With serious issues due to enter a decisive phase of public debate, the political atmosphere in Washington DC was expectant as the summer of 2007 gave way to the first hints of fall. Both the top U.S. military commander and the ambassador in Iraq were scheduled to depose before Congress on the state of the war that President George Bush had launched in defiance of world opinion, over four years before. Popular discontent was running high and Iraq was increasingly being perceived as the most disastrous cause the country had engaged in since Vietnam. With the electoral season due formally to kick off in a matter of months, politicians were manoeuvring to place themselves in the best position to capitalise on the popular mood.
As the politicians sought new power balances that would preserve their relative immunity from public scrutiny, Barnett R Rubin, a respected foreign policy analyst and recognised authority on Afghanistan, flung a metaphorical fire-bomb that threatened to burn away layers of subterfuge and lay bare the sordid devices through which they win popular consent for their most reckless plans. Quoting unnamed sources from within the Bush administration and the intelligence services, Rubin declared on a web-log (blog) of informed foreign policy comment, that U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney had signalled close allies in the media and the think tank circuit, that the week following the Labour Day holiday would be the formal launch of war preparations against Iran.[i]
In making this forecast, Rubin referred back to an article in the New York Times (NYT) of September 7, 2002, which laid out a sequence of manoeuvres, by which the Bush administration expected to “sell” the idea of the invasion of Iraq. The strategy had been “meticulously planned” and Bush’s inner cabal of advisors had determined that they stood the best chance of winning public consent, by waiting till after the Labour Day weekend. The management philosophy for this decision was articulated by Andrew Card, then chief of staff in the White House: “From a marketing point of view,” he was quoted as saying, “you don't introduce new products in August”.[ii]
Despite this level of insight into the “marketing” strategy for war, the NYT proved all too willing to play along with the Bush administration. The very next day, on September 8, 2002, the newspaper carried an article by Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller, in which it reported with breathless ardour, the Bush administration’s finding that Iraq had, “more than a decade after (President) Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction”, “stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and .. embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb”. The report went onto report in graphic detail the allegation that Iraq had “sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes”, which were “intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium”.[iii]
What followed was an epic onslaught of official disinformation. As Frank Rich observed in a recent column in the NYT, the White House that Sunday dispatched “the four horsemen of the apocalypse” headed by Vice President Cheney, with the Secretary of Defence, Secretary of State and National Security Advisor in accompaniment, to the weekend talk shows. Once there, “they eagerly pointed to a front-page New York Times article amplifying subsequently debunked administration claims that Saddam had sought to buy aluminium tubes meant for nuclear weapons”.[iv]
The rest, as they say, is history, all too recent and all too tragic.
Media interest in Iraq falling
On August 20 this year, the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), which by its own lights, is “a research organisation that specialises in using empirical methods to evaluate and study the performance of the press” and resolutely seeks to be “non-partisan, non-ideological and non-political”, published a research report on the news priorities of the U.S. media over the second quarter of 2007. It revealed a media that was trying hard to forget the unending nightmare that the country was going through. Coverage of the war in Iraq, the PEJ found after its survey of 48 news outlets across a range of media – print, broadcast, cable, and online – had fallen in the second quarter of 2007, relative to the first.
The reason was simply that coverage of the domestic political debate on Iraq had faded after the Bush administration was granted Congressional approval for its spending plans. Since winning a majority in the U.S. Congress in November 2006, the Democratic Party had insisted on a firm timetable for the withdrawal of troops as a necessary price for granting Bush his authority to spend on the war. Once that particular threat was defeated by the White House, which expectedly used the well-worn formula of “standing by the troops” as a bludgeon to beat down all dissent, media interest in the war subsided rather dramatically – from 22 percent of total time and space in the news media, Iraq coverage fell to 15 percent.[v]
The finer details of the PEJ analysis are interesting in themselves. Of the total coverage of Iraq in the first quarter of 2007, a little over 55 percent was devoted to the policy debate within the U.S. In the second quarter, this fell to just over 46 percent. Events in Iraq involving U.S. interests, merited close to 31 percent of media coverage in the first, and 43 percent in the second. The Iraq homefront, merited 14 percent of news space in the first quarter, and well under 11 percent in the second. Here too, the main priority was internal politics rather than the lives of ordinary citizens in the country that the U.S. had set out with overweening arrogance, to “liberate” from tyranny.
Perhaps it is perfectly comprehensible why the U.S. media should choose collectively to avert its eyes from the unending tragedy of Iraq. In July 2007, the U.K.-based charity, Oxfam International, released a briefing paper on the humanitarian situation in Iraq, depicting a country plumbing the depths of human misery. In a country of an estimated 25 million people – which had reached levels of welfare in the 1970s and 1980s that were the envy of the neighbourhood -- Oxfam found that no fewer than eight million were in need of emergency assistance. The figure included four million who were “food insecure and in dire need of different types of humanitarian assistance”, more than two million who were internally displaced and an equal number that had fled to neighbouring countries like Syria and Jordan and were living on the margins of subsistence.
Of the Iraqis dependent on food assistance, fewer than 60 percent had access to the government-run public distribution system, down from 96 percent in 2004. Over half the population were without work and some 43 percent of all Iraqis suffered from “absolute poverty”. Drinking water was unavailable in anything like adequate quantities for 70 percent of the population and 80 percent suffered from a complete lack of sanitation. Reconstruction had been blocked as much by endemic of violence, as by corruption and an alarming “brain drain” that had seen virtually every Iraqi with an exit option, exercising it.[vi]
For all the misery that it drew attention to, a state of national despair that the U.S. as an occupying power, necessarily bore responsibility for, the space the U.S. media devoted to the Oxfam report was derisory. NYT ran a brief story on July 31, making cursory mention of Oxfam’s findings. With little obvious relevance to the facts of the case, the NYT then reminded readers that Oxfam had “opposed the 2003 American invasion”. It then subtly sought to discredit the findings on methodological grounds, reporting that Oxfam “presents its statistics as hard facts, without acknowledging the wide margin of error that typically accompanies social research in a war zone”. Further, the aid organisation’s failure to offer any proposals on “how to root out the corruption that has hobbled the Iraqi government and international aid efforts in the past”, was deemed a significant weakness in its report, as too was its failure to “address the links between criminal militias and Iraqi government agencies, like the Ministry of Health”.[vii]
In comparison, the Washington Post carried a relatively non-judgmental report, though tucked away on page 14 of its edition of July 31. And the relatively low priority accorded to the Oxfam findings was underlined by the newspaper’s inattention to the need for an official response. The Iraqi government spokesman, it reported, was “out of the country .. and unavailable to comment on the report”. And a “spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad”, similarly, “could not be reached for comment”.[viii]
Blaming the victims
Clearly, the U.S. media would prefer not to even begin looking at the humanitarian tragedy of Iraq, far less to start assigning responsibility for it. On the rare occasions when the issue of accountability is raised, it is only to blame the victims. Thus, Charles Krauthammer, who was among the most obsessive advocates of the invasion of Iraq wrote in the Washington Post on February 2, 2007, that “Iraqis were given their freedom and yet many have chosen civil war”. It was a situation, he said, in which “you can always count on some to find the blame in America”. But “of all the accounts of the current situation, this (would be) by far the most stupid”. Dusting up his knowledge of recent history for analogies, Krauthammer asked: “Did Britain ‘give’ India the Hindu-Muslim war of 1947-48 that killed a million souls and ethnically cleansed 12 million more? The Jewish-Arab wars in Palestine? The tribal wars of post-colonial Uganda?” To argue thus was to betray a strangely skewed perspective on history and to make “infants” of the Arabs and “demons” of the U.S. Perhaps unaware in the passion of his advocacy that he was doing considerably worse than the adversaries he had targeted and tripping over his own rhetoric, Krauthammer concluded with three simple observations: “Iraq is their country. We midwifed their freedom. They chose civil war”.
Krauthammer’s locutions betray a particularly crass form of neo-colonial illogic and conceit. They speak of the overweening civilisational arrogance of a western imperial power that believes it has a divinely ordained right to march into a Third World country and dismantle its system of governance. The people who have been rudely invaded would then be expected to feel no emotion other than gratitude and to eagerly adopt a model of political organisation that the occupying power would be in a unique position to dictate.
Above all, the neo-conservative element in the U.S., Krauthammer being among its most voluble spokesmen, shows little remorse or repentance over the widely-acknowledged fact that all their prognoses about the war in Iraq have proved disastrously miscued. And in a continuing affront to the intelligence of the average media consumer in the U.S., they continue to enjoy the hospitality of media time and space, to propagate their self-serving verbiage. Much as the neo-conservative element has come in for well-deserved obloquy in recent months, their voice continues to be heard and to be decisive in critical junctures, as evidenced by the U.S. Congress’ recent capitulation on a troop withdrawal schedule. What this suggests clearly, is shared complicity. Despite the space that the war’s more consistent critics – such as NYT columnists Frank Rich and Paul Krugman enjoy – the mainstream media has been unable to thoroughly expose the patent fraud that was perpetrated by neo-conservative ideologues and unreconstructed colonialists. More than being unwilling dupes, they have been accomplices in the process. That clearly is the picture that emerges from most systematic studies of the media in the context of the war in Iraq.
Public misperceptions and the media
A research paper published within a few months of Bush’s “mission accomplished” declaration of May 1, 2003, saw certain “compelling questions” raised by the Iraq war, particularly in relation to the “capacity of the executive branch (or the U.S. federal government) to elicit public consent for the use of military force and about the role media plays in this process”.[ix]
This research paper was based upon the results of an extended series of surveys conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes and Knowledge Networks (hereafter PIPA/KN). Between January and September 2003, these two organisations in concert, carried out “seven different polls that dealt with the conflict in Iraq”. It found that “in the run-up to the war …. (and) in the post war period, a significant portion of the American public had held a number of misperceptions that have played a key role in generating and maintaining approval for the decision to go to war”.[x] Among these:
Ø That Iraq was directly involved in the September 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. territory and that evidence of links between Iraq and Osama bin-Laden’s Islamist group al-Qaeda had been found;
Ø That weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq after the invasion and that Iraq actually used weapons of mass destruction during the war; and,
Ø That world opinion was overwhelmingly in approval of the U.S. going to war in Iraq.
It was also found that while “in most cases, only a minority (had) any particular misperception, a large majority (had) at least one misperception.
These misperceptions in turn, showed a significant correlation – individually and collectively -- with support for the war, prior to the actual invasion. Of the sample surveyed, 30 percent suffered none of these misperceptions, while 32 percent had just one and no more, 20 percent had two and just 8 percent had all three. Going up this continuum of public misinformation: in the first category, support for the war was confined to a mere 23 percent, while 53 percent of the people with one misperception, 78 percent of those with two and 86 percent of those with all three, supported the war.
There were significant positive correlations between the incidence of these misperceptions and several other parameters, such as faith in the integrity of the person in the White House, belief in the values espoused by his party, and education levels. But for present purposes, what is most important is to understand how these misperceptions were related within the sample population, with primary news sources. Here again, the results are striking and need extensive quotation: “The extent of (U.S. citizens’) misperceptions vary significantly depending on their source of news. Those who receive most of their news from Fox News are more likely than average to have misperceptions. Those who receive most of their news from NPR or PBS (respectively the National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service) are less likely to have misperceptions. These variations cannot simply be explained as a result of differences in the demographic characteristics of each audience, because these variations can also be found when comparing the demographic subgroups of each audience”. (Words in parentheses added for clarity).
Within the total sample, 80 percent of those who identified the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News as their primary news source, had one or more misperception. The corresponding figures for other news sources are as follows:
Ø CBS 71 percent
Ø ABC 61 percent
Ø NBC 55 percent
Ø CNN 55 percent
Ø Print media 47 percent
Ø PBS/NPR 23 percent
These levels of misperception are not on account of inattention to detail in news coverage. As the PIPA/KN poll found: “While it would seem that misperceptions are derived from a failure to pay attention to the news, overall, those who pay greater attention to the news are no less likely to have misperceptions. Among those who primarily watch Fox, those who pay more attention are more likely to have misperceptions. Only those who mostly get their news from print media, and to some extent those who primarily watch CNN, have fewer misperceptions as they pay more attention”.
Summarising the findings of the study and delineating its political implications, Kull and his co-authors conclude as follows: “From the perspective of democratic process, the findings of this study are cause for concern. They suggest that if the public is opposed to taking military action without U.N. approval and the President is determined to do so, he has remarkable capacities to move the public to support his decision. This in itself is not worrisome – to the degree it is the product of persuasion, based on the merits of an argument. What is worrisome is that it appears that the President has the capacity to lead members of the public to assume false beliefs in support of his position”.
The further inferences drawn from here are also powerful cause for concern for those concerned with the integrity of the media as a public institution. “It also appears that the media cannot necessarily be counted on to play the critical role of doggedly challenging the administration”, the study points out: “The fact that viewers of some media outlets had far lower levels of misperception than did others (even when controlling for political attitudes) suggests that not all were making the maximal effort to counter the potential for misperception.[xi]
Evidently, Fox News was ideologically committed to the President’s program and also believed the invasion of Iraq justified, irrespective of the stated rationale. This made them completely inattentive to the abundance of evidence that had surfaced about the flawed case for war, and the quite deliberate effort by the Bush administration to inflate the threat from Iraq in order to justify its bellicosity. What Fox News felt at liberty to completely ignore, CNN and the other networks may have felt obliged to at least cover in a cursory manner, in accordance with a certain residual commitment to a doctrine of “fairness” in media coverage. This might have engendered some reservations in the audiences of these channels about the rush to war, especially among those who paid greater attention to news bulletins.
Similarly, as Michael Massing has pointed out in a surpassingly clear and uncompromising analysis of media failures in the lead-up to the war in Iraq, unequivocal signals were not lacking, that the case for the invasion of Iraq was rife with misrepresentations and outright concoctions.[xii] The media just failed to take these signals, to give them the public prominence they deserved, and to knit together diverse pieces of information into the compelling master-narrative of an administration intent on going to war for reasons it was unwilling to reveal. The sceptical notes did however, come through some of the cracks and crevices in the print media and the news channels. The attentive viewer of Fox News was rewarded for his pains with a greater burden of misperceptions. But as would be expected by anybody who has been told – as most have – that paying attention is the way to gain knowledge, other channels and the print media did reward the attentive audience with a relatively more authentic appreciation of reality.
The results of the PIPA/KN study also prompt a number of other questions. For instance, does the media choose its audience or does the audience choose its media? Is Fox News impelled to give its own pro-war skew to the facts because its audience tended to view the invasion of Iraq as necessary and inevitable? Or did the audience develop its fervour for the war as a consequence of watching the feverishly hyperbolic coverage that Fox News never failed to provide? Alternately, is the reality -- as in much else that has to do with the real world -- one of mutual reinforcement between the two? The channel chooses its audience just as the audience chooses its channel. And they reinforce the worst insecurities and political perversities of each other.
Downing Street Memorandum and after
Subsequent events showed how the media was failing to hold up the political leadership in the U.S. to any standard of morality and integrity, despite growing signs of public disquiet. On May 1, 2005, The Times of London published the entire transcript of a secret memorandum written by a top political aide of U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, dating from several months before the war in Iraq began. Referring to the impressions gathered during a visit to Washington by the chief of U.K. intelligence, codenamed “C”, the memorandum informed the ministers handling the top national security portfolios in the British government, that “there had been a perceptible shift in attitude” in the U.S. “Military action” against Iraq “was now seen as inevitable”.
Bush was intent on deposing the Iraqi president and stamping out his regime through military action, which would be justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD (weapons of mass destruction)”. And the British official’s professional assessment was that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”. The U.S. evidently had no patience with going through the United Nations or in making an elaborate case on the “Iraqi regime’s record” to win broad-based international approval. Yet with all the enthusiasm for unilateral military action, the memo warned, “there was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after (sic) military action”.[xiii]
The preamble to the intelligence chief’s briefing clearly suggested that the U.S. was in utter self-delusion, walking into a military quagmire. The main priority of the participants at the meeting though, was not to warn an ally to steer clear of a potentially suicidal course, or to distance themselves from its baneful consequences, but to work out a program for participating in what already seemed a likely military disaster. As the Defence Secretary remarked, “it seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided”. The case against Iraq though, was “thin”: “(Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran”. The optimal course for the U.K. then, seemed to “work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the U.N. weapons inspectors”. That might in the reading of the Defence Secretary, “help with the legal justification for the use of force”.
The Attorney-General though was unconvinced that “the desire for regime change” was a “legal base for military action”. Self-defence and a humanitarian crisis could potentially be grounds for intervention, but neither applied in the case at hand. A third option would of course be the authorisation of the U.N. Security Council. But the mandate of the Security Council, which had last considered Iraqi disarmament three years before, could not be taken for granted.
The deliberations over, the participants were assigned specific tasks. The Chief of Defence Staff was required to send the Prime Minister “full details of the proposed military campaign” by the end of the week. The Foreign Secretary in turn, would “discreetly work up the ultimatum to Saddam”. And the legal issues being in themselves deeply troublesome, the Attorney General would initiate discussions with advisers in the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence.[xiv]
As The Nation of New York put it shortly after the Downing Street memorandum (or DSM) surfaced, it was not exactly a news flash that Bush and Blair had flagrantly lied in making the case for war in Iraq.[xv] But the DSM was conclusive proof that the course was set as early as March 2002, well before either leader began speaking in public about war as a possibility. And far from being a contingent outcome of weapons inspections, the path to war was deliberate and premeditated. Every seeming concession to the spirit of multilateral consensus was little else than a pretence – indeed, for those who retained even a fraction of their critical faculties, a lurid exercise in falsehood.
