Conjoined by history, Pakistan and Afghanistan need new ideas to work themselves out of the geopolitical trap they have been lured into by the U.S.
As a term in the international political science discourse, “failed state” is of relatively recent origin. It would take a great deal of effort to understand when the term entered the vocabulary, gaining currency first in a tiny trickle, before becoming the virtual torrent it is today. What is germane for present purposes, is that Afghanistan and Pakistan both gained the honour around the same time – Afghanistan perhaps a few years ahead of Pakistan, though the two have since been marching in virtual lockstep.
Despite the lack of clarity about its provenance, there is little doubt that the U.S. foreign policy establishment has played a key role in lending the notion of the “failed state” respectability. The discussion has been fuelled in large part by the concern within these circles on the growing disorder of the international states system. In the mid-1990s, the term was applied to states that seemed to be on a progressive pathway towards disintegration. The end of the Cold War as it was called, was also the beginning of a severe process of deterioration of internal governance structures in a number of countries.
That coincidence, if that indeed it was, needs to be further researched. But if “failure” as pronounced by the U.S. foreign policy establishment is the sole criterion, then South Asia – and India as the pivotal nation within the region – has much to worry about.
For Pakistan, conferment of the honour of “state failure” dates from around the late-1990s, roughly from the time that disillusionment with the Taliban was beginning to dawn in the U.S. and the numerous U.S. companies that had looked to the Islamic militia as the key to opening a pathway towards the energy riches of Central Asia, were beginning to tire of the strategic complexities involved in the new version of the “great game”. Pakistan was then one among many countries considered worthy of the accolade, which of course had been conferred upon Afghanistan well before.
The Science of Failed States
By the early years of the millennium, the science of “failed states” was being systematically established. In 2005, the “Fund for Peace”, a research and advocacy body based in Washington DC, in association with Foreign Policy magazine, began putting out an annual listing of the world’s “failed states”. It was the global, negative beauty pageant that was awaited with the most dread.
In 2005, Afghanistan ranked 11th in the listing and Pakistan 34th. In the system adopted by the analysts of “failed states”, Pakistan just escaped being classed under the “alert” category, which comprised all the countries deemed beyond the threshold. It was however, ranked top within the next category of critical attention, named “warning”.
The following year, Pakistan was ranked 9th, well within the “alert” category and ahead (or to be more precise, behind, since this is a negative beauty contest) even of Afghanistan, ranked 10th. It was perhaps the most precipitate collapse of credibility as a state, at least as far as perceptions within the U.S. foreign policy establishment are concerned.
In part because it managed to halt its own precipitate slide in the indicators that make up the “failed state” index, Pakistan recovered fractionally in the rankings to 12th position in 2007, while Afghanistan dwindled to 8th. The following year brought about a further decline in the fortunes of both: Afghanistan clocking in at the 7th place and Pakistan intimately behind (or rather ahead), at 9th place.
In the most recent listing of state failure, 35 of 177 nations were classed under the “alert” category, suggesting the imminent possibility of failure. Another 92 countries were categorised under the “warning” list. Taken as an aggregate of crisis possibilities, this means that no fewer than 71 percent of the nations that were within the sample and well over 60 percent of the current membership of the United Nations, are deemed to be in danger of implosion.
In the most recent rankings, India came in respectably at 98th, classed within the tail-end of the “warning” category. But India has ample reason to worry, since five countries within its near neighbourhood, from amongst the membership of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), have been graded under the “alert” category. And the two others keep India company in the “warning” list.
Whatever the ethical merits of the rankings – and it must be noted that they lack a sense of history and completely leave out of account western culpability in the undermining of Third World states – they provide a window into understanding the current situation in Pakistan. Increasingly, it is a country whose fate is tied up with Afghanistan. This is not just because of undeniable historical links and ties of community and kinship, but also because, to their dual misfortune, they have been designated as battlegrounds in the preservation of a geopolitical order of growing fragility. They have in the interests of mere survival, surrendered virtually all autonomy to a superpower that began a military adventure within their territories in the firm belief that it would not be challenged. Now that superpower is flailing about and sinking into a morass of strategic confusion as it seeks to deal with the multitude of challenges – military and above all economic – that it faces.
The law of unexpected outcomes has kicked in with a vengeance.
When the accidental U.S. president, George W. Bush, launched his wars against Afghanistan, and following that, Iraq, he was convinced that these were not wars of choice: they had been forced on the U.S. Equally, he was confident that the wars would end at a time of his choosing. Yet as he nears the end of his term, he is clueless about how and under what conditions he would be willing to call an end to the many wars he has launched, now unanimously recognised to have been wars of choice. And it is the misfortune of Afghanistan and Pakistan, that they have been the countries targeted in this misbegotten adventure by a superpower that simply did not know when its time was up.
Since the wars for maintaining U.S. primacy began, every major rite of political passage in Pakistan has had the conspicuous representation of somebody from Afghanistan. Pervez Musharraf was Pakistan’s army chief, president and chief executive all rolled into one, when the military operations in Afghanistan began. In fractional, but distinct measures, he was compelled over time to surrender this vast accumulation of power. Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s most well-known political leader, was expected incrementally, to assume the power that Musharraf ceded. But the Benazir-Musharraf pact never had the remotest chance of being implemented. The orderly transfer of power that the U.S. had scripted was quickly transformed into a messy affair, involving the putative rights of a widower to assume control of a political legacy, almost in the manner of a family heirloom, and his own shadowy past, involving multiple instances of seriously breaching public trust.
Shortly after the last vestige of Musharraf’s authority was removed, Asif Ali Zardari – who assumed leadership of the Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) following the assassination of his wife Benazir -- was voted into office as the president of Pakistan. Present at his inauguration was Hamid Karzai, the figure who in western perceptions, represents the new Afghanistan. As Zardari shortly afterwards, addressed his first press conference as head of state, Karzai continued to be at his elbow.
This was an event without precedent, that had media observers scratching their heads in puzzlement. As the front page report in Dawn, Pakistan’s principal English-language daily put it: “President Zardari’s move to address his maiden press conference along with a foreign dignitary surprised many in the federal capital. Some analysts considered it a result of bad advice being given by people around him.”
Substantively, neither President had very much to say, aside from denouncing terrorism and vowing to combat all its forms. Karzai for his part, expressed “concern” over civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or as the U.S. and its allies put it, “collateral damage” in the war against terrorism, though without specifically referring to the air-strikes that had taken a heavy toll of civilian life in Afghanistan in the months preceding. And he stressed the need to win the “cooperation” of the people to make terrorism extinct.
This was the presumable alternative to the preferred western strategy of intimidating the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan into submission through massive displays of military prowess. The target of military action, said Karzai, “should be sanctuaries of terrorists, be these in Afghanistan or in Pakistan, and not the civilian population. We cannot tolerate civilian casualties and a fool-proof mechanism has to be established”.
Musharraf botches his compact with Benazir
Karzai also happened to be in Islamabad on December 27, 2007, the day Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. The two met around noon that day and according to an account rendered from first-hand observation, exchanged much good-natured banter, though without getting down to any serious business. Scheduled to meet two senior legislators from the U.S. that evening, Benazir went directly into a meeting with a senior political aide, who she tasked with preparing a memorandum to be presented to her U.S. interlocutors. She thought it an especially urgent priority that the peculiar status of the military intelligence agencies in Pakistan should be explained to the U.S. political establishment.
Benazir then went on to her public meeting at Liaqat Bagh, named in tribute to Pakistan’s first Prime Minister, assassinated in 1950 in the same vicinity. Her assassins struck less than five hours from her meeting with Karzai. The clumsy official response shocked the world and led to much adverse comment since it seemed focused on effacing all traces of the outrageous assault on democracy rather than identifying those responsible for it. Benazir’s killing only served to underline, in the words of a perceptive observer, the “chasm of trust between Pakistan’s government and its people”.
Zardari was far away, in Dubai, as the deadly attack on Benazir took place. In a technical sense, he had secured indemnity in multiple cases of corruption, abduction and murder, through the extraordinary ordinance promulgated by Musharraf in October 2007. Yet Zardari did not feel sufficiently emboldened to return with Benazir to Pakistan that same month.
This may have been a decision made in abundant caution, since the terms of his return, as also of Benazir’s – as specified in the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) signed into law by Musharraf on October 5 -- like all such hastily crafted pieces of law, had areas of ambiguity that could conceivably have been manipulated to place Zardari under custody. Clearly, the man who had earned widespread disrepute for his rampant corruption and cronyism during Benazir’s last tenure as prime minister, had no wish to repeat the long years he had spent in jail between 1996 and 2005, for charges that included the murder in 1996 of Mir Murtaza Bhutto, his brother-in-law and prospective challenger for the mantle of the Bhutto political legacy.
Musharraf’s anxiety level in October though, was sufficient for him to bury all concerns about Zardari’s unsavoury past. He was intent on securing re-election as president by national and provincial legislatures that were at the end of their tenures and had little authority to elect a head of state to a full five-year term. The NRO was part of a deal to ensure him the loyalty of Benazir’s bloc of legislators, for which he was prepared reciprocally, to promise the waiver of the multitude of charges Benazir and her family faced. The legal device that was invoked for this very personalised exertion of the presidential power of pardon was an arbitrary cut-off point: October 12, 1999, the day Musharraf as chief of staff of the Pakistan army, overthrew Prime Minister Nawaz Sharief and installed himself as chief executive. In effect, the NRO divided up Pakistan’s political history into the ante and post-Musharraf periods. And as chief of staff of the army and an omnipotent president, Musharraf in October 2007 assumed the authority to extinguish, with a stroke of his pen, all cases registered before his advent to power.
Despite the long and arduous bargaining that went into it, this entire compromise was a seriously flawed affair. Musharraf first reportedly met in secret with Benazir in the Gulf emirate of Abu Dhabi in July 2007. Clearly, some extraordinary circumstances had impelled him into this concession to the civilian politicians he had disdained and in earlier public utterances, held singularly responsible for all the woes that Pakistan as a nation faced.
Sources of Musharraf’s anxiety
Among the many circumstances that might have forced his hand, the bloody confrontation at the Lal Masjid in Islamabad in July 2007 was undoubtedly, among the most important. That was when long-simmering provocations by two brothers, both with claims to Islamic wisdom, who controlled the officially-funded Lal Masjid in Pakistan’s capital city – the venue for congregational prayers by much of the country’s top military brass – reached tipping point. Vigilante squads from the Lal Masjid had for months together been roaming free, imposing their own version of Islamic purity on the city. Islamabad’s prestigious Qaid-e-Azam University was targeted for its alleged disregard for Islamic values. Houses were raided and women taken hostage for alleged immorality. And a radio station operating within the premises of the mosque backed up this campaign of vigilantism with flagrant incitements to violence.
The Lal Masjid clerics were in effect given the untrammelled authority to both create flashpoints of tension and determine their modes of resolution. With great self-importance, clerics in the Lal Masjid played host to the Saudi Arabian ambassador, as also the Chinese diplomats who approached them as supplicants pleading for the release of compatriots taken hostage while working as technical experts on infrastructure projects. All this while, the premises of the mosque were being saturated with guns, explosives and lethal weaponry of every description.
Musharraf’s motives in condoning this perilous accumulation of power within a religious institution in the national capital, can only be guessed at. As Pervez Hoodbhoy, professor of physics at Qaid-e-Azam University – and a highly respected spokesman for civil liberties – has argued, Musharraf could have been “banking on Islamic fanatics to create chaos in the nation's capital” and engineering a “bloodbath”, that would give him the alibi for an army intervention and the possible declaration of a “national emergency”. These in turn, would have given him a credible basis for arguing that national elections scheduled for October 2007, could not be conducted.
The game was up when China, smarting from the humiliation of supplicating for the release of its kidnapped technicians, issued an ultimatum. The subsequent conflagaration in the heart of Pakistan’s capital claimed, by the official count, 107 lives, though unofficial estimates put the magnitude of the carnage much higher. Musharraf had won a dubious triumph at enormous human cost. He had once again been shown up as the sorcerer’s apprentice who in his self-imagined cleverness, unleashes forces that later come back to haunt him.
Just days after the Lal Masjid bloodbath, Musharraf woke up to the discomfiting realisation that his continuing patronage by the U.S. could not really be taken for granted. On July 16, 2007, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence released his National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), a periodic summation mandated by the U.S. Congress, of the most authoritative findings of U.S. intelligence agencies. The NIE had several inconvenient truths to tell. It told for instance, of how the extremist group Al-Qaeda had, despite all the pressure exerted by the U.S. military machine, “protected or regenerated key elements” of its capability in the relatively sheltered environment of the Waziristan region in Pakistan. It observed too that Al Qaeda had achieved significant success in its effort to “recruit and indoctrinate operatives” willing to strike on U.S. territory, in part through an Iraqi affiliate.
The NIE set off feverish activity on another front, provoking calls by politicians, both minor and major, for aggressive new military action. Barack Obama, then one among many candidates for the presidential nomination of the Democratic party, insisted that the U.S. should be at liberty to act in the Waziristan region if “actionable intelligence” existed and Pakistan failed to do what was necessary.
Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S. then, the former general Mahmud Ali Durrani, responded with alacrity. Variously describing the findings of the NIE as “absolutely incorrect” and “an absolute fallacy”, Durrani reminded his U.S. hosts that they had no option but to rely on Pakistan to bring peace to Afghanistan. Unilateral action by U.S. forces often resulted in unacceptable levels of “collateral damage”, with few of the legitimate military objectives being met. Pakistan could not afford to sustain these levels of civilian deaths. Besides, Pakistan had the concern that U.S. intelligence very often was “faulty”, “inaccurate” and tended not to be “timely” either.
These locutions were clearly, a coded reference to the frequent missile strikes in Waziristan and other border regions of Pakistan, which were by then inflicting casualties in the scores. Two such attacks occurred in June 2007, though the bloodiest till then, was the October 2006 strike on a madrasa, which killed around 80 students. Eager to dispel any notion of its territorial sovereignty being breached, Pakistan had stepped up on all occasions to take responsibility for these attacks.
Waziristan erupts again
The same month brought another testing moment for Musharraf, when tribal chieftains in the Waziristan region, home to autonomous and fiercely independent Pashtun tribes that had never acknowledged the centralising power of the federal government in Islamabad, decided to tear up the peace agreement worked out in 2006.
