
It is possible to make the case that the more accurate measure to use for assessing the adequacy of credit flows to agriculture would be to take these in proportion to GDP. With the share of agriculture in GDP having fallen progressively over the years, it should occasion no surprise that the flow of institutional credit to the sector too, should diminish. But this does not take into account the fact that 60 percent of the country still depends on agriculture for its livelihood. With the shrinking of its access to institutional sources of support – whether budgetary or through the credit system – the agrarian sector becomes more vulnerable to transient parameters, such as weather fluctuations, pest infestation, or natural disasters. The consequence has been a huge increase in agricultural indebtedness, which the most recent survey of the NSSO testifies to in an abstract sense, and the spate of suicides by debt-ridden farmers bears witness to in a rather more intimate and alarming way.
Iran, U.S. and the drumbeats of war
Iran, US and the drumbeats of war
Abstract: Iran’s claim that it has mastered the nuclear fuel cycle does not mean it is near assembling an atomic bomb, but this has not prevented scaremongers in the US from sounding the drumbeats of war. For a U.S. administration besieged by growing public scepticism about the war in Iraq, a renewed military adventure may well be an escape route. It could as well be a fatal error. .
Sukumar Muralidharan
April 20, 2006
It is not known if Mahmud Ahmedinejad, the president of Iran, reads the western media. Nor is it clear that investigative reporters in the US ever speak to him. Yet, working independently, the Iranian president and Seymour Hersh – a journalist with established credentials in bringing to light the seamy underside of US military and intelligence operations – have managed to engineer a coincidence that could well have been scripted by the great dramatist in the sky. But if the intent was to stage a climactic battle between good and evil, there is just too much ambiguity surrounding the protagonists. Both US President George Bush and his Iranian counterpart, believe they have a call from heaven to do what is right. But only one has international law on his side. The other is floundering in a sea of domestic political adversities, while seeking to foist a new standard of law on the world.
On April 10, the New Yorker, that venerable magazine that has for decades been a celebration of the languid elegance of unhurried prose, posted on its website an article with a rather urgent tone.[i] Though Seymour Hersh has occasionally misdirected his reportorial ardour, his article on the operational planning for a military strike against Iran, was just too compelling to ignore – much like his work on the scandal of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Matters had gone well beyond the stage of contingency planning to minute operational details, Hersh reported. The US military, he continued, had quite possibly launched both land and air-based reconnaissance missions in Iranian territory. The options discussed and approved at the highest level of the Bush administration included the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons. With many of the facilities involved in Iran’s contentious nuclear programme located underground and protected by heavy concrete fortifications, there seemed no alternative to the use of these weapons of the apocalypse.
Hersh’s reportage provoked spasms of anxiety in strategic circles worldwide But the one person who seemed almost serenely unconcerned was Ahmedinejad. Barely two days after the Hersh article was put up for a global audience, the Iranian president announced, with appropriate fanfare, that the country’s dedicated scientists had established complete mastery over the nuclear fuel cycle. Speaking in a nationally televised speech, Ahmedinejad offered the friendly advice that the west should resign itself to the legitimate rights Iran enjoyed as a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Iran was in a position to independently fuel its nuclear power reactors, he said, but it would ensure full compliance with NPT obligations and pay appropriate deference to the authority of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
For an Indian audience inured to regular displays of nuclear nationalism, the tone of the Iranian president’s remarks must have sounded familiar. India’s Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) has proclaimed its complete mastery over the fuel cycles involving four different nuclear materials – natural uranium, enriched uranium, plutonium and thorium. In terms of the obeisance paid to dedicated scientific research and self-reliance, the Iranian president has been well within this paradigm. But being undoubtedly a man of some modesty, he has claimed mastery over only one nuclear fuel and deviated further from the Indian model in vowing compliance with the NPT and the authority of the IAEA.
Uranium Enrichment
Soon after Ahmedinejad’s announcement, Mohammad Saeedi, the deputy chairman of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran (AEOI) came out with the finer details of the Iranian nuclear programme. The achievement in scientific scale experiments had used 164 gas centrifuges for enriching natural uranium, in which the vital fissile isotope is present to the extent of a mere 0.7 per cent, up to the level of 3.5 percent This is roughly the required enrichment level of the fissile isotope for a light water reactor like the one that Iran is importing from Russia. The experiments were in accordance with the notification that Iran had issued to the IAEA late in March. That apart, Iran had also concurrently announced that it intended to put into operation a 3,000 machine cascade for enrichment purposes by the last quarter of 2006.
Saeedi explained that the Iranian authority ultimately planned to utilise the experience gained with the 164-machine cascade to scale up production to an industrial facility utilising 54,000 centrifuges. Working at levels of operational efficiency established in the laboratory experiment, the industrial facility would be able to produce adequate fuel for a 1,000 megawatt nuclear power reactor. The time horizon that Iran would require to build up this inventory, though, was not specified.
Scaremongers from the US lost little time in stoking the mood of public paranoia, which has been a fruitful venture since the September 11, 2001 attacks. With 54,000 centrifuges, Iran would be able to produce enough fuel for a nuclear bomb within 16 days, said Stephen Rademaker, US assistant secretary of state for international security and non-proliferation. When questioned about the alternative circumstance of 3,000 centrifuges -- now part of the official correspondence between Iran and the IAEA – the US official demonstrated his facility with numbers by revising the time-scale for an Iranian nuclear bomb to debut on the world stage, to 261 days. For obvious reasons, it was the 16-day scenario that gained greater traction in the US press.
Rademaker did not, of course, choose to look at certain more fundamental questions. Iran’s laboratory scale results with uranium enrichment are themselves rather tenuously established. Iran faces serious challenges in ironing out these problems and it is yet to contend with the enormous complications involved in going from the laboratory to the industrial scale. Apart from the fact that the material used in constructing centrifuges is rare and closely guarded, Iran is, by all expert assessments, yet to acquire the precision in machine building and process control required to enrich uranium on an industrial scale. If a reasonable time scale for acquiring these – and all other competences – were to be factored in, then Iran might be 10 years away from assembling a solitary nuclear explosive device.
Indian Experience
India’s DAE would be able to render some clarity to the public debate, if it were, like its Iranian counterpart, to operate in an environment of transparency. In the context of India’s recent nuclear deal with the US, non-proliferation advocacy groups in the west have begun to cast a rather sceptical eye on the country’s record of compliance with global norms. This has resulted in a renewed focus on a little known facet of the DAE’s activities. After successful tests with a 100 centrifuge cascade in its facility at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Mumbai, the DAE has been engaged in constructing an industrial scale enrichment facility at Rattehalli near Mysore. Though commenced in the mid-1980s, the facility was publicly acknowledged by DAE officials only in 1992. In 1997, the DAE confirmed that the purpose of the Rattehalli plant was to produce uranium enriched to the 40 to 45 percent level, for a nuclear submarine project that has been underway since the 1970s. It denied that the unit was engaged in producing uranium enriched to the higher levels needed for a compact explosive device.