Yet for all the potential it embodied for renewed public scrutiny of the case for war, the DSM sank into a mire of media indifference. Around mid-May, 2005, the economist and columnist Paul Krugman commented that there had “been notably little U.S. coverage” of the DSM.[xvi] In a posting on the web on May 24, the Public Editor of The New York Times, whose function is to attend to the readers’ interests, responded to a torrent of complaints about the newspaper’s rather casual attitude to the DSM. And he put on record the following observation: “The (New York) Times's coverage of the once-secret memo started alertly with a May 2 article .. that laid out its contents in the context of the possible impact on the May 5 British election. But the news coverage languished until this morning when a Times article from Washington focused on the reaction to the memo there. This has left Times readers pretty much in the dark until today -- and left critics of the paper's news columns to suspect the worst about its motives.”
The Public Editor found no grounds to suspect that news content in the NYT was suffering from any form of censorship. But his final judgment was evidently that the newspaper had failed to perform its role of contributing towards an informed public discourse: “even if the editors decided it was old news that Mr. Bush had decided in July 2002 to attack Iraq or that the (DSM) didn't provide solid evidence that the administration was manipulating intelligence, I think Times readers deserved to know that earlier...”[xvii]
On May 17, two weeks after the DSM became public, the Christian Science Monitor was speculating on the reasons why the story had been a “dud” in the U.S. Audience indifference was obviously not to blame. As it observed, the ombudsman of the Washington Post, who serves as a watchdog over ethical standards, had admitted to being “inundated” with write-in campaigns on the subject. And he was “amazed” that the leading newspaper in the U.S. capital had taken “almost two weeks to follow up” on the story.[xviii]
As June 2005 wore on, the media began to take note of an undeniable shift in public mood. The Washington Post reported the results of an opinion survey early in the month: “Americans continue to rank Iraq second only to the economy in importance (and) many of them are losing patience with the enterprise”. A clear majority of those interviewed thought the war in Iraq had made no contribution to the “long-term security” of the U.S. -- in the estimation of the newspaper, the first recorded instance of a majority of citizens disagreeing with the “central notion Bush (had) offered to build support for war”. All this, combined with popular worries about the economy and social security, made for a significant drop in Bush’s overall rating: 52 per cent of the respondents to the survey actually disapproved of his handling of the U.S. presidency.[xix]
Around the same time, The Economist was reporting that “one-third of Americans (in a poll by the Pew Research Centre) and almost half (in one for ABC) say Iraq will turn out to be another Vietnam”.[xx] People in the U.S. and the U.K. had waited long enough for the flower-strewn parade and the triumphal march of the victorious “allies” that in pre-war prognoses, was represented as the rosy culmination of the invasion of Iraq. They had endured the handover of sovereignty to Iraq, the conclusion of elections in that country, and the installation of its first supposedly democratic government. Activist groups that had opposed the war, were speaking out in public about the infinitely greater suffering that the Iraqi people were suffering as price for the vainglorious ambitions of long defunct colonial powers.
Growing public disquiet called forth a new propaganda effort by Bush, beginning with a sequence of weekly radio addresses. But as he prepared for a climactic speech in the cycle, to rally the flagging spirits of a war-weary nation, an opinion poll was reporting that for the first time, a majority of citizens believed that he had “deliberately misled” the country in making the case for invading Iraq.[xxi] Once the speech was made at the military base at Fort Bragg to a strangely subdued gathering of service personnel,[xxii] a survey of the public found that it had imparted little “bounce” to Bush’s approval ratings. Indeed, the Zogby International poll seemed to suggest that much of the public was inclined to the view that Bush’s time was up: “more than two-in-five (42 per cent) voters say that, if it is found that President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should hold him accountable through impeachment.”[xxiii]
Perhaps the best assessment of Bush’s speech came from Daniel Ellsberg, the former U.S. Defence Department official whose act of moral conscience in leaking the so-called “Pentagon Papers” to the public in 1971, turned the mood in the U.S. decisively against the Vietnam war. Hearing Bush’s words , said Ellsberg, stirred in him a “sense of familiarity, but not nostalgia”. He had heard all the themes before, “almost word for word” in speeches delivered by the three presidents he had worked with: Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. Indeed, he had perhaps drafted an identical speech four decades prior, with like purpose: “how to rationalise and motivate continued public support for a hopelessly stalemated, unnecessary war our president had lied us into”.[xxiv]
Postscript
Within hours of the Labour Day weekend, Fox News devoted two prime time slots to all-out warmongering propaganda, calling for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Norman Podhoretz, one of the gurus of the neo-conservative cabal, had a book out, provocatively titled “World War IV: The long struggle against Islamofascism”, which made the case for unrelenting warfare by the U.S. against a range of enemies, beginning of course with Iran. And Michael Ledeen, a shadowy political operative suspected to have been a key player in the forged documents purporting, in the months before the war, to show an Iraqi intent to import uranium from Niger, had a book out which said all that was needed in its title: “The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots’ Quest for Destruction”.[xxv] The neo-conservative cabal was responding with expected fervour and alacrity to the signal from its acknowledged leader, Dick Cheney. And sections of the media were again beginning that dangerous lockstep march into war, as the propaganda arm of the most dangerous elements in U.S. politics. All that remained to be seen was whether other sections of the media, known for at least a semblance of sanity and rationality, would blow the whistle at the alarming new buildup of belligerence, or, as in 2003, meekly play along.
[i] Rubin is a highly respected foreign affairs commentator with a special expertise on Afghanistan. His revelations were posted on the “Informed Comment Global Affairs” blog and they are available at this writing on: http://icga.blogspot.com/2007/08/post-labor-day-product-rollout-war-with.html.
The first Monday of September is by national custom, observed as Labour Day in the U.S. It also marks at the popular level, the cusp between summer and fall, though the autumn solstice is typically three weeks later.
[ii] Elisabeth Bumiller, “THE STRATEGY; Bush Aides Set Strategy to Sell Policy on Iraq”, The New York Times, September 7, 2002; available at this writing at: http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F30D17F63B5A0C748CDDA00894DA404482.
[iii] Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller, “U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts”, New York Times, September 8, 2002.
[iv] Frank Rich, “As the Iraqis Stand Down, We’ll Stand Up”, The New York Times, September 9, 2007, available at this writing at: http://select.nytimes.com/2007/09/09/opinion/09rich.html.
[v] Project for Excellence in Journalism, “Iraq War Coverage Drops Off in 2nd Quarter”, http://www.journalism.org/node/7071.
[vi] Oxfam International, Briefing Paper number 105, “Rising to the Humanitarian Challenge in Iraq”, July 2007, available at this writing at: http://www.oxfam.org/en/policy/briefingpapers/bp105_humanitarian_challenge_in_iraq_0707.
[vii] Damien Cave, “Aid Organization Says Iraqis and Foreign Donors Must Ease a Growing Humanitarian Crisis”, The New York Times, July 31, 2007.
[viii] Megan Greenwell, “A dismal picture of life in Iraq”, Washington Post, July 31, 2007, page A 14.
[ix] Steven Kull, et al, “Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War”, Political Science Quarterly, Winter 2003-04, Volume 118, Number 4, pp 569 to 598 (the words in the parenthesis have been added for clarity).
[x] PIPA/KN, “Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War”, October 2, 2003, available at this writing at: http://americanassembler.com/issues/media/docs/Media_10_02_03_Report.pdf.
[xi] Kull, et al, pp 596-7 (emphasis added).
[xii] Michael Massing, “Now They Tell Us”, The New York Review of Books, February 26, 2004.
[xiii] The text of the memorandum was extracted from www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-523-1593607-523,00.html with emphases added in both places. The accompanying story in The Times dated May 1, 2005, sets out the explanation of the memo’s significance and places it in context, with a comprehensive identification of all its dramatis personae. The Guardian and The Independent of May 1 also provided extensive coverage of the memo and its significance, though priority in breaking the story went to The Times.
[xiv] It needs to be added parenthetically, that the Attorney General first submitted the opinion that the war in Iraq would be illegal. This advice, proffered on March 7, 2003 – less than two weeks before the war began – cited three grounds for this finding: that Security Council resolution 1441 setting down conditions for the resumption of arms inspections in Iraq, provided no trigger for war independent of further deliberations in the world body; that a duly authorised body for weapons inspections was in place; and weapons inspections were underway. Ten days later, on the eve of the war, Britain’s top law officer changed his views, cerifying in Blair’s words, that the war would “unequivocally” meet the tests of legality. How this spectacular conversion was achieved was never made clear. See the column by Simon Jenkins in The Times “Does it matter if the Iraq war was legal?”, April 25, 2005, extracted from: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,6-1584733,00.html
[xv] Steve Cobble, “After Downing Street”, posted online on June 6, 2005, and extracted from www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050620&s=cobble.
[xvi] “Staying What Course?”, The New York Times, May 16, 2005.
[xvii] Extracted from The New York Times, public editor’s web journal, at: http://forums.nytimes.com/top/opinion/readersopinions/forums/thepubliceditor/publiceditorswebjournal/index.html. “The Times” refers here, of course, to the shorthand description The New York Times
[xviii] Available at www.csmonitor.com/2005/0517/dailyUpdate.html
[xix] “Poll Finds Dimmer View of Iraq War”, The Washington Post, June 8, 2005, page A01.
[xx] “That not-winning feeling”, Editorial, The Economist, June 16, 2005.
[xxi] “Survey Finds Most Support Staying in Iraq”, The Washington Post, June 28, 2005, page A01. Characteristically, the headline conveyed the single respect in which the mood of the public had not diverged from the political posture of the Bush administration. And perhaps in a slight anomaly in relation to the survey conducted three weeks prior, 52 per cent of those sampled in this survey seemed to think that the war had contributed to U.S. national security. But independent of perspective, the point at which the survey results broke fresh ground was in reporting that a significant 52 per cent of the respondents believed that “the administration deliberately misled the public before the war”.
[xxii] It was perhaps a sign of the times that the contrast with earlier speeches that Bush had delivered to U.S. military personnel, when the audience response had been little short of exuberantly jingoistic, was much remarked upon. See “Troops’ Silence at Fort Bragg Starts a Debate all its Own”, The New York Times, June 30, 2005. Questions reached a sufficient pitch for the president’s official spokesperson to clarify that the audience had been under instruction to remain quiet, since the occasion was deemed to be a solemn one at which significant matters of policy were being laid out by their commander-in-chief.
[xxiii] The results of the survey were posted on the web at: http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1007. They have since been archived but should be available at the Zogby International website.
[xxiv] Daniel Ellsberg, “I Wrote Bush’s War Words – in 1965”, The Los Angeles Times, July 3, 2005, available at this writing at http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/latimes000A.html.
[xxv] For brief reviews of these two books, see “Enemies List”, The New York Times, September 9, 2007. For the background to Ledeen’s possible involvement in the Niger-uranium forgeries, see this author’s “American Exceptionalism and the Multilateral Pretence: Or, John Bolton and the New Lawlessness”, Economic and Political Weekly, May 7, 2005, especially page 1944.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Broadcast bill: once more into the limbo
The fleeting public reappearance of the Broadcast Services Regulation Bill (BSRB) and its subsequent relegation to a legislative limbo, is consistent with the Central Government’s record of continually failing the test of creatively managing the airwaves as a public resource.
In comparison to its immediate predecessor -- the 2006 bill with an identical name -- the 2007 visitation of the BSRB shows some inclination to accommodate reservations about the Government’s obduracy in holding on to its formal powers of control. A concession to autonomy has been made in the 2007 draft by ceding the power of appointing the broadcast regulatory authority to a supposedly non-partisan committee comprising the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha, the Speaker of the Lok Sabha and the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha.
The delicate political balance within this collegium though, is perhaps upset by the norm that a quorum of two would be sufficient to effect all appointments if the last named post is vacant. And if the committee fails to arrive at a consensus within thirty days of the Central Government putting up its nominations, the matter would go to the President of India for a decision.
Inevitably, initiatives in broadcast regulation will be assessed against the background of various proposals tabled since the mid-1990s. The norms on appointment of a broadcast regulator at once bring to mind the provisions governing the choice of the board of the public broadcast trust, Prasar Bharati. Precisely such a non-partisan framework of decision-making was enshrined in the Prasar Bharati Act, notified in 1997. But in practice, the process has degenerated into blatant political and bureaucratic cronyism.
In consequence, Prasar Bharati, which was already floundering in the face of the challenge from the new generation of cable and satellite broadcasters, has now been quite decisively banished to the distant margins of the broadcast sector.
That apart, the Government succeeds, in the following clauses of the BSRB, in clawing back much of the power yielded to an autonomous regulator. For instance, the broadcast regulator would be obliged to choose its “secretary”, who would be its chief executive officer, from a panel of names that would be put before it by the Central Government. The qualifications specified for this post clearly suggest that the nominees would be drawn from the bureaucracy. And the same process would be followed by the authority in its appointment of chief executives to the various regional regulatory bodies envisaged under the BSRB.
Any residual suggestion of autonomy is extinguished by the provision that the broadcast regulator would have to adhere to “policy guidelines” issued by the Central Government in the performance of its tasks, which would include the registration of broadcasters, allocation of frequencies, and the governance of content. The identification of public service broadcasters whose signals would by law, have to be carried by all cable networks, was within the province of the regulator under the 2006 bill. The current version brings it under the jurisdiction of the Central Government, despite an entire chapter being added on the powers of a putative “public service broadcasting council”.
These apart, the BSRB 2007 reserves a large area of discretionary authority for the Central Government to intervene in broadcast content on grounds of “external threat or war involving India” or other “exceptional circumstances”. These eventualities, which are already inscribed into article 19 of the Constitution, could include public order, friendly relations with a foreign country, or internal security.
Where the functioning of the media is concerned, these constitutional restrictions have never, except during the Emergency regime, been used to justify prior restraint of the right to free speech. The BSRB formally introduces the possibility of prior restraint into the debate on free speech. This in turn, could well mean a significant abridgment in the public right to information, since free speech and the right to know, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, are closely intertwined principles.
While invoking the 1995 Supreme Court judgment on the airwaves being a public resource, the BSRB 2007 seeks little else than to extend the bureaucracy and vest it with formal powers that have long ceased to have any constructive purpose. The powers of search and seizure though, stand undiluted in relation to the 2006 draft. Whatever its ultimate fate, the BSRB 2007 perhaps, suggests nothing so much as bureaucracy’s ingrained resistance to change and its talent for confusing the public interest with the perpetuation of its own powers.
In comparison to its immediate predecessor -- the 2006 bill with an identical name -- the 2007 visitation of the BSRB shows some inclination to accommodate reservations about the Government’s obduracy in holding on to its formal powers of control. A concession to autonomy has been made in the 2007 draft by ceding the power of appointing the broadcast regulatory authority to a supposedly non-partisan committee comprising the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha, the Speaker of the Lok Sabha and the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha.
The delicate political balance within this collegium though, is perhaps upset by the norm that a quorum of two would be sufficient to effect all appointments if the last named post is vacant. And if the committee fails to arrive at a consensus within thirty days of the Central Government putting up its nominations, the matter would go to the President of India for a decision.
Inevitably, initiatives in broadcast regulation will be assessed against the background of various proposals tabled since the mid-1990s. The norms on appointment of a broadcast regulator at once bring to mind the provisions governing the choice of the board of the public broadcast trust, Prasar Bharati. Precisely such a non-partisan framework of decision-making was enshrined in the Prasar Bharati Act, notified in 1997. But in practice, the process has degenerated into blatant political and bureaucratic cronyism.
In consequence, Prasar Bharati, which was already floundering in the face of the challenge from the new generation of cable and satellite broadcasters, has now been quite decisively banished to the distant margins of the broadcast sector.
That apart, the Government succeeds, in the following clauses of the BSRB, in clawing back much of the power yielded to an autonomous regulator. For instance, the broadcast regulator would be obliged to choose its “secretary”, who would be its chief executive officer, from a panel of names that would be put before it by the Central Government. The qualifications specified for this post clearly suggest that the nominees would be drawn from the bureaucracy. And the same process would be followed by the authority in its appointment of chief executives to the various regional regulatory bodies envisaged under the BSRB.
Any residual suggestion of autonomy is extinguished by the provision that the broadcast regulator would have to adhere to “policy guidelines” issued by the Central Government in the performance of its tasks, which would include the registration of broadcasters, allocation of frequencies, and the governance of content. The identification of public service broadcasters whose signals would by law, have to be carried by all cable networks, was within the province of the regulator under the 2006 bill. The current version brings it under the jurisdiction of the Central Government, despite an entire chapter being added on the powers of a putative “public service broadcasting council”.
These apart, the BSRB 2007 reserves a large area of discretionary authority for the Central Government to intervene in broadcast content on grounds of “external threat or war involving India” or other “exceptional circumstances”. These eventualities, which are already inscribed into article 19 of the Constitution, could include public order, friendly relations with a foreign country, or internal security.
Where the functioning of the media is concerned, these constitutional restrictions have never, except during the Emergency regime, been used to justify prior restraint of the right to free speech. The BSRB formally introduces the possibility of prior restraint into the debate on free speech. This in turn, could well mean a significant abridgment in the public right to information, since free speech and the right to know, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, are closely intertwined principles.
While invoking the 1995 Supreme Court judgment on the airwaves being a public resource, the BSRB 2007 seeks little else than to extend the bureaucracy and vest it with formal powers that have long ceased to have any constructive purpose. The powers of search and seizure though, stand undiluted in relation to the 2006 draft. Whatever its ultimate fate, the BSRB 2007 perhaps, suggests nothing so much as bureaucracy’s ingrained resistance to change and its talent for confusing the public interest with the perpetuation of its own powers.
Broadcast regulation: Narrow consultations, indifferent results
Broadcast regulation, for all its importance from a public interest standpoint, today seems reduced to an elaborate game of feint and manoeuvre between the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and the country’s bigger media houses. Played out every so often in public view, there is yet no accounting for the specific intervals at which the two principals choose to enact their practised routine, except perhaps the Ministry’s reading of when it is in need of some media attention.