Musharraf had secured the uneasy right to station his forces in the tribal regions in 2002, in exchange for a reciprocal promise that he would pay special attention to the developmental needs of an area that had subsisted for literally centuries in an administrative limbo. In 2004, under pressure from the U.S. to do something drastic to end the safe havens that Islamic militants fleeing Afghanistan had secured in the region, Musharraf sanctioned offensive actions by his forces. The results were catastrophic. Despite gung-ho predictions of swift and certain victory as his troops marched into the unknown, Pakistan’s armed forces suffered immense losses. And to multiply his agonies, the truce that Musharraf concluded after this misadventure was, soon after the Lal Masjid confrontation, unilaterally abrogated by the tribal chieftains of Waziristan who accused federal forces of a persistent pattern of violations.
Impelled by dire necessity to talk terms with the civilians he had once disdained, Musharraf soon ran into problems. Within a month of commencing the secret parleys, Benazir announced that the talks were off. Negotiations with Musharraf’s representatives, she said, had progressed “80 percent” of the way towards a deal, but resistance from members of the Pakistan Muslim League (Qaid-e-Azam), or the “King’s Party” as it was called in Pakistani political circles, had scuppered chances of a successful outcome. Benazir was also fairly explicit about what the ideal outcome of the negotiations would be: Musharraf’s resignation as army chief of staff and his reelection as civilian president for another term, and the restoration of her rights, as also of all party colleagues, to contest elections and hold political office.
It is uncertain whether Benazir had a specific sequence in mind when she placed these demands on record, though it is abundantly clear that neither side had the slightest faith in the other. Musharraf only signed the NRO into law on the eve of the scheduled election to the presidency. Despite the PPP’s very marginal presence in the electoral college, he was desperate to get Benazir’s endorsement, simply because there was no other way the second term he aspired to, could be spent in relative tranquillity. In the event, the PPP walked out of the assembly chambers in both the national and provincial capitals, rather than vote for Musharraf’s reelection.
If Benazir believed that Musharraf would stand down as army chief prior to seeking reelection, she was again gravely mistaken. Musharraf made sure that he still was in absolute power when seeking reelection, which permitted him the luxury – in disregard of all constitutional requirements – to choose the day that he would shed his khaki. And the day he chose was the eve of his swearing in for a second term as president. He had meanwhile, ensured that the formidable military machine that he was ceding control over, would remain pliant to his designs. On September 21, he effected significant changes in the top military command structure. The pivotal post of Director-General in the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) – often described as the secret state within Pakistan -- was entrusted to Lieutenant-General Nadeem Taj, a close confidant who had served him as military secretary from virtually the very beginning of his tenure as the army chief.
Musharraf takes a political insurance policy
Keenly aware of the fragility of his political support, Musharraf then proceeded to remove all potential sources of inconvenient questions. A nationwide state of emergency was declared in November 2007, after which he proceeded to effect a massive surgical operation on the judiciary, removing all possible sources of dissent and bringing in judges who were less likely to entertain challenges to the political edifice he was constructing, on markedly dubious legal foundations.
When national and provincial elections were finally conducted, the PPP rode the sympathy wave created by Benazir’s assassination, to emerge as the largest single party at the federal level. But it was denied an absolute majority and had to enter into seemingly endless bargaining over constituting a government. The sticking point, ostensibly, was the insistence of the Pakistan Muslim League headed by Nawaz Sharief, (the PML-N) that a minimal condition for its association with the ruling arrangement would be a PPP commitment on reinstating all the judges dismissed by Musharraf. Now having assumed control of the PPP, as Tariq Ali described it, almost in the manner of a family heirloom, Zardari had evident reservations about allowing independent minds back into the portals of the country’s higher judiciary. That would have quite conceivably led to a reexamination of the entire foundations of his return to Pakistan and the reversed the remarkable revival in political fortunes that he was enjoying.
Sharief though, was smarting from the memory of the many humiliations he had suffered at Musharraf’s hands – first his ignominious ouster from premiership and imprisonment in 1999, his trial in 2000 and conviction for terrorism and “attempted hijacking” and the long years of banishment in Saudi Arabia. As recently as September 2007, he chose to preempt the Musharraf-Benazir negotiations and unilaterally reinterpret the terms of his exile by returning to Pakistan, only to be bundled out in double quick time and deep dishonour. It took an extraordinary political intervention by the Saudi ruling dynasty to secure his return in November, though his pathway towards resuming an elected role in politics remained blocked by judicial rulings.
The story of those deep intrigues still remains to be written. But the people of Pakistan could not have been happy with the games their politicians were playing, endlessly bickering over petty issues of personal concern, while delaying the formation of a civilian government, which had been the consuming passion of all for the many months preceding. Finally, the PPP and the PML-N agreed, just in time to salvage public trust, that they would constitute a government on the understanding that the judges would be reinstated and Musharraf’s future would be decided once they were installed in power.
To underline their very real resentments about Musharraf continuing in office on the basis of a dubiously engineered vote, PML-N ministers took their oath of office in March wearing black armbands. The gesture almost prompted a stormy riposte by Musharraf but it was a sign of the weak hand he had been left with, that he consented, in obvious ill-temper, to proceed with the swearing-in ceremony.
Within a mere six weeks of the taking the oath, all PML-N ministers quit the Federal Cabinet. Two deadlines had been set for the PPP leadership and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, to order the reinstatement of the judges. Both passed with no action.
Early in August 2008 though, the PPP and the PML-N found that they had a new basis for unity. After prolonged and still rather opaque negotiations, they resolved that they would jointly seek Musharraf’s removal as president, through impeachment if necessary. Zardari’s anxieties about the adverse consequences that could ensue from a confrontational course, had obviously been allayed by then. How this was accomplished is of course a matter that can only be guessed at, though the clues available are ample.
Late in August, two major U.S. newspapers reported that the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, the Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, had been sharply upbraided by seniors in the U.S. State Department, for carrying out “unauthorised” contacts with Zardari. As U.N. ambassador, Khalilzad had little formal jurisdiction over Pakistan and yet, as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher put it in an angry e-mail message, he had reportedly been offering “advice and help” to Zardari. Clearly infuriated that Khalilzad’s intervention had gone contrary to declared policy, Boucher demanded to know in what capacity he had offered “advice and help”: whether “government, private or personal”.
The contacts between the two men had been by all accounts, extensive. As The New York Times put it, they had spoken over telephone “several times a week for the past month”. It turned out moreover, that this was part of a pattern of deviant behaviour by Khalilzad, since he had in mid-2007, earned a “stern warning” from the second-ranking official of the U.S. State Department, Deputy Secretary John Negroponte, for carrying on freelance diplomacy with the Bhutto family. The flamboyant Khalilzad, a former oil industry operative and a charter member of the cabal of “neo-conservatives” that drives U.S. foreign policy, agreed then to fall in line, but three days later, was reported to have had a private dinner with Benazir.
The U.S. decides who in Pakistan is dispensable
Clearly, the U.S. foreign policy establishment, despite all the official noises emanating from the State Department, had decided by August 2008, that they could dispense with Musharraf, since Zardari offered the more promising opportunities for future engagements in Pakistan. Rather than risk the humiliation of impeachment, Musharraf chose shortly afterwards to resign. The war in Afghanistan, once his greatest assurance of continuing support from the U.S., had become by then, a millstone that he could no longer bear. And the U.S. for its part had evidently tired of Musharraf by then and was keen to explore other options.
For the U.S., the change of horses was, from the strategic point of view, long overdue. Early in October, a French diplomatic telegram came to light, which recorded the rather lugubrious observations of the British ambassador to Kabul. The U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, said the British diplomat in a conversation with French counterparts, was “destined to fail”. Seeking troop reinforcements from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) would be counterproductive, since that would only multiply the range of targets for Afghan insurgents to aim their firepower at. Indeed, the foreign military forces on Afghan territory were part of the problem rather then the solution.
Karzai in this demi-official assessment, had lost all trust and could not be counted on to retrieve the rapidly deteriorating situation. Indeed, the most happy outcome for the west, would be for an “acceptable dictator” to assume absolute authority in Kabul in the next few years.
The gloomy message was underlined by the top-ranking U.S. military official, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, Admiral Mike Mullen, in remarks to the media early-October. “The trends across the board are not going in the right direction,” he said. ”I would anticipate next year would be a tougher year.” Citing an intelligence assessment which was in the final stages of preparation, Mullen spoke of the imminent possibility of a “downward spiral” in the situation “unless there were rapid, major improvements”. These included curbing the booming heroin trade -- the most important source of funds for the insurgency – significantly devolving power to the district and provincial chiefs, and choking off the flow of militants from safe havens in Pakistan.
From the time in September 2001, that Musharraf was compelled to sign on to the U.S. war project in Afghanistan and to enroll himself as an accessory in the destruction of the Taliban regime that Pakistan had been singularly responsible in creating, he had shown ample signs of ambivalence. On the one hand, he was highly responsive to western demarches that he crack down on known Al-Qaeda operatives in his country and had offered significant logistical support in the capture and extradition of key figures such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and Ramzi bin al-Shibh. At the same time, he hardly made a secret of his deep disdain for the Afghan regime, despite the explicit and oft-repeated U.S. belief that Karzai was the man that it trusted to bring order to Afghanistan.
Musharraf’s behaviour in this respect has been described as “schizophrenic”, though to be fair to him, he probably was responding with as much consistency as he could muster, to conflicting pressures. Illustratively, in July 2006, he denied in a series of public statements that there were any Taliban cadre sheltering in Pakistan and accused Karzai of being manipulated by India. Shortly afterwards, he declared in a televised speech that the Taliban indeed, were a presence in Pakistan, though less so than in Afghanistan. In September that year, three days after signing a peace agreement with the Waziristan tribes, he paid a visit to Kabul at short notice, where he told a gathering of Afghan parliamentarians that “the best way to fight the common enemy (the Taliban) (was) to join hands, trust each other and form a common strategy”.
Barely civil
Shortly afterwards, Musharraf and Karzai who both happened to be in New York for the U.N. General Assembly, engaged in a bruising verbal battle in public, questioning each other credentials and capabilities. When they met a few days later in Washington DC, under the gaze of U.S. President George Bush, they reportedly avoided shaking hands. Karzai put forward his single-point demand: that Musharraf arrest the Taliban leaders sheltering in Pakistan, rather than make deals with them. Having barely extricated himself from a bruising military encounter with the Waziristan tribes, Musharraf was in no mood to listen. And Bush reportedly, was anxious not to be seen taking sides. An earlier demand from Karzai for the arrest and extradition of Taliban leaders sheltering in Pakistan was rebuffed with the accusation that Indian intelligence agencies, operating on Afghan soil, were engaged in a campaign of sabotage and destabilisation in the Baloch region of Pakistan.
The idea of a “peace jirga” involving Pakistan and Afghanistan was proposed at the Washington meeting, on Karzai’s initiative. By all accounts, Musharraf was lukewarm, but acceded to the proposal under U.S. pressure. The idea of adapting the jirga, or traditional assembly of Pashtun tribes to the cause of building bridges between two neighbouring States, each facing problems of internal turmoil and external tutelage, was a novel one. But it continued to encounter Pakistan’s indifference.
It is not difficult to see that the process of tribal consultations across borders runs contrary to the centralising tendency of a state dominated by the military. To be of any consequence, these consultations must be accompanied by a commitment that cross-border solidarities, of tribe or ethnicity or language, would be given significant room, setting up a force potentially antithetical to the centralising state. With the persistent trouble it was facing in Baluchistan compounded by the turmoil in Waziristan, there was ample reason for Islamabad to worry about yielding greater room for tribal communities to determine the contours of relations with Afghanistan. Aside from the insecurity engendered by recent experience, the process also seemed to necessitate a dilution of the concept of “strategic depth” – a doctrine that military administrations in Pakistan have in particular been committed to, as an antidote to the sense of siege the state has suffered from the moment of its birth.
Under relentless prodding from Washington, the peace jirga was finally scheduled for the early part of August 2007. In the days before the event, three heavyweight leaders of Islamic political parties in Pakistan – Fazlur Rahman, Samiul Haq and Qazi Hussain Ahmad – all of Pashtun extraction, decided to stay away. The tribal chiefs of Waziristan soon followed suit. Before setting off for Kabul, Pakistan delegates were extensively briefed by senior officials of the federal government in Islamabad and the provincial government in Peshawar, and told that they were under no circumstances to yield the moral ground. Any attempt to place the blame on Pakistan for the situation in Afghanistan, they were told, would have to be firmly rebuffed.
Musharraf opted out of attending the jirga, sending Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz instead and staying back amidst frenetic speculation about his intent to declare a state of emergency. The mounting speculation only died down when the Pakistan president disavowed the idea, amidst expressions of disapproval from Washington. Shortly afterwards he decided to accept Karzai’s invitation to address the closing session of the jirga in Kabul. From Washington, a spokesman of the State Department put out the statement that the Bush administration was “pleased” at the decision.
Pakistan’s schizoid policy
In the hours before the Pakistan president’s arrival, the jirga had been debating, beyond the florid speeches and the routine expressions of good intent, how best to operationalise a credible truce in the border region between the two countries. Curiously, according to a report put out by the Afghan news agency, Pajhwok, the Pakistan delegates at one stage tabled a proposal that two Indian consulates – of the four opened in Afghanistan since the ejection of the Taliban – be shut down. The Afghan delegates protested that these demands were in breach of agreed rules of non-interference. And when Musharraf finally appeared before the closing session of the jirga, he came with a virtual mea culpa. In breach of the rules framed for Pakistan’s delegates, Pakistan’s president, with his Afghan counterpart nodding vigorously in agreement, read out the following lines from a prepared text: “There is no doubt Afghan militants are supported from Pakistan soil. The problem that you have in your region is because support is provided from our side.”
This was another revelation of Musharraf’s uniquely schizoid style. And however well intended he may have been, there has been little change since then, in strategic realities in the two countries. In the midst of all the chatter at the jirga, though, there were views expressed that salvation for the region lay in nothing less than the withdrawal of all alien forces. It was a demand that the dominant political parties in Balochistan and the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan soon afterwards amplified.
The U.S. forces have seemingly paid no heed. Shortly after Khalilzad and Zardari had presumably at one of their secret parleys, worked out their deal to oust Musharraf, U.S. air and ground forces stepped up their activity in the Waziristan region of Pakistan. There was a symmetry here between U.S. actions immediately after Musharraf’s ouster and actions just after he was voted to a full-term in the presidency in the infamously rigged referendum of 2002. As a recent work of reportage on Pakistan puts it: “The timing hardly seemed fortuitous. On May 1, 2002, only twenty-four hours after the controversial and flawed referendum that extended Pervez Musharraf’s presidency for an additional five years – with the tacit approval of Washington – Pakistan officials acknowledged that a small number of U.S. ground forces had been given reluctant permission to operate inside Pakistan”.
Every change of regime in Pakistan is in other words, merely a way-station in the growing assertion of U.S. military suzerainty in the region.