In March this year, the Institute for Science and International Security, a US research and advocacy group, published a paper that frontally questioned India’s supposedly impeccable record in non-proliferation. Aside from highlighting the questionable procurement processes used by the Rattehalli facility, through a number of front organisations, the study also called into question the inflated claims of self-reliance that the DAE has consistently made. These apart, the most significant finding of the paper was that the Rattehalli facility, after serious technical difficulties in the construction stages, had established a uranium enrichment capacity in the range of 5,000 separative work units (SWU) per year.[ii]
The SWU is a term of art that eludes the comprehension of most laypersons. But just by way of comparison, it is estimated that a facility with a capacity of 100,000 SWU would be just about adequate to fuel a 1,000 megawatt nuclear power reactor for a year. M.V. Ramana, a physicist and analyst of the Indian nuclear programme, has sought to piece together a coherent picture of the scope and the achievements of the Indian uranium enrichment program. Using all the material available in the public domain, he has proposed that the best estimate of India’s uranium enrichment capacity, as of 2004, would be around 4,800 SWU per year. However, there are a number of uncertainties surrounding this estimate and if all possible scenarios were to be constructed – including the possible use of highly enriched uranium as a “trigger” for the nuclear fusion device that India tested in May 1998 – then the enrichment capacity could be anywhere between 3,900 and 10,000 SWU per year.[iii] At the lower bound of this range, India could produce around 20 kg of uranium enriched to the weapons grade every year, just enough for a Hiroshima-scale nuclear weapon. The relative modesty of this achievement after a two-decades long effort, should offer an accurate perspective on how close the Iranian programme is to a weapon.
Iran and IAEA
What is indubitable though, is that if Iran were to embark upon the path of uranium enrichment for weapons purposes, it would be swiftly found out and put under appropriate sanctions. For all the disinformation that surrounds the issue, Iran is still obliged to submit to a regime of safeguards administered by the IAEA. A few days after Ahmedinejad’s announcement, in fact, the IAEA director-general Mohammad El Baradei, was in Teheran for talks with the Iranian government on “confidence-building measures”. At his last public appearance before leaving, El Baradei urged Iran to suspend uranium enrichment work as required by the UN security council. But he also observed that IAEA inspectors were, even as he spoke, continuing their verification activities in Iran.
With an objective, institutionalised process underway to verify whether Iran is 16 days or 10 years away from a nuclear bomb, it may seem rather odd that the US and its European allies should work themselves up into a frenzy over the supposed threat from that quarter. On March 29, the UN security council, after hours of futile debate on a possible resolution demanding that Iran comply with the demands of the west, finally settled upon the uneasy compromise of a “presidential statement” demanding that Iran establish the “full and sustained” suspension of enrichment-related activities, including those being carried out on an experimental basis. With a month being specified as the time available for compliance, the US is not far from its objective, of holding Iran in violation of the demands of the international community.
Expectedly, Ahmedinejad’s announcement was followed within hours, by the active advocacy of military action by the same group of right-wing zealots that set the agenda for Iraq. Though a diplomatic settlement was always preferable, military action against Iran had become almost inevitable, said a commentator in Rupert Murdoch’s The Weekly Standard. In fact, without the buttressing of a credible military threat, a diplomatic initiative would have little chance of success. Though the US could go it alone, it would be preferable to recruit a number of potential allies to the cause, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Turkey, Britain, France, and Germany. And the purpose of military strikes would be “first and foremost, to destroy or severely damage Iran's nuclear development and production facilities and put them out of commission for at least five years”. That apart, the US should aim to “destroy the Iranian air defence system, significantly damage its air force, naval forces, and Shahab-3 offensive missile forces”. The air campaign would target more than “1,500 aim points” across Iran, and among the weapons it would use would be the “new 28,000-pound bunker busters, 5,000-pound bunker penetrators, 2,000-pound bunker busters, 1,000-pound general purpose bombs, and 500-pound GP bombs”.[iv]
Whether the US will embark upon this broad-ranging and potentially catastrophic military campaign, depends upon a range of factors. It is now looking increasingly unlikely that the UN security council will fall in line behind the US demand for comprehensive economic sanctions on Iran. Russia for one, has strongly hinted that it is unwilling to go that far without positive proof of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme. This represents a radical rewriting of the rules in relation to those that the US used in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. To avoid war in 2003, Iraq was required to prove an absence, or alternately, to disprove a presence. A basic familiarity with logic would show that this is an impossible task in every sense, compared to the other procedure of proving a presence, or disproving an absence. Proving an absence requires the examination of a virtual infinity of possibilities and situations. The proof of a presence though, is accomplished with just one instance.
The Lies on Iraq
Iraq could never prove the absence of a weapons of mass destruction programme despite 12 years of inspections and enervating sanctions, because the US managed at every turn, to infiltrate the process of reporting to the U.N., convincing the disarmament teams – and in the final instance, coercing them – into falling in line. It failed conspicuously in March 2003, when El Baradei certified Iraq’s nuclear disarmament complete and dismissed the US effort to prove a presence – Iraq’s alleged effort to buy uranium from Niger and its import of aluminium tubes for an enrichment programme – as clumsy forgeries or crass misrepresentations.
That chapter in the march to war against Iraq has now come back to haunt the US administration. Recent disclosures in the US media indicate that President George Bush was, as early as October 2002, in possession of intelligence findings about the dubious provenance of the allegation that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger. Yet he went ahead and used this as a plank on which to construct the case for war in his state of the union address in January 2003.
Other efforts to prove the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq have also been discredited. On May 29, 2003, Bush declared that a number of mobile units found in Iraq were proven conclusively to be biological weapons laboratories. It is now evident that he had been informed two days prior to this announcement, that the mobile units in question were in fact, nothing more threatening than surveillance balloon launchers to support artillery units in battlefield situations.
Evidence is mounting that the war in Iraq, which has now entered the annals of military history as a disaster beyond imagination, was launched on a foundation of lies. The top echelons of the US military are known to be restive and no fewer than six retired generals from different wings of the US armed forces have recently called for the resignation of US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as the debate over who lost Iraq becomes more rancorous. Some have indeed, gone so far as to say that they reflect the sentiments of senior officers still on active duty. If there is anything more dangerous for a putative democracy than civilian authority being challenged by the uniformed military, that can only be an executive that remains unfettered by any norms of accountability and believes it can deploy force in the pursuit of murky and unstated agendas in distant corners of the world But that ominously, is the situation that the US finds itself in today. And it just may be a conundrum that the Bush administration may try to shoot its way out of.
Email: sukumar.md@gmail.com
[i] Seymour Hersh, “The Iran Plans”, The New Yorker, April 17, 2006, posted on the web, April 8, 2006, and available at this writing at: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060417fa_fact.
[ii] David Albright and Susan Basu, “India’s Gas Centrifuge Program: Stopping Illicit Procurement and the Leakage of Technical Centrifuge Know-how”, The Institute for Science and International Security, Washington DC, March 10, 2006; available at: http://www.isis-online.org/publications/southasia/indianprocurement.pdf.
[iii] M.V. Ramana, “India’s Uranium Enrichment Program”, INESAP Information Bulletin, Number 25, December 2004, pp 71-4. Also available is a rather more technical analysis by the same author, “An Estimate of India’s Uranium Enrichment Capacity”, Science and Global Security, Number 12, 2004, pp 115-24
[iv] Thomas McInerney, “Target Iran”, The Weekly Standard, Volume 11, Issue 30, April 24, 2006; posted on the web early April and available at, http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/101dorxa.asp.
Abstract: Iran’s claim that it has mastered the nuclear fuel cycle does not mean it is near assembling an atomic bomb, but this has not prevented scaremongers in the US from sounding the drumbeats of war. For a U.S. administration besieged by growing public scepticism about the war in Iraq, a renewed military adventure may well be an escape route. It could as well be a fatal error. .
Sukumar Muralidharan
April 20, 2006
It is not known if Mahmud Ahmedinejad, the president of Iran, reads the western media. Nor is it clear that investigative reporters in the US ever speak to him. Yet, working independently, the Iranian president and Seymour Hersh – a journalist with established credentials in bringing to light the seamy underside of US military and intelligence operations – have managed to engineer a coincidence that could well have been scripted by the great dramatist in the sky. But if the intent was to stage a climactic battle between good and evil, there is just too much ambiguity surrounding the protagonists. Both US President George Bush and his Iranian counterpart, believe they have a call from heaven to do what is right. But only one has international law on his side. The other is floundering in a sea of domestic political adversities, while seeking to foist a new standard of law on the world.