In its two most recent visitations, the drama has played itself out with remarkable similarity. A bill is introduced and opened up for public comments; it is greeted with a torrent of adverse comment by the country’s main media houses; the Ministry concedes the need for further consultation and organises a few such events, marked more by the exertion of lung-power than reason. Finally, the Ministry, in acknowledgment of the strong sentiments of the media industry, accepts the need for further deliberations and defers the introduction of the bill in Parliament a little longer.
In its phrasing, the new version of the Broadcast Services Regulation Bill (BSRB) differs in a few minor matters of detail from its immediate predecessor. In spirit though, it partakes of the same inspiration, making no more than a pretence of letting zealously guarded governmental powers go. That these powers are now a pale shadow of what they once were, is seemingly of no consequence. The erosion of the governmental monopoly over the airwaves has not yet engendered a constructive spirit of engagement with the potential rewards of open access to the airwaves.
The BSRB in its most recent avatar was introduced for public discussion on July 21, with the stipulation that all comments be submitted within two weeks. Even by the standards of a bureaucracy that has reduced public consultations to an empty ritual, this was rather cavalier. In the days that followed, the Minister for Information and Broadcasting, Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi, seemed to retreat from his earlier expressed intent to introduce the bill in the monsoon session of Parliament.
The reasons for the minister’s reticence can only be guessed at. But it was almost certainly a powerful consideration that industry associations and the big media houses had uniformly, reacted adversely to the draft bill. And thus, after one more round of public consultations, confined to representatives of the broadcast industry and a few other bodies that the Ministry chose to identify as “stakeholders”, the fourth attempt at broadcast regulation in a decade passed into history. Like its predecessors, it had fallen victim to the hostility of the broadcast industry and the failure of the Ministry to go beyond a narrow circle in assessing the larger public stakes in broadcast regulation.
This most recent attempt at introducing a broadcast law has shown more clearly than ever before, that the Government is unlikely to get very far if it continues to use the approval of big players in the broadcast industry as the touchstone for assessing the worth of any proposed legislation. But while the government dithers, facts on the ground are being created that make the job of regulation increasingly difficult. Cross-media ownership was once non-existent in India. Today, giant companies with entrenched interests in print, radio and television are increasingly dominating the media scene and exercising a virtual veto over any proposed legislation.
The consequence is that, 12 years after a historic judgment by the Supreme Court, which laid down the principle of public ownership over the broadcast spectrum, the Government continues to be in default on the task it was specifically enjoined to undertake: the creation of a public authority that would oversee the allocation of the spectrum for optimal public benefit.
Civil society groups, anxious to see the principle of public ownership operationalised, have focused on the many serious lacunae in the process of drafting and introducing broadcast legislation. Invariably, there has been little public consultation. Committees are formed in accordance with opaque criteria and these committees, in turn, function without any serious effort at eliciting a broad range of opinion. They finally arrive at legislative drafts that are an uneasy compromise between the government’s reluctance to let go of its controlling urge, and the broadcast industry’s aversion to accepting any form of oversight.
Yet, with every successive cycle through which this game is played out, the Government’s hand steadily weakens. Its monopoly over the airwaves has long since been breached by technological changes. And its voice, once a decisive influence in the policy debate, is steadily being diminished by the growing clout of the broadcast industry and its ability to tap the resources of the print media, to further its cause.
Though the Ministry has been insistent that it has factored in the perceptions of media consumers in producing its draft bill, there has yet been no credible account of how these consumer groups are identified. Other civil society groups have perhaps by design, been a marginal presence in the discussions so far. They have, moreover, been reluctant to join the debate on terms determined by the Government and the broadcast industry.
These aspects of the process that has been followed by the Ministry are reflected in the text of the BSRB, in its latest draft. At no point does the bill make the slightest concession to public as opposed to political control of the broadcast spectrum. The process that it conceives of for the appointment of a Broadcast Regulatory Authority of India (BRAI) is entirely political and involves little consultation with the public on a broader scale. The powers of the BRAI moreover, are not derived from the public in accordance with the mandate of the Supreme Court’s 1995 judgment, but delegated from the Government.
Discussions organised by advocacy groups around the most recent draft of the broadcast bill have thrown up a significant issue of process. The 1995 airwaves judgment gives the Government contingent rights of custodianship over the airwaves, but no enduring powers to determine how they should be utilised. Broadcast regulation, certain civil society groups have argued, should in this sense, begin with the constitution of a broad-based forum that would represent the public in the most comprehensive possible manner. The institutional forms and procedures of broadcast regulation should then be worked out by this body, rather than be assigned to it by the Government.
Media houses have for obvious reasons focused on the powers of search and seizure that the BSRB confers, as an area of serious concern. This apart, the bill identifies certain contingencies, such as an “external threat”, “public order” and more mysteriously, “friendly relations with foreign countries”, as occasions when the Government would feel entitled to abridge the content of broadcasts, or even proscribe certain categories of broadcast. This amounts to little less than the introduction of a doctrine of prior restraint into the jurisprudence on the media and the right to free speech. It is a legislative provision with farreaching consequences, which obviously deserves more than the cursory attention it has attracted so far.
Among the grounds on which the BRAI could stop certain categories of broadcasts, is a failure to abide by the so-called Self-Regulation Guidelines for the Broadcasting Sector, that have been introduced as a corollary to the new draft of the BSRB. These “guidelines”, otherwise known as the “content code”, are partly about relieving the judiciary and the Government of some of the burden of administering post facto remedies and sanctions. Broadcast service providers will be expected to set up in-house content auditors to ensure that all broadcasts are in conformity with agreed norms. Complaints from the public if any, would first be dealt with through this in-house mechanism.
If redress is unavailable at this level, the complainant would be entitled to take his grievance to the next tier in the hierarchy, which would be the industry body. All apex associations in the industry – such as the News Broadcasters’ Association, the Indian Broadcasting Federation, the Community Radio Forum, the Cable Operators’ Forum of India and the Advertising Standards Council of India – would be expected to set up “complaints commissions” to address these public grievances.
Beyond this, the BRAI comes into the picture and then the higher judiciary. Though this regulatory mechanism does not supercede the judicial process, it is expected to relieve some of the stresses that the courts endure when called upon to adjudicate on matters of media practice.
The utility of this very intrusive charter, which goes by the name of “self-regulation”, should be weighed against the possible impact that a minimal number of sound judicial precedents would have. A set of clear and transparent judicial rulings could conceivably be of far greater significance in this respect, than a policy that seeks to internalise within every media house, certain restraints on free speech.
Viewed from this perspective, there is ultimately no alternative to establishing the juridical foundations of free speech and media practice. Anything less would mean undue concessions to a doctrine of prior restraint. In this respect, there have been proposals mooted by professional bodies, to widen the ambit of the Press Council of India, to enable it to deal with the broadcast media and to tighten up its procedures so that its findings are minimally binding on the industry.
Yet the Government in addressing the mission of broadcast regulation, seems to adopt the reverse perspective: that post facto remedies are impossible or useless, and that prior restraint is the only feasible recourse. In seeking to justify the strict application of the “content code” to the media for instance, the Ministry argues that “damage or injustice resulting from news and current affairs contents of television cannot be undone post facto”.
This must seem a rather curious plea in an age of proliferating media channels, when erstwhile constraints that were deemed to arise from the physical limitations of the broadcast spectrum, are no longer operative. The changes that have arisen from these changes are apparent all around. In 1949, for instance, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the U.S., enacted what came to be called the Fairness Doctrine, which was premised upon the notion that broadcast companies were no more than “public trustees” over the airwaves and obliged as such, to provide a fair hearing for every conceivable viewpoint within society. It was always a doctrine that was clumsy and selective in its application. But in 1987, with erstwhile limitations on the broadcast spectrum proving inapplicable, the FCC felt emboldened to repeal the Fairness Doctrine, on the grounds that no member of the public would be deprived of the means to access the airwaves to put his viewpoints across. Though a decision based as much on ideology as fact, it does highlight how a regulatory regime that guarantees fair rules of access, can make notions of prior restraint thoroughly superfluous.
The remedy in other words, lies not in constraining the right to free speech, but in allowing it greater latitude. Though the Government has chosen to overlook the infinite possibilities available on that front, recasting the Prasar Bharati apparatus to transform it into an authentic public service broadcaster, that ensures fair rules of access, would be one way to guarantee that false and scurrilous news reports in other channels do not go unchallenged. But with its well-known aversion to “letting go”, the Government seems unwilling to consider any progressive change on that front.
Certain other locutions within the “content code” seem to give rise to a fair suspicion that its true purpose may be to restrain the public scrutiny of official malfeasance. The following, patently illogical clause hints at this hidden intent: “Any infringement of privacy in the making of a news based/related programme should be with the person’s and/or organization’s consent or be otherwise ‘warranted’.” (Chapter IV, clause 14.4).
Though poorly enforced and understood, laws protecting an individual’s privacy are very much a part of the Indian Penal Code. Any intrusion into an individual’s privacy by the media has in this sense, to clear certain legal hurdles. Over time though, it has become an accepted principle that in cases involving the public interest, media intrusions into an individual’s privacy may be warranted, though if the revelations do not measure up in their seriousness to the gravity of the intrusion, the media would be laying itself open to sanctions under the law. Privacy in other words, cannot be a shroud for gross acts of malfeasance. The “content code” seeks to reduce this common-sense to absurdity by insisting on an individual’s consent for an invasion into his privacy.
These are matters involving media practice in its most fundamental sense, as a duty to inform the public and to contribute to the quality of the public discourse. Viewed in this manner, it would seem inadmissible that the Ministry should proceed with broadcast legislation in the complete absence of any consultations with accredited bodies of media practitioners and the larger public. That in short, is the reason why the fourth effort at broadcast regulation, like its immediate predecessor, has lacked public acceptance and legitimacy. Indeed, the principal reason why broadcast regulation has sunk into a rut, may well be the determination of the Government to keep the public interest, defined in as broad a manner as possible, out of the debate.
Sukumar Muralidharan
September 10, 2007
In its two most recent visitations, the drama has played itself out with remarkable similarity. A bill is introduced and opened up for public comments; it is greeted with a torrent of adverse comment by the country’s main media houses; the Ministry concedes the need for further consultation and organises a few such events, marked more by the exertion of lung-power than reason. Finally, the Ministry, in acknowledgment of the strong sentiments of the media industry, accepts the need for further deliberations and defers the introduction of the bill in Parliament a little longer.
In its phrasing, the new version of the Broadcast Services Regulation Bill (BSRB) differs in a few minor matters of detail from its immediate predecessor. In spirit though, it partakes of the same inspiration, making no more than a pretence of letting zealously guarded governmental powers go. That these powers are now a pale shadow of what they once were, is seemingly of no consequence. The erosion of the governmental monopoly over the airwaves has not yet engendered a constructive spirit of engagement with the potential rewards of open access to the airwaves.
The BSRB in its most recent avatar was introduced for public discussion on July 21, with the stipulation that all comments be submitted within two weeks. Even by the standards of a bureaucracy that has reduced public consultations to an empty ritual, this was rather cavalier. In the days that followed, the Minister for Information and Broadcasting, Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi, seemed to retreat from his earlier expressed intent to introduce the bill in the monsoon session of Parliament.
The reasons for the minister’s reticence can only be guessed at. But it was almost certainly a powerful consideration that industry associations and the big media houses had uniformly, reacted adversely to the draft bill. And thus, after one more round of public consultations, confined to representatives of the broadcast industry and a few other bodies that the Ministry chose to identify as “stakeholders”, the fourth attempt at broadcast regulation in a decade passed into history. Like its predecessors, it had fallen victim to the hostility of the broadcast industry and the failure of the Ministry to go beyond a narrow circle in assessing the larger public stakes in broadcast regulation.
This most recent attempt at introducing a broadcast law has shown more clearly than ever before, that the Government is unlikely to get very far if it continues to use the approval of big players in the broadcast industry as the touchstone for assessing the worth of any proposed legislation. But while the government dithers, facts on the ground are being created that make the job of regulation increasingly difficult. Cross-media ownership was once non-existent in India. Today, giant companies with entrenched interests in print, radio and television are increasingly dominating the media scene and exercising a virtual veto over any proposed legislation.
The consequence is that, 12 years after a historic judgment by the Supreme Court, which laid down the principle of public ownership over the broadcast spectrum, the Government continues to be in default on the task it was specifically enjoined to undertake: the creation of a public authority that would oversee the allocation of the spectrum for optimal public benefit.
Civil society groups, anxious to see the principle of public ownership operationalised, have focused on the many serious lacunae in the process of drafting and introducing broadcast legislation. Invariably, there has been little public consultation. Committees are formed in accordance with opaque criteria and these committees, in turn, function without any serious effort at eliciting a broad range of opinion. They finally arrive at legislative drafts that are an uneasy compromise between the government’s reluctance to let go of its controlling urge, and the broadcast industry’s aversion to accepting any form of oversight.
Yet, with every successive cycle through which this game is played out, the Government’s hand steadily weakens. Its monopoly over the airwaves has long since been breached by technological changes. And its voice, once a decisive influence in the policy debate, is steadily being diminished by the growing clout of the broadcast industry and its ability to tap the resources of the print media, to further its cause.
Though the Ministry has been insistent that it has factored in the perceptions of media consumers in producing its draft bill, there has yet been no credible account of how these consumer groups are identified. Other civil society groups have perhaps by design, been a marginal presence in the discussions so far. They have, moreover, been reluctant to join the debate on terms determined by the Government and the broadcast industry.
These aspects of the process that has been followed by the Ministry are reflected in the text of the BSRB, in its latest draft. At no point does the bill make the slightest concession to public as opposed to political control of the broadcast spectrum. The process that it conceives of for the appointment of a Broadcast Regulatory Authority of India (BRAI) is entirely political and involves little consultation with the public on a broader scale. The powers of the BRAI moreover, are not derived from the public in accordance with the mandate of the Supreme Court’s 1995 judgment, but delegated from the Government.
Discussions organised by advocacy groups around the most recent draft of the broadcast bill have thrown up a significant issue of process. The 1995 airwaves judgment gives the Government contingent rights of custodianship over the airwaves, but no enduring powers to determine how they should be utilised. Broadcast regulation, certain civil society groups have argued, should in this sense, begin with the constitution of a broad-based forum that would represent the public in the most comprehensive possible manner. The institutional forms and procedures of broadcast regulation should then be worked out by this body, rather than be assigned to it by the Government.
Media houses have for obvious reasons focused on the powers of search and seizure that the BSRB confers, as an area of serious concern. This apart, the bill identifies certain contingencies, such as an “external threat”, “public order” and more mysteriously, “friendly relations with foreign countries”, as occasions when the Government would feel entitled to abridge the content of broadcasts, or even proscribe certain categories of broadcast. This amounts to little less than the introduction of a doctrine of prior restraint into the jurisprudence on the media and the right to free speech. It is a legislative provision with farreaching consequences, which obviously deserves more than the cursory attention it has attracted so far.
Among the grounds on which the BRAI could stop certain categories of broadcasts, is a failure to abide by the so-called Self-Regulation Guidelines for the Broadcasting Sector, that have been introduced as a corollary to the new draft of the BSRB. These “guidelines”, otherwise known as the “content code”, are partly about relieving the judiciary and the Government of some of the burden of administering post facto remedies and sanctions. Broadcast service providers will be expected to set up in-house content auditors to ensure that all broadcasts are in conformity with agreed norms. Complaints from the public if any, would first be dealt with through this in-house mechanism.
If redress is unavailable at this level, the complainant would be entitled to take his grievance to the next tier in the hierarchy, which would be the industry body. All apex associations in the industry – such as the News Broadcasters’ Association, the Indian Broadcasting Federation, the Community Radio Forum, the Cable Operators’ Forum of India and the Advertising Standards Council of India – would be expected to set up “complaints commissions” to address these public grievances.
Beyond this, the BRAI comes into the picture and then the higher judiciary. Though this regulatory mechanism does not supercede the judicial process, it is expected to relieve some of the stresses that the courts endure when called upon to adjudicate on matters of media practice.
The utility of this very intrusive charter, which goes by the name of “self-regulation”, should be weighed against the possible impact that a minimal number of sound judicial precedents would have. A set of clear and transparent judicial rulings could conceivably be of far greater significance in this respect, than a policy that seeks to internalise within every media house, certain restraints on free speech.
Viewed from this perspective, there is ultimately no alternative to establishing the juridical foundations of free speech and media practice. Anything less would mean undue concessions to a doctrine of prior restraint. In this respect, there have been proposals mooted by professional bodies, to widen the ambit of the Press Council of India, to enable it to deal with the broadcast media and to tighten up its procedures so that its findings are minimally binding on the industry.
Yet the Government in addressing the mission of broadcast regulation, seems to adopt the reverse perspective: that post facto remedies are impossible or useless, and that prior restraint is the only feasible recourse. In seeking to justify the strict application of the “content code” to the media for instance, the Ministry argues that “damage or injustice resulting from news and current affairs contents of television cannot be undone post facto”.
This must seem a rather curious plea in an age of proliferating media channels, when erstwhile constraints that were deemed to arise from the physical limitations of the broadcast spectrum, are no longer operative. The changes that have arisen from these changes are apparent all around. In 1949, for instance, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the U.S., enacted what came to be called the Fairness Doctrine, which was premised upon the notion that broadcast companies were no more than “public trustees” over the airwaves and obliged as such, to provide a fair hearing for every conceivable viewpoint within society. It was always a doctrine that was clumsy and selective in its application. But in 1987, with erstwhile limitations on the broadcast spectrum proving inapplicable, the FCC felt emboldened to repeal the Fairness Doctrine, on the grounds that no member of the public would be deprived of the means to access the airwaves to put his viewpoints across. Though a decision based as much on ideology as fact, it does highlight how a regulatory regime that guarantees fair rules of access, can make notions of prior restraint thoroughly superfluous.