With civilian rule restored in Pakistan though, the U.S. would have little reason to expect a clear field for their military operations. The newly installed provincial government in the North-west Frontier Province for instance, is committed to a new approach to bringing peace to the trouble border with Afghanistan, other than the heavy-handed military tactics favoured by the U.S. The chief minister of NWFP, Asfandyar Wali Khan and the provincial chief of the ruling Awami National Party, Afrasiab Khattak – both scions of major political dynasties in the region – have indicated that they will open negotiations rather than risk a further escalation of hostilities.
There are indications also, that the Pakistan military has begun to respond with something approaching alarm to the impunity with which U.S. forces have been crossing the border. Late September, Pakistan forces fired what they claimed were warning shots at two U.S. army helicopters that were flying perilously close to the border.
Perhaps the most hopeful sign though, is that a new dynamic seems to be developing between the Pakistan military and the newly installed civilian leadership, as a response to the challenge posed by growing U.S. military overlordship. Contrary to earlier practices, when elected civilian leaders were denied access to security information that the army deemed its exclusive preserve, the Pakistan military brass recently delivered an extensive briefing on the war scenario to a joint session of both houses of the Pakistan National Assembly. The military leadership, though angered at what it called the persistent vilification of the ISI, also undertook to support the effort to evolve a new consensus on the security challenges facing Pakistan.
Things fall apart
How far this new mood of consensus will go is anybody’s guess. Since May 2008, casualties among U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan have consistently outstripped the toll in Iraq. Afghan civilian deaths meanwhile, have multiplied, increasingly as a consequence of misdirected attacks by U.S. and allied forces. Each such incident elicits a volley of protests from the Afghan national government, followed by a commitment from the foreign forces that investigations would duly be conducted. And as virtually foretold from the moment the inquiries are launched, the finding, finally, is that the occupying military forces acted “appropriately”.
The reasons why the border with Pakistan is now bristling with insurgency against the Karzai regime, owe entirely to the architecture of the western plan for Afghanistan. Because it did not want the retrieval effort in one failed state to end in a situation of two failed states, the west connived in the early phase of its military campaign in Afghanistan, with Pakistan’s strategy of withdrawing most assets invested in the Taliban regime, or at least all that could be salvaged. This withdrawal was part of an agreed compact by which Musharraf sought in the cataclysmic defeat of his country’s strategic ambitions, a pretence – even if a very thin one – that the country was well-served by the war in Afghanistan.
The militant tendencies were transferred to Pakistan’s northern areas, to greatly add to the restiveness of the Pashtun tribes there. Afghanistan meanwhile, approaches meltdown, since the leadership that the west had anointed for what it fancifully calls the “democratic transition”, has carved up the country into a multitude of personal fiefdoms. Rather than attend to the rigours of building up a genuine sense of national solidarity, the west opted for a confederacy of the same warlords – Rashid Dostum, Abdul Rasool Sayyaf, Mohammad Mohaqiq, Ismael Khan, Karim Khalili, and numerous others – whose ouster by the Taliban was greeted by the people of Afghanistan in the mid-1990s as a form of deliverance.
Denied authority in most of the country, Karzai himself has decided, according to authoritative assessments, to cultivate his own fiefdom in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar – currently Afghanistan’s most fertile breeding grounds for illicit opium. A loss of image in the west, the risk that he may be seen as a patron of the lethal trade in narcotics, is for Karzai, clearly a lesser danger than being overwhelmed by the confederacy of warlords that the U.S. military intervention has created.
It is increasingly clear, though, that peace can only be restored in Afghanistan through a process that fosters real sentiments of social solidarity and restores the benign face of the old allegiances of tribe and ethnicity. This is a process that would necessarily have to accommodate cross-border (or extra-territorial) ties of community and kinship. It would in that sense, work against the centralising logic of a modern nation-state, especially one that has remained for long years under military management. If the current gloomy prognoses by the U.S. intelligence agencies are to be taken at face value, things are likely to get much worse before they get better. That prognoses would be equally applicable to Pakistan too. And since no nation is an island, that is a forecast that all countries in South Asia need to pay heed to. There is little room for complacency. And the repercussions of a “business as usual” approach to neighbourhood relations, especially for the largest country in the region, may well be unacceptably high.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
“War” on terror: losing sight of strategic fundamentals
If “war” is the appropriate description for the struggle against terror that the country is now engaged in, then it is a war that differs very significantly from the conventional understanding.
Four attacks in major cities in as many months – the latest being the Delhi serial blasts of September 13 -- may represent an escalation, but the war really began from well before. The precise date is a matter of almost arbitrary choice: by one mode of reckoning, the attacks on Srinagar’s legislative assembly building on October 13, 2001, and on India’s parliament on December 11, 2001, could be deemed the formal start of hostilities. On another scale, the war began on October 29, 2005, when middle-class markets in Delhi were gutted on the eve of a rare conjunction when Diwali and Eid-ul-fitr were celebrated on the same day.
Lethal explosions, striking random and indiscriminate terror in teeming urban milieus, have since been recurrent events. On July 11, 2006, the suburban train system of Mumbai – the lifeline of the country’s greatest metropolis -- was torn up as evening rush hour began, in the kind of meticulously deadly serial bombing the city had seen before in March 1993. Over 200 people with no concern other than getting on with their lives in the best tradition of Mumbai, were killed in those attacks.
There have since, been bombings with serious loss of life in Malegaon, Hyderabad (at three distinct venues on two separate dates), Jaipur, Bangalore, Ahmedabad and Delhi. Three bombs went off in court-room compounds in different cities of Uttar Pradesh on November 23, 2007, killing ten. And punctuating this litany of atrocities has been the occasional, narrowly averted tragedy, as in Surat, where a number of bombs were discovered on July 28, that just failed to detonate.
Each of these are resilient cities that for all their signs of urban blight, still manage to accommodate the vastness, the complexity and generosity of India. And the people in these cities, responding with immense fortitude to adversity, have shown that their spirit is not easily subdued.
The victims of terrorism deserve justice and they deserve considerably more than the political vaudeville that is being served up by the BJP, as the principal opposition party, and the Congress, as the principal constituent of the ruling coalition at the centre. Expectedly, the BJP has responded to the recent sequence of attacks with shrill invective, demanding summary justice for terrorists and damning the Congress for its vacillation. And unlike in earlier conjunctures, when the Congress proved firm enough in its convictions to withstand the pressure, this time around it has buckled. Clearly, it has suffered a failure of will and has sought preemptive protection against the propaganda device that the BJP is almost certain to deploy – that Congress-led governments have been negligent of the security of the common citizen, having repealed two anti-terrorism statutes in under a decade.
The government’s intent was conveyed in the report of an ambiguously empowered body called the Administrative Reforms Committee, headed by Veerappa Moily, an active duty politician who has served as chief minister of Karnataka. This is a committee that has in several earlier conjunctures come up with formulae to bail the government out of thorny dilemmas. This time around, it has proposed a range of legal measures – not as a distinct enactment, but as amendments to an existing law on the prevention of “unlawful activities”.
The official view now seems to tilt strongly towards creating a specially empowered agency under the central government’s jurisdiction, to investigate and prosecute terrorism cases. This agency would be vested with powers under a special statute, allowing for preventive detention for a defined period of time.
The BJP needless to say, remains unconvinced, and has fielded some of its most voluble spokesmen to argue that punitive, rather than preventive, clauses should really be the essence of the new law. These provisions would enable the handing out of swift justice in cases of terrorism. And in this respect, the admissibility of confessions made before the police as legal evidence, is really where the focus should be.
Using its current anti-terrorism icon – Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi -- as principal propagandist, the BJP also argued the case that states should be allowed the freedom to enact anti-terrorism laws of their own, on the lines of the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA). The BJP has a grievance that a closely analogous law it has enacted in Gujarat, called the GUJCOCA, is yet to receive central government assent.
These are partisan battles that go back a long way and involve much political opportunism. The substantive point though, is that the two anti-terrorism statutes that the BJP today makes much of – the Terrorism and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act of 1987 (TADA) and the Prevention of Terrorism Act of 2002 (POTA) – have been instruments of State terror and victimisation of the vulnerable, rather than credible instruments of justice. Convictions secured under TADA were a dismally low proportion of the total number of cases lodged. And the only significant case prosecuted under POTA – the 2001 attack on India’s Parliament compound – ended in fiasco, with some of the country’s most senior lawyers arguing the case for the accused in the Supreme Court and denouncing the Delhi Police for flagrantly concocting evidence.
To allow confessions made to the police as evidence in terrorism trials would do little else than arbitrarily empower an already lawless and unaccountable police force. It would deepen institutional prejudices against the religious minorities and enlarge the scope for criminal collusion between police forces all over the country and the agents of majoritarian mayhem and disorder, such as the Bajrang Dal. What the country needs clearly, is not a more powerful police force or a judiciary that has the authority to dispense summary justice. Without a firm reiteration and institutionalisation of the long-forgotten verity of equality before the law, the war against terrorism may well be lost even before it is joined.
Four attacks in major cities in as many months – the latest being the Delhi serial blasts of September 13 -- may represent an escalation, but the war really began from well before. The precise date is a matter of almost arbitrary choice: by one mode of reckoning, the attacks on Srinagar’s legislative assembly building on October 13, 2001, and on India’s parliament on December 11, 2001, could be deemed the formal start of hostilities. On another scale, the war began on October 29, 2005, when middle-class markets in Delhi were gutted on the eve of a rare conjunction when Diwali and Eid-ul-fitr were celebrated on the same day.
Lethal explosions, striking random and indiscriminate terror in teeming urban milieus, have since been recurrent events. On July 11, 2006, the suburban train system of Mumbai – the lifeline of the country’s greatest metropolis -- was torn up as evening rush hour began, in the kind of meticulously deadly serial bombing the city had seen before in March 1993. Over 200 people with no concern other than getting on with their lives in the best tradition of Mumbai, were killed in those attacks.
There have since, been bombings with serious loss of life in Malegaon, Hyderabad (at three distinct venues on two separate dates), Jaipur, Bangalore, Ahmedabad and Delhi. Three bombs went off in court-room compounds in different cities of Uttar Pradesh on November 23, 2007, killing ten. And punctuating this litany of atrocities has been the occasional, narrowly averted tragedy, as in Surat, where a number of bombs were discovered on July 28, that just failed to detonate.
Each of these are resilient cities that for all their signs of urban blight, still manage to accommodate the vastness, the complexity and generosity of India. And the people in these cities, responding with immense fortitude to adversity, have shown that their spirit is not easily subdued.
The victims of terrorism deserve justice and they deserve considerably more than the political vaudeville that is being served up by the BJP, as the principal opposition party, and the Congress, as the principal constituent of the ruling coalition at the centre. Expectedly, the BJP has responded to the recent sequence of attacks with shrill invective, demanding summary justice for terrorists and damning the Congress for its vacillation. And unlike in earlier conjunctures, when the Congress proved firm enough in its convictions to withstand the pressure, this time around it has buckled. Clearly, it has suffered a failure of will and has sought preemptive protection against the propaganda device that the BJP is almost certain to deploy – that Congress-led governments have been negligent of the security of the common citizen, having repealed two anti-terrorism statutes in under a decade.
The government’s intent was conveyed in the report of an ambiguously empowered body called the Administrative Reforms Committee, headed by Veerappa Moily, an active duty politician who has served as chief minister of Karnataka. This is a committee that has in several earlier conjunctures come up with formulae to bail the government out of thorny dilemmas. This time around, it has proposed a range of legal measures – not as a distinct enactment, but as amendments to an existing law on the prevention of “unlawful activities”.
The official view now seems to tilt strongly towards creating a specially empowered agency under the central government’s jurisdiction, to investigate and prosecute terrorism cases. This agency would be vested with powers under a special statute, allowing for preventive detention for a defined period of time.
The BJP needless to say, remains unconvinced, and has fielded some of its most voluble spokesmen to argue that punitive, rather than preventive, clauses should really be the essence of the new law. These provisions would enable the handing out of swift justice in cases of terrorism. And in this respect, the admissibility of confessions made before the police as legal evidence, is really where the focus should be.
Using its current anti-terrorism icon – Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi -- as principal propagandist, the BJP also argued the case that states should be allowed the freedom to enact anti-terrorism laws of their own, on the lines of the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA). The BJP has a grievance that a closely analogous law it has enacted in Gujarat, called the GUJCOCA, is yet to receive central government assent.
These are partisan battles that go back a long way and involve much political opportunism. The substantive point though, is that the two anti-terrorism statutes that the BJP today makes much of – the Terrorism and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act of 1987 (TADA) and the Prevention of Terrorism Act of 2002 (POTA) – have been instruments of State terror and victimisation of the vulnerable, rather than credible instruments of justice. Convictions secured under TADA were a dismally low proportion of the total number of cases lodged. And the only significant case prosecuted under POTA – the 2001 attack on India’s Parliament compound – ended in fiasco, with some of the country’s most senior lawyers arguing the case for the accused in the Supreme Court and denouncing the Delhi Police for flagrantly concocting evidence.
To allow confessions made to the police as evidence in terrorism trials would do little else than arbitrarily empower an already lawless and unaccountable police force. It would deepen institutional prejudices against the religious minorities and enlarge the scope for criminal collusion between police forces all over the country and the agents of majoritarian mayhem and disorder, such as the Bajrang Dal. What the country needs clearly, is not a more powerful police force or a judiciary that has the authority to dispense summary justice. Without a firm reiteration and institutionalisation of the long-forgotten verity of equality before the law, the war against terrorism may well be lost even before it is joined.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
War against terror and the new lawlessness
“Made for media” investigations are creating a public hysteria and betraying the cause of justice
Investigations into the recent terrorist attacks in India, with all the media spectacle they afford, have done little else than fuel public hysteria. The process of the law has been wilfully shredded while a case is made for broader powers of detention and investigation for the police. As contradictions in the official narrative on terrorism and its protagonists become manifest, public confidence will inevitably be eroded. And if a united and well-informed people are the only guarantee of public security, then the heavy-handed approach in evidence today seems designed to open the door towards greater terror.
Two days after the deadly September 13 bombings that struck busy commercial areas in Delhi, an editorial in the country’s largest circulated English daily pronounced a rather sombre assessment, while also sounding a call to action: “We are at war. The string of blasts (in Delhi) .. which killed 30 people and injured 90 is the fourth attack by terrorists on a major Indian city in the span of four months”. The people of India, the newspaper advised, should get used to the idea of surrendering some of the liberties they had got accustomed to. This was a necessary, short-term sacrifice, since the enemy they faced was an even greater threat to human freedom.