On April 10, the New Yorker, that venerable magazine that has for decades been a celebration of the languid elegance of unhurried prose, posted on its website an article with a rather urgent tone.[i] Though Seymour Hersh has occasionally misdirected his reportorial ardour, his article on the operational planning for a military strike against Iran, was just too compelling to ignore – much like his work on the scandal of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Matters had gone well beyond the stage of contingency planning to minute operational details, Hersh reported. The US military, he continued, had quite possibly launched both land and air-based reconnaissance missions in Iranian territory. The options discussed and approved at the highest level of the Bush administration included the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons. With many of the facilities involved in Iran’s contentious nuclear programme located underground and protected by heavy concrete fortifications, there seemed no alternative to the use of these weapons of the apocalypse.
Hersh’s reportage provoked spasms of anxiety in strategic circles worldwide But the one person who seemed almost serenely unconcerned was Ahmedinejad. Barely two days after the Hersh article was put up for a global audience, the Iranian president announced, with appropriate fanfare, that the country’s dedicated scientists had established complete mastery over the nuclear fuel cycle. Speaking in a nationally televised speech, Ahmedinejad offered the friendly advice that the west should resign itself to the legitimate rights Iran enjoyed as a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Iran was in a position to independently fuel its nuclear power reactors, he said, but it would ensure full compliance with NPT obligations and pay appropriate deference to the authority of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
For an Indian audience inured to regular displays of nuclear nationalism, the tone of the Iranian president’s remarks must have sounded familiar. India’s Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) has proclaimed its complete mastery over the fuel cycles involving four different nuclear materials – natural uranium, enriched uranium, plutonium and thorium. In terms of the obeisance paid to dedicated scientific research and self-reliance, the Iranian president has been well within this paradigm. But being undoubtedly a man of some modesty, he has claimed mastery over only one nuclear fuel and deviated further from the Indian model in vowing compliance with the NPT and the authority of the IAEA.
Uranium Enrichment
Soon after Ahmedinejad’s announcement, Mohammad Saeedi, the deputy chairman of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran (AEOI) came out with the finer details of the Iranian nuclear programme. The achievement in scientific scale experiments had used 164 gas centrifuges for enriching natural uranium, in which the vital fissile isotope is present to the extent of a mere 0.7 per cent, up to the level of 3.5 percent This is roughly the required enrichment level of the fissile isotope for a light water reactor like the one that Iran is importing from Russia. The experiments were in accordance with the notification that Iran had issued to the IAEA late in March. That apart, Iran had also concurrently announced that it intended to put into operation a 3,000 machine cascade for enrichment purposes by the last quarter of 2006.
Saeedi explained that the Iranian authority ultimately planned to utilise the experience gained with the 164-machine cascade to scale up production to an industrial facility utilising 54,000 centrifuges. Working at levels of operational efficiency established in the laboratory experiment, the industrial facility would be able to produce adequate fuel for a 1,000 megawatt nuclear power reactor. The time horizon that Iran would require to build up this inventory, though, was not specified.
Scaremongers from the US lost little time in stoking the mood of public paranoia, which has been a fruitful venture since the September 11, 2001 attacks. With 54,000 centrifuges, Iran would be able to produce enough fuel for a nuclear bomb within 16 days, said Stephen Rademaker, US assistant secretary of state for international security and non-proliferation. When questioned about the alternative circumstance of 3,000 centrifuges -- now part of the official correspondence between Iran and the IAEA – the US official demonstrated his facility with numbers by revising the time-scale for an Iranian nuclear bomb to debut on the world stage, to 261 days. For obvious reasons, it was the 16-day scenario that gained greater traction in the US press.
Rademaker did not, of course, choose to look at certain more fundamental questions. Iran’s laboratory scale results with uranium enrichment are themselves rather tenuously established. Iran faces serious challenges in ironing out these problems and it is yet to contend with the enormous complications involved in going from the laboratory to the industrial scale. Apart from the fact that the material used in constructing centrifuges is rare and closely guarded, Iran is, by all expert assessments, yet to acquire the precision in machine building and process control required to enrich uranium on an industrial scale. If a reasonable time scale for acquiring these – and all other competences – were to be factored in, then Iran might be 10 years away from assembling a solitary nuclear explosive device.
Indian Experience
India’s DAE would be able to render some clarity to the public debate, if it were, like its Iranian counterpart, to operate in an environment of transparency. In the context of India’s recent nuclear deal with the US, non-proliferation advocacy groups in the west have begun to cast a rather sceptical eye on the country’s record of compliance with global norms. This has resulted in a renewed focus on a little known facet of the DAE’s activities. After successful tests with a 100 centrifuge cascade in its facility at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Mumbai, the DAE has been engaged in constructing an industrial scale enrichment facility at Rattehalli near Mysore. Though commenced in the mid-1980s, the facility was publicly acknowledged by DAE officials only in 1992. In 1997, the DAE confirmed that the purpose of the Rattehalli plant was to produce uranium enriched to the 40 to 45 percent level, for a nuclear submarine project that has been underway since the 1970s. It denied that the unit was engaged in producing uranium enriched to the higher levels needed for a compact explosive device.
In March this year, the Institute for Science and International Security, a US research and advocacy group, published a paper that frontally questioned India’s supposedly impeccable record in non-proliferation. Aside from highlighting the questionable procurement processes used by the Rattehalli facility, through a number of front organisations, the study also called into question the inflated claims of self-reliance that the DAE has consistently made. These apart, the most significant finding of the paper was that the Rattehalli facility, after serious technical difficulties in the construction stages, had established a uranium enrichment capacity in the range of 5,000 separative work units (SWU) per year.[ii]
The SWU is a term of art that eludes the comprehension of most laypersons. But just by way of comparison, it is estimated that a facility with a capacity of 100,000 SWU would be just about adequate to fuel a 1,000 megawatt nuclear power reactor for a year. M.V. Ramana, a physicist and analyst of the Indian nuclear programme, has sought to piece together a coherent picture of the scope and the achievements of the Indian uranium enrichment program. Using all the material available in the public domain, he has proposed that the best estimate of India’s uranium enrichment capacity, as of 2004, would be around 4,800 SWU per year. However, there are a number of uncertainties surrounding this estimate and if all possible scenarios were to be constructed – including the possible use of highly enriched uranium as a “trigger” for the nuclear fusion device that India tested in May 1998 – then the enrichment capacity could be anywhere between 3,900 and 10,000 SWU per year.[iii] At the lower bound of this range, India could produce around 20 kg of uranium enriched to the weapons grade every year, just enough for a Hiroshima-scale nuclear weapon. The relative modesty of this achievement after a two-decades long effort, should offer an accurate perspective on how close the Iranian programme is to a weapon.
Iran and IAEA
What is indubitable though, is that if Iran were to embark upon the path of uranium enrichment for weapons purposes, it would be swiftly found out and put under appropriate sanctions. For all the disinformation that surrounds the issue, Iran is still obliged to submit to a regime of safeguards administered by the IAEA. A few days after Ahmedinejad’s announcement, in fact, the IAEA director-general Mohammad El Baradei, was in Teheran for talks with the Iranian government on “confidence-building measures”. At his last public appearance before leaving, El Baradei urged Iran to suspend uranium enrichment work as required by the UN security council. But he also observed that IAEA inspectors were, even as he spoke, continuing their verification activities in Iran.
With an objective, institutionalised process underway to verify whether Iran is 16 days or 10 years away from a nuclear bomb, it may seem rather odd that the US and its European allies should work themselves up into a frenzy over the supposed threat from that quarter. On March 29, the UN security council, after hours of futile debate on a possible resolution demanding that Iran comply with the demands of the west, finally settled upon the uneasy compromise of a “presidential statement” demanding that Iran establish the “full and sustained” suspension of enrichment-related activities, including those being carried out on an experimental basis. With a month being specified as the time available for compliance, the US is not far from its objective, of holding Iran in violation of the demands of the international community.