The remedy in other words, lies not in constraining the right to free speech, but in allowing it greater latitude. Though the Government has chosen to overlook the infinite possibilities available on that front, recasting the Prasar Bharati apparatus to transform it into an authentic public service broadcaster, that ensures fair rules of access, would be one way to guarantee that false and scurrilous news reports in other channels do not go unchallenged. But with its well-known aversion to “letting go”, the Government seems unwilling to consider any progressive change on that front.
Certain other locutions within the “content code” seem to give rise to a fair suspicion that its true purpose may be to restrain the public scrutiny of official malfeasance. The following, patently illogical clause hints at this hidden intent: “Any infringement of privacy in the making of a news based/related programme should be with the person’s and/or organization’s consent or be otherwise ‘warranted’.” (Chapter IV, clause 14.4).
Though poorly enforced and understood, laws protecting an individual’s privacy are very much a part of the Indian Penal Code. Any intrusion into an individual’s privacy by the media has in this sense, to clear certain legal hurdles. Over time though, it has become an accepted principle that in cases involving the public interest, media intrusions into an individual’s privacy may be warranted, though if the revelations do not measure up in their seriousness to the gravity of the intrusion, the media would be laying itself open to sanctions under the law. Privacy in other words, cannot be a shroud for gross acts of malfeasance. The “content code” seeks to reduce this common-sense to absurdity by insisting on an individual’s consent for an invasion into his privacy.
These are matters involving media practice in its most fundamental sense, as a duty to inform the public and to contribute to the quality of the public discourse. Viewed in this manner, it would seem inadmissible that the Ministry should proceed with broadcast legislation in the complete absence of any consultations with accredited bodies of media practitioners and the larger public. That in short, is the reason why the fourth effort at broadcast regulation, like its immediate predecessor, has lacked public acceptance and legitimacy. Indeed, the principal reason why broadcast regulation has sunk into a rut, may well be the determination of the Government to keep the public interest, defined in as broad a manner as possible, out of the debate.
Sukumar Muralidharan
September 10, 2007
Friday, August 17, 2007
Pakistan and Afghanistan After the Peace Jirga
Never very attentive to the subtleties of professional intelligence gathering, the war cabal in Washington DC has premised much of its global enterprise on embellishing and embroidering findings to support predetermined courses of action. There was little they could do though, with the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released mid-July, except to evade the substance of the argument and narrow their focus to certain conclusions.
The NIE, which is a periodic summation of the most authoritative findings of U.S. intelligence agencies, had several inconvenient truths to tell. It told for instance, of how the extremist group Al Qaeda had, despite all the pressure exerted by the U.S. military machine, “protected or regenerated key elements” of its capability in the relatively sheltered environment of the Waziristan region in Pakistan. It observed too that Al Qaeda had achieved significant success in its effort to “recruit and indoctrinate operatives” willing to strike on U.S. territory, in part through an Iraqi affiliate.
U.S. President George Bush, sinking rapidly into a mire of approval ratings in the lower twenties, picked up the possibility of another attack on home soil and expectedly flaunted it as sufficient reason for the country to support him. Even if he managed yet again to fan aflame deep-seated insecurities, few seemed to believe that he had the political imagination or the credibility, to address the issue.
The NIE set off feverish activity on another front, provoking calls by politicians, both minor and major, for aggressive new military action. Barack Obama, a candidate for the presidential nomination of the Democratic party, insisted that the U.S. should be at liberty to act in the Waziristan region if “actionable intelligence” existed and Pakistan failed to do what was necessary.
Obama’s was among the more reasoned responses to the NIE. Days later, the Republican Tommy Tancredo, also a candidate for presidential nomination, had a much more drastic solution to propose. “If it is up to me”, he said, “we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland… would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina”.
As the Bush administration sought desperately to distance itself from these vituperations, Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S., the former general Mahmud Ali Durrani, was engaged in a fire-fighting operation of his own. Variously describing the findings of the NIE as “absolutely incorrect” and “an absolute fallacy”, Durrani reminded his U.S. hosts that they had no option but to rely on Pakistan to bring peace to Afghanistan. Unilateral action by U.S. forces often resulted in unacceptable levels of “collateral damage”, with few of the legitimate military objectives being met. Pakistan could not afford to sustain these levels of civilian deaths. Besides, it had the concern too, that U.S. intelligence very often was “faulty”, “inaccurate” and tended not to be “timely” either.
These locutions could have been a coded reference to the frequent missile strikes in Waziristan and other border regions of Pakistan, which have inflicted casualties in the scores. Two such attacks occurred in June, though the bloodiest so far, was the October 2006 strike on a madrasa, which killed around 80 students. Eager to dispel any notion of its territorial sovereignty being breached, Pakistan has been stepping up to take the responsibility for these attacks. The October attack, it has claimed, was targeted at Al Qaeda’s second-in-command, Ayman Al-Zawahari, who had planned a visit to the area and then changed his mind.
Pakistan’s claims have fooled none, since the operations have had the fingerprints of the U.S. all over them. Far from neutralising terrorism, the U.S. combat strategy of using massive airpower, is creating a fertile breeding ground for insurgents, in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. According to recent media reports, the civilian casualties inflicted by U.S. and allied forces in the southern Afghanistan province of Helmand, are now running well in excess of those caused by the Taliban.
Afghan president Hamid Karzai has repeatedly called for greater care and circumspection by the U.S. military. But “overwhelming force” remains the operational philosophy of U.S. forces, a doctrine underwritten by a lack of accountability that stems directly from the demonisation of Afghan civilians in both the official discourse and the media. Also of material consequence, is Karzai’s rather limited cachet at home, and his dependence on U.S. approval for continuing in office.
Karzai’s problems are in large measure, similar to those his counterpart in Pakistan faces. Indeed, the more that he and General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan are seen to be standing with the U.S. and the more they are paid homage by Bush for their steadfast commitment, the greater the political damage they suffer.
The symmetry of their political predicaments has not induced any sense of mutual understanding between the two. Pakistan is deeply committed to the Pashtu interests in Afghanistan, which it fears, would boil over into its own restive tribal territories if denied a legitimate place across the Durand line. But the regime in Kabul is too dependent on the Dari-Farsi segment of Afghan society, represented by the Panjsher valley contingent of erstwhile mujahedin, who claim the authority of their late commander Ahmad Shah Masood, not to mention the Herath provincial chieftain, Mohammad Ismail Khan. Karzai’s government moreover, is obliged to make peace with sundry other warlords who retain enormous potential for mischief.
With all these accommodations made, there has been no credible way for the Karzai regime to grant the Pashtu tribes of the south and east the share in power they assume would be their due.
Even if the complexities of the situation on the ground were alien to Bush’s understanding, he has been aware of the frosty relations between the two men he acknowledges as key allies. September last, he invited both presidents to Washington DC, for a three-way meeting. The idea of a “peace jirga” involving Pakistan and Afghanistan was born then, on Karzai’s initiative. By all accounts, Musharraf was lukewarm, but acceded to the proposal under U.S. pressure.
The idea of adapting the jirga, or traditional assembly of Pashtu tribes to the cause of building bridges between two neighbouring States, each facing problems of internal turmoil and external tutelage, was a novel one. But it continued to encounter Pakistan’s indifference. Since very little has officially been said about the matter, the reasons can only be guessed at.
It is not difficult to see that the process of tribal consultations across borders runs contrary to the centralising tendency of a state dominated by the military. To be of any consequence, these consultations must be accompanied by a commitment that cross-border solidarities, of tribe or ethnicity or language, would be given significant room, setting up a force potentially antithetical to the centralising state. With the persistent trouble it has faced in Baluchistan now compounded by the turmoil in Waziristan, there is ample reason for Islamabad to worry about yielding greater room for tribal communities to determine the contours of relations with Afghanistan. Aside from the insecurity engendered by recent experience, the process would also necessitate a dilution of the concept of “strategic depth” – a doctrine that military administrations in Pakistan have in particular been committed to, as an antidote to the sense of siege the state has suffered from the moment of its birth.
In the days before the jirga, three heavyweight leaders of Islamic political parties in Pakistan – Fazlur Rahman, Samiul Haq and Qazi Hussain Ahmad – all of Pashtu extraction, decided to stay away. The tribal chiefs of Waziristan soon followed suit. Before setting off for Kabul, Pakistan delegates were extensively briefed by senior officials of both the federal government in Islamabad and the provincial government in Peshawar. Public expectations were low. And the delegates were reportedly instructed that they were under no circumstances to yield the moral ground. Any attempt to place the blame on Pakistan for the situation in Afghanistan, would have to be firmly rebuffed.
Musharraf opted out of attending the jirga, sending Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz instead and staying back amidst frenetic speculation about his intent to declare a state of emergency. The mounting speculation only died down when the Pakistan president disavowed the idea, amidst expressions of disapproval from Washington.
The month preceding, since the siege of the Lal Masjid in Islamabad was broken by heavy-handed military methods, had been traumatic for the Musharraf regime. Moderate and enlightened opinion in Pakistan, which he had been counting on for support, was turning progressively more cynical at his intent to stay in office and retain his status as army chief. People increasingly were tilting to the belief that the Lal Masjid militants were marionettes that Musharraf had self-servingly put into play, to create a climate of fear and bolster his claims to another term as Pakistan’s uniformed president. The armed confrontation that followed only proved that he was not quite in control of the forces that he chose to unleash.
The Lal Masjid confrontation was followed in short order, by a public repudiation by tribal chiefs in Waziristan, of the peace agreement that Musharraf had forged with them in September 2006. This effectively turned the clock back four years, to the military operations that Musharraf had begun in the region in the turbulent summer of 2002, when India and Pakistan were mobilising forces for what both sides vowed, would be a decisive battle, and the U.S. was pressuring the Pakistan leader into doing its bidding as a price for its continuing neutrality.
The Pakistan army took heavy casualties in the operation and the peace agreement of September 2006 was perhaps a clear admission of defeat.
It was yet another admission of defeat when Musharraf shortly after the Lal Masjid conflagration, met with the exiled former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto in Abu Dhabi and reportedly agreed terms for her return prior to the next elections to the Pakistan National Assembly. But like a puppet master who had become himself an unwitting puppet, jerked around by unseen strings, Musharraf shortly afterwards denied any such deal. Another phase of public speculation ensued about Bhutto being indeed on her way back. And in the interim, the Sindh High Court admitted a petition calling for the annulment of the presidential decree (or deal) under which another former prime minister, Nawaz Sharief, was exiled.
To climax this tale of painful reversals by a beleaguered head of state, Musharraf shortly afterwards decided that he would accept Karzai’s invitation to address the closing session of the jirga in Kabul. From Washington, a spokesman of the State Department put out the statement that the Bush administration was “pleased” at the decision.
In the hours before the Pakistan president’s arrival, the jirga had been debating, beyond the florid speeches and the routine expressions of good intent, how best to operationalise a credible truce in the border region between the two countries. Curiously, according to a report put out by the Afghan news agency, Pajhwok, the Pakistan delegates at one stage tabled a proposal that two Indian consulates – of the four that this country has opened in Afghanistan – be shut down. Pakistan has for long argued that India’s decision to open four consulates in Afghanistan goes beyond a concern for good-neighbourly relations and has more to do with hegemonic ambitions. Indian consulates at Jalalabad and Kandahar, Pakistan argued, needed to be shut down, since these had become cockpits of intrigue, instrumental in fomenting tribal unrest in Balochistan and Waziristan.
The Afghan delegates protested that these demands were in breach of agreed rules of non-interference. And when Musharraf appeared before the closing session of the jirga, he came with a virtual mea culpa. In breach of the rules he had framed for Pakistan’s delegates, the president of Pakistan, with his Afghan counterpart nodding vigorously in agreement, read out the following lines from a prepared text: “There is no doubt Afghan militants are supported from Pakistan soil. The problem that you have in your region is because support is provided from our side.”
How this admission will influence the global U.S. crusade, is still a matter for debate. The Kabul peace jirga, expectedly, earned little coverage in the Indian media, which was busy celebrating the nuclear deal with the U.S. -- or the “123 agreement” -- another project in India’s continuing festival of concord with the global hegemon. But in the midst of all the chatter at the jirga, there were views expressed in Kabul, that salvation for the region lay in nothing less than the withdrawal of all alien forces. It was a demand that the dominant political parties in Balochistan and the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan soon afterwards amplified. Client regimes of the U.S. in the region though, are yet to hear that demand. That condemns them perhaps to drifting further away from popular sentiment in their countries, with the possible consequence that inter-state violence could escalate in the months ahead.
The NIE, which is a periodic summation of the most authoritative findings of U.S. intelligence agencies, had several inconvenient truths to tell. It told for instance, of how the extremist group Al Qaeda had, despite all the pressure exerted by the U.S. military machine, “protected or regenerated key elements” of its capability in the relatively sheltered environment of the Waziristan region in Pakistan. It observed too that Al Qaeda had achieved significant success in its effort to “recruit and indoctrinate operatives” willing to strike on U.S. territory, in part through an Iraqi affiliate.
U.S. President George Bush, sinking rapidly into a mire of approval ratings in the lower twenties, picked up the possibility of another attack on home soil and expectedly flaunted it as sufficient reason for the country to support him. Even if he managed yet again to fan aflame deep-seated insecurities, few seemed to believe that he had the political imagination or the credibility, to address the issue.
The NIE set off feverish activity on another front, provoking calls by politicians, both minor and major, for aggressive new military action. Barack Obama, a candidate for the presidential nomination of the Democratic party, insisted that the U.S. should be at liberty to act in the Waziristan region if “actionable intelligence” existed and Pakistan failed to do what was necessary.
Obama’s was among the more reasoned responses to the NIE. Days later, the Republican Tommy Tancredo, also a candidate for presidential nomination, had a much more drastic solution to propose. “If it is up to me”, he said, “we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland… would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina”.
As the Bush administration sought desperately to distance itself from these vituperations, Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S., the former general Mahmud Ali Durrani, was engaged in a fire-fighting operation of his own. Variously describing the findings of the NIE as “absolutely incorrect” and “an absolute fallacy”, Durrani reminded his U.S. hosts that they had no option but to rely on Pakistan to bring peace to Afghanistan. Unilateral action by U.S. forces often resulted in unacceptable levels of “collateral damage”, with few of the legitimate military objectives being met. Pakistan could not afford to sustain these levels of civilian deaths. Besides, it had the concern too, that U.S. intelligence very often was “faulty”, “inaccurate” and tended not to be “timely” either.
These locutions could have been a coded reference to the frequent missile strikes in Waziristan and other border regions of Pakistan, which have inflicted casualties in the scores. Two such attacks occurred in June, though the bloodiest so far, was the October 2006 strike on a madrasa, which killed around 80 students. Eager to dispel any notion of its territorial sovereignty being breached, Pakistan has been stepping up to take the responsibility for these attacks. The October attack, it has claimed, was targeted at Al Qaeda’s second-in-command, Ayman Al-Zawahari, who had planned a visit to the area and then changed his mind.
Pakistan’s claims have fooled none, since the operations have had the fingerprints of the U.S. all over them. Far from neutralising terrorism, the U.S. combat strategy of using massive airpower, is creating a fertile breeding ground for insurgents, in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. According to recent media reports, the civilian casualties inflicted by U.S. and allied forces in the southern Afghanistan province of Helmand, are now running well in excess of those caused by the Taliban.
Afghan president Hamid Karzai has repeatedly called for greater care and circumspection by the U.S. military. But “overwhelming force” remains the operational philosophy of U.S. forces, a doctrine underwritten by a lack of accountability that stems directly from the demonisation of Afghan civilians in both the official discourse and the media. Also of material consequence, is Karzai’s rather limited cachet at home, and his dependence on U.S. approval for continuing in office.
Karzai’s problems are in large measure, similar to those his counterpart in Pakistan faces. Indeed, the more that he and General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan are seen to be standing with the U.S. and the more they are paid homage by Bush for their steadfast commitment, the greater the political damage they suffer.
The symmetry of their political predicaments has not induced any sense of mutual understanding between the two. Pakistan is deeply committed to the Pashtu interests in Afghanistan, which it fears, would boil over into its own restive tribal territories if denied a legitimate place across the Durand line. But the regime in Kabul is too dependent on the Dari-Farsi segment of Afghan society, represented by the Panjsher valley contingent of erstwhile mujahedin, who claim the authority of their late commander Ahmad Shah Masood, not to mention the Herath provincial chieftain, Mohammad Ismail Khan. Karzai’s government moreover, is obliged to make peace with sundry other warlords who retain enormous potential for mischief.
With all these accommodations made, there has been no credible way for the Karzai regime to grant the Pashtu tribes of the south and east the share in power they assume would be their due.
Even if the complexities of the situation on the ground were alien to Bush’s understanding, he has been aware of the frosty relations between the two men he acknowledges as key allies. September last, he invited both presidents to Washington DC, for a three-way meeting. The idea of a “peace jirga” involving Pakistan and Afghanistan was born then, on Karzai’s initiative. By all accounts, Musharraf was lukewarm, but acceded to the proposal under U.S. pressure.
The idea of adapting the jirga, or traditional assembly of Pashtu tribes to the cause of building bridges between two neighbouring States, each facing problems of internal turmoil and external tutelage, was a novel one. But it continued to encounter Pakistan’s indifference. Since very little has officially been said about the matter, the reasons can only be guessed at.
It is not difficult to see that the process of tribal consultations across borders runs contrary to the centralising tendency of a state dominated by the military. To be of any consequence, these consultations must be accompanied by a commitment that cross-border solidarities, of tribe or ethnicity or language, would be given significant room, setting up a force potentially antithetical to the centralising state. With the persistent trouble it has faced in Baluchistan now compounded by the turmoil in Waziristan, there is ample reason for Islamabad to worry about yielding greater room for tribal communities to determine the contours of relations with Afghanistan. Aside from the insecurity engendered by recent experience, the process would also necessitate a dilution of the concept of “strategic depth” – a doctrine that military administrations in Pakistan have in particular been committed to, as an antidote to the sense of siege the state has suffered from the moment of its birth.