On September 19, the Special Cell of the Delhi Police, with the electronic media providing real-time coverage, raided a fourth-floor flat in a tenement in Batla House, a crowded south-eastern suburb of the city, neighbouring the campus of the Jamia Millia Islamia university. The “encounter” resulted in the killing of two youths, Bashir alias Atif, aged in his mid-twenties and Sajid, aged in his mid-teens. Another person of twenty and odd years, Mohammad Saif, was taken captive. And to square the account, since the supposed intelligence report that led to the police raid had identified five known terrorists hiding out, the Delhi Police admitted with great regret, that two of their quarries had escaped their cordon.
Beyond this summation of results from the dramatic swoop on terrorism, a tale emerged of the Batla House operation that verged on unimaginative fantasy. As reported in one of Delhi’s newspapers, the team of the Delhi Police “Special Cell”, numbering about 60 – all draped in bullet proof vests – entered the “fifth-floor flat” at 10:15 that morning, accompanied by commandos of the National Security Guard. In the vanguard of this expedition into the unknown was Inspector Mohan Chand Sharma of the Special Cell, who went knocking on all the doors in the tenement. As the report puts it: “Around 10:30 a.m., the door to (flat number) L-18 opened and Sharma was shot thrice”. A gun-battle ensued in which the Delhi Police fired 22 rounds to register two kills and one capture. Eight rounds in all were fired by the opposing side.
Inspector Sharma was carried away to a nearby hospital where he died hours later, reportedly of a cardiac arrest occasioned by severe bleeding. As the day’s events were reported in another of city’s newspapers, Delhi’s police commissioner pronounced in his press briefing that evening, that Inspector Sharma and his team had “cordoned off” the area that morning. Armed policemen “took positions” around the building at 10:30 that morning and a half-hour later, “another team went up to the flat on the fourth floor”. This team was fired upon, following which the gun-battle ensued.
Yet another newspaper had it that the Special Cell squad under Inspector Sharma “barged into” the fourth-floor flat, “following credible inputs” about the presence there of a person “whose physical appearance tallied” with descriptions of a senior operative involved in the July 26 serial bombings in Ahmedabad. The Special Cell had in this version, been helped by the Intelligence Bureau and by the police departments in Gujarat and Maharashtra in “developing” vital information leading to the raid.
The Delhi police, despite losing an officer in the operation, were exultant. As reported in the local press, Atiq, killed in the encounter, was “a key Indian Mujahideen functionary who played a major role in the Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad (and) Delhi serial blasts”.
It did not take long for troubling inconsistencies to emerge in the official narration. Two fact-finding teams visited the Jamia Nagar area within two days of the encounter – one involving the Delhi-based voluntary group, Anhad, and members of the academic community of the Jamia Millia Islamia university; the other involving the advocacy groups, Janahastakshep and the Peoples’ Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR). Residents of the neighbourhood, in testimony to these teams, recounted that as soon as the police action began, the area was cordoned off for all locals, though it was soon saturated with broadcast vans of Delhi’s many news channels. The caretaker of the flat where the dreaded terrorists were holed out, testified that they had in accordance with procedures introduced in Delhi, registered with the local police station on August 21, well after the Ahmedabad bombings. This suggested either great audacity or extreme insouciance, or the troubling third possibility, of innocence.
Finally, the tenement in which the shooting took place, was a four storey structure, abutted on both sides by much smaller structures. The fourth-floor flat where the killing took place had only one door, which opened onto the only staircase in the building. The police could have easily cut off all escape routes and secured the surrender of the flat’s occupants. And once the shooting began, there was no way that two persons holed up in the flat could have effected an escape.
Suggesting that information, like much else in the country, is in danger of ghettoisation, these questions were first raised solely in the Urdu press. On September 22, the Coordination Committee of Indian Muslims, described as a “coalition of 11 organisations formed to take up the perceived harassment of Muslims in the country” called into question the entire police narrative and demanded an independent judicial inquiry. Three days later, the academic community of Jamia, led by Vice Chancellor Mushirul Hasan took out a massive peace march through the campus, resolving with complete unanimity to set up a fund for the legal defence of students swept up in the terrorism dragnet. On September 26, the Janahastakshep-PUDR team formally released its findings, underlining the demand for a judicial probe.
The Delhi Police, to their credit, did make an effort to answer these questions. In flat contradiction to the general assessment, they insisted that the tenancy verification obtained by Atif and Sajid was forged, since the counterpart document did not exist in the concerned police station. As for the escape of two suspects in Batla House on the day of the encounter, the Delhi Police put out a plea of injured innocence: that it would be unfair to query them too closely on a matter placed on public record only as a gesture of good faith and accountability.
Finally, of course, there was the expected questioning of the patriotism of all who dared to challenge an operation that had resulted in the death of a heroic police officer: “It is the irony of this country that they (sic) continue to sympathise with the terrorists despite the death of a policeman in this operation”.
If the Batla House encounter remains a mystery, the links connecting the supposed protagonists of the serial bombing in Jaipur on May 13, Ahmedabad on July 26 and Delhi on September 13, have been portrayed variously over time and with disturbing inconsistencies. At the centre of the narrative is the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), a once obscure body of uncertain provenance, vaguely believed to be affiliated to the Jamaat-e-Islami-e-Hind, banned in 2001 and except for a brief interlude following the change of government at the Centre, an outlaw organisation ever since. As a fine investigative article has recently documented, every notification renewing the ban on the organisation for the maximum period allowed under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, has been a virtual copy of the earlier one. No additional evidence, in other words, has been produced to support the ban, other than whatever was in the original notification of 2001.
When Safdar Nagori, the SIMI general secretary, was arrested in March 2008, a security analyst well-known for his feverishly speculative commentary, observed that “SIMI cadre have been involved in almost every Islamist terror strike since (2000), ranging from the Mumbai serial bombings of 2003 and 2006 to attacks in Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Delhi”.
Despite the seeming certainty behind this pronouncement, obviously inspired by driblets of information leaked by the intelligence agencies, a tribunal constituted to review the extension of the ban, held on August 5, that there simply was no evidence connecting SIMI with terrorism. The Central Government on that occasion, secured a face-saving stay from the Supreme Court on the application of this ruling. Media comment was muted and the public, still under the pall of fear spread by the Jaipur, Bangalore and Ahmedabad bombings, remained indifferent to finer points of legality and fairness.
The pursuit of the terrorists picked up momentum with the mid-August arrest of Abu Bashar Qasmi, a 25-year old cleric, snatched from his home in Azamgarh district of Uttar Pradesh by four men who came visiting on the pretext of exploring a matrimonial alliance. Taken immediately to Gujarat, he was identified by the state police as the man behind July’s Ahmedabad attacks. He also reportedly, confessed to an undefined role in the Jaipur bombing.
On August 24, the Rajasthan police announced the arrest of Shahbaz Husain, a computer software expert who ran a small business in Lucknow. As the Lucknow-based civil rights campaigner Sandeep Pandey recalls, the house that Shahbaz shares with his parents, was raided by about 50 personnel of the Anti-Terrorism Squad of Rajasthan Police. Apart from impounding a computer, the raiding party took away all the literature they could find, as also some currency and a cheque made out in favour of Shahbaz’s business. The next day, the same team revisited and compelled Shahbaz’s father, Abdul Moid, to sign two blank sheets of paper.
Pandey visited the local police station the following day to ask what possible use the blank sheets of paper would be put to, only to be unceremoniously turned out. Press reports that he later saw, blazoned the claim of the Rajasthan Police that sophisticated electronic chips and circuits of bombs resembling those used in Surat had been found in Shahbaz’s premises.
With Shahbaz’s firm implication in terrorism, an elaborate chain of linkages began to be drawn between the Jaipur and Ahmedabad blasts. Nagori, Shahbaz and Qasmi were all reportedly, members of a secretive cell that underwent explosives training in camps as far afield as Kerala and the jungles of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. Brooding over the whole conspiracy was the presence of Mohammad Altaf Subhan -- later identified as Abdul Subhan Quereshi, and variously described by the alternative names, Taufeeq and Tauqeer, by which he was allegedly known in jihadi circles -- a computer hardware specialist missing from his home in Mumbai’s distant suburb of Mira Road, since 2006.
Subhan is supposed to have been the technical brain behind the ingeniously designed bombs and the e-mail messages -- replete with graphics and intense Islamic religious symbolism -- that had been sent out celebrating each terrorist strike in the heart of urban India. When Delhi was gutted by three simultaneous bombings in September, Subhan was the name on every investigating agency’s lips. Working its way through the chain that connected Subhan with Qasmi and Shahbaz, the Delhi police quickly identified the other links in the terrorism plot, all from Uttar Pradesh: Abdul Rajib, Mujib, Alamjed Afridi and Qayamuddin. Acting in concert with their Gujarat counterparts, the Delhi police secured access to Abu Bashar Qasmi for a round of interrogation.
In just over a day, the script was radically rewritten. As the encounter at Batla House began, concurrent media commentary had it that the interrogation of Qasmi had led to the identification of the tenement and that the prize catch, Subhan, was holed out there. When the dust settled, Subhan remained as elusive as ever, though the Delhi Police still claimed it had cracked not merely the Delhi bombings, but also the Jaipur and Ahmedabad attacks. Atif became, in the new narrative, the master terrorist.
Symptomatic of the shoddiness of their media briefings, as also the casualness (if not contempt) with which the police treats the public information function, one of Delhi’s leading newspapers carried stories cheek by jowl on its front page, which flat out, contradicted each other. The top story that day quoted the Delhi Police Commissioner claiming exclusive ownership over the Batla House raid and denying that Qasmi’s presence in the city – courtesy the Gujarat Police -- had anything to do with it. Right below this news-report, was a commentary which provided the following narration: that Bashir alias Atif and his accomplices in the Delhi bombings were identified after a major Intelligence Bureau operation targeting the communications system of the Indian Mujahideen (IM); that Jamia Nagar (the broader neighbourhood in which Batla House is a part) was identified as the most likely refuge he had been afforded by SIMI; and that his safe-house, “could only be located when Qasmi was brought to New Delhi and driven around the Jamia Nagar area on Thursday night”.
The final twist in the story came on September 24, with the arrest of five in Mumbai. In just a matter of days, the Nagori-Qasmi-Shahbaz chain of culpability, was history. The Mumbai Police now definitively identified 31-year old Sadiq Sheikh, a resident of the Cheetah Camp slum sprawl near the city’s north-eastern suburb of Chembur, as the inspiration and the mentor for all the terrorist actions of the preceding months. Four others were arrested alongside, including a computer software expert, an alleged car thief, and supposed specialists in bomb making and in rigging the circuitry for explosive devices.
A few days afterwards, a number of retired police officials with high name-recognition – Kiran Bedi, Prakash Singh, Ved Marwah – reacted in alarm to the contrary and competitive narratives from various police agencies. Loyalty to the khakhi they had worn, determined that they would not question any of the actions taken by the police, though they found ample reason to question the words employed. The discordant voices that were emerging from the police, they feared, would only lend strength to clever defence attorneys in securing the judicial exculpation of terrorism suspects. Marwah’s comment, in conclusion, was that the key issue was of building “political consensus” and avoiding “political one-upmanship”.
Public scrutiny over the investigations into terrorism has been loose, in part, because political reactions have been sharply polarised, and in large measure, opportunistic. The principal opposition party, the BJP, has along with its allies, responded with a predictable, almost conditioned, reflex, to the recent wave of bombings: denouncing the incumbent government for its ineptitude and demanding a special law appropriate to the magnitude of the threat.
The debate on the legal underpinnings of what is now called a “war” against terrorism will presumably rage on for long, with all its partisan resonances. But the reality of the “war” as waged in India, has been that the law is immaterial. Public criticisms of the enforcement agencies have been muted even on the rare occasions that they are voiced. This has created the climate in which a new culture of lawlessness has flourished.
Since the 2005 attack on the makeshift temple built over the ruins of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, lawyers in the state of Uttar Pradesh have been taking an aggressive stance against terrorism suspects. Faizabad began the practice in 2005, when its bar association resolved that none among its members would ever defend a terrorism suspect. This shredding of the fundamentals of natural justice was eagerly emulated by bar associations in Varanasi in 2006, and Lucknow and Barabanki in 2007. A new dimension was added to this mode of ostracism, when three suspects behind an alleged plot to kidnap Congress leader Rahul Gandhi were assaulted by a group of lawyers, as they were produced before a Lucknow court in November 2007.
If ghettoisation is not already the reality in India’s justice system, these events will ensure that it is an accomplished fact. When Aftab Ansari, an electricity board employee from Kolkata, was picked up from his home by Uttar Pradesh police and accused of being a key player in the courtroom blasts of November 2007, Mohammad Shoaib of Lucknow was the only lawyer who stepped up to defend him. Ansari was discharged in February this year after three weeks of detention and torture. Seemingly having failed to extract a confession from him, the police admitted rather lamely, that it was an innocuous case of mistaken identity.
In April, Mohammad Shoaib, undoubtedly in recognition of the commitment and courage he had shown in taking up an unpopular case, was retained as defence lawyer for Mohammad Tariq Kazmi and Mohammad Khalid Mujahid, arrested in Barabanki, and accused of complicity in the courtroom bombings. According to a narration he presented at Hyderabad on August 22, before a “Peoples’ Tribunal” on the application of the anti-terrorism laws, he faced a persistent pattern of obstruction at all levels of the police hierarchy. The case papers were not furnished as required by the law and the jail superintendent in Barabanki defied repeated judicial summons to produce the accused. Finally, the magistrate went to the jail to read out the charges to the two accused.
In April, when Shoaib went to the Barabanki court to argue his clients’ case for bail, he was threatened by the president of the local bar association and told very clearly that he was putting life and limb at risk. Shoaib withdrew but took up the brief again when he found that the families of the accused had no other recourse. He had meanwhile, approached the Allahabad High Court for a writ holding that the delinquency of the bar associations of Faizabad, Varanasi, Lucknow and Barabanki, posed a clear and present danger to the administration of justice. He is yet to secure a hearing from the High Court.
Meanwhile, Shoaib suffered a full-blown physical assault in court-room premises in Lucknow on August 12, when appearing for Naushad, a casual labourer from Bijnore district who faces charges of being a soldier in the armies of the jihad. The following day, Shoaib sent a formal complaint to the local police chief and went in person to the district judge to hand over his report of the assault he had suffered from legal luminaries in Lucknow. He suffered an even more grievous physical attack that day.
A similar lesson in the new principles of the rule of law was imparted to the lawyer Noor Mohammad in April, when he went to the Dhar district court in Madhya Pradesh to defend a group of Muslim youths who had been accused of running a terrorism training camp in the district. Noor Mohammad was at the “Peoples’ Tribunal” on August 22, to provide a harrowing account of the humiliation he had suffered. And the only remonstrance he heard from the bench as he was being roughed up in full view of the presiding judge, was that the disputants needed to take their dispute settlement process elsewhere, lest the violent assault against a lawyer within the courtroom be construed as a case of contempt.