Expectedly, Ahmedinejad’s announcement was followed within hours, by the active advocacy of military action by the same group of right-wing zealots that set the agenda for Iraq. Though a diplomatic settlement was always preferable, military action against Iran had become almost inevitable, said a commentator in Rupert Murdoch’s The Weekly Standard. In fact, without the buttressing of a credible military threat, a diplomatic initiative would have little chance of success. Though the US could go it alone, it would be preferable to recruit a number of potential allies to the cause, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Turkey, Britain, France, and Germany. And the purpose of military strikes would be “first and foremost, to destroy or severely damage Iran's nuclear development and production facilities and put them out of commission for at least five years”. That apart, the US should aim to “destroy the Iranian air defence system, significantly damage its air force, naval forces, and Shahab-3 offensive missile forces”. The air campaign would target more than “1,500 aim points” across Iran, and among the weapons it would use would be the “new 28,000-pound bunker busters, 5,000-pound bunker penetrators, 2,000-pound bunker busters, 1,000-pound general purpose bombs, and 500-pound GP bombs”.[iv]
Whether the US will embark upon this broad-ranging and potentially catastrophic military campaign, depends upon a range of factors. It is now looking increasingly unlikely that the UN security council will fall in line behind the US demand for comprehensive economic sanctions on Iran. Russia for one, has strongly hinted that it is unwilling to go that far without positive proof of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme. This represents a radical rewriting of the rules in relation to those that the US used in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. To avoid war in 2003, Iraq was required to prove an absence, or alternately, to disprove a presence. A basic familiarity with logic would show that this is an impossible task in every sense, compared to the other procedure of proving a presence, or disproving an absence. Proving an absence requires the examination of a virtual infinity of possibilities and situations. The proof of a presence though, is accomplished with just one instance.
The Lies on Iraq
Iraq could never prove the absence of a weapons of mass destruction programme despite 12 years of inspections and enervating sanctions, because the US managed at every turn, to infiltrate the process of reporting to the U.N., convincing the disarmament teams – and in the final instance, coercing them – into falling in line. It failed conspicuously in March 2003, when El Baradei certified Iraq’s nuclear disarmament complete and dismissed the US effort to prove a presence – Iraq’s alleged effort to buy uranium from Niger and its import of aluminium tubes for an enrichment programme – as clumsy forgeries or crass misrepresentations.
That chapter in the march to war against Iraq has now come back to haunt the US administration. Recent disclosures in the US media indicate that President George Bush was, as early as October 2002, in possession of intelligence findings about the dubious provenance of the allegation that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger. Yet he went ahead and used this as a plank on which to construct the case for war in his state of the union address in January 2003.
Other efforts to prove the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq have also been discredited. On May 29, 2003, Bush declared that a number of mobile units found in Iraq were proven conclusively to be biological weapons laboratories. It is now evident that he had been informed two days prior to this announcement, that the mobile units in question were in fact, nothing more threatening than surveillance balloon launchers to support artillery units in battlefield situations.
Evidence is mounting that the war in Iraq, which has now entered the annals of military history as a disaster beyond imagination, was launched on a foundation of lies. The top echelons of the US military are known to be restive and no fewer than six retired generals from different wings of the US armed forces have recently called for the resignation of US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as the debate over who lost Iraq becomes more rancorous. Some have indeed, gone so far as to say that they reflect the sentiments of senior officers still on active duty. If there is anything more dangerous for a putative democracy than civilian authority being challenged by the uniformed military, that can only be an executive that remains unfettered by any norms of accountability and believes it can deploy force in the pursuit of murky and unstated agendas in distant corners of the world But that ominously, is the situation that the US finds itself in today. And it just may be a conundrum that the Bush administration may try to shoot its way out of.
Email: sukumar.md@gmail.com
[i] Seymour Hersh, “The Iran Plans”, The New Yorker, April 17, 2006, posted on the web, April 8, 2006, and available at this writing at: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060417fa_fact.
[ii] David Albright and Susan Basu, “India’s Gas Centrifuge Program: Stopping Illicit Procurement and the Leakage of Technical Centrifuge Know-how”, The Institute for Science and International Security, Washington DC, March 10, 2006; available at: http://www.isis-online.org/publications/southasia/indianprocurement.pdf.
[iii] M.V. Ramana, “India’s Uranium Enrichment Program”, INESAP Information Bulletin, Number 25, December 2004, pp 71-4. Also available is a rather more technical analysis by the same author, “An Estimate of India’s Uranium Enrichment Capacity”, Science and Global Security, Number 12, 2004, pp 115-24
[iv] Thomas McInerney, “Target Iran”, The Weekly Standard, Volume 11, Issue 30, April 24, 2006; posted on the web early April and available at, http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/101dorxa.asp.
The Bush visit and India's burdens of partnership
INDIA AND THE U.S.: THE BURDENS OF PARTNERSHIP
Sukumar Muralidharan
March 21, 2006
Three days after touching down, U.S. President George Bush left Indian shores, leaving in his wake an aura of general contentment. From deep within his security envelope, Bush had little opportunity to see the seething rage on the Indian street. The constituencies he addressed were the middle and upper strata, anxious to secure a U.S. stamp of approval for India as a partner in global affairs. And for the Indian nuclear establishment and its peers in foreign policy, the agreements forged on the occasion marked the beginning of a new concord. After their unseemly squabbles in the weeks prior, the Bush visit marked a new mutual amity for them, as much as it represented a new beginning between India and the U.S.
India’s Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) had initially resisted the deal that involved a segregation of military and civilian nuclear facilities. For foreign policy ideologues though, complete autonomy in nuclear affairs was not too high a sacrifice for winning U.S. benediction in global councils. Above all, autonomy was not to be confused with autarky, since isolation was no virtue when nuclear fission was potentially a valuable energy source for a rapidly industrialising country and international cooperation, the key to opening these limitless vistas.
If the deal that was finally agreed on day two of the Bush visit, succeeded in calming these quarrels and anxieties, its international repercussions were something else. Stopping in Pakistan on his way back – though not with the same cavalier inattention to local sensibilities that his predecessor Bill Clinton showed in 2000 -- Bush rebuffed any possibility that Pakistan could claim a status akin to that granted India. Two weeks later, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri warned darkly, that the whole Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty would “unravel” since it was “only a matter of time before other countries (began) to act the same way.” Since ministers in Pakistan invariably direct their most pointed barbs at India, it may seem axiomatic that Kasuri was referring to the negative example that India had set in terms of global nuclear non-proliferation norms. On closer reading though, his statement seems to bear equal reference to both the U.S. as the patron of this breakout from the NPT norms, and to India as the client.
Tightly bound up in an alliance with the U.S., Pakistan may not have very much latitude to deliver on this threat. Yet, it is striking that India’s new bonding with the U.S., has evoked deep suspicion in even liberal circles, not known to be traditional bastions of hostility. The Guardian in London, for one, commented editorially, that the nuclear agreement between India and the U.S. was “about breaking rules and expecting others to abide by them”. More picturesquely put, it was about “preaching temperance from the barstool”. Indians may well delight in the bargain they had driven, said the newspaper, but there were likely to be some “thoughtful smiles” in Iran and North Korea as the “wider implications” sank in.