In the days before the jirga, three heavyweight leaders of Islamic political parties in Pakistan – Fazlur Rahman, Samiul Haq and Qazi Hussain Ahmad – all of Pashtu extraction, decided to stay away. The tribal chiefs of Waziristan soon followed suit. Before setting off for Kabul, Pakistan delegates were extensively briefed by senior officials of both the federal government in Islamabad and the provincial government in Peshawar. Public expectations were low. And the delegates were reportedly instructed that they were under no circumstances to yield the moral ground. Any attempt to place the blame on Pakistan for the situation in Afghanistan, would have to be firmly rebuffed.
Musharraf opted out of attending the jirga, sending Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz instead and staying back amidst frenetic speculation about his intent to declare a state of emergency. The mounting speculation only died down when the Pakistan president disavowed the idea, amidst expressions of disapproval from Washington.
The month preceding, since the siege of the Lal Masjid in Islamabad was broken by heavy-handed military methods, had been traumatic for the Musharraf regime. Moderate and enlightened opinion in Pakistan, which he had been counting on for support, was turning progressively more cynical at his intent to stay in office and retain his status as army chief. People increasingly were tilting to the belief that the Lal Masjid militants were marionettes that Musharraf had self-servingly put into play, to create a climate of fear and bolster his claims to another term as Pakistan’s uniformed president. The armed confrontation that followed only proved that he was not quite in control of the forces that he chose to unleash.
The Lal Masjid confrontation was followed in short order, by a public repudiation by tribal chiefs in Waziristan, of the peace agreement that Musharraf had forged with them in September 2006. This effectively turned the clock back four years, to the military operations that Musharraf had begun in the region in the turbulent summer of 2002, when India and Pakistan were mobilising forces for what both sides vowed, would be a decisive battle, and the U.S. was pressuring the Pakistan leader into doing its bidding as a price for its continuing neutrality.
The Pakistan army took heavy casualties in the operation and the peace agreement of September 2006 was perhaps a clear admission of defeat.
It was yet another admission of defeat when Musharraf shortly after the Lal Masjid conflagration, met with the exiled former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto in Abu Dhabi and reportedly agreed terms for her return prior to the next elections to the Pakistan National Assembly. But like a puppet master who had become himself an unwitting puppet, jerked around by unseen strings, Musharraf shortly afterwards denied any such deal. Another phase of public speculation ensued about Bhutto being indeed on her way back. And in the interim, the Sindh High Court admitted a petition calling for the annulment of the presidential decree (or deal) under which another former prime minister, Nawaz Sharief, was exiled.
To climax this tale of painful reversals by a beleaguered head of state, Musharraf shortly afterwards decided that he would accept Karzai’s invitation to address the closing session of the jirga in Kabul. From Washington, a spokesman of the State Department put out the statement that the Bush administration was “pleased” at the decision.
In the hours before the Pakistan president’s arrival, the jirga had been debating, beyond the florid speeches and the routine expressions of good intent, how best to operationalise a credible truce in the border region between the two countries. Curiously, according to a report put out by the Afghan news agency, Pajhwok, the Pakistan delegates at one stage tabled a proposal that two Indian consulates – of the four that this country has opened in Afghanistan – be shut down. Pakistan has for long argued that India’s decision to open four consulates in Afghanistan goes beyond a concern for good-neighbourly relations and has more to do with hegemonic ambitions. Indian consulates at Jalalabad and Kandahar, Pakistan argued, needed to be shut down, since these had become cockpits of intrigue, instrumental in fomenting tribal unrest in Balochistan and Waziristan.
The Afghan delegates protested that these demands were in breach of agreed rules of non-interference. And when Musharraf appeared before the closing session of the jirga, he came with a virtual mea culpa. In breach of the rules he had framed for Pakistan’s delegates, the president of Pakistan, with his Afghan counterpart nodding vigorously in agreement, read out the following lines from a prepared text: “There is no doubt Afghan militants are supported from Pakistan soil. The problem that you have in your region is because support is provided from our side.”
How this admission will influence the global U.S. crusade, is still a matter for debate. The Kabul peace jirga, expectedly, earned little coverage in the Indian media, which was busy celebrating the nuclear deal with the U.S. -- or the “123 agreement” -- another project in India’s continuing festival of concord with the global hegemon. But in the midst of all the chatter at the jirga, there were views expressed in Kabul, that salvation for the region lay in nothing less than the withdrawal of all alien forces. It was a demand that the dominant political parties in Balochistan and the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan soon afterwards amplified. Client regimes of the U.S. in the region though, are yet to hear that demand. That condemns them perhaps to drifting further away from popular sentiment in their countries, with the possible consequence that inter-state violence could escalate in the months ahead.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Good Palestinian, Bad Palestinian
Unprecedented pressures have built up in recent weeks on the beleaguered Palestinian people, fuelling a heightened sense of despair. Participants in the Palestinian struggle for a national home and identity are convinced that never in the nearly six decades since the “catastrophe” of 1948, have things seemed as dark and gloomy. This applies as much to the communities that have been scattered widely across Arab lands by Israeli ethnic cleansing, as to those that have been corralled into desperately squalid and congested urban spaces in the West Bank and the Gaza strip.
Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, which have enjoyed tacit immunity and a high degree of administrative autonomy under a four-decades old agreement, were attacked by the Lebanese army in May, ostensibly to track down and eliminate certain “extremist” elements within. These punitive raids enjoyed the ostentatious support of the U.S., which made a special point of shipping arms and equipment deemed essential for the operations to the Lebanese army.
Mid-June, the Palestinian resistance group Hamas, acting by all accounts to preempt a move to void national elections and oust it from power, carried out a swift, surgical strike within the Gaza strip to efface all traces of Fatah, its principal rival for influence. This brought to an end the diarchic situation within the occupied Palestinian territories, under which Hamas controlled the government but was compelled to work under the irksome tutelage of the Fatah president, Mahmoud Abbas.
The Hamas takeover was the unexpected denouement to a global campaign launched by Israel and its U.S. patrons to isolate the Palestinian people living under military occupation for close to four decades. In the pressure-cooker like atmosphere that resulted from a complete denial of contact with the outside world, the Zionist state expected that the more amenable elements within Fatah would feel emboldened to confront and defeat the militant nationalists within Hamas.
Even if the Hamas takeover of the Gaza strip was unexpected, it has presented ardent expansionists within Israel with something akin to an opportunity. The parting of ways between Hamas and Fatah, and their sequestration respectively, within the Gaza and the West bank, now affords Israel the opportunity to continue with its brutal military rampage through the Gaza. This has been a signature activity of its campaign to suppress the Palestinian uprising that began in September 2000. Now that the good Palestinians in the West Bank have been separated from the bad Palestinians of Gaza, even the faint murmurs of protest that were heard will presumably be silenced.
The havoc wrought on Gaza by periodic Israeli military incursions punctuate the slow haemorrhage that has been caused by a year-and-a-half of economic siege – not to mention 40 years of military occupation. Since the Hamas takeover, Israel’s closure of all land crossings into and out of Gaza has if anything, become even more comprehensive. An estimated two-thirds of Gaza’s population is now living in dire poverty. The essentials of life have become increasingly scarce, not least because one of Israel’s first military actions since Hamas’ electoral triumph, destroyed the Gaza’s sole power station.
Seemingly to underline its belief that the good can quite easily be sundered from the bad Palestinians through the coarse application of the lure of lucre, Israel has ordered that Palestinian tax revenues -- illegally withheld for years together – can now be released to the Fatah authorities in the West Bank.
There is an unbroken thread connecting these developments with the Israeli effort to undermine any credible leadership emerging within the Palestinian society, so that it can persist with the foundational myths of the Zionist state. The myth has itself undergone mutations over the years but its fundamental premise is the denial of the humanity of the victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing. The victims then are compelled to bear the burden of blame for their misfortunes.
When Hamas won a landslide victory in the January 2006 Palestinian national elections – universally certified as free and fair -- Israel with the active encouragement of the U.S., contrived a way of delegitimising the outcome. It was not sufficient that Hamas win a mandate from the Palestinian people, it also needed to recognise the state of Israel, renounce violence and publicly proclaim that it would honour all the preceding agreements that had been concluded between Israel and the Palestinian authority.
It was an irony of this demarche placed upon the Palestinians, one that passed largely unremarked, that Israel has never acknowledged their existence as a people. When a qualified and hesitant recognition came with the Oslo accord of 1994, it was only to recruit them as accomplices in the task of policing the occupation of their own lands.
This was an endeavour that had little chance of success so long as Yasser Arafat remained the symbolic head of the Palestinian people. Mahmoud Abbas though was a far more pliable figure: the memorandum of understanding he concluded with Israeli cabinet minister Yossi Beilin in 1994 as the basis for the peace accord, has rightly earned notoriety as a shameful document of surrender.
Though Arafat refused to instigate the Palestinian civil war that Israel dearly wanted, the structures of patronage that he created flourished during the years of pretended peace negotiations. They have persisted well into the Palestinian intifada and the breakdown of all dialogue. Hamas’ landslide election victory last year was a popular insurrection by against a conniving Fatah leadership that had since Arafat’s death, functioned unabashedly as a corrupt clique intent on pursuing its own interests at the cost of the larger struggle. In seeking retribution, Israel has imposed a collective punishment upon the Palestinians much more severe than anything seen till now, which is likely to enormously compound its own formidable record of crimes against humanity.
Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, which have enjoyed tacit immunity and a high degree of administrative autonomy under a four-decades old agreement, were attacked by the Lebanese army in May, ostensibly to track down and eliminate certain “extremist” elements within. These punitive raids enjoyed the ostentatious support of the U.S., which made a special point of shipping arms and equipment deemed essential for the operations to the Lebanese army.
Mid-June, the Palestinian resistance group Hamas, acting by all accounts to preempt a move to void national elections and oust it from power, carried out a swift, surgical strike within the Gaza strip to efface all traces of Fatah, its principal rival for influence. This brought to an end the diarchic situation within the occupied Palestinian territories, under which Hamas controlled the government but was compelled to work under the irksome tutelage of the Fatah president, Mahmoud Abbas.
The Hamas takeover was the unexpected denouement to a global campaign launched by Israel and its U.S. patrons to isolate the Palestinian people living under military occupation for close to four decades. In the pressure-cooker like atmosphere that resulted from a complete denial of contact with the outside world, the Zionist state expected that the more amenable elements within Fatah would feel emboldened to confront and defeat the militant nationalists within Hamas.
Even if the Hamas takeover of the Gaza strip was unexpected, it has presented ardent expansionists within Israel with something akin to an opportunity. The parting of ways between Hamas and Fatah, and their sequestration respectively, within the Gaza and the West bank, now affords Israel the opportunity to continue with its brutal military rampage through the Gaza. This has been a signature activity of its campaign to suppress the Palestinian uprising that began in September 2000. Now that the good Palestinians in the West Bank have been separated from the bad Palestinians of Gaza, even the faint murmurs of protest that were heard will presumably be silenced.
The havoc wrought on Gaza by periodic Israeli military incursions punctuate the slow haemorrhage that has been caused by a year-and-a-half of economic siege – not to mention 40 years of military occupation. Since the Hamas takeover, Israel’s closure of all land crossings into and out of Gaza has if anything, become even more comprehensive. An estimated two-thirds of Gaza’s population is now living in dire poverty. The essentials of life have become increasingly scarce, not least because one of Israel’s first military actions since Hamas’ electoral triumph, destroyed the Gaza’s sole power station.
Seemingly to underline its belief that the good can quite easily be sundered from the bad Palestinians through the coarse application of the lure of lucre, Israel has ordered that Palestinian tax revenues -- illegally withheld for years together – can now be released to the Fatah authorities in the West Bank.
There is an unbroken thread connecting these developments with the Israeli effort to undermine any credible leadership emerging within the Palestinian society, so that it can persist with the foundational myths of the Zionist state. The myth has itself undergone mutations over the years but its fundamental premise is the denial of the humanity of the victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing. The victims then are compelled to bear the burden of blame for their misfortunes.
When Hamas won a landslide victory in the January 2006 Palestinian national elections – universally certified as free and fair -- Israel with the active encouragement of the U.S., contrived a way of delegitimising the outcome. It was not sufficient that Hamas win a mandate from the Palestinian people, it also needed to recognise the state of Israel, renounce violence and publicly proclaim that it would honour all the preceding agreements that had been concluded between Israel and the Palestinian authority.
It was an irony of this demarche placed upon the Palestinians, one that passed largely unremarked, that Israel has never acknowledged their existence as a people. When a qualified and hesitant recognition came with the Oslo accord of 1994, it was only to recruit them as accomplices in the task of policing the occupation of their own lands.
This was an endeavour that had little chance of success so long as Yasser Arafat remained the symbolic head of the Palestinian people. Mahmoud Abbas though was a far more pliable figure: the memorandum of understanding he concluded with Israeli cabinet minister Yossi Beilin in 1994 as the basis for the peace accord, has rightly earned notoriety as a shameful document of surrender.
Though Arafat refused to instigate the Palestinian civil war that Israel dearly wanted, the structures of patronage that he created flourished during the years of pretended peace negotiations. They have persisted well into the Palestinian intifada and the breakdown of all dialogue. Hamas’ landslide election victory last year was a popular insurrection by against a conniving Fatah leadership that had since Arafat’s death, functioned unabashedly as a corrupt clique intent on pursuing its own interests at the cost of the larger struggle. In seeking retribution, Israel has imposed a collective punishment upon the Palestinians much more severe than anything seen till now, which is likely to enormously compound its own formidable record of crimes against humanity.
Friday, April 27, 2007
Supreme Court Blocks Mandal II: An opportunity, not a threat
The Supreme Court on March 29, imposed an interim stay on the application of the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admissions) Act of 2006, throwing well-advanced admission procedures in these institutions into considerable disarray. In introducing legislation for reservation of seats for “socially and educationally backward classes”, the court held that the Government had been inattentive to material realities.
It is a curiosity of India’s policy on reservations, that its legislative foundations are rather thin. Mandal II, or the move to reserve seats in higher educational institutions run by the Central Government, was indeed the first occasion that a law was enacted, rather than the customary “Government Order” on reservations. That this first attempt by Parliament has encountered a judicial roadblock, is a bitter blow to the political establishment in Delhi. Coming in a sequence of several other such rulings by the court, this has led to much resentful murmurs about the judiciary as an institution becoming an impediment to social justice.
Yet with all the argumentation that has been produced in making the case for reservations, there has been little attention devoted to its actual track-record as an element of social policy. Indeed, as a well known media commentator recently observed, for all the importance of reservations in India, the best work on the efficacy of this manner of undoing the disadvantages of history, have come from scholars overseas. In India, reservations are simply not a matter where cool logic and rational argument can be applied.
If for a moment though, the passions and partisanship were to be kept aside, certain key findings on reservations would seem relevant. It has been found, as it would be intuitively obvious, that students benefiting from reservations generally under-perform in relation to those who gain their admission through the “open category”. Their rates of graduation also tend to be lower. On this account, it is not unreasonable to suppose that they would probably perform less well than the open category candidates who risk being displaced by the reserved quotas. Outside the university setting though, once the candidates have graduated and entered the workforce, there is no reason to believe that their performance is any less efficient or useful to society. Reservations in other words, contribute to the democratisation of decision making in society. They also engender significant benefits in sectors where people-orientation is necessary, since the individuals performing these tasks are likely to be more understanding and empathetic towards the disadvantaged.
It has also been found that over time, there has been a convergence in the qualifying requirements: the gap at entry level between the beneficiaries of reservations and the open category candidates has been narrowing over time. But there is little to suggest that the beneficiaries are being drawn from a broad-based section of the target groups. In fact, the better off among the backward classes have gained and continue to gain disproportionately from reservations.
If these fairly well established findings were to be factored in, a number of fine adjustments would suggest themselves in policy. Unfortunately, none of these issues seems to have come up for discussion in either the legislative or the judicial forums. The basis on which the Supreme Court issued its interim order was the numerical imprecision of the Central Government’s estimate that the “other backward classes” number 52 percent of India’s population.
The court relied upon a recent survey by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), which estimated that OBCs number 41 percent of the population. It did not go into the nuances of this issue, since the NSSO used a rather different methodology of estimation, merely asking the respondent whether or not he belonged to a backward class. The 52 percent estimate in contrast, is based on an official list maintained by the Central Government and extrapolations of population growth from the 1931 census, the last occasion when castes were enumerated.
The material point uncovered by the NSSO survey has been lost in this quibble. The OBCs, whatever their number, still continue to suffer enormous social disadvantages, registering numbers well below the average on virtually all welfare indicators.
Despite these realities, a feeling still persists that the process of identification of backward classes suffers certain serious infirmities. This is a conceptual vacuum in which varieties of high-voltage pressure politics have flourished. Since the Mandal Commission report became part of official policy in 1993, backwardness has become an appellation that various social groups have been willing to fight for. A case in point would be the Jats of Rajasthan, who despite winning on average 40 percent of all seats in state-wide elections, began agitating for the tag of backwardness in 1999. Ashok Gehlot, then the chief minister of the state and himself a member of a notified backward community, had little time for this demand and paid the price, with the Jats mobilising state-wide to inflict a severe drubbing on the Congress. Soon afterwards, empowered bodies at both state and national levels, conceded the Jat demand.