Serial bombs that target vital nodes of a city’s civic life, are intended to produce the kind of effect on an average citizen’s psyche as “shock and awe”, the war doctrine recently implemented by the U.S. in Iraq. The purpose is to create a real life montage of simultaneous destruction, that would be so enveloping in its scope, as to defeat popular loyalty to a regime. The wider lesson it seeks to impart is that the average citizen cannot count on duly constituted political authorities for protection, and would need to assume the right to self-defence. Applied across a wide social expanse, this would become the recipe for a descent into the law of the jungle, a “war of all against all”.
That the people of India have defied this calculus despite repeated provocation, is tribute to the resilience of their faith in a democratic order. But nothing can be taken for granted. Those who have directly suffered from terrorist atrocities need recognition for their fortitude and this can only come through pursuing the perpetrators with all the determination and fairness that the law mandates. And this is where the police force in India has repeatedly let down the people it is mandated to protect: it has picked up innocent people and subjected them to endless torture merely for the sin of possessing names that suggest allegiance to a particular faith; and it has failed to proceed against threats to public order and blatant acts of terror, merely because the perpetrators happen to belong to the faith that is supposedly, the unique cultural identity of the Indian nation.
Speaking at the Hyderabad tribunal, the well-known civil rights defender, Suresh Khairnar, described the public inquiry he had conducted, alongside a retired judge of the Bombay High court, B.G. Kolse-Patil and ten others, into the “encounter” in Nagpur in June 2006, in which a potential terrorist strike against the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) headquarters in Nagpur was thwarted and its intending authors killed. He described the mass of fishy circumstances that the inquiry came across and the suspicious reluctance of the Nagpur police commissioner to meet with the team. The inquiry concluded in the light of all the information available, that the encounter was “fake” and required a “fair probe” in the national interest.
Similar ambiguities, Khairnar recalled, surrounded a bomb blast in the district town of Nanded in Maharashtra, in April 2006, in which the fabricators of the explosive device – both known members of a Hindu extremist organisation – were killed. Unsurprisingly, this incident did not receive any of the nation-wide coverage that the Nagpur incident did. Interest soon died out and the police, for reasons yet unclear, sought to dissuade any further media coverage on the grounds that it would damage the investigative process.
On August 24 this year, just as major breakthroughs were being claimed in the investigations into the Jaipur and Ahmedabad bombings, an explosion in Kanpur in a private residential premise, killed two identified cadre of the Bajrang Dal – charter members of the Hindutva brigade with a history of involvement in lethally riotous behaviour – while they were fabricating a bomb. The police registered their suspicions over the incident, but chose evidently not to follow up. And the media simply lost interest, since it did not fit into a master narrative on jihadi terrorism.
Obviously though, the hamhanded and cynically biased investigations into incidents of terrorist violence are succeeding where all the bomb blasts have failed. They are actually fostering the widespread belief, at least among the country’s largest religious minority, that the institutional discrimination they suffer is being ever more deeply imbedded in the context of the “war on terror”. If a united and well-informed citizenry is the prime requirement for a successful defence of civil society, the official investigations may well be creating the optimal conditions for the reverse outcome.
Investigations into the recent terrorist attacks in India, with all the media spectacle they afford, have done little else than fuel public hysteria. The process of the law has been wilfully shredded while a case is made for broader powers of detention and investigation for the police. As contradictions in the official narrative on terrorism and its protagonists become manifest, public confidence will inevitably be eroded. And if a united and well-informed people are the only guarantee of public security, then the heavy-handed approach in evidence today seems designed to open the door towards greater terror.
Two days after the deadly September 13 bombings that struck busy commercial areas in Delhi, an editorial in the country’s largest circulated English daily pronounced a rather sombre assessment, while also sounding a call to action: “We are at war. The string of blasts (in Delhi) .. which killed 30 people and injured 90 is the fourth attack by terrorists on a major Indian city in the span of four months”. The people of India, the newspaper advised, should get used to the idea of surrendering some of the liberties they had got accustomed to. This was a necessary, short-term sacrifice, since the enemy they faced was an even greater threat to human freedom.
On September 19, the Special Cell of the Delhi Police, with the electronic media providing real-time coverage, raided a fourth-floor flat in a tenement in Batla House, a crowded south-eastern suburb of the city, neighbouring the campus of the Jamia Millia Islamia university. The “encounter” resulted in the killing of two youths, Bashir alias Atif, aged in his mid-twenties and Sajid, aged in his mid-teens. Another person of twenty and odd years, Mohammad Saif, was taken captive. And to square the account, since the supposed intelligence report that led to the police raid had identified five known terrorists hiding out, the Delhi Police admitted with great regret, that two of their quarries had escaped their cordon.
Beyond this summation of results from the dramatic swoop on terrorism, a tale emerged of the Batla House operation that verged on unimaginative fantasy. As reported in one of Delhi’s newspapers, the team of the Delhi Police “Special Cell”, numbering about 60 – all draped in bullet proof vests – entered the “fifth-floor flat” at 10:15 that morning, accompanied by commandos of the National Security Guard. In the vanguard of this expedition into the unknown was Inspector Mohan Chand Sharma of the Special Cell, who went knocking on all the doors in the tenement. As the report puts it: “Around 10:30 a.m., the door to (flat number) L-18 opened and Sharma was shot thrice”. A gun-battle ensued in which the Delhi Police fired 22 rounds to register two kills and one capture. Eight rounds in all were fired by the opposing side.
Inspector Sharma was carried away to a nearby hospital where he died hours later, reportedly of a cardiac arrest occasioned by severe bleeding. As the day’s events were reported in another of city’s newspapers, Delhi’s police commissioner pronounced in his press briefing that evening, that Inspector Sharma and his team had “cordoned off” the area that morning. Armed policemen “took positions” around the building at 10:30 that morning and a half-hour later, “another team went up to the flat on the fourth floor”. This team was fired upon, following which the gun-battle ensued.
Yet another newspaper had it that the Special Cell squad under Inspector Sharma “barged into” the fourth-floor flat, “following credible inputs” about the presence there of a person “whose physical appearance tallied” with descriptions of a senior operative involved in the July 26 serial bombings in Ahmedabad. The Special Cell had in this version, been helped by the Intelligence Bureau and by the police departments in Gujarat and Maharashtra in “developing” vital information leading to the raid.
The Delhi police, despite losing an officer in the operation, were exultant. As reported in the local press, Atiq, killed in the encounter, was “a key Indian Mujahideen functionary who played a major role in the Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad (and) Delhi serial blasts”.
It did not take long for troubling inconsistencies to emerge in the official narration. Two fact-finding teams visited the Jamia Nagar area within two days of the encounter – one involving the Delhi-based voluntary group, Anhad, and members of the academic community of the Jamia Millia Islamia university; the other involving the advocacy groups, Janahastakshep and the Peoples’ Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR). Residents of the neighbourhood, in testimony to these teams, recounted that as soon as the police action began, the area was cordoned off for all locals, though it was soon saturated with broadcast vans of Delhi’s many news channels. The caretaker of the flat where the dreaded terrorists were holed out, testified that they had in accordance with procedures introduced in Delhi, registered with the local police station on August 21, well after the Ahmedabad bombings. This suggested either great audacity or extreme insouciance, or the troubling third possibility, of innocence.
Finally, the tenement in which the shooting took place, was a four storey structure, abutted on both sides by much smaller structures. The fourth-floor flat where the killing took place had only one door, which opened onto the only staircase in the building. The police could have easily cut off all escape routes and secured the surrender of the flat’s occupants. And once the shooting began, there was no way that two persons holed up in the flat could have effected an escape.
Suggesting that information, like much else in the country, is in danger of ghettoisation, these questions were first raised solely in the Urdu press. On September 22, the Coordination Committee of Indian Muslims, described as a “coalition of 11 organisations formed to take up the perceived harassment of Muslims in the country” called into question the entire police narrative and demanded an independent judicial inquiry. Three days later, the academic community of Jamia, led by Vice Chancellor Mushirul Hasan took out a massive peace march through the campus, resolving with complete unanimity to set up a fund for the legal defence of students swept up in the terrorism dragnet. On September 26, the Janahastakshep-PUDR team formally released its findings, underlining the demand for a judicial probe.
The Delhi Police, to their credit, did make an effort to answer these questions. In flat contradiction to the general assessment, they insisted that the tenancy verification obtained by Atif and Sajid was forged, since the counterpart document did not exist in the concerned police station. As for the escape of two suspects in Batla House on the day of the encounter, the Delhi Police put out a plea of injured innocence: that it would be unfair to query them too closely on a matter placed on public record only as a gesture of good faith and accountability.
Finally, of course, there was the expected questioning of the patriotism of all who dared to challenge an operation that had resulted in the death of a heroic police officer: “It is the irony of this country that they (sic) continue to sympathise with the terrorists despite the death of a policeman in this operation”.
If the Batla House encounter remains a mystery, the links connecting the supposed protagonists of the serial bombing in Jaipur on May 13, Ahmedabad on July 26 and Delhi on September 13, have been portrayed variously over time and with disturbing inconsistencies. At the centre of the narrative is the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), a once obscure body of uncertain provenance, vaguely believed to be affiliated to the Jamaat-e-Islami-e-Hind, banned in 2001 and except for a brief interlude following the change of government at the Centre, an outlaw organisation ever since. As a fine investigative article has recently documented, every notification renewing the ban on the organisation for the maximum period allowed under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, has been a virtual copy of the earlier one. No additional evidence, in other words, has been produced to support the ban, other than whatever was in the original notification of 2001.
When Safdar Nagori, the SIMI general secretary, was arrested in March 2008, a security analyst well-known for his feverishly speculative commentary, observed that “SIMI cadre have been involved in almost every Islamist terror strike since (2000), ranging from the Mumbai serial bombings of 2003 and 2006 to attacks in Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Delhi”.
Despite the seeming certainty behind this pronouncement, obviously inspired by driblets of information leaked by the intelligence agencies, a tribunal constituted to review the extension of the ban, held on August 5, that there simply was no evidence connecting SIMI with terrorism. The Central Government on that occasion, secured a face-saving stay from the Supreme Court on the application of this ruling. Media comment was muted and the public, still under the pall of fear spread by the Jaipur, Bangalore and Ahmedabad bombings, remained indifferent to finer points of legality and fairness.
The pursuit of the terrorists picked up momentum with the mid-August arrest of Abu Bashar Qasmi, a 25-year old cleric, snatched from his home in Azamgarh district of Uttar Pradesh by four men who came visiting on the pretext of exploring a matrimonial alliance. Taken immediately to Gujarat, he was identified by the state police as the man behind July’s Ahmedabad attacks. He also reportedly, confessed to an undefined role in the Jaipur bombing.
On August 24, the Rajasthan police announced the arrest of Shahbaz Husain, a computer software expert who ran a small business in Lucknow. As the Lucknow-based civil rights campaigner Sandeep Pandey recalls, the house that Shahbaz shares with his parents, was raided by about 50 personnel of the Anti-Terrorism Squad of Rajasthan Police. Apart from impounding a computer, the raiding party took away all the literature they could find, as also some currency and a cheque made out in favour of Shahbaz’s business. The next day, the same team revisited and compelled Shahbaz’s father, Abdul Moid, to sign two blank sheets of paper.
Pandey visited the local police station the following day to ask what possible use the blank sheets of paper would be put to, only to be unceremoniously turned out. Press reports that he later saw, blazoned the claim of the Rajasthan Police that sophisticated electronic chips and circuits of bombs resembling those used in Surat had been found in Shahbaz’s premises.
With Shahbaz’s firm implication in terrorism, an elaborate chain of linkages began to be drawn between the Jaipur and Ahmedabad blasts. Nagori, Shahbaz and Qasmi were all reportedly, members of a secretive cell that underwent explosives training in camps as far afield as Kerala and the jungles of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. Brooding over the whole conspiracy was the presence of Mohammad Altaf Subhan -- later identified as Abdul Subhan Quereshi, and variously described by the alternative names, Taufeeq and Tauqeer, by which he was allegedly known in jihadi circles -- a computer hardware specialist missing from his home in Mumbai’s distant suburb of Mira Road, since 2006.
Subhan is supposed to have been the technical brain behind the ingeniously designed bombs and the e-mail messages -- replete with graphics and intense Islamic religious symbolism -- that had been sent out celebrating each terrorist strike in the heart of urban India. When Delhi was gutted by three simultaneous bombings in September, Subhan was the name on every investigating agency’s lips. Working its way through the chain that connected Subhan with Qasmi and Shahbaz, the Delhi police quickly identified the other links in the terrorism plot, all from Uttar Pradesh: Abdul Rajib, Mujib, Alamjed Afridi and Qayamuddin. Acting in concert with their Gujarat counterparts, the Delhi police secured access to Abu Bashar Qasmi for a round of interrogation.
In just over a day, the script was radically rewritten. As the encounter at Batla House began, concurrent media commentary had it that the interrogation of Qasmi had led to the identification of the tenement and that the prize catch, Subhan, was holed out there. When the dust settled, Subhan remained as elusive as ever, though the Delhi Police still claimed it had cracked not merely the Delhi bombings, but also the Jaipur and Ahmedabad attacks. Atif became, in the new narrative, the master terrorist.
Symptomatic of the shoddiness of their media briefings, as also the casualness (if not contempt) with which the police treats the public information function, one of Delhi’s leading newspapers carried stories cheek by jowl on its front page, which flat out, contradicted each other. The top story that day quoted the Delhi Police Commissioner claiming exclusive ownership over the Batla House raid and denying that Qasmi’s presence in the city – courtesy the Gujarat Police -- had anything to do with it. Right below this news-report, was a commentary which provided the following narration: that Bashir alias Atif and his accomplices in the Delhi bombings were identified after a major Intelligence Bureau operation targeting the communications system of the Indian Mujahideen (IM); that Jamia Nagar (the broader neighbourhood in which Batla House is a part) was identified as the most likely refuge he had been afforded by SIMI; and that his safe-house, “could only be located when Qasmi was brought to New Delhi and driven around the Jamia Nagar area on Thursday night”.
The final twist in the story came on September 24, with the arrest of five in Mumbai. In just a matter of days, the Nagori-Qasmi-Shahbaz chain of culpability, was history. The Mumbai Police now definitively identified 31-year old Sadiq Sheikh, a resident of the Cheetah Camp slum sprawl near the city’s north-eastern suburb of Chembur, as the inspiration and the mentor for all the terrorist actions of the preceding months. Four others were arrested alongside, including a computer software expert, an alleged car thief, and supposed specialists in bomb making and in rigging the circuitry for explosive devices.