In advance of the Bush visit, the New York Times commented that despite all the accompanying froth, the presidential passage to India was “built around a bad nuclear deal”. With the deal consummated, the “newspaper of record” commented rather acidly, that Bush was turning out to be Iran’s best friend. His adventure in Iraq, launched on flimsy and fabricated evidence, had only succeeded in transforming that country into a satellite of the Islamic Republic next door. And his deal with India sent “exactly the wrong message .. just days before Washington and its European allies” were scheduled to “refer Iran’s case to the United Nations Security Council for further action”. Iran’s hopes of thwarting a global consensus on restraining its nuclear program rested on “convincing the rest of the world that the West (was) guilty of a double standard on nuclear issues”, commented the New York Times. And in this respect, Bush “might as well have tied a pretty red bow around his India nuclear deal and mailed it as a gift to Tehran”.
The Economist was no less scathing, accusing Bush of favouring a friend rather than sticking to principle. Here he was, insisting in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), that Iran should “not be allowed to bend the anti-nuclear rules out of shape to further what are assumed to be its weapons ambitions”. At the same time, he was without the slightest hint of irony, proposing that India, already in possession of nuclear weapons, be allowed to do just that.
This enormous sense of effrontery, this belief that the world will do as it says rather than as it does, is not a new mood in the U.S. But it is certainly so in India. Consistency in standards of international conduct is a virtue valued only by the weak, who seek their security through agreed rules and norms. The powerful have no use for them, as anybody who has witnessed the U.S. attitude of indulgence and abetment towards Israel’s policy of conquest in West Asia would know. But the strong nevertheless are in need of justifying their double standards. Just as Israel’s unending atrocities on the Palestinians are justified by its divinely ordained title to the land and by the redress owed world Jewry for the suffering inflicted by the Nazi Holocaust, India’s great escape from the prison of the non-proliferation regime, stands in need of a rationalisation. An authoritative if not exhaustive justification, one that fortunately, does not venture into the theological realm, is provided by Ashley Tellis, an Indian born U.S. national who has been on the inside track of national security policy in Washington DC, and now serves on the staff of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.[1]
Tellis derives his first rationale from the principle of neoclassical economics, which holds that a public good can be secured only at a price. In a situation of collective action, the fulfilment of this object may be impeded by the conflicting agendas that motivate diverse agents. Absent the capacity to quash the recalcitrant elements, this would require a special subvention being made to those who have the least incentive in obtaining the public good. India in this reckoning is deserving of a special concession. The other two hold-outs in the context of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) are Israel and Pakistan, both of which merit special consideration in U.S. aid allocations. India is an exception within the “three-nation problem” that confronts the NPT, gaining neither from access to nuclear fuel and technology, nor enjoying any exceptional benefit from U.S. aid.
This argument might have been halfway convincing if it did not conflict quite so flagrantly with the U.S. agenda on Iran. Successive inspections by the IAEA have found that the transgressions of the NPT by Iran, if any, are borderline in nature. Since the agency was granted access to suspect sites in Iran in early-2003, it has found little material evidence of a nuclear weapons program. The quantity of uranium that has been processed is nowhere near the requirement for a nuclear weapon, and the level of uranium enrichment achieved falls short even of what is needed for energy applications. To make the arduous transition from the 1.7 percent enrichment level achieved to the 95 percent required for one – merely one – nuclear bomb, would take Iran many years, even up to a decade.
Several rounds of inspection have been conducted by the IAEA and despite serious reservations about unwarranted intrusions into sovereign sites, cooperation from Iran has not been lacking. But this has not prevented the IAEA from demanding, first in September last year and then again in February, that Iran should go beyond the formal stipulations of the NPT, to adopt “transparency and confidence-building measures” that may be demanded at regular intervals.
Essentially, India is granted a special dispensation to join the global nuclear imperium as a country allowed to possess nuclear weapons, while Iran is required to submit to greater rigours than even the NPT dictates. This particular anomaly needs an explanation that goes beyond neoclassical economic theories, and to his credit, Tellis does make the effort.
Tellis argues that for one thing, by allowing India to join the non-proliferation regime as a state with an internationally recognised right to bear nuclear arms, the U.S. would be giving it an incentive to “scrupulously control its national capabilities”. This in turn would “choke off” the only real security threat emanating from India.
This assessment, which flatters India’s capacities and misrepresents its intentions, needs to be treated with some scepticism. In Tellis’ analysis though, it is only a brief preamble before the crux of the issue is approached. To bring India on board the counter-proliferation regime would be consistent, he argues, with the Bush administration’s “new policy of advancing India’s economic transformation and growth in national power”. Within this paradigm, attention needs to be focused on how India’s “military resources could be used collaboratively (with the U.S.) to advance the national interests of both countries”.
If there has ever been an instance in the annals of geopolitics, of one country seeking as a matter of declared policy, to enhance the power of another, it would be interesting to define the correspondences and divergences with the situation that the U.S. has adopted today in relation to India. In Tellis’ narration, the crucial point of transition came in early-2005, when the U.S. decided after months of deliberation and much secret confabulations, to clear the sale of an advanced fighter aircraft to Pakistan. The expected outburst of indignation from India was met with the assurance that the “hyphenated relationship” was at an end. No longer would the U.S. assess each policy decision towards one of the adversarial neighbours in terms of the other’s perception. Rather, the new game would explicitly recognise India’s pre-eminence in the region. Beyond this formal acknowledgment, the U.S. would take upon itself the mission of helping India achieve the status of a major world power in the 21st century.
Tellis argues that this would involve multiple benefits for the U.S. Among other things, it would ensure that India’s “nuclear weaponry and associated delivery systems would deter against the growing and utterly more capable nuclear forces Beijing is likely to possess by 2025”. And beyond the necessity of setting up a pivot around which the containment of China could be effected, India also would serve to lend a semblance of stability in a volatile neighbourhood. “The problems of regional order”, Tellis argues, “are unified by an overarching theme: the need to cope with state failure in almost every political entity on India’s periphery”.
Taking a broader view, Tellis concedes that the special exceptions made for India were likely to excite the jealousy of other aspiring regional powers. And in putting down these expectations, the U.S. needed to learn that consistency in standards was not a particular virtue. The need argues Tellis, is for a “proliferation of counter proliferation strategies”. Each country merited differential treatment, depending upon its “friendship toward and value to the U.S.”
These prescriptions are salutary in their healthy absence of principle. An India that is just a little excited in its self-awareness as an emerging world power, may well be seduced by this robust amorality. But there is a price to be paid for seeking this privileged position within the new global architecture of power. What that price would be is made amply evident in another product from the Carnegie Endowment. Though it predates Tellis’ work, the volume authored by George Perkovich and four associates from the Carnegie Endowment, was published in India at the same time. Its title, Universal Compliance, A Strategy for Nuclear Security, has the same breathless as Tellis’ work. But without being in any way picky, it could be pointed out that the title itself encapsulates a gigantic incongruity, since there are no formulae for security in the nuclear realm, only for relative degrees of insecurity.
Perkovich and his associates (referred to hereafter by the lead author’s name alone), expect in gross disregard of fact or reality, that the U.S. could credibly lead the new global strategic consensus by bringing into effect the commitment to disarmament that is enjoined on it by the NPT. They deserve the benefit of the doubt if only because their book was written before the NPT Review Conference of 2005, which ended in disastrous failure, primarily because the U.S. refused to countenance a final declaration which reaffirmed the “13 practical steps” towards universal disarmament that had been agreed five years prior. Those commitments, entered into by the Clinton administration at the preceding review conference, were deemed just too much of a sacrifice of national security interests by the cabal of hyper-nationalists surrounding Bush.
The 2005 Review Conference effectively put the faltering momentum of global disarmament in reverse gear. To be fair to him, Perkovich could have been hoping for a better outcome when he suggested that the U.S. should, following this event, “orchestrate a summit” involving all the recognised nuclear weapons states, to “clarify the commitments they will make to advance universal compliance with nuclear non-proliferation norms and rules”. Elsewhere, Perkovich points out that the very word “compliance” suggests an asymmetric distribution of rights and responsibilities, leaving far too much coercive power in the hands of a few and enjoining meek obedience upon the many. Though grounded in substantive features of the global architecture of power today, this attitude he argues, need not be either “ignored or indulged”.