It could be asked whether a community that is able to mobilise so powerfully and articulate its case with quite this kind of energy, can be described as backward under any criterion. The issue it turned out, was not their relative deprivation in relation to society as a whole, but in relation to the politically dominant Rajput community. This is an issue that stretches back to the 1920s when the Jats first began mobilising against Rajput dominance in all spheres of activity. Some part of this battle was fought on the terrain of land reforms and tenancy legislation. Another chapter in that battle came after independence, when the Jats managed to use the new panchayati raj institutions to shore up their social power. When the Mandal recommendations were implemented, reservations became another weapon in this battle of attrition. In the process, reservations stood diminished, it became a weapon of political contestation between two powerful communities, rather than an instrument of promoting the general social welfare.
Another category of problem relates to the equity of reservations within particular categories. OBCs are a broad and heterogeneous grouping and unless sub-quotas or certain criteria of exclusion are specified, there is little likelihood that the agreed quantum of reservations would be shared out equitably. This is a problem that is already evident in the realm of Scheduled Castes reservations. It is a firmly established fact that certain castes within the SC category – like the Jatavs of north India and the Mahars of Maharashtra – have been over the generations, gainers from reservations to a degree that goes beyond their share within the SC population. This has led to a demand by others, such as the Valmikis of north India, for a sub-category within SC reservations. Needless to say, admitting such a demand would prove immensely challenging in an administrative sense, and politically, it could quite possibly be promoting the infinite fragmentation of society.
Informed observers believe though, that there are ways around these difficulties. But that would require above all, that the formulaic approach to reservations be abandoned in favour of more subtlety and sensitivity. If the Supreme Court order is viewed in this light, rather than an occasion for plotting acts of institutional vengeance or one-up-manship, that would be an unequivocal gain for the cause of social justice.
It is a curiosity of India’s policy on reservations, that its legislative foundations are rather thin. Mandal II, or the move to reserve seats in higher educational institutions run by the Central Government, was indeed the first occasion that a law was enacted, rather than the customary “Government Order” on reservations. That this first attempt by Parliament has encountered a judicial roadblock, is a bitter blow to the political establishment in Delhi. Coming in a sequence of several other such rulings by the court, this has led to much resentful murmurs about the judiciary as an institution becoming an impediment to social justice.
Yet with all the argumentation that has been produced in making the case for reservations, there has been little attention devoted to its actual track-record as an element of social policy. Indeed, as a well known media commentator recently observed, for all the importance of reservations in India, the best work on the efficacy of this manner of undoing the disadvantages of history, have come from scholars overseas. In India, reservations are simply not a matter where cool logic and rational argument can be applied.
If for a moment though, the passions and partisanship were to be kept aside, certain key findings on reservations would seem relevant. It has been found, as it would be intuitively obvious, that students benefiting from reservations generally under-perform in relation to those who gain their admission through the “open category”. Their rates of graduation also tend to be lower. On this account, it is not unreasonable to suppose that they would probably perform less well than the open category candidates who risk being displaced by the reserved quotas. Outside the university setting though, once the candidates have graduated and entered the workforce, there is no reason to believe that their performance is any less efficient or useful to society. Reservations in other words, contribute to the democratisation of decision making in society. They also engender significant benefits in sectors where people-orientation is necessary, since the individuals performing these tasks are likely to be more understanding and empathetic towards the disadvantaged.
It has also been found that over time, there has been a convergence in the qualifying requirements: the gap at entry level between the beneficiaries of reservations and the open category candidates has been narrowing over time. But there is little to suggest that the beneficiaries are being drawn from a broad-based section of the target groups. In fact, the better off among the backward classes have gained and continue to gain disproportionately from reservations.
If these fairly well established findings were to be factored in, a number of fine adjustments would suggest themselves in policy. Unfortunately, none of these issues seems to have come up for discussion in either the legislative or the judicial forums. The basis on which the Supreme Court issued its interim order was the numerical imprecision of the Central Government’s estimate that the “other backward classes” number 52 percent of India’s population.
The court relied upon a recent survey by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), which estimated that OBCs number 41 percent of the population. It did not go into the nuances of this issue, since the NSSO used a rather different methodology of estimation, merely asking the respondent whether or not he belonged to a backward class. The 52 percent estimate in contrast, is based on an official list maintained by the Central Government and extrapolations of population growth from the 1931 census, the last occasion when castes were enumerated.
The material point uncovered by the NSSO survey has been lost in this quibble. The OBCs, whatever their number, still continue to suffer enormous social disadvantages, registering numbers well below the average on virtually all welfare indicators.
Despite these realities, a feeling still persists that the process of identification of backward classes suffers certain serious infirmities. This is a conceptual vacuum in which varieties of high-voltage pressure politics have flourished. Since the Mandal Commission report became part of official policy in 1993, backwardness has become an appellation that various social groups have been willing to fight for. A case in point would be the Jats of Rajasthan, who despite winning on average 40 percent of all seats in state-wide elections, began agitating for the tag of backwardness in 1999. Ashok Gehlot, then the chief minister of the state and himself a member of a notified backward community, had little time for this demand and paid the price, with the Jats mobilising state-wide to inflict a severe drubbing on the Congress. Soon afterwards, empowered bodies at both state and national levels, conceded the Jat demand.
It could be asked whether a community that is able to mobilise so powerfully and articulate its case with quite this kind of energy, can be described as backward under any criterion. The issue it turned out, was not their relative deprivation in relation to society as a whole, but in relation to the politically dominant Rajput community. This is an issue that stretches back to the 1920s when the Jats first began mobilising against Rajput dominance in all spheres of activity. Some part of this battle was fought on the terrain of land reforms and tenancy legislation. Another chapter in that battle came after independence, when the Jats managed to use the new panchayati raj institutions to shore up their social power. When the Mandal recommendations were implemented, reservations became another weapon in this battle of attrition. In the process, reservations stood diminished, it became a weapon of political contestation between two powerful communities, rather than an instrument of promoting the general social welfare.
Another category of problem relates to the equity of reservations within particular categories. OBCs are a broad and heterogeneous grouping and unless sub-quotas or certain criteria of exclusion are specified, there is little likelihood that the agreed quantum of reservations would be shared out equitably. This is a problem that is already evident in the realm of Scheduled Castes reservations. It is a firmly established fact that certain castes within the SC category – like the Jatavs of north India and the Mahars of Maharashtra – have been over the generations, gainers from reservations to a degree that goes beyond their share within the SC population. This has led to a demand by others, such as the Valmikis of north India, for a sub-category within SC reservations. Needless to say, admitting such a demand would prove immensely challenging in an administrative sense, and politically, it could quite possibly be promoting the infinite fragmentation of society.
Informed observers believe though, that there are ways around these difficulties. But that would require above all, that the formulaic approach to reservations be abandoned in favour of more subtlety and sensitivity. If the Supreme Court order is viewed in this light, rather than an occasion for plotting acts of institutional vengeance or one-up-manship, that would be an unequivocal gain for the cause of social justice.
Wolfowitz's fatal attractions
The scandal surrounding Paul Wolfowitz, president of the World Bank, and a female companion who he secured a cosy billet in the U.S. State Department for, is one among many sordid dramas being played out in Washington DC. The unifying theme of it all could be called the implosion of the Bush administration.
It is an index of the precipitous fall in public esteem of the U.S. president and all those associated with his signature campaign – the war in Iraq – that Bush’s ringing endorsement of Wolfowitz was, like a similar testimonial handed out a few days before to his embattled Attorney-General, read as sure sign that the World Bank president’s political demise was nigh.
Wolfowitz came to the World Bank with a formidable reputation as a strategic hawk, the original author of the infamous doctrine of the “New American Century”. When his name was announced early in Bush’s second term, editorial comment even in sympathetic quarters held that an uncompromising proponent of “hard power” may not be the most effective steward of the foremost agency of “soft power”.
But for those of more sober judgment, what seemed germane was Wolfowitz’s distinguished record of delusional thinking. He had few credentials in the development domain, except the monumentally misconceived forecast made in the second week of the invasion of Iraq, that “we’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon”. For sheer idiocy, this must rank close to the prediction made by his neo-conservative confrere Richard Perle in September 2003, that a grand square in Baghdad could well be named after Bush within a year.
Robert McNamara was the analogy that sprang to mind when Bush chose to place one of the principal architects of the Iraq tragedy at the helm of the World Bank. It was an inexact comparison, since McNamara had with Vietnam’s Tet offensive in 1968, realised his folly. And as World Bank president for 13 years, McNamara brought in many of the values of the Kennedy-Johnson administration’s civil rights agenda and its “war on poverty”. Though his approach, when not distinctly quixotic, was U.S. foreign policy by other means, McNamara is widely credited with bringing poverty front and centre and vastly expanding the lending of the institution.
In contrast, Wolfowitz brought the Manichean worldview of the Bush administration with its sharply etched distinctions of good and evil, its refusal to admit error and its propensity to dissemble for any cause deemed worthwhile. Unlike McNamara again, Wolfowitz had few credentials as a manager or institutional leader. Indeed, it transpires, his approach towards leadership, best expressed during a visit to Iraq in July 2003, was different only in its shades from that of a gang-lord. With the sheen of “victory” yet to wear off, he pronounced then, that leadership was not about “lecturing and posturing and demanding, but demonstrating that your friends will be protected and taken care of, that your enemies will be punished, and that those who refuse to support you will regret having done so”.
It is now known that soon after the September 11 attacks on the U.S., Wolfowitz had shocked moderate elements in the Bush cabinet with his unseemly eagerness to attack Iraq. But if this frenzy was confined at least then within the inner cabals of the Bush White House, there was little that was secret about the response he favoured. The U.S., he proclaimed, needed to go beyond “capturing people and holding them accountable”: it would necessarily have to start “removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism”.
It was the statement of an obsessive ideologue, which had the U.S. Secretary of State, a distinguished soldier who knew what war was about, scrambling to undo the potential for damage around the world.
For a while it seemed likely that European shareholders, whose voting power in the World Bank has increased over the years, would turn down Wolfowitz’s nomination. But the European Union and its main powers proved disinclined to do battle then, since a global division of spoils was at stake. A challenge to U.S. hegemony over the World Bank would have threatened the E.U.’s customary prerogative to name the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Besides, the E.U. was also then manoeuvring to place a partisan in its cause, Pascal Lamy, at the head of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
Details of the generous package of benefits that Wolfowitz personally worked out for his female companion were intimated to the World Bank board soon after they became operative. But the board chose to sleep over it, only to rouse itself into a simulated sense of outrage when an internal audit reported that the deal was out of line with rules. Wolfowitz had by then managed to tick off just about every significant shareholder in the institution with his crusade against corruption, rightly seen as an effort to bend the rules of the World Bank to the U.S.’s militarist agenda.
That the Wolfowitz scandal has not been resolved over two weeks, despite all the feints and manoeuvres of its principals, suggests that the ongoing shift in the global power balance, is yet too slow to produce the summary justice warranted for a man who bears constructive responsibility for some of the worst war crimes of the new millennium. Like the Bush administration itself, it is indubitable though, that Wolfowitz is soon going, deservedly, to be consigned to the garbage dump of history.
It is an index of the precipitous fall in public esteem of the U.S. president and all those associated with his signature campaign – the war in Iraq – that Bush’s ringing endorsement of Wolfowitz was, like a similar testimonial handed out a few days before to his embattled Attorney-General, read as sure sign that the World Bank president’s political demise was nigh.
Wolfowitz came to the World Bank with a formidable reputation as a strategic hawk, the original author of the infamous doctrine of the “New American Century”. When his name was announced early in Bush’s second term, editorial comment even in sympathetic quarters held that an uncompromising proponent of “hard power” may not be the most effective steward of the foremost agency of “soft power”.
But for those of more sober judgment, what seemed germane was Wolfowitz’s distinguished record of delusional thinking. He had few credentials in the development domain, except the monumentally misconceived forecast made in the second week of the invasion of Iraq, that “we’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon”. For sheer idiocy, this must rank close to the prediction made by his neo-conservative confrere Richard Perle in September 2003, that a grand square in Baghdad could well be named after Bush within a year.
Robert McNamara was the analogy that sprang to mind when Bush chose to place one of the principal architects of the Iraq tragedy at the helm of the World Bank. It was an inexact comparison, since McNamara had with Vietnam’s Tet offensive in 1968, realised his folly. And as World Bank president for 13 years, McNamara brought in many of the values of the Kennedy-Johnson administration’s civil rights agenda and its “war on poverty”. Though his approach, when not distinctly quixotic, was U.S. foreign policy by other means, McNamara is widely credited with bringing poverty front and centre and vastly expanding the lending of the institution.
In contrast, Wolfowitz brought the Manichean worldview of the Bush administration with its sharply etched distinctions of good and evil, its refusal to admit error and its propensity to dissemble for any cause deemed worthwhile. Unlike McNamara again, Wolfowitz had few credentials as a manager or institutional leader. Indeed, it transpires, his approach towards leadership, best expressed during a visit to Iraq in July 2003, was different only in its shades from that of a gang-lord. With the sheen of “victory” yet to wear off, he pronounced then, that leadership was not about “lecturing and posturing and demanding, but demonstrating that your friends will be protected and taken care of, that your enemies will be punished, and that those who refuse to support you will regret having done so”.
It is now known that soon after the September 11 attacks on the U.S., Wolfowitz had shocked moderate elements in the Bush cabinet with his unseemly eagerness to attack Iraq. But if this frenzy was confined at least then within the inner cabals of the Bush White House, there was little that was secret about the response he favoured. The U.S., he proclaimed, needed to go beyond “capturing people and holding them accountable”: it would necessarily have to start “removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism”.
It was the statement of an obsessive ideologue, which had the U.S. Secretary of State, a distinguished soldier who knew what war was about, scrambling to undo the potential for damage around the world.
For a while it seemed likely that European shareholders, whose voting power in the World Bank has increased over the years, would turn down Wolfowitz’s nomination. But the European Union and its main powers proved disinclined to do battle then, since a global division of spoils was at stake. A challenge to U.S. hegemony over the World Bank would have threatened the E.U.’s customary prerogative to name the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Besides, the E.U. was also then manoeuvring to place a partisan in its cause, Pascal Lamy, at the head of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
Details of the generous package of benefits that Wolfowitz personally worked out for his female companion were intimated to the World Bank board soon after they became operative. But the board chose to sleep over it, only to rouse itself into a simulated sense of outrage when an internal audit reported that the deal was out of line with rules. Wolfowitz had by then managed to tick off just about every significant shareholder in the institution with his crusade against corruption, rightly seen as an effort to bend the rules of the World Bank to the U.S.’s militarist agenda.
That the Wolfowitz scandal has not been resolved over two weeks, despite all the feints and manoeuvres of its principals, suggests that the ongoing shift in the global power balance, is yet too slow to produce the summary justice warranted for a man who bears constructive responsibility for some of the worst war crimes of the new millennium. Like the Bush administration itself, it is indubitable though, that Wolfowitz is soon going, deservedly, to be consigned to the garbage dump of history.
The Media and Communalism: Changing scenarios, unchanging predilections
The media function in society was for long studied almost exclusively in terms of a “transmission” model, which emphasised the autonomy of the institution and the anonymity of its audience. Its central focus was the influence exerted by the media on social perceptions, through a process of “indoctrination”.
The passage of years has brought in a more sensitive approach, which concerns itself not with the transmission of a message that is passively absorbed by a mass of recipients, but with the meanings attached to the message at the point of reception. In this sense, the modern sociology of the media tends to view it as an apparatus, or more so, a process, of creating shared meanings that an audience can identify with, that equip them with the vocabulary and the empirical knowledge to engage in a public conversation. The media is not just about answering a community’s needs for information; it is as much about constituting that community.
To the extent that “communities” are defined by negative association, the media would reflect, sometimes subtly though often rather crudely, the perceptions of “otherness” without which communal boundaries would remain uncomfortably fluid. But there are also sections of the media that claim to represent a “national” perspective, untainted by narrow pulls of community loyalty. Penetrating the subtleties of the “national” media discourse is often a challenge, since it succeeds in most cases, in disguising communal predilections in the pretence of a larger solidarity.
Several of these features emerge from a comparison between two crucial reference points in India’s recent history, when the communal virus was rampant. The first is the period between 1990 and 1992, when the country was convulsed by the conflict over the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya. If the media in most parts of the country was guilty of not opposing the communal adventurism of the Hindutva forces with sufficient passion or principle, the media in the Hindi speaking region was engaged actively in abetting them. This is no subjective judgment, since it was the firmly established view of the Press Council of India, which in 1990 went into the news coverage and editorial comment of four of the largest Hindi language dailies and passed severe strictures against all of them.
Moving forward from those dark days to 2002 and the communal carnage of Gujarat, another pattern of media conduct is evident. With the exception of the Gujarati press – where a clear tilt was evident towards blaming the victims, towards lurid exaggeration and incitement to violence – the rest of the press nation-wide, both in English and the bhasha, earned wide credit for their unflinching portrayal of the brutalities of Gujarat. Indeed, the pressure was severe enough for the Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi, to lash out at the media for creating what he called “secular riots”. If it could elicit this manner of a response from the man widely identified as the architect of the carnage, then the media must have been doing something right.
There had evidently been a significant cultural change in the media over the preceding twelve years, especially in the Hindi language press. The crucial factor here could well be the tremendous growth in the reach of the Hindi press since the days of Ayodhya. One estimate puts the total number of readers of Hindi dailies in 1990 at around 7.8 million. By the year 2001, it was over 21 million. Today, the two leading newspapers in Hindi alone, are estimated to have a total readership of 40 million. This quantitative explosion has led to significant qualitative changes.
The need to bring larger numbers of readers on board, for one thing, has induced Hindi newspapers to go beyond traditional notions of audience taste and take in cross-community interests. There is a theory in the sociology of the media, which likens the daily ritual of reading a newspaper to the erstwhile practice of prayer, a mass ceremony which individuals in their social isolation pursue, without direct knowledge of others who are similarly engaged. But the implicit knowledge that others too are going through that mass ceremony serves as a form of social solidarity. In this sense, the growth of the Hindi language press in the 1990s may be both the cause and consequence of these emerging new forms of communal solidarity.