A few days afterwards, a number of retired police officials with high name-recognition – Kiran Bedi, Prakash Singh, Ved Marwah – reacted in alarm to the contrary and competitive narratives from various police agencies. Loyalty to the khakhi they had worn, determined that they would not question any of the actions taken by the police, though they found ample reason to question the words employed. The discordant voices that were emerging from the police, they feared, would only lend strength to clever defence attorneys in securing the judicial exculpation of terrorism suspects. Marwah’s comment, in conclusion, was that the key issue was of building “political consensus” and avoiding “political one-upmanship”.
Public scrutiny over the investigations into terrorism has been loose, in part, because political reactions have been sharply polarised, and in large measure, opportunistic. The principal opposition party, the BJP, has along with its allies, responded with a predictable, almost conditioned, reflex, to the recent wave of bombings: denouncing the incumbent government for its ineptitude and demanding a special law appropriate to the magnitude of the threat.
The debate on the legal underpinnings of what is now called a “war” against terrorism will presumably rage on for long, with all its partisan resonances. But the reality of the “war” as waged in India, has been that the law is immaterial. Public criticisms of the enforcement agencies have been muted even on the rare occasions that they are voiced. This has created the climate in which a new culture of lawlessness has flourished.
Since the 2005 attack on the makeshift temple built over the ruins of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, lawyers in the state of Uttar Pradesh have been taking an aggressive stance against terrorism suspects. Faizabad began the practice in 2005, when its bar association resolved that none among its members would ever defend a terrorism suspect. This shredding of the fundamentals of natural justice was eagerly emulated by bar associations in Varanasi in 2006, and Lucknow and Barabanki in 2007. A new dimension was added to this mode of ostracism, when three suspects behind an alleged plot to kidnap Congress leader Rahul Gandhi were assaulted by a group of lawyers, as they were produced before a Lucknow court in November 2007.
If ghettoisation is not already the reality in India’s justice system, these events will ensure that it is an accomplished fact. When Aftab Ansari, an electricity board employee from Kolkata, was picked up from his home by Uttar Pradesh police and accused of being a key player in the courtroom blasts of November 2007, Mohammad Shoaib of Lucknow was the only lawyer who stepped up to defend him. Ansari was discharged in February this year after three weeks of detention and torture. Seemingly having failed to extract a confession from him, the police admitted rather lamely, that it was an innocuous case of mistaken identity.
In April, Mohammad Shoaib, undoubtedly in recognition of the commitment and courage he had shown in taking up an unpopular case, was retained as defence lawyer for Mohammad Tariq Kazmi and Mohammad Khalid Mujahid, arrested in Barabanki, and accused of complicity in the courtroom bombings. According to a narration he presented at Hyderabad on August 22, before a “Peoples’ Tribunal” on the application of the anti-terrorism laws, he faced a persistent pattern of obstruction at all levels of the police hierarchy. The case papers were not furnished as required by the law and the jail superintendent in Barabanki defied repeated judicial summons to produce the accused. Finally, the magistrate went to the jail to read out the charges to the two accused.
In April, when Shoaib went to the Barabanki court to argue his clients’ case for bail, he was threatened by the president of the local bar association and told very clearly that he was putting life and limb at risk. Shoaib withdrew but took up the brief again when he found that the families of the accused had no other recourse. He had meanwhile, approached the Allahabad High Court for a writ holding that the delinquency of the bar associations of Faizabad, Varanasi, Lucknow and Barabanki, posed a clear and present danger to the administration of justice. He is yet to secure a hearing from the High Court.
Meanwhile, Shoaib suffered a full-blown physical assault in court-room premises in Lucknow on August 12, when appearing for Naushad, a casual labourer from Bijnore district who faces charges of being a soldier in the armies of the jihad. The following day, Shoaib sent a formal complaint to the local police chief and went in person to the district judge to hand over his report of the assault he had suffered from legal luminaries in Lucknow. He suffered an even more grievous physical attack that day.
A similar lesson in the new principles of the rule of law was imparted to the lawyer Noor Mohammad in April, when he went to the Dhar district court in Madhya Pradesh to defend a group of Muslim youths who had been accused of running a terrorism training camp in the district. Noor Mohammad was at the “Peoples’ Tribunal” on August 22, to provide a harrowing account of the humiliation he had suffered. And the only remonstrance he heard from the bench as he was being roughed up in full view of the presiding judge, was that the disputants needed to take their dispute settlement process elsewhere, lest the violent assault against a lawyer within the courtroom be construed as a case of contempt.
Serial bombs that target vital nodes of a city’s civic life, are intended to produce the kind of effect on an average citizen’s psyche as “shock and awe”, the war doctrine recently implemented by the U.S. in Iraq. The purpose is to create a real life montage of simultaneous destruction, that would be so enveloping in its scope, as to defeat popular loyalty to a regime. The wider lesson it seeks to impart is that the average citizen cannot count on duly constituted political authorities for protection, and would need to assume the right to self-defence. Applied across a wide social expanse, this would become the recipe for a descent into the law of the jungle, a “war of all against all”.
That the people of India have defied this calculus despite repeated provocation, is tribute to the resilience of their faith in a democratic order. But nothing can be taken for granted. Those who have directly suffered from terrorist atrocities need recognition for their fortitude and this can only come through pursuing the perpetrators with all the determination and fairness that the law mandates. And this is where the police force in India has repeatedly let down the people it is mandated to protect: it has picked up innocent people and subjected them to endless torture merely for the sin of possessing names that suggest allegiance to a particular faith; and it has failed to proceed against threats to public order and blatant acts of terror, merely because the perpetrators happen to belong to the faith that is supposedly, the unique cultural identity of the Indian nation.
Speaking at the Hyderabad tribunal, the well-known civil rights defender, Suresh Khairnar, described the public inquiry he had conducted, alongside a retired judge of the Bombay High court, B.G. Kolse-Patil and ten others, into the “encounter” in Nagpur in June 2006, in which a potential terrorist strike against the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) headquarters in Nagpur was thwarted and its intending authors killed. He described the mass of fishy circumstances that the inquiry came across and the suspicious reluctance of the Nagpur police commissioner to meet with the team. The inquiry concluded in the light of all the information available, that the encounter was “fake” and required a “fair probe” in the national interest.
Similar ambiguities, Khairnar recalled, surrounded a bomb blast in the district town of Nanded in Maharashtra, in April 2006, in which the fabricators of the explosive device – both known members of a Hindu extremist organisation – were killed. Unsurprisingly, this incident did not receive any of the nation-wide coverage that the Nagpur incident did. Interest soon died out and the police, for reasons yet unclear, sought to dissuade any further media coverage on the grounds that it would damage the investigative process.
On August 24 this year, just as major breakthroughs were being claimed in the investigations into the Jaipur and Ahmedabad bombings, an explosion in Kanpur in a private residential premise, killed two identified cadre of the Bajrang Dal – charter members of the Hindutva brigade with a history of involvement in lethally riotous behaviour – while they were fabricating a bomb. The police registered their suspicions over the incident, but chose evidently not to follow up. And the media simply lost interest, since it did not fit into a master narrative on jihadi terrorism.
Obviously though, the hamhanded and cynically biased investigations into incidents of terrorist violence are succeeding where all the bomb blasts have failed. They are actually fostering the widespread belief, at least among the country’s largest religious minority, that the institutional discrimination they suffer is being ever more deeply imbedded in the context of the “war on terror”. If a united and well-informed citizenry is the prime requirement for a successful defence of civil society, the official investigations may well be creating the optimal conditions for the reverse outcome.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Afghanistan: the unravelling of a warlord confederacy
Afghanistan was just a way station in the broader civilisational mission of ridding the world of terrorism, a brief halt for the armies of virtue before they went on to nobler tasks. When the larger project got mired in a strategic mess of exclusive U.S. authorship in Iraq, Afghanistan still remained the saving grace, with all the signs it was showing of change for the better.
The puncturing of that delusion began from about early-2006, though the virtuous took a while to recognise that reality. Since May this year, casualties among U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan have consistently outstripped the toll in Iraq. Afghan civilian deaths meanwhile, have multiplied, increasingly as a consequence of misdirected attacks by U.S. and allied forces. Each such incident elicits a volley of protests from the Afghan national government, followed by a commitment from the foreign forces that investigations would duly be conducted. And as virtually foretold from the moment the inquiries are launched, the finding, finally, is that the occupying military forces acted “appropriately”.
August 18 may have been a decisive moment in the shattering of these illusions. Coordinated attacks on that day killed ten members of an elite French paratroop company near Kabul and caused extensive damage to one of the largest U.S. bases in Afghanistan. It was the worst toll from one day’s fighting for western troops in Afghanistan since 2002.
The French President, Nicolas Sarkozy’s, hasty rush to Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath, was as much about deflecting domestic criticism – he had increased French troop commitments a mere five months back – as to express solidarity with soldiers trapped in an unending and unrewarding mission.
Expectedly, Sarkozy was told by his Afghan counterpart, Hamid Karzai, that the consolidation of insurgents on both sides of the border with Pakistan, was really the source of the problem. Karzai’s denunciations of Pakistan, even if well-founded, have acquired much of a ritual quality, not merely because he has been pressing the issue for long, but also because he and his allies have acknowledged – in deeds if not in words – that there is nothing much to do about it.
The reasons why the border with Pakistan is now bristling with insurgency against the Karzai regime, owe entirely to the architecture of the western plan for Afghanistan. Because it did not want the retrieval effort in one failed state to end in a situation of two failed states, the west connived in the early phase of its military campaign in Afghanistan, with Pakistan’s strategy of withdrawing most assets invested in the Taliban regime, or at least all that could be salvaged. This withdrawal was part of an agreed compact by which Pakistan’s army chief and president then, Pervez Musharraf, sought in the cataclysmic defeat of his country’s strategic ambitions, a pretence – even if a very thin one – that the country was well-served by the war in Afghanistan.
The militant tendencies transferred to Pakistan’s northern areas, to greatly add to the restiveness of the Pashto tribes there, were handled through perhaps the first armed incursions by the Pakistan army into areas that had zealously guarded their autonomy. Whether this was make-believe, or a serious effort at extending the authority of the Pakistan state to the territorial frontiers, where its writ had never run strong, is a matter for future historians to assess, when they write up the balance-sheet of the Musharraf years.
The visible outcome of these engagements though, was a precipitate withdrawal of Pakistan’s armed forces and a rather demeaning peace treaty with the chieftains of the tribal areas.
The west, having connived at the evacuation of Pakistan’s assets in Afghanistan, applauded the armed incursion of the Pakistan army into the tribal areas, and perhaps unaware of the irony, warmly congratulated Musharraf on his peace accord with the tribal chiefs.
But with Musharraf now having passed into history, abdicating the presidency he had engineered for himself in a sham election conducted by a defunct national assembly, the civilian government that had, belatedly, summoned up the will to oust him from office, remains even more clueless about dealing with the tribal frontiers.
Afghanistan meanwhile, approaches meltdown, since the leadership that the west had anointed for the supposed democratic transition in the country, has carved up the country into a multitude of personal fiefdoms. Rather than attend to the rigours of building up a genuine sense of national solidarity, the west opted for a confederacy of the same warlords – Rashid Dostum, Abdul Rasool Sayyaf, Mohammad Mohaqiq, Ismael Khan, Karim Khalili, and numerous others – whose ouster by the Taliban was greeted by the people of Afghanistan in the mid-1990s as a form of deliverance.
Denied authority in most of the country, Karzai himself has decided, according to authoritative assessments, to cultivate his own fiefdom in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar – currently Afghanistan’s most fertile breeding grounds for illicit opium. A loss of image in the west, the risk that he may be seen as a patron of the lethal trade in narcotics, is for Karzai, clearly a lesser danger than being overwhelmed by the confederacy of warlords that the western military intervention in his country has created.
The puncturing of that delusion began from about early-2006, though the virtuous took a while to recognise that reality. Since May this year, casualties among U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan have consistently outstripped the toll in Iraq. Afghan civilian deaths meanwhile, have multiplied, increasingly as a consequence of misdirected attacks by U.S. and allied forces. Each such incident elicits a volley of protests from the Afghan national government, followed by a commitment from the foreign forces that investigations would duly be conducted. And as virtually foretold from the moment the inquiries are launched, the finding, finally, is that the occupying military forces acted “appropriately”.
August 18 may have been a decisive moment in the shattering of these illusions. Coordinated attacks on that day killed ten members of an elite French paratroop company near Kabul and caused extensive damage to one of the largest U.S. bases in Afghanistan. It was the worst toll from one day’s fighting for western troops in Afghanistan since 2002.
The French President, Nicolas Sarkozy’s, hasty rush to Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath, was as much about deflecting domestic criticism – he had increased French troop commitments a mere five months back – as to express solidarity with soldiers trapped in an unending and unrewarding mission.
Expectedly, Sarkozy was told by his Afghan counterpart, Hamid Karzai, that the consolidation of insurgents on both sides of the border with Pakistan, was really the source of the problem. Karzai’s denunciations of Pakistan, even if well-founded, have acquired much of a ritual quality, not merely because he has been pressing the issue for long, but also because he and his allies have acknowledged – in deeds if not in words – that there is nothing much to do about it.
The reasons why the border with Pakistan is now bristling with insurgency against the Karzai regime, owe entirely to the architecture of the western plan for Afghanistan. Because it did not want the retrieval effort in one failed state to end in a situation of two failed states, the west connived in the early phase of its military campaign in Afghanistan, with Pakistan’s strategy of withdrawing most assets invested in the Taliban regime, or at least all that could be salvaged. This withdrawal was part of an agreed compact by which Pakistan’s army chief and president then, Pervez Musharraf, sought in the cataclysmic defeat of his country’s strategic ambitions, a pretence – even if a very thin one – that the country was well-served by the war in Afghanistan.
The militant tendencies transferred to Pakistan’s northern areas, to greatly add to the restiveness of the Pashto tribes there, were handled through perhaps the first armed incursions by the Pakistan army into areas that had zealously guarded their autonomy. Whether this was make-believe, or a serious effort at extending the authority of the Pakistan state to the territorial frontiers, where its writ had never run strong, is a matter for future historians to assess, when they write up the balance-sheet of the Musharraf years.
The visible outcome of these engagements though, was a precipitate withdrawal of Pakistan’s armed forces and a rather demeaning peace treaty with the chieftains of the tribal areas.
The west, having connived at the evacuation of Pakistan’s assets in Afghanistan, applauded the armed incursion of the Pakistan army into the tribal areas, and perhaps unaware of the irony, warmly congratulated Musharraf on his peace accord with the tribal chiefs.