Curiously though, Perkovich then proceeds to do just that: ignore the global sensitivities involved in compelling acquiescence to a U.S. scheme for nuclear non-proliferation. He also ignores a sustained track record of contrary behaviour by the U.S., which has seriously vitiated the climate for nuclear disarmament. Thus, the “13 practical steps” – in themselves a concession made by the nuclear weapons states to the growing impatience of the world community about the tardy progress of disarmament -- included the principle of “irreversibility” in arms reductions, and required that the U.S. and Russia, as the principal offenders in the nuclear realm, should preserve the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and hasten the entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). All three stipulations had been seriously mauled well before the 2005 Review Conference, and in all three cases, the most serious violations had come from the U.S.
To take just the principle of irreversibility, the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) framework, allowed for a verifiable cutback in deployments of missiles by the two powers, though it was silent on the larger question of eliminating the nuclear warheads. Following a prolonged war of attrition by the right wing of the Republican party in the U.S., Bush transformed this process – with all its uncertainties on the dimension of warhead elimination – into a doubly uncertain one, with cuts in both delivery systems and warheads being potentially reversible. At the same time, he has repudiated the ABM Treaty, to accelerate research and development work on a technologically infeasible and financially profligate missile defence system, whose only enduring contribution would be to trigger an arms race in outer space. And he has shown little inclination to retrieve the CTBT from the legislative limbo into which it was cast by the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate in 1999.
All this makes for a rather flimsy moral platform from which to launch an ambitious agenda of “universal compliance”, more so since Perkovich’s blueprint involves an intrusive system of inspections, interdictions and interventions, organised and spearheaded by the U.S. It will involve cutting off access to the nuclear fuel cycle, rigorously inventorying all existing fissile material and placing it under tight custody, diminishing the role of nuclear weapons in national security strategies, and obtaining sanctions for tough action against violators.
With all this, Perkovich disfavours any disarmament initiative on the part of the U.S., arguing that the U.S. nuclear deterrent is an essential safeguard during the transition to a regime of “universal compliance”. He mildly criticises the current thinking in U.S. national security circles, which tilts towards using tactical nuclear weapons to “take out” enemy assets. His reservations on this score are derived not from ethical concerns, but from potential fallibilities of intelligence, as seen in the missile strike against a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, and more catastrophically, in the invasion of Iraq.
Perkovich misses the point, so obvious from a non-U.S. perspective, that the threat of aggression, including through nuclear arms, is the worst form of incentive for reluctant nations to sign on to the non-proliferation regime. And when the aggressive instinct is unbridled, as by all accounts, it has with the Bush administration, then the environment is vitiated irretrievably. When forging a consensus however reluctant, becomes impossible, coercion remains the only recourse.
A few days after the Indian nuclear deal was solemnised, an arms control lobby in the U.S., which had always been deeply sceptical about its merits, put out a brief study seeking to debunk one of the platforms on which it had been constructed – India’s supposedly impeccable record in safeguarding sensitive technologies and meeting non-proliferation norms despite being outside the NPT orbit. Taking the instance of India’s uranium enrichment plant near Mysore, David Albright and Susan Basu, two prominent non-proliferation advocates, sought to paint a picture of clandestine procurement from abroad and consistent evasion of import controls by the DAE.
The account was of course, vigorously challenged in the decidedly DAE-friendly Indian media. But that is not perhaps the most interesting point about these exchanges. Rather, what is arresting is that Albright and Basu, sourcing their findings from a variety of published and unpublished accounts, construct a picture of gross under-performance by the DAE facility. Two decades after it was commenced, the project is far from producing enough enriched uranium to fuel a research reactor of fairly modest dimensions. It remains decades behind, in terms of meeting the Tarapur Atomic Power Station’s requirements and the more exacting needs of India’s nuclear submarine project and strategic arsenal.
Alibis of course could be found if needed, but those are of little concern in this context. What is relevant is that India’s modest achievements two decades into a uranium enrichment program should have provided it with quite a realistic picture of the technical constraints faced by Iran’s nuclear research. There was no reason in other words, why India should have bought into the grossly inflated assessment of the U.S., that Iran was menacingly close to acquiring adequate fissile material to assemble a weapon. That it did so is testimony to the fact that the strategic partnership with the U.S., involves not merely a sacrifice of principle, but a quite arrant disregard for facts.
The first down payment on the deal with the U.S. fell due rather rapidly. Within days of Bush’s Indian sojourn, the IAEA met in Vienna to debate the Iranian nuclear research program. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had, just hours before, spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin, seeking to ensure that the debate remained confined within the IAEA. He also upheld India’s belief that Iran should have access to the full range of nuclear technologies for peaceful purposes.
A last-minute Russian gambit failed, which would have transferred industrial scale uranium enrichment out of Iran, allowing that country only the limited option of laboratory scale experiments. Rudely flouting the assurance of the NPT that every member-state has the right to access nuclear technologies for peaceful purposes, the U.S. has repeatedly announced that Iran cannot be trusted with any stage of the nuclear fuel cycle. The most recent affirmations – from Vice President Dick Cheney and U.N. ambassador John Bolton -- came at the policy conference of the American-Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC), which devoted a substantial part of its three-day annual event to Iran.
Using the same platform, Daniel Gillerman, the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., engaged in a rhetorical flourish that could have been taken straight out of any political bigot’s notebook: “While it may be true -- and probably is -- that not all Muslims are terrorists, it also happens to be true that nearly all terrorists are Muslim”.
India has reason to worry about the company it is getting into. Addressing a carefully chosen audience in the picturesque environs of Delhi’s Purana Qila, Bush announced just before he left, that the U.S. and India are today “closer than ever before”. Indeed, there was no way that the two countries could shirk their common destiny of “leadership in the cause of democracy”. Should India buy into these rather quirky definitions – whether of “terrorism” or “democracy” -- it may well find itself a house divided against itself. And that would be a steep price to pay for the illusory security of nuclear deterrence.
(ENDS)
[1] Ashley J. Tellis, India as a New Global Power, India Research Press, Delhi (under licence from the Carnegie Endowment for International Press, Washington DC), 2005, pp 121.
Sukumar Muralidharan
March 21, 2006
Three days after touching down, U.S. President George Bush left Indian shores, leaving in his wake an aura of general contentment. From deep within his security envelope, Bush had little opportunity to see the seething rage on the Indian street. The constituencies he addressed were the middle and upper strata, anxious to secure a U.S. stamp of approval for India as a partner in global affairs. And for the Indian nuclear establishment and its peers in foreign policy, the agreements forged on the occasion marked the beginning of a new concord. After their unseemly squabbles in the weeks prior, the Bush visit marked a new mutual amity for them, as much as it represented a new beginning between India and the U.S.
India’s Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) had initially resisted the deal that involved a segregation of military and civilian nuclear facilities. For foreign policy ideologues though, complete autonomy in nuclear affairs was not too high a sacrifice for winning U.S. benediction in global councils. Above all, autonomy was not to be confused with autarky, since isolation was no virtue when nuclear fission was potentially a valuable energy source for a rapidly industrialising country and international cooperation, the key to opening these limitless vistas.