At the same time, there are other forms of social exclusions, other kinds of particularities, that are unstated premises of media functioning. It is not necessary to go any further than the news coverage and editorial comment on the Rajinder Sachar committee report on the status of India’s Muslims, to grasp the processes through which this works.
The presentation of the Sachar report in Parliament, coincided with an outbreak of violence in Maharashtra over the vandalisation of a statue of Dr B.R. Ambedkar in Uttar Pradesh. The country’s largest English-language newspaper, The Times of India (ToI) confined the Sachar report to the news digest section, occupying about 3 column-centimetres on the first page. Considerably more attention was devoted to the violence of the Dalit protests in Maharashtra, with the picture of a train that had been set afire between Mumbai and Pune getting marquee space on the front page.
Both the Sachar committee and the Dalit protests earned significant space in the inner pages of the ToI that day, with the latter enjoying by far the greater prominence. What the ToI chose to put front and centre in its coverage of Sachar was the government’s uncertain resolve about introducing reservations in education and employment for the minorities. Thus the issue of the institutionalised discrimination suffered by the Muslim minority was transformed in the ToI discourse into a concern over keeping India’s enclaves of modernity secure from the ingress of the underprivileged.
Where the Dalit protests in Maharashtra were concerned, perceptive media critics have pointed out that the consistent refrain of the mainstream press, in both English and the bhasha, was the inherent violence of the Dalit agitators and the ease with which they could be provoked into serious acts of depredation. There were oblique references to the Khairlanji massacre of September 29 in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra -- in which four members of a Dalit family, a mother and three children, including a visually challenged young man, were killed -- as a contributory factor in the upwelling of Dalit rage. But no effort was in evidence to make amends for a shocking record of media neglect of the egregious crime. Indeed, the record of the media since the massacre was to underplay it, to not see in it the unrelenting social prejudice and persecution that Dalits suffer, but to cast it as a regrettable case of moral vigilantism carried to excess. And it speaks eloquently of the blinkers that the media willingly dons on account of ownership pressures and the social conditioning of its staff, that it took a Dalit-owned newspaper in Maharashtra to investigate and bring the crime to light after weeks of arduous effort.
Similar acts of wilful social blindness were in evidence in the media’s approach to the Sachar committee findings. There could be various alibis offered for the relative inattention with which the report was received by the media. It could well be argued that the social and educational handicaps of the Muslim community are not exactly a news flash. Again, those familiar with the dynamics of competition in the newspaper business, might ascribe the relative neglect of the Sachar committee to another factor. The Indian Express (IE), had as the media jargon has it, “scooped” the main findings of the Sachar committee well over a month before its report was formally presented. The IE coverage appeared in a compact series of articles on the front page, through the last week of October. The newspaper then chose to pronounce its final editorial verdict on the issue by urging the political leadership to acknowledge the undeniable verity, that economic growth was the way out of social backwardness. In effect, the IE succeeded in submerging the complexity of the Sachar committee’s findings in a simplistic nostrum much favoured in today’s neo-liberal climate.
While the IE was constructing this narrative of discrimination on its news pages and paying obeisance to the virtues of globalisation editorially, a quite different picture of willing thraldom to superstition and a stubborn refusal to adopt modernity, was being assembled in another quarter of the print media. Between October 24 and 29, the ToI carried no fewer than 6 articles – of which two were on the frontpage and one on the editorial page – on the case of Imrana, the young woman who had been raped by her father-in-law and stigmatised by the Muslim clergy for her temerity in seeking to bring the criminal to account.
On October 25, the ToI ran a story on Imrana on page one, right alongside another one on the confusion within the Muslim community about when precisely the Eid festivities were to be observed. This latter story led off with a description of the subjectivity underlying the identification of the precise date and the tension that this set up with modern notions of objectivity.
The Imrana story and the accompanying article on Eid enjoyed roughly the same priority in terms of space allocation and placement. But these stories were topped off by a large photograph, occupying marquee space on the front page, which showed the touring Pakistani cricket team offering Eid prayers at their port of call in Chandigarh. The picture was rather boldly captioned “Champions of the faith?”
With this rather bizarre juxtaposition of stories and visuals, the ToI managed within about a third of the space on its front page, to reinforce several stereotypes about the Muslim community, not least among these being their supposedly extra-territorial loyalties.
Yet the ToI could not remain oblivious to the news emerging from another quarter on the findings of the Sachar report. On November 4, it ran an editorial on the main findings of the committee. It began by deprecating the policy of reservations as a “blunt instrument” that failed to address the roots of the problem. Instead, other forms of “positive discrimination” could be thought of, including building “quality schools” and “providing healthcare” in “backward districts” that have high settlement densities of Muslims, dalits or tribals. Government contracts again, could be preferentially allocated to these disadvantaged social groups, to “facilitate their participation in the modern economy”. In turn, the ToI chose to place a special onus on the “Muslim leadership” to “encourage the community to take to modern education in larger numbers”.
Article 350A of the Constitution mandates precisely this manner of positive discrimination in favour of minority communities where State investments in education are concerned. Backward area development policies adopted by the central government, not to mention various states, have also sought, without overtly assuming the colours of a class or community-based approach, to direct attention preferentially towards regions of economic stagnancy. The ToI has shown admirable percipience in waking up to the reality that backward areas are in most parts of the country, also predominantly populated by people who would fall within the broad rubric of “backward classes”. But this realisation is not informed by any effort to understand why backward area development policies have also proved fairly ineffective in redressing disparities, indeed, why they have proven an even blunter instrument than reservations.
On November 8, the ToI carried an article on Islamic schools or madarsas, on its editorial page. Titled “Beyond Terror”, the article argued that the debate on these institutions had remained for too long confined to the issue of terrorism, but because the Muslim community was under pressure in times of global concern over the issue, it had responded with a spirited defence of these institutions and the learning they imparted, as uniquely imbued with a moral and spiritual sensibility. This attitude in turn simply evaded the reality that the madarsas have a tendency to “promote a narrow, insular mindset”. And as long as security concerns remained the principal impulse behind the debate, there was little chance that matters of immense import to the “welfare of millions of children studying in madarsas” would be addressed.
Though not formally released at the time this article was published, many of the key findings of the Sachar committee were in the public domain by then. On the issue of madarsas, the conclusions were fairly clear: fewer than 4 percent of Muslim children in the school-going age group attended these institutions; at an all-India level, their number is not the “millions” as the commentator in the ToI suggested, but just marginally over one million. Far from being an institution of choice, madarsas were “often the last recourse of Muslims especially those who lack the economic resources to bear the costs of schooling”. And for all the odium heaped on them, madarsas had very often been found to “have indeed provided schooling to Muslim children where the State (had) failed them”.
Granted, the commentator in the ToI could not possibly have reflected all these findings in their complexity since they were yet to be made public in an official sense. But to admit that gaps exist in the level of public information is one thing, to leapfrog into realms of conjecture, quite another. A few inconvenient facts could not evidently, stand in the way of constructing what seemed a compelling narrative of social backwardness by choice among the Mulsim community.
It was mid-November by the time the ToI returned on its news pages, to the theme of the Sachar committee. On November 17, it reported that the committee’s recommendations had put the ruling coalition, the United Progressive Alliance, in a “fix”. The following day, it frontpaged a report arguing that the committee’s recommendation that the Muslim share in several vital sectors be increased, would in effect “give rise to the demand for a community quota leading to a fullscale political confrontation”. Having begun its coverage of the Sachar report by viewing it through the prism of the reservations issue, the ToI undoubtedly saw no reason to change course when more details were available.
To look at the media today is to look at a complex, dynamic and evolving scenario, to consider a quantitative explosion that has not quite been accompanied by a corresponding qualitative change. While the media can be relied upon to raise its voice against overt and violent attacks on minority communities, its resolve in dealing with systemic discrimination that is less visible, is not quite so clear. Some of the rougher edges that were evident in the early-1990s may well have been ironed out. That was the time that the Muslim minority was portrayed as the legatees of the numerous abuses that India’s culture and civilisation had suffered in the past. Today, they are portrayed as an impediment to the glittering promises of modernity that lie in the future for India.
The passage of years has brought in a more sensitive approach, which concerns itself not with the transmission of a message that is passively absorbed by a mass of recipients, but with the meanings attached to the message at the point of reception. In this sense, the modern sociology of the media tends to view it as an apparatus, or more so, a process, of creating shared meanings that an audience can identify with, that equip them with the vocabulary and the empirical knowledge to engage in a public conversation. The media is not just about answering a community’s needs for information; it is as much about constituting that community.
To the extent that “communities” are defined by negative association, the media would reflect, sometimes subtly though often rather crudely, the perceptions of “otherness” without which communal boundaries would remain uncomfortably fluid. But there are also sections of the media that claim to represent a “national” perspective, untainted by narrow pulls of community loyalty. Penetrating the subtleties of the “national” media discourse is often a challenge, since it succeeds in most cases, in disguising communal predilections in the pretence of a larger solidarity.
Several of these features emerge from a comparison between two crucial reference points in India’s recent history, when the communal virus was rampant. The first is the period between 1990 and 1992, when the country was convulsed by the conflict over the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya. If the media in most parts of the country was guilty of not opposing the communal adventurism of the Hindutva forces with sufficient passion or principle, the media in the Hindi speaking region was engaged actively in abetting them. This is no subjective judgment, since it was the firmly established view of the Press Council of India, which in 1990 went into the news coverage and editorial comment of four of the largest Hindi language dailies and passed severe strictures against all of them.
Moving forward from those dark days to 2002 and the communal carnage of Gujarat, another pattern of media conduct is evident. With the exception of the Gujarati press – where a clear tilt was evident towards blaming the victims, towards lurid exaggeration and incitement to violence – the rest of the press nation-wide, both in English and the bhasha, earned wide credit for their unflinching portrayal of the brutalities of Gujarat. Indeed, the pressure was severe enough for the Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi, to lash out at the media for creating what he called “secular riots”. If it could elicit this manner of a response from the man widely identified as the architect of the carnage, then the media must have been doing something right.
There had evidently been a significant cultural change in the media over the preceding twelve years, especially in the Hindi language press. The crucial factor here could well be the tremendous growth in the reach of the Hindi press since the days of Ayodhya. One estimate puts the total number of readers of Hindi dailies in 1990 at around 7.8 million. By the year 2001, it was over 21 million. Today, the two leading newspapers in Hindi alone, are estimated to have a total readership of 40 million. This quantitative explosion has led to significant qualitative changes.
The need to bring larger numbers of readers on board, for one thing, has induced Hindi newspapers to go beyond traditional notions of audience taste and take in cross-community interests. There is a theory in the sociology of the media, which likens the daily ritual of reading a newspaper to the erstwhile practice of prayer, a mass ceremony which individuals in their social isolation pursue, without direct knowledge of others who are similarly engaged. But the implicit knowledge that others too are going through that mass ceremony serves as a form of social solidarity. In this sense, the growth of the Hindi language press in the 1990s may be both the cause and consequence of these emerging new forms of communal solidarity.
At the same time, there are other forms of social exclusions, other kinds of particularities, that are unstated premises of media functioning. It is not necessary to go any further than the news coverage and editorial comment on the Rajinder Sachar committee report on the status of India’s Muslims, to grasp the processes through which this works.
The presentation of the Sachar report in Parliament, coincided with an outbreak of violence in Maharashtra over the vandalisation of a statue of Dr B.R. Ambedkar in Uttar Pradesh. The country’s largest English-language newspaper, The Times of India (ToI) confined the Sachar report to the news digest section, occupying about 3 column-centimetres on the first page. Considerably more attention was devoted to the violence of the Dalit protests in Maharashtra, with the picture of a train that had been set afire between Mumbai and Pune getting marquee space on the front page.
Both the Sachar committee and the Dalit protests earned significant space in the inner pages of the ToI that day, with the latter enjoying by far the greater prominence. What the ToI chose to put front and centre in its coverage of Sachar was the government’s uncertain resolve about introducing reservations in education and employment for the minorities. Thus the issue of the institutionalised discrimination suffered by the Muslim minority was transformed in the ToI discourse into a concern over keeping India’s enclaves of modernity secure from the ingress of the underprivileged.
Where the Dalit protests in Maharashtra were concerned, perceptive media critics have pointed out that the consistent refrain of the mainstream press, in both English and the bhasha, was the inherent violence of the Dalit agitators and the ease with which they could be provoked into serious acts of depredation. There were oblique references to the Khairlanji massacre of September 29 in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra -- in which four members of a Dalit family, a mother and three children, including a visually challenged young man, were killed -- as a contributory factor in the upwelling of Dalit rage. But no effort was in evidence to make amends for a shocking record of media neglect of the egregious crime. Indeed, the record of the media since the massacre was to underplay it, to not see in it the unrelenting social prejudice and persecution that Dalits suffer, but to cast it as a regrettable case of moral vigilantism carried to excess. And it speaks eloquently of the blinkers that the media willingly dons on account of ownership pressures and the social conditioning of its staff, that it took a Dalit-owned newspaper in Maharashtra to investigate and bring the crime to light after weeks of arduous effort.
Similar acts of wilful social blindness were in evidence in the media’s approach to the Sachar committee findings. There could be various alibis offered for the relative inattention with which the report was received by the media. It could well be argued that the social and educational handicaps of the Muslim community are not exactly a news flash. Again, those familiar with the dynamics of competition in the newspaper business, might ascribe the relative neglect of the Sachar committee to another factor. The Indian Express (IE), had as the media jargon has it, “scooped” the main findings of the Sachar committee well over a month before its report was formally presented. The IE coverage appeared in a compact series of articles on the front page, through the last week of October. The newspaper then chose to pronounce its final editorial verdict on the issue by urging the political leadership to acknowledge the undeniable verity, that economic growth was the way out of social backwardness. In effect, the IE succeeded in submerging the complexity of the Sachar committee’s findings in a simplistic nostrum much favoured in today’s neo-liberal climate.
While the IE was constructing this narrative of discrimination on its news pages and paying obeisance to the virtues of globalisation editorially, a quite different picture of willing thraldom to superstition and a stubborn refusal to adopt modernity, was being assembled in another quarter of the print media. Between October 24 and 29, the ToI carried no fewer than 6 articles – of which two were on the frontpage and one on the editorial page – on the case of Imrana, the young woman who had been raped by her father-in-law and stigmatised by the Muslim clergy for her temerity in seeking to bring the criminal to account.
On October 25, the ToI ran a story on Imrana on page one, right alongside another one on the confusion within the Muslim community about when precisely the Eid festivities were to be observed. This latter story led off with a description of the subjectivity underlying the identification of the precise date and the tension that this set up with modern notions of objectivity.
The Imrana story and the accompanying article on Eid enjoyed roughly the same priority in terms of space allocation and placement. But these stories were topped off by a large photograph, occupying marquee space on the front page, which showed the touring Pakistani cricket team offering Eid prayers at their port of call in Chandigarh. The picture was rather boldly captioned “Champions of the faith?”
With this rather bizarre juxtaposition of stories and visuals, the ToI managed within about a third of the space on its front page, to reinforce several stereotypes about the Muslim community, not least among these being their supposedly extra-territorial loyalties.
Yet the ToI could not remain oblivious to the news emerging from another quarter on the findings of the Sachar report. On November 4, it ran an editorial on the main findings of the committee. It began by deprecating the policy of reservations as a “blunt instrument” that failed to address the roots of the problem. Instead, other forms of “positive discrimination” could be thought of, including building “quality schools” and “providing healthcare” in “backward districts” that have high settlement densities of Muslims, dalits or tribals. Government contracts again, could be preferentially allocated to these disadvantaged social groups, to “facilitate their participation in the modern economy”. In turn, the ToI chose to place a special onus on the “Muslim leadership” to “encourage the community to take to modern education in larger numbers”.
Article 350A of the Constitution mandates precisely this manner of positive discrimination in favour of minority communities where State investments in education are concerned. Backward area development policies adopted by the central government, not to mention various states, have also sought, without overtly assuming the colours of a class or community-based approach, to direct attention preferentially towards regions of economic stagnancy. The ToI has shown admirable percipience in waking up to the reality that backward areas are in most parts of the country, also predominantly populated by people who would fall within the broad rubric of “backward classes”. But this realisation is not informed by any effort to understand why backward area development policies have also proved fairly ineffective in redressing disparities, indeed, why they have proven an even blunter instrument than reservations.
On November 8, the ToI carried an article on Islamic schools or madarsas, on its editorial page. Titled “Beyond Terror”, the article argued that the debate on these institutions had remained for too long confined to the issue of terrorism, but because the Muslim community was under pressure in times of global concern over the issue, it had responded with a spirited defence of these institutions and the learning they imparted, as uniquely imbued with a moral and spiritual sensibility. This attitude in turn simply evaded the reality that the madarsas have a tendency to “promote a narrow, insular mindset”. And as long as security concerns remained the principal impulse behind the debate, there was little chance that matters of immense import to the “welfare of millions of children studying in madarsas” would be addressed.
Though not formally released at the time this article was published, many of the key findings of the Sachar committee were in the public domain by then. On the issue of madarsas, the conclusions were fairly clear: fewer than 4 percent of Muslim children in the school-going age group attended these institutions; at an all-India level, their number is not the “millions” as the commentator in the ToI suggested, but just marginally over one million. Far from being an institution of choice, madarsas were “often the last recourse of Muslims especially those who lack the economic resources to bear the costs of schooling”. And for all the odium heaped on them, madarsas had very often been found to “have indeed provided schooling to Muslim children where the State (had) failed them”.