But with Musharraf now having passed into history, abdicating the presidency he had engineered for himself in a sham election conducted by a defunct national assembly, the civilian government that had, belatedly, summoned up the will to oust him from office, remains even more clueless about dealing with the tribal frontiers.
Afghanistan meanwhile, approaches meltdown, since the leadership that the west had anointed for the supposed democratic transition in the country, has carved up the country into a multitude of personal fiefdoms. Rather than attend to the rigours of building up a genuine sense of national solidarity, the west opted for a confederacy of the same warlords – Rashid Dostum, Abdul Rasool Sayyaf, Mohammad Mohaqiq, Ismael Khan, Karim Khalili, and numerous others – whose ouster by the Taliban was greeted by the people of Afghanistan in the mid-1990s as a form of deliverance.
Denied authority in most of the country, Karzai himself has decided, according to authoritative assessments, to cultivate his own fiefdom in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar – currently Afghanistan’s most fertile breeding grounds for illicit opium. A loss of image in the west, the risk that he may be seen as a patron of the lethal trade in narcotics, is for Karzai, clearly a lesser danger than being overwhelmed by the confederacy of warlords that the western military intervention in his country has created.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Should India's Supreme Court be Writing Rules for Journalism?
The Indian Supreme Court on August 18 declared that it intends to lay down norms for media coverage of ongoing criminal investigations.
According to media reports, India’s highest court, hearing a public interest petition filed by an independent lawyer, determined that media coverage of the investigations into the murder of a teenage girl, Aarushi Talwar, in the township of Noida neighbouring Delhi, had seriously breached all norms of responsible journalism.
As The Hindu (Delhi edition, August 19) reported the court’s observations: “Nobody is trying to gag the media. They must play a responsible role. By investigation, the media must not do anything which will prejudice either the prosecution or the accused. Sometimes the entire focus is lost. A person is found guilty even before the trial takes place”.
The Supreme Court has issued notices seeking an opinion from the Press Council of India and explanations from two newspapers (The Times of India and the Hindustan Times) and three major 24-hour news channels (Aaj Tak, NDTV and CNN-IBN).
The higher judiciary’s attempt to write rules for journalism represents a new threat to the autonomy of India’s robust media industry. Most media houses already have well-considered norms in place covering every such journalistic contingency.
It is another matter though, that these norms are seldom honoured and that new entrants into the profession rarely benefit from mentoring procedures that would attune them to best journalistic practices. The judiciary’s current initiative is in this sense, symptomatic of a wider crisis of standards in the Indian media: one occasioned by the rampant commercialism that has followed the boom in cable television and the new media.
Since Aarushi Talwar was discovered murdered at her family home in Noida on May 16, there has been considerable public disquiet over the spectacular incompetence of the police investigation and the shocking abdication of responsibility by vast sections of the Indian media. These two in a sense, reinforced each other, ensuring that the truth remained obscure for an inordinate length of time. For the Talwar family and for all those who knew Aarushi, it was a deeply truamatic experience to see her being denied dignity even in death.
The media in other words, abandoned its truth-telling role in favour of crass sensationalism. Where it could have, potentially, served as a window for the public to keep themselves informed about the investigations, it chose instead, to reproduce and regurgitate every half-formed explanation put out by the police force.
Media ethics is all about sound internal scrutiny in the newsroom and editorial department, as also, of accountability to the readership or audience. A code of conduct that is externally imposed, even if it pertains to the specific area of ongoing criminal investigations, is not guaranteed either to be effective or to best serve the public interest.
Credible self-regulation on the basis of internally evolved norms, requires that the autonomy of journalism within the media industry be honoured. The increasing encroachment of the marketing and advertising functions into content decisions is responsible for many of the ethical breaches recently manifest in the Indian media.
The Aarushi Talwar case is only the most recent instance involving the use of governmental or judicial authority to restrain the media. On August 14, according to media reports, India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting issued notices to three TV channels, to show cause why they should not be penalised for violating the “programme code”.
It is another matter that the “programme code” is a fairly loosely worded text drawn up in 1995 as an annexure to the sole existing law on cable TV broadcasting. It has never been subject to any form of public scrutiny, or won the explicit endorsement of journalists or the media industry. Indeed, efforts by the Ministry since 2006 to evolve a “content code” in consultation with the industry have so far failed to produce an agreed text, in part, because they have not involved media professionals in any significant way.
Despite an understanding on content being a distant prospect, the Ministry in February this year notified the creation of a number of state and district-level “monitoring bodies” that will assess non-governmental broadcast entities for conformity with the programme code. These committees as first constituted, were made up overwhelmingly of bureaucrats and police personnel. It was only in July, almost as an afterthought, that the Ministry mandated the participation of the journalism profession within these committees.
The media has also had to face the prospect of the judiciary often seeking to get involved in content decisions. In disposing of a public interest petition arising from the “sting” operation that wrongly implicated a teacher in a non-existent prostitution racket, the Delhi High Court held in December 2007, that any channel planning to broadcast programs involving a “sting” should be legally obliged to obtain prior permission from a government-appointed committee. It recommended that the Ministry should appoint a retired judge of a High Court to chair the committee, which should also comprise two others drawn from the bureaucracy.
The fake sting was a canonical case of non-existent editorial processes, which should be tackled through credible norms of self-regulation. In this respect, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) – the organisation this writer works with -- recently launched in association with affiliate unions in India, a series of broad-ranging discussions under the rubric of its “Ethical Journalism Initiative”. The IFJ believes that with the active engagement of journalists, the challenge of ethics in the newsroom can be adequately faced and dealt with.
According to media reports, India’s highest court, hearing a public interest petition filed by an independent lawyer, determined that media coverage of the investigations into the murder of a teenage girl, Aarushi Talwar, in the township of Noida neighbouring Delhi, had seriously breached all norms of responsible journalism.
As The Hindu (Delhi edition, August 19) reported the court’s observations: “Nobody is trying to gag the media. They must play a responsible role. By investigation, the media must not do anything which will prejudice either the prosecution or the accused. Sometimes the entire focus is lost. A person is found guilty even before the trial takes place”.
The Supreme Court has issued notices seeking an opinion from the Press Council of India and explanations from two newspapers (The Times of India and the Hindustan Times) and three major 24-hour news channels (Aaj Tak, NDTV and CNN-IBN).
The higher judiciary’s attempt to write rules for journalism represents a new threat to the autonomy of India’s robust media industry. Most media houses already have well-considered norms in place covering every such journalistic contingency.
It is another matter though, that these norms are seldom honoured and that new entrants into the profession rarely benefit from mentoring procedures that would attune them to best journalistic practices. The judiciary’s current initiative is in this sense, symptomatic of a wider crisis of standards in the Indian media: one occasioned by the rampant commercialism that has followed the boom in cable television and the new media.
Since Aarushi Talwar was discovered murdered at her family home in Noida on May 16, there has been considerable public disquiet over the spectacular incompetence of the police investigation and the shocking abdication of responsibility by vast sections of the Indian media. These two in a sense, reinforced each other, ensuring that the truth remained obscure for an inordinate length of time. For the Talwar family and for all those who knew Aarushi, it was a deeply truamatic experience to see her being denied dignity even in death.
The media in other words, abandoned its truth-telling role in favour of crass sensationalism. Where it could have, potentially, served as a window for the public to keep themselves informed about the investigations, it chose instead, to reproduce and regurgitate every half-formed explanation put out by the police force.
Media ethics is all about sound internal scrutiny in the newsroom and editorial department, as also, of accountability to the readership or audience. A code of conduct that is externally imposed, even if it pertains to the specific area of ongoing criminal investigations, is not guaranteed either to be effective or to best serve the public interest.
Credible self-regulation on the basis of internally evolved norms, requires that the autonomy of journalism within the media industry be honoured. The increasing encroachment of the marketing and advertising functions into content decisions is responsible for many of the ethical breaches recently manifest in the Indian media.
The Aarushi Talwar case is only the most recent instance involving the use of governmental or judicial authority to restrain the media. On August 14, according to media reports, India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting issued notices to three TV channels, to show cause why they should not be penalised for violating the “programme code”.
It is another matter that the “programme code” is a fairly loosely worded text drawn up in 1995 as an annexure to the sole existing law on cable TV broadcasting. It has never been subject to any form of public scrutiny, or won the explicit endorsement of journalists or the media industry. Indeed, efforts by the Ministry since 2006 to evolve a “content code” in consultation with the industry have so far failed to produce an agreed text, in part, because they have not involved media professionals in any significant way.
Despite an understanding on content being a distant prospect, the Ministry in February this year notified the creation of a number of state and district-level “monitoring bodies” that will assess non-governmental broadcast entities for conformity with the programme code. These committees as first constituted, were made up overwhelmingly of bureaucrats and police personnel. It was only in July, almost as an afterthought, that the Ministry mandated the participation of the journalism profession within these committees.
The media has also had to face the prospect of the judiciary often seeking to get involved in content decisions. In disposing of a public interest petition arising from the “sting” operation that wrongly implicated a teacher in a non-existent prostitution racket, the Delhi High Court held in December 2007, that any channel planning to broadcast programs involving a “sting” should be legally obliged to obtain prior permission from a government-appointed committee. It recommended that the Ministry should appoint a retired judge of a High Court to chair the committee, which should also comprise two others drawn from the bureaucracy.
The fake sting was a canonical case of non-existent editorial processes, which should be tackled through credible norms of self-regulation. In this respect, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) – the organisation this writer works with -- recently launched in association with affiliate unions in India, a series of broad-ranging discussions under the rubric of its “Ethical Journalism Initiative”. The IFJ believes that with the active engagement of journalists, the challenge of ethics in the newsroom can be adequately faced and dealt with.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Caste and the world of business
Review article
Harish Damodaran, India’s New Capitalists: Caste, Business and Industry in a Modern Nation, Permanent Black in association with the New India Foundation, 2008, Delhi, pp xxiii + 341, Rs 695.
To call this work a fascinating collage of business biographies would best describe the experience of reading it, though perhaps at the risk of undermining the rigour with which its material has been assembled. Quite in contrast to the unfettered subjectivity of a collage, Harish Damodaran has written this book with rigorous attention to the dimension of caste (or more precisely, jati) as a central determinant of entrepreneurial behaviour and business success in India.
Entrepreneurs have been viewed as the dynamic element in economic processes, as the rebels against conformity, who (as Joseph Schumpeter puts it) break the dull rhythms of the “circular flow” of the economy – or the reproduction from day-to-day of stagnant human horizons – and open up limitlessly expanding possibilities. Missing perhaps in this view of the entrepreneur as an epic hero, is a vision of the individual innovator within a larger network of social and cultural ties.
Caste in India, though often considered a residue of the pre-modern economy, has proved an inescapable part of all business histories, indeed, even perhaps a decisive element in modern entrepreneurial success. Social networks are key, simply because business is all about building and sustaining commodity exchange networks and industry is all about establishing productivity enhancing techniques at vital nodes in these networks. To put it in terms of the basic vocabulary of the economist, caste networks aid entrepreneurship by reducing “transaction costs”.
Yet approaches to business history have suffered from certain serious deficiencies, which Damodaran cites as the principal motivation for his work. There has been for one thing, a tendency to remain confined to “traditional” business communities without an understanding of how these traditions are continually being invented and reinvented. This in turn leads to a lack of contemporary focus. Several traditional merchant families, having made the transition to industry and riches beyond imagination, have since fallen away into obscurity. And despite all the continuing prominence of older trading communities in the Indian entrepreneurial landscape, there are new entrants of no recognisable business pedigree who are leading the charge into new frontiers. In terms of geographical focus, the south of the country again, has tended to fall outside the gaze of the conventional business historian.
For these reasons, Damodaran does not dwell at length on the so-called “old merchant communities”, which he identifies as the Banias and Jains of Gujarat and north India, the Marwaris, Parsis, Nattukottai Chettiars, and the Lohanas and Bhatias of the Kutch-Kathiawar-Sindh belt. After a quick consideration of the “general trajectories” of entrepreneurial growth within these communities, which brings the narrative right up to contemporary times, Damodaran turns his attention to the communities less studied: Brahmins and Khatris, Kammas and Reddys, Naidus and Gounders, Nadars and Ezhavas, Patidars and Marathas. He documents the presence of entrepreneurial energy in all these quarters and then turns his attention to explaining an absence. The northern farming communities – in particular, the Jats – he points out, have yet to manifest any tendency to make the transition from agrarian dynamism to industry. Damodaran concludes, a little implausibly since his entire treatment has dealt with “minorities”, with a “note on the minorities”, unable to resist the temptation of using a politicised euphemism in referring to the Muslims. Here again, he is dealing with an absence – or rather, a marginal presence that was splintered and scattered with the partition of 1947.
Damodaran shows how extended kinship networks have concretely worked in ensuring business success. The Nadars of southern Tamilnadu promoted a bank entirely through small capital subscriptions from their caste folk, providing their business ventures with an effective bulwark against fthe uncertainties of finance; a Gounder family of Coimbatore, newly arrived in the sugar industry, overcame a stiff working capital bottleneck by effecitvely persuading clansmen to part with sugarcane on an extended line of credit, a business deal that would have been unthinkable outside of strong and deep community bonds. Then again, Damodaran also demonstrates with a number of illustrations, how globalisation and the stockmarket, which have given a fresh impetus to the mobility of capital and loosened its anchorage in specific social and cultural milieus, has led to a weakening of these kinship ties in business.
Summing up the experiences of these diverse social aggregates, Damodaran identifies three kinds of trajectories of business success. “Bazaar to factory” sums up the path taken by the traditional merchant communities, which are really not the primary focus of this book. Rather, what this book is more concerned with, are the “office to factory” route, which brought the service-oriented and “scribal” castes – Brahmins, Khatris, Kayasths, the Bengali Bhadralok -- into the portals of industry; and the “farm to factory” trajectory represented by the Naidus, Gounders, Patidars, Marathas and Nadars.
Considering the mutability of tradition, it could also be argued that these perhaps are not three distinct trajectories, but three variants of the same trajectory, though displaced in time. That argument perhaps is especially apt when it comes to the “office to factory” trajectory, since many of the traditional merchant communities identified by Damodaran, began their industrial empires as minor functionaries in the early colonial trade in opium, raw cotton and indigo. As these networks of commodity exchange spread out through the south Asian landmass and gradually acquired diversity and depth, greater numbers were drawn into it, both as movers and shakers, and as hapless victims. New identities were forged, such as capitalist and worker, even as several old identities, such as craftsman and subsistence peasant, were undone.