If the deal that was finally agreed on day two of the Bush visit, succeeded in calming these quarrels and anxieties, its international repercussions were something else. Stopping in Pakistan on his way back – though not with the same cavalier inattention to local sensibilities that his predecessor Bill Clinton showed in 2000 -- Bush rebuffed any possibility that Pakistan could claim a status akin to that granted India. Two weeks later, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri warned darkly, that the whole Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty would “unravel” since it was “only a matter of time before other countries (began) to act the same way.” Since ministers in Pakistan invariably direct their most pointed barbs at India, it may seem axiomatic that Kasuri was referring to the negative example that India had set in terms of global nuclear non-proliferation norms. On closer reading though, his statement seems to bear equal reference to both the U.S. as the patron of this breakout from the NPT norms, and to India as the client.
Tightly bound up in an alliance with the U.S., Pakistan may not have very much latitude to deliver on this threat. Yet, it is striking that India’s new bonding with the U.S., has evoked deep suspicion in even liberal circles, not known to be traditional bastions of hostility. The Guardian in London, for one, commented editorially, that the nuclear agreement between India and the U.S. was “about breaking rules and expecting others to abide by them”. More picturesquely put, it was about “preaching temperance from the barstool”. Indians may well delight in the bargain they had driven, said the newspaper, but there were likely to be some “thoughtful smiles” in Iran and North Korea as the “wider implications” sank in.
In advance of the Bush visit, the New York Times commented that despite all the accompanying froth, the presidential passage to India was “built around a bad nuclear deal”. With the deal consummated, the “newspaper of record” commented rather acidly, that Bush was turning out to be Iran’s best friend. His adventure in Iraq, launched on flimsy and fabricated evidence, had only succeeded in transforming that country into a satellite of the Islamic Republic next door. And his deal with India sent “exactly the wrong message .. just days before Washington and its European allies” were scheduled to “refer Iran’s case to the United Nations Security Council for further action”. Iran’s hopes of thwarting a global consensus on restraining its nuclear program rested on “convincing the rest of the world that the West (was) guilty of a double standard on nuclear issues”, commented the New York Times. And in this respect, Bush “might as well have tied a pretty red bow around his India nuclear deal and mailed it as a gift to Tehran”.
The Economist was no less scathing, accusing Bush of favouring a friend rather than sticking to principle. Here he was, insisting in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), that Iran should “not be allowed to bend the anti-nuclear rules out of shape to further what are assumed to be its weapons ambitions”. At the same time, he was without the slightest hint of irony, proposing that India, already in possession of nuclear weapons, be allowed to do just that.
This enormous sense of effrontery, this belief that the world will do as it says rather than as it does, is not a new mood in the U.S. But it is certainly so in India. Consistency in standards of international conduct is a virtue valued only by the weak, who seek their security through agreed rules and norms. The powerful have no use for them, as anybody who has witnessed the U.S. attitude of indulgence and abetment towards Israel’s policy of conquest in West Asia would know. But the strong nevertheless are in need of justifying their double standards. Just as Israel’s unending atrocities on the Palestinians are justified by its divinely ordained title to the land and by the redress owed world Jewry for the suffering inflicted by the Nazi Holocaust, India’s great escape from the prison of the non-proliferation regime, stands in need of a rationalisation. An authoritative if not exhaustive justification, one that fortunately, does not venture into the theological realm, is provided by Ashley Tellis, an Indian born U.S. national who has been on the inside track of national security policy in Washington DC, and now serves on the staff of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.[1]
Tellis derives his first rationale from the principle of neoclassical economics, which holds that a public good can be secured only at a price. In a situation of collective action, the fulfilment of this object may be impeded by the conflicting agendas that motivate diverse agents. Absent the capacity to quash the recalcitrant elements, this would require a special subvention being made to those who have the least incentive in obtaining the public good. India in this reckoning is deserving of a special concession. The other two hold-outs in the context of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) are Israel and Pakistan, both of which merit special consideration in U.S. aid allocations. India is an exception within the “three-nation problem” that confronts the NPT, gaining neither from access to nuclear fuel and technology, nor enjoying any exceptional benefit from U.S. aid.
This argument might have been halfway convincing if it did not conflict quite so flagrantly with the U.S. agenda on Iran. Successive inspections by the IAEA have found that the transgressions of the NPT by Iran, if any, are borderline in nature. Since the agency was granted access to suspect sites in Iran in early-2003, it has found little material evidence of a nuclear weapons program. The quantity of uranium that has been processed is nowhere near the requirement for a nuclear weapon, and the level of uranium enrichment achieved falls short even of what is needed for energy applications. To make the arduous transition from the 1.7 percent enrichment level achieved to the 95 percent required for one – merely one – nuclear bomb, would take Iran many years, even up to a decade.
Several rounds of inspection have been conducted by the IAEA and despite serious reservations about unwarranted intrusions into sovereign sites, cooperation from Iran has not been lacking. But this has not prevented the IAEA from demanding, first in September last year and then again in February, that Iran should go beyond the formal stipulations of the NPT, to adopt “transparency and confidence-building measures” that may be demanded at regular intervals.
Essentially, India is granted a special dispensation to join the global nuclear imperium as a country allowed to possess nuclear weapons, while Iran is required to submit to greater rigours than even the NPT dictates. This particular anomaly needs an explanation that goes beyond neoclassical economic theories, and to his credit, Tellis does make the effort.
Tellis argues that for one thing, by allowing India to join the non-proliferation regime as a state with an internationally recognised right to bear nuclear arms, the U.S. would be giving it an incentive to “scrupulously control its national capabilities”. This in turn would “choke off” the only real security threat emanating from India.
This assessment, which flatters India’s capacities and misrepresents its intentions, needs to be treated with some scepticism. In Tellis’ analysis though, it is only a brief preamble before the crux of the issue is approached. To bring India on board the counter-proliferation regime would be consistent, he argues, with the Bush administration’s “new policy of advancing India’s economic transformation and growth in national power”. Within this paradigm, attention needs to be focused on how India’s “military resources could be used collaboratively (with the U.S.) to advance the national interests of both countries”.
If there has ever been an instance in the annals of geopolitics, of one country seeking as a matter of declared policy, to enhance the power of another, it would be interesting to define the correspondences and divergences with the situation that the U.S. has adopted today in relation to India. In Tellis’ narration, the crucial point of transition came in early-2005, when the U.S. decided after months of deliberation and much secret confabulations, to clear the sale of an advanced fighter aircraft to Pakistan. The expected outburst of indignation from India was met with the assurance that the “hyphenated relationship” was at an end. No longer would the U.S. assess each policy decision towards one of the adversarial neighbours in terms of the other’s perception. Rather, the new game would explicitly recognise India’s pre-eminence in the region. Beyond this formal acknowledgment, the U.S. would take upon itself the mission of helping India achieve the status of a major world power in the 21st century.
Tellis argues that this would involve multiple benefits for the U.S. Among other things, it would ensure that India’s “nuclear weaponry and associated delivery systems would deter against the growing and utterly more capable nuclear forces Beijing is likely to possess by 2025”. And beyond the necessity of setting up a pivot around which the containment of China could be effected, India also would serve to lend a semblance of stability in a volatile neighbourhood. “The problems of regional order”, Tellis argues, “are unified by an overarching theme: the need to cope with state failure in almost every political entity on India’s periphery”.
Taking a broader view, Tellis concedes that the special exceptions made for India were likely to excite the jealousy of other aspiring regional powers. And in putting down these expectations, the U.S. needed to learn that consistency in standards was not a particular virtue. The need argues Tellis, is for a “proliferation of counter proliferation strategies”. Each country merited differential treatment, depending upon its “friendship toward and value to the U.S.”
These prescriptions are salutary in their healthy absence of principle. An India that is just a little excited in its self-awareness as an emerging world power, may well be seduced by this robust amorality. But there is a price to be paid for seeking this privileged position within the new global architecture of power. What that price would be is made amply evident in another product from the Carnegie Endowment. Though it predates Tellis’ work, the volume authored by George Perkovich and four associates from the Carnegie Endowment, was published in India at the same time. Its title, Universal Compliance, A Strategy for Nuclear Security, has the same breathless as Tellis’ work. But without being in any way picky, it could be pointed out that the title itself encapsulates a gigantic incongruity, since there are no formulae for security in the nuclear realm, only for relative degrees of insecurity.