Granted, the commentator in the ToI could not possibly have reflected all these findings in their complexity since they were yet to be made public in an official sense. But to admit that gaps exist in the level of public information is one thing, to leapfrog into realms of conjecture, quite another. A few inconvenient facts could not evidently, stand in the way of constructing what seemed a compelling narrative of social backwardness by choice among the Mulsim community.
It was mid-November by the time the ToI returned on its news pages, to the theme of the Sachar committee. On November 17, it reported that the committee’s recommendations had put the ruling coalition, the United Progressive Alliance, in a “fix”. The following day, it frontpaged a report arguing that the committee’s recommendation that the Muslim share in several vital sectors be increased, would in effect “give rise to the demand for a community quota leading to a fullscale political confrontation”. Having begun its coverage of the Sachar report by viewing it through the prism of the reservations issue, the ToI undoubtedly saw no reason to change course when more details were available.
To look at the media today is to look at a complex, dynamic and evolving scenario, to consider a quantitative explosion that has not quite been accompanied by a corresponding qualitative change. While the media can be relied upon to raise its voice against overt and violent attacks on minority communities, its resolve in dealing with systemic discrimination that is less visible, is not quite so clear. Some of the rougher edges that were evident in the early-1990s may well have been ironed out. That was the time that the Muslim minority was portrayed as the legatees of the numerous abuses that India’s culture and civilisation had suffered in the past. Today, they are portrayed as an impediment to the glittering promises of modernity that lie in the future for India.
Monday, April 23, 2007
Getting connected at the SAARC Summit
Among the ceremonial events that marked the opening of the 14th SAARC Summit in Delhi early April, was the flagging-off of a car rally. Beginning two weeks earlier in Bangladesh, the rally had briefly halted in Delhi en route to covering all the member countries (then seven) of the regional grouping, in the space of a month. It was a rather literal-minded effort to underline the Summit’s ostensible theme of ‘connectivity’. But even as the cars went their way, proudly emblazoned with the emblems of generous Indian corporate sponsors, nine forlorn youths from Maharashtra were making their way back from the Wagah border. They had cycled 2000 kilometres over a few weeks, in the expectation of visiting Lahore on a peace-and-goodwill mission – only to have their visa applications rejected at the last moment.
Is ‘connectivity’ about a coming together of the people of Southasia? Or is it merely a means of creating greater opportunities for Indian business? Certainly, as the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, addressed his summit partners shortly after assuming the SAARC chair from Bangladesh, he seemed to be advocating connectivity in its widest possible sense – a confluence not merely of “physical, economic” attributes, but also “of the mind”. Southasia as a region, he said, has traditionally only flourished when it has been connected within itself and to the rest of the world.
Prime Minister Singh was reprising a much-favoured theme: the endeavour of making borders irrelevant, and giving the people of the region the wherewithal to move freely across the vast populated expanses of Southasia, searching out and utilising every opportunity available for both their own betterment and the larger social good. This is undoubtedly a noble vision, yet it overlooks a significant point. As the cyclists from Maharashtra found, they probably do not enjoy the same privileges of cross-border mobility as the owner of a car. While connectivity within Southasia could become a right theoretically enjoyed by all, it may practically remain the preserve of a mere handful.
To give him due credit, what the Indian prime minister envisages is a situation in which the freedom to travel becomes a reality for a broad cross-section of the people of Southasia. And thus, he promised that India would soon announce a unilateral liberalisation of visa rules and procedures for students, academics, journalists, as well as individuals traveling for medical treatment. India would also provide duty-free and quota-free access for imports from SAARC member countries that happen to be classified among the “least developed” – excluding Pakistan from the party. The sensitive list of commodities, where the new rules would not apply, would, the prime minister assured, be pared down and soon made public. No time frame was specified for these decisions being made and operationalised, though the history of SAARC as a regional grouping is strewn with promises made in the effulgence of a summit, only to be forgotten just as rapidly.
It was little surprise that the assembled dignitaries were underwhelmed by Prime Minister Singh’s announcement. As former Indian Foreign Secretary Muchkund Dubey has commented, trade liberalisation in Southasia has been “flawed” from the start – and this has been a conscious “political choice” on all sides. A key aspect of all such agreements is the ‘negative list’, which specifies the product lines where free trade does not apply. As yet, no Southasian country, least of all the region’s largest, has shown the generosity or courage to prune this list to a meaningful level. In the inchoately formed and contentiously interpreted South Asian Free Trade Agreement (SAFTA), India’s negative list is four times larger than the most recent offer it has made to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
Regional tokenism
When it is not of purely symbolic value, the fact is that ‘duty free’ access could also be a means of increasing opportunities for Indian business. India’s free trade agreement (FTA) with Sri Lanka, which came into effect in 2000, has been an umbrella under which shrewd businessmen have managed to arbitrage customs-duty differentials on third-country imports. Sri Lanka, for instance, allows duty-free imports of copper scrap and Indian businessmen have been sharp enough to spot the opportunities this affords for investing in copper smelters in Sri Lanka, for re-export to India. A similar process has been underway in the vegetable-oils market. Value addition in Sri Lanka from these exports, which account for the bulk of its trade with India, is minimal. The principal upshot has been that a few Indian businessmen have managed to enrich themselves. How Sri Lankan business groups have fared in the same sectors, remains a matter that is yet to be documented.
On the other hand, India could be using the promise of duty-free access for the region’s least-developed member countries as a means of leveraging greater trade openings within Southasia, with an eye towards emerging as a major investor in regional light industry, transport and telecom. This is likely to encounter competition from China, which perhaps could underline its own investment ambitions with a greater infusion of funds. Moreover, as long as the smaller countries in Southasia remain locked in a low-level equilibrium of poverty and slow growth, the opportunities for such investments are not likely to be particularly large in the near future.
As home to the largest concentration of the world’s poor, Southasia needs to reconsider how well the process of trade liberalisation truly aids in increasing social welfare. There is at least an equal risk that liberalisation within the region could become a zero-sum game, with each country trying to out-compete the other in lowering wage levels– in other words, in using poverty as a source of competitive advantage. Trade liberalisation has all too often been seen exclusively in terms of a charter of rights for business. What Southasia needs in order to escape from its grinding poverty is a social charter, one that will secure at least the barest entitlements to subsistence for its people.
Of all the pronouncements made in the Summit’s Delhi Declaration of 4 April, two may have a direct bearing on mass welfare. First is the SAARC Development Fund, which has now been ordered operationalised in full conformity with the charter of the association. Second is the SAARC Food Bank, which is intended to “supplement national efforts to provide food security to the people of the region”. Scepticism would not be out of place with regard to either of these endeavours, especially since India’s management of its food economy over the past decade and a half of globalisation has been little short of chaotic. In short order, the depleted warehouses of the early 1990s were swamped with an over-abundance of food, which was subsequently disposed of by exporting at prices lower than those reserved for India’s poor. Since the severe drought of 2002, the pace of stock depletion has accelerated, and the last two years have seen grain imports of unprecedented magnitude.
When the efforts of national governments have been so disastrously askew, there seems little reason to believe that trans-national efforts at cooperation will fare much better. Anybody viewing the financial allocations that have been made would be justified in concluding that these programmes are but the barest tokenism. They would serve little purpose other than sustaining the somnolent SAARC bureaucracy through another year. Of course, if a much needed fillip is also imparted to the various track-two efforts that have rather ineffectively sought to energise ‘regionalism’ thus far, that would be an outcome to celebrate, even if it is unintended.
A regional institution
This does not mean that the Delhi Summit was a complete fiasco. As Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee said, it was the smoothest and least contentious such gathering in many years. This despite SAARC’s new member, Afghanistan, having provided a rather colourful prelude, in President Hamid Karzai’s trenchant attack on Pakistan just before his arrival in Delhi. In remarks to The New York Times, published to much consternation just when the committee of SAARC foreign ministers was in session, President Karzai accused Pakistan of harbouring a “colonial” mentality, and being intent on transforming Afghanistan into a satellite state.
Landing in Delhi, President Karzai would have undoubtedly been comforted by the thought that most of the member countries in SAARC were undergoing transitions, though with varying degrees of tension and trauma. Indeed, aside perhaps, from Bhutan and the Maldives (the two smallest members) and India (which is too big to feel the pain of its million mutinies too acutely), every other SAARC member state might witness a change in the character of its ruling arrangement before the next summit. This raises some interesting questions about just how far the decisions made in Delhi will stand the test of changing times.
Yet for all the cynicism that customarily shrouds the SAARC organisation, there was at least one decision made during the Summit that was welcomed across a broad spectrum. If all goes according to plan, a Southasian University could soon be a part of the academic landscape of the region. Its central campus would be in India, with satellites and perhaps entire faculties being located in other countries. An intergovernmental steering committee has now been tasked with drawing up the charter of the university.
Considering the record of earlier initiatives in the realm of education (for instance, the little-known SAARC fellowships programme), there is reason to believe that things may not indeed pan out quite as well as the more optimistic observers believe. Presumably, with the Southasian University’s location having been broadly settled, any residual uncertainties on this count would be an internal matter of India’s. There are believed to be two contending opinions within the Indian government, the first of which seeks to convert an existing campus – such as the Viswabharati at Shantiniketan, West Bengal – into a Southasian institution; while the second favours an entirely new establishment, based in all probability in Delhi. Quite apart from these decisions, there is immense potential for discord between the member nations when the charter of the new centre of learning is drawn up.
With the extravagance of hope continually bumping up against the recognition of reality, some scholars believe that the best course for the new university to follow would be to go to the heart of the most contentious subjects that divide the Subcontinent: history, comparative religion, contemporary politics, international affairs and the like. Southasia is a region divided as much by conflicting readings of history as by competing ambitions of national elites. And for reasons of history and sheer geopolitical clout, India has assumed for itself the mantle of representing the civilisational ethos of the region, in a manner that neighbouring states find insensitive, if not hegemonic.
The groves of academia may well afford a congenial environment in which an alternative vision could be constructed – one that provides room for all Southasians to participate, and respects their particularities. Though optimism is at a premium after the indifferent performance of SAARC over the first 22 years of its existence, there is still room presumably, for the occasional extravagance of the imagination.
Is ‘connectivity’ about a coming together of the people of Southasia? Or is it merely a means of creating greater opportunities for Indian business? Certainly, as the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, addressed his summit partners shortly after assuming the SAARC chair from Bangladesh, he seemed to be advocating connectivity in its widest possible sense – a confluence not merely of “physical, economic” attributes, but also “of the mind”. Southasia as a region, he said, has traditionally only flourished when it has been connected within itself and to the rest of the world.
Prime Minister Singh was reprising a much-favoured theme: the endeavour of making borders irrelevant, and giving the people of the region the wherewithal to move freely across the vast populated expanses of Southasia, searching out and utilising every opportunity available for both their own betterment and the larger social good. This is undoubtedly a noble vision, yet it overlooks a significant point. As the cyclists from Maharashtra found, they probably do not enjoy the same privileges of cross-border mobility as the owner of a car. While connectivity within Southasia could become a right theoretically enjoyed by all, it may practically remain the preserve of a mere handful.
To give him due credit, what the Indian prime minister envisages is a situation in which the freedom to travel becomes a reality for a broad cross-section of the people of Southasia. And thus, he promised that India would soon announce a unilateral liberalisation of visa rules and procedures for students, academics, journalists, as well as individuals traveling for medical treatment. India would also provide duty-free and quota-free access for imports from SAARC member countries that happen to be classified among the “least developed” – excluding Pakistan from the party. The sensitive list of commodities, where the new rules would not apply, would, the prime minister assured, be pared down and soon made public. No time frame was specified for these decisions being made and operationalised, though the history of SAARC as a regional grouping is strewn with promises made in the effulgence of a summit, only to be forgotten just as rapidly.
It was little surprise that the assembled dignitaries were underwhelmed by Prime Minister Singh’s announcement. As former Indian Foreign Secretary Muchkund Dubey has commented, trade liberalisation in Southasia has been “flawed” from the start – and this has been a conscious “political choice” on all sides. A key aspect of all such agreements is the ‘negative list’, which specifies the product lines where free trade does not apply. As yet, no Southasian country, least of all the region’s largest, has shown the generosity or courage to prune this list to a meaningful level. In the inchoately formed and contentiously interpreted South Asian Free Trade Agreement (SAFTA), India’s negative list is four times larger than the most recent offer it has made to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
Regional tokenism
When it is not of purely symbolic value, the fact is that ‘duty free’ access could also be a means of increasing opportunities for Indian business. India’s free trade agreement (FTA) with Sri Lanka, which came into effect in 2000, has been an umbrella under which shrewd businessmen have managed to arbitrage customs-duty differentials on third-country imports. Sri Lanka, for instance, allows duty-free imports of copper scrap and Indian businessmen have been sharp enough to spot the opportunities this affords for investing in copper smelters in Sri Lanka, for re-export to India. A similar process has been underway in the vegetable-oils market. Value addition in Sri Lanka from these exports, which account for the bulk of its trade with India, is minimal. The principal upshot has been that a few Indian businessmen have managed to enrich themselves. How Sri Lankan business groups have fared in the same sectors, remains a matter that is yet to be documented.
On the other hand, India could be using the promise of duty-free access for the region’s least-developed member countries as a means of leveraging greater trade openings within Southasia, with an eye towards emerging as a major investor in regional light industry, transport and telecom. This is likely to encounter competition from China, which perhaps could underline its own investment ambitions with a greater infusion of funds. Moreover, as long as the smaller countries in Southasia remain locked in a low-level equilibrium of poverty and slow growth, the opportunities for such investments are not likely to be particularly large in the near future.
As home to the largest concentration of the world’s poor, Southasia needs to reconsider how well the process of trade liberalisation truly aids in increasing social welfare. There is at least an equal risk that liberalisation within the region could become a zero-sum game, with each country trying to out-compete the other in lowering wage levels– in other words, in using poverty as a source of competitive advantage. Trade liberalisation has all too often been seen exclusively in terms of a charter of rights for business. What Southasia needs in order to escape from its grinding poverty is a social charter, one that will secure at least the barest entitlements to subsistence for its people.
Of all the pronouncements made in the Summit’s Delhi Declaration of 4 April, two may have a direct bearing on mass welfare. First is the SAARC Development Fund, which has now been ordered operationalised in full conformity with the charter of the association. Second is the SAARC Food Bank, which is intended to “supplement national efforts to provide food security to the people of the region”. Scepticism would not be out of place with regard to either of these endeavours, especially since India’s management of its food economy over the past decade and a half of globalisation has been little short of chaotic. In short order, the depleted warehouses of the early 1990s were swamped with an over-abundance of food, which was subsequently disposed of by exporting at prices lower than those reserved for India’s poor. Since the severe drought of 2002, the pace of stock depletion has accelerated, and the last two years have seen grain imports of unprecedented magnitude.
When the efforts of national governments have been so disastrously askew, there seems little reason to believe that trans-national efforts at cooperation will fare much better. Anybody viewing the financial allocations that have been made would be justified in concluding that these programmes are but the barest tokenism. They would serve little purpose other than sustaining the somnolent SAARC bureaucracy through another year. Of course, if a much needed fillip is also imparted to the various track-two efforts that have rather ineffectively sought to energise ‘regionalism’ thus far, that would be an outcome to celebrate, even if it is unintended.
A regional institution
This does not mean that the Delhi Summit was a complete fiasco. As Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee said, it was the smoothest and least contentious such gathering in many years. This despite SAARC’s new member, Afghanistan, having provided a rather colourful prelude, in President Hamid Karzai’s trenchant attack on Pakistan just before his arrival in Delhi. In remarks to The New York Times, published to much consternation just when the committee of SAARC foreign ministers was in session, President Karzai accused Pakistan of harbouring a “colonial” mentality, and being intent on transforming Afghanistan into a satellite state.
Landing in Delhi, President Karzai would have undoubtedly been comforted by the thought that most of the member countries in SAARC were undergoing transitions, though with varying degrees of tension and trauma. Indeed, aside perhaps, from Bhutan and the Maldives (the two smallest members) and India (which is too big to feel the pain of its million mutinies too acutely), every other SAARC member state might witness a change in the character of its ruling arrangement before the next summit. This raises some interesting questions about just how far the decisions made in Delhi will stand the test of changing times.
Yet for all the cynicism that customarily shrouds the SAARC organisation, there was at least one decision made during the Summit that was welcomed across a broad spectrum. If all goes according to plan, a Southasian University could soon be a part of the academic landscape of the region. Its central campus would be in India, with satellites and perhaps entire faculties being located in other countries. An intergovernmental steering committee has now been tasked with drawing up the charter of the university.
Considering the record of earlier initiatives in the realm of education (for instance, the little-known SAARC fellowships programme), there is reason to believe that things may not indeed pan out quite as well as the more optimistic observers believe. Presumably, with the Southasian University’s location having been broadly settled, any residual uncertainties on this count would be an internal matter of India’s. There are believed to be two contending opinions within the Indian government, the first of which seeks to convert an existing campus – such as the Viswabharati at Shantiniketan, West Bengal – into a Southasian institution; while the second favours an entirely new establishment, based in all probability in Delhi. Quite apart from these decisions, there is immense potential for discord between the member nations when the charter of the new centre of learning is drawn up.
With the extravagance of hope continually bumping up against the recognition of reality, some scholars believe that the best course for the new university to follow would be to go to the heart of the most contentious subjects that divide the Subcontinent: history, comparative religion, contemporary politics, international affairs and the like. Southasia is a region divided as much by conflicting readings of history as by competing ambitions of national elites. And for reasons of history and sheer geopolitical clout, India has assumed for itself the mantle of representing the civilisational ethos of the region, in a manner that neighbouring states find insensitive, if not hegemonic.
The groves of academia may well afford a congenial environment in which an alternative vision could be constructed – one that provides room for all Southasians to participate, and respects their particularities. Though optimism is at a premium after the indifferent performance of SAARC over the first 22 years of its existence, there is still room presumably, for the occasional extravagance of the imagination.
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