Perkovich and his associates (referred to hereafter by the lead author’s name alone), expect in gross disregard of fact or reality, that the U.S. could credibly lead the new global strategic consensus by bringing into effect the commitment to disarmament that is enjoined on it by the NPT. They deserve the benefit of the doubt if only because their book was written before the NPT Review Conference of 2005, which ended in disastrous failure, primarily because the U.S. refused to countenance a final declaration which reaffirmed the “13 practical steps” towards universal disarmament that had been agreed five years prior. Those commitments, entered into by the Clinton administration at the preceding review conference, were deemed just too much of a sacrifice of national security interests by the cabal of hyper-nationalists surrounding Bush.
The 2005 Review Conference effectively put the faltering momentum of global disarmament in reverse gear. To be fair to him, Perkovich could have been hoping for a better outcome when he suggested that the U.S. should, following this event, “orchestrate a summit” involving all the recognised nuclear weapons states, to “clarify the commitments they will make to advance universal compliance with nuclear non-proliferation norms and rules”. Elsewhere, Perkovich points out that the very word “compliance” suggests an asymmetric distribution of rights and responsibilities, leaving far too much coercive power in the hands of a few and enjoining meek obedience upon the many. Though grounded in substantive features of the global architecture of power today, this attitude he argues, need not be either “ignored or indulged”.
Curiously though, Perkovich then proceeds to do just that: ignore the global sensitivities involved in compelling acquiescence to a U.S. scheme for nuclear non-proliferation. He also ignores a sustained track record of contrary behaviour by the U.S., which has seriously vitiated the climate for nuclear disarmament. Thus, the “13 practical steps” – in themselves a concession made by the nuclear weapons states to the growing impatience of the world community about the tardy progress of disarmament -- included the principle of “irreversibility” in arms reductions, and required that the U.S. and Russia, as the principal offenders in the nuclear realm, should preserve the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and hasten the entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). All three stipulations had been seriously mauled well before the 2005 Review Conference, and in all three cases, the most serious violations had come from the U.S.
To take just the principle of irreversibility, the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) framework, allowed for a verifiable cutback in deployments of missiles by the two powers, though it was silent on the larger question of eliminating the nuclear warheads. Following a prolonged war of attrition by the right wing of the Republican party in the U.S., Bush transformed this process – with all its uncertainties on the dimension of warhead elimination – into a doubly uncertain one, with cuts in both delivery systems and warheads being potentially reversible. At the same time, he has repudiated the ABM Treaty, to accelerate research and development work on a technologically infeasible and financially profligate missile defence system, whose only enduring contribution would be to trigger an arms race in outer space. And he has shown little inclination to retrieve the CTBT from the legislative limbo into which it was cast by the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate in 1999.
All this makes for a rather flimsy moral platform from which to launch an ambitious agenda of “universal compliance”, more so since Perkovich’s blueprint involves an intrusive system of inspections, interdictions and interventions, organised and spearheaded by the U.S. It will involve cutting off access to the nuclear fuel cycle, rigorously inventorying all existing fissile material and placing it under tight custody, diminishing the role of nuclear weapons in national security strategies, and obtaining sanctions for tough action against violators.
With all this, Perkovich disfavours any disarmament initiative on the part of the U.S., arguing that the U.S. nuclear deterrent is an essential safeguard during the transition to a regime of “universal compliance”. He mildly criticises the current thinking in U.S. national security circles, which tilts towards using tactical nuclear weapons to “take out” enemy assets. His reservations on this score are derived not from ethical concerns, but from potential fallibilities of intelligence, as seen in the missile strike against a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, and more catastrophically, in the invasion of Iraq.
Perkovich misses the point, so obvious from a non-U.S. perspective, that the threat of aggression, including through nuclear arms, is the worst form of incentive for reluctant nations to sign on to the non-proliferation regime. And when the aggressive instinct is unbridled, as by all accounts, it has with the Bush administration, then the environment is vitiated irretrievably. When forging a consensus however reluctant, becomes impossible, coercion remains the only recourse.
A few days after the Indian nuclear deal was solemnised, an arms control lobby in the U.S., which had always been deeply sceptical about its merits, put out a brief study seeking to debunk one of the platforms on which it had been constructed – India’s supposedly impeccable record in safeguarding sensitive technologies and meeting non-proliferation norms despite being outside the NPT orbit. Taking the instance of India’s uranium enrichment plant near Mysore, David Albright and Susan Basu, two prominent non-proliferation advocates, sought to paint a picture of clandestine procurement from abroad and consistent evasion of import controls by the DAE.
The account was of course, vigorously challenged in the decidedly DAE-friendly Indian media. But that is not perhaps the most interesting point about these exchanges. Rather, what is arresting is that Albright and Basu, sourcing their findings from a variety of published and unpublished accounts, construct a picture of gross under-performance by the DAE facility. Two decades after it was commenced, the project is far from producing enough enriched uranium to fuel a research reactor of fairly modest dimensions. It remains decades behind, in terms of meeting the Tarapur Atomic Power Station’s requirements and the more exacting needs of India’s nuclear submarine project and strategic arsenal.
Alibis of course could be found if needed, but those are of little concern in this context. What is relevant is that India’s modest achievements two decades into a uranium enrichment program should have provided it with quite a realistic picture of the technical constraints faced by Iran’s nuclear research. There was no reason in other words, why India should have bought into the grossly inflated assessment of the U.S., that Iran was menacingly close to acquiring adequate fissile material to assemble a weapon. That it did so is testimony to the fact that the strategic partnership with the U.S., involves not merely a sacrifice of principle, but a quite arrant disregard for facts.
The first down payment on the deal with the U.S. fell due rather rapidly. Within days of Bush’s Indian sojourn, the IAEA met in Vienna to debate the Iranian nuclear research program. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had, just hours before, spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin, seeking to ensure that the debate remained confined within the IAEA. He also upheld India’s belief that Iran should have access to the full range of nuclear technologies for peaceful purposes.
A last-minute Russian gambit failed, which would have transferred industrial scale uranium enrichment out of Iran, allowing that country only the limited option of laboratory scale experiments. Rudely flouting the assurance of the NPT that every member-state has the right to access nuclear technologies for peaceful purposes, the U.S. has repeatedly announced that Iran cannot be trusted with any stage of the nuclear fuel cycle. The most recent affirmations – from Vice President Dick Cheney and U.N. ambassador John Bolton -- came at the policy conference of the American-Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC), which devoted a substantial part of its three-day annual event to Iran.
Using the same platform, Daniel Gillerman, the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., engaged in a rhetorical flourish that could have been taken straight out of any political bigot’s notebook: “While it may be true -- and probably is -- that not all Muslims are terrorists, it also happens to be true that nearly all terrorists are Muslim”.
India has reason to worry about the company it is getting into. Addressing a carefully chosen audience in the picturesque environs of Delhi’s Purana Qila, Bush announced just before he left, that the U.S. and India are today “closer than ever before”. Indeed, there was no way that the two countries could shirk their common destiny of “leadership in the cause of democracy”. Should India buy into these rather quirky definitions – whether of “terrorism” or “democracy” -- it may well find itself a house divided against itself. And that would be a steep price to pay for the illusory security of nuclear deterrence.
(ENDS)
[1] Ashley J. Tellis, India as a New Global Power, India Research Press, Delhi (under licence from the Carnegie Endowment for International Press, Washington DC), 2005, pp 121.
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