India’s industrial growth was derivative of the dynamics of colonialism, rather than autonomous. The national bourgeoisie that grew out of the process remained segmented, divided into numerous endogamous groups. This book ends with an affirmation of the value of diversity. When democratic political contestation and spontaneous economic change, contribute towards a socially diverse middle class, the likely further outcome is a socially diverse entrepreneurial class. Diversity in turn, becomes an assurance of solidarity. Though the country has in its southern and western regions, achieved a semblance of social diversity, large sections still remain excluded. And in the vast Hindi heartland and the east, even the semblance has not been achieved.
The last two decades of economic liberalisation have seemingly created conditions for those lower in the hierarchy of business and industry to migrate upwards into the interstices of the capitalist system and acquire leadership positions. Yet there has also been in this time, a vast increase of inequalities of income and wealth.
There is currently underway, an impassioned debate among the Dalits – a heterogeneous social group that shares the common attribute of exclusion under the ritual order – on globalisation as a possible antidote to all their inherited debilities. That argument remains inconclusive. And while the jury remains out, material realities are ensuring that the answer is not left to spontaneous forces of entrepreneurship and economic change. Politics, it is increasingly recognised, will now drive the agenda.
Harish Damodaran, India’s New Capitalists: Caste, Business and Industry in a Modern Nation, Permanent Black in association with the New India Foundation, 2008, Delhi, pp xxiii + 341, Rs 695.
To call this work a fascinating collage of business biographies would best describe the experience of reading it, though perhaps at the risk of undermining the rigour with which its material has been assembled. Quite in contrast to the unfettered subjectivity of a collage, Harish Damodaran has written this book with rigorous attention to the dimension of caste (or more precisely, jati) as a central determinant of entrepreneurial behaviour and business success in India.
Entrepreneurs have been viewed as the dynamic element in economic processes, as the rebels against conformity, who (as Joseph Schumpeter puts it) break the dull rhythms of the “circular flow” of the economy – or the reproduction from day-to-day of stagnant human horizons – and open up limitlessly expanding possibilities. Missing perhaps in this view of the entrepreneur as an epic hero, is a vision of the individual innovator within a larger network of social and cultural ties.
Caste in India, though often considered a residue of the pre-modern economy, has proved an inescapable part of all business histories, indeed, even perhaps a decisive element in modern entrepreneurial success. Social networks are key, simply because business is all about building and sustaining commodity exchange networks and industry is all about establishing productivity enhancing techniques at vital nodes in these networks. To put it in terms of the basic vocabulary of the economist, caste networks aid entrepreneurship by reducing “transaction costs”.
Yet approaches to business history have suffered from certain serious deficiencies, which Damodaran cites as the principal motivation for his work. There has been for one thing, a tendency to remain confined to “traditional” business communities without an understanding of how these traditions are continually being invented and reinvented. This in turn leads to a lack of contemporary focus. Several traditional merchant families, having made the transition to industry and riches beyond imagination, have since fallen away into obscurity. And despite all the continuing prominence of older trading communities in the Indian entrepreneurial landscape, there are new entrants of no recognisable business pedigree who are leading the charge into new frontiers. In terms of geographical focus, the south of the country again, has tended to fall outside the gaze of the conventional business historian.
For these reasons, Damodaran does not dwell at length on the so-called “old merchant communities”, which he identifies as the Banias and Jains of Gujarat and north India, the Marwaris, Parsis, Nattukottai Chettiars, and the Lohanas and Bhatias of the Kutch-Kathiawar-Sindh belt. After a quick consideration of the “general trajectories” of entrepreneurial growth within these communities, which brings the narrative right up to contemporary times, Damodaran turns his attention to the communities less studied: Brahmins and Khatris, Kammas and Reddys, Naidus and Gounders, Nadars and Ezhavas, Patidars and Marathas. He documents the presence of entrepreneurial energy in all these quarters and then turns his attention to explaining an absence. The northern farming communities – in particular, the Jats – he points out, have yet to manifest any tendency to make the transition from agrarian dynamism to industry. Damodaran concludes, a little implausibly since his entire treatment has dealt with “minorities”, with a “note on the minorities”, unable to resist the temptation of using a politicised euphemism in referring to the Muslims. Here again, he is dealing with an absence – or rather, a marginal presence that was splintered and scattered with the partition of 1947.
Damodaran shows how extended kinship networks have concretely worked in ensuring business success. The Nadars of southern Tamilnadu promoted a bank entirely through small capital subscriptions from their caste folk, providing their business ventures with an effective bulwark against fthe uncertainties of finance; a Gounder family of Coimbatore, newly arrived in the sugar industry, overcame a stiff working capital bottleneck by effecitvely persuading clansmen to part with sugarcane on an extended line of credit, a business deal that would have been unthinkable outside of strong and deep community bonds. Then again, Damodaran also demonstrates with a number of illustrations, how globalisation and the stockmarket, which have given a fresh impetus to the mobility of capital and loosened its anchorage in specific social and cultural milieus, has led to a weakening of these kinship ties in business.
Summing up the experiences of these diverse social aggregates, Damodaran identifies three kinds of trajectories of business success. “Bazaar to factory” sums up the path taken by the traditional merchant communities, which are really not the primary focus of this book. Rather, what this book is more concerned with, are the “office to factory” route, which brought the service-oriented and “scribal” castes – Brahmins, Khatris, Kayasths, the Bengali Bhadralok -- into the portals of industry; and the “farm to factory” trajectory represented by the Naidus, Gounders, Patidars, Marathas and Nadars.
Considering the mutability of tradition, it could also be argued that these perhaps are not three distinct trajectories, but three variants of the same trajectory, though displaced in time. That argument perhaps is especially apt when it comes to the “office to factory” trajectory, since many of the traditional merchant communities identified by Damodaran, began their industrial empires as minor functionaries in the early colonial trade in opium, raw cotton and indigo. As these networks of commodity exchange spread out through the south Asian landmass and gradually acquired diversity and depth, greater numbers were drawn into it, both as movers and shakers, and as hapless victims. New identities were forged, such as capitalist and worker, even as several old identities, such as craftsman and subsistence peasant, were undone.
India’s industrial growth was derivative of the dynamics of colonialism, rather than autonomous. The national bourgeoisie that grew out of the process remained segmented, divided into numerous endogamous groups. This book ends with an affirmation of the value of diversity. When democratic political contestation and spontaneous economic change, contribute towards a socially diverse middle class, the likely further outcome is a socially diverse entrepreneurial class. Diversity in turn, becomes an assurance of solidarity. Though the country has in its southern and western regions, achieved a semblance of social diversity, large sections still remain excluded. And in the vast Hindi heartland and the east, even the semblance has not been achieved.
The last two decades of economic liberalisation have seemingly created conditions for those lower in the hierarchy of business and industry to migrate upwards into the interstices of the capitalist system and acquire leadership positions. Yet there has also been in this time, a vast increase of inequalities of income and wealth.
There is currently underway, an impassioned debate among the Dalits – a heterogeneous social group that shares the common attribute of exclusion under the ritual order – on globalisation as a possible antidote to all their inherited debilities. That argument remains inconclusive. And while the jury remains out, material realities are ensuring that the answer is not left to spontaneous forces of entrepreneurship and economic change. Politics, it is increasingly recognised, will now drive the agenda.
Friday, July 18, 2008
How dollar accountancy of the costs of the Iraq war could be deceptive
Review Article
Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War, The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, Allen Lane (Penguin Books), London, 2008, pp 311, Rs 595; ISBN 978-1-846-14128-7
It was election year in the U.S. and the country was trapped in what seemed an endless war. Confronted with a colossal loss of public confidence in his leadership and widespread revulsion at the tableau of destruction he was staging in a faraway land, the U.S. President took to the airwaves, vowing that he would utilise every forum and opportunity, to discuss “means of bringing (an) ugly war to an end”.
The moral dimension, explicit in the use of the term “ugly”, was not the only consideration. The war as the U.S. president put it, was taking a heavy toll of government finances. Failing the imposition of fresh taxes or stringent expenditure restraints, the U.S. budget deficit would spiral up -- and out of control -- putting at risk the foundation of the nation’s unparalleled prosperity since World War II: the role of the U.S. dollar “as the keystone of international trade and finance”.
If George W. Bush had been capable of acknowledging error, if he had in him the human capacity for contrition, this script could well have been written for him in 2004. In reality, it was the scenario played out by Lyndon Johnson in March 1968, as he renounced his candidacy for a second full term in the U.S. presidency and determined that his remaining days in office would be devoted to ending the Vietnam war (it is quite another story though, that his effort proved futile, partly on account of sabotage from within).
Bush in 2004 followed a rather different script, defying all polls to eke out a narrow win and in that moment of dubious triumph, announcing that he had surmounted a crucial moment of accountability and would not hesitate to make an already ugly conflict positively repellent. What followed was a slash-and-burn offensive through the Iraqi city of Fallujah, borrowed straight from the World War II playbook.
Despite a display of military machismo that reduced Iraq’s city of mosques to smouldering ruins, the insurgency showed little sign of yielding. And even if Bush’s bravado remained undimmed, his approval ratings began a rapid downward plunge.
If this accidental president had at all been interested in arresting the free-fall in his credibility, he could have sought a pathway back from the fatal error of Iraq. As Stiglitz and Bilmes (hereafter S&B) point out in this important book, Bush was given his best opportunity when the report of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group was submitted, shortly after his Republican party was pummelled in the mid-term elections of November 2006. He passed that moment by with no explanation, repudiating the findings of an expert group he had appointed and entrusted with a broad mandate.
Ever since, the U.S. President has used a familiar trope to deter all talk of withdrawal: to reverse course, he has said, would be to dishonour the sacrifices made by U.S. soldiers in a noble cause. With a wealth of documentation on all current and future human costs of the Iraq war, S&B conclusively establish that this is one of the most cynically insincere pleas ever advanced. The most significant contribution that S&B make to the accountancy of the Iraq war, perhaps, is in their treatment of the burden borne by U.S. military personnel – those killed who have families to be provided for, those incapacitated, who need lifelong care, those returned time and again to the field of battle, who progressively lose their capacity to deal with “normality” because of accumulated traumas.
These costs however, do not go into the headline figure of $3 trillion (or $3,000 billion), which earned S&B the instant attention of those who inhabit the rational fringe in the U.S. and the instant derision of the vociferous band of right-wing commentators and Bush supporters, who called it a lame attempt to coin a “catchphrase”. Contrary to what the diminishing but voluble band of Bush partisans may say, the “three trillion” estimate is arrived at on the basis of very cautious and conservative assumptions. S&B take all the known appropriations that have been made for the war and add them up. This process does not involve any arithmetical operation more complicated than addition.
Bookkeeping procedures in the U.S. defence department, though, are infamously – and deliberately – muddled and this compels S&B to undertake a fine-tooth search to factor in costs that may be hidden elsewhere. Once they track down all those elusive numbers, they add on costs that will likely be incurred in restoring the U.S. armed forces to the state they were in before the war – in terms of munitions replaced, equipment repaired and long deferred maintenance procedures implemented.
War imposes costs on all sectors of society. Higher energy costs, S&B argue, have meant that the U.S. economy has suffered serious harm. But the extra money paid by energy consumers do not figure in the $3 trillion price tag. S&B do however, factor into their cost calculations the consequences – in terms of lower tax accruals to the public exchequer – of the economic slowdown that soaring energy costs has caused.
With the profusion of assumptions, numbers and calculations that S&B lay out, it is often difficult to retain attention on essential distinctions. The headline number of “three trillion”, they explain, relates only to the budgetary costs borne by the U.S. federal government. After full budgetary costs are added, S&B take on board the interest component and then add what they call the “macro-economic costs”, which refer to the benefits the economy has foregone because money has unaccountably gone into the pursuit of war. Finally, S&B add on the costs of the U.S. operations in Afghanistan.
When S&B declare that this process is “conceptually simple” they perhaps take too much for granted. To begin with, some of the costs they total up are real: they are actually paid out of the public exchequer. Others are notional, the outcome of “what might have been” calculations, such as revenues that have been lost to the public exchequer. Matters are not rendered any easier, by the authors’ choice of “three trillion” as shorthand. At no stage of the reckoning, does the total reach that comfortably rounded sum. Indeed, that sum turns out to be a compromise between two scenarios that the authors construct: strict budgetary costs and total economic costs. S&B could as well have titled their book “the five trillion dollar war”, since that is what they estimate “total economic costs” at. No reason is offered for the choice of the lower number, though this should be deemed a minor omission, since both figures are equally beyond ordinary human comprehension, whether as astronomical distances or dollar sums.
The larger part of S&B’s work is about costs that are outside the boundaries of both “budgetary” and “economic” costs – such as the costs to U.S. community life, and the costs to the two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, which have to their misfortune been designated the principal theatres of the civilisational mission of the U.S. Exercises such as this, inevitably, involve several counter-factual assumptions. Besides, S&B face a considerable moral dilemma in transporting the standards applied in the valuation of the life of a U.S. soldier to a different milieu. S&B seek heroically to grapple with this dilemma: they recognise every estimate that has been made of the deaths in Iraq since the war began, and also take on board humanitarian consequences of exile and internal displacement. They occasionally throw up their hands in despair at the accounting complexities of reckoning with all these human tragedies. But their intent remains, firmly, on putting a dollar value on the consequences of the Iraq war.
So what does it involve to recognise the 100,000 and perhaps 500,000 Iraqi deaths from the U.S. invasion? Parenthetically, one may ask: what does it mean to acknowledge the one million casualties from the sanctions against Iraq that were so zealously enforced by the Clinton administration, which both the authors of this book loyally served?
S&B recognise some of the moral difficulties. But they have little problem branding Bush’s plea of honouring the sacrifices made by the U.S. armed forces, as a cynical ploy and an evasion of responsibility. It is a conspicuous failure of all systems of accountability, even in the most professedly perfect democracy, that decision makers rarely have to face the full consequences of their blunders. Corporate executives who make the most disastrous strategic choices while in authority can always count upon a golden parachute and a comfortable severance package when they leave their cosy billets. Similarly, no U.S. president has ever had to deal with the stigma of defeat in a military adventure that he started.
Discerning the cynicism of Bush’s strategy of leaving the reckoning with Iraq to his successor, does not mean yet, that the U.S. public, or for that matter, the global public, would consent to walking away from the disaster of Iraq. The public also need also to be convinced that this abdication will not entail consequences even more disastrous. S&B offer a simple moral pathway out of the conundrum, summed up in an age-old aphorism: “let bygones be bygones”. This aphorism, they say, also has a foundation in economic theory, in the concept of “sunk costs”.
Yet, what seem like “sunk costs” to the economist may well appear to those who have borne the brunt of U.S. military aggression, as a case for reparations. Even if withdrawal is the strategy of choice for the U.S., the rest of the world would have to reckon with the costs of, first, the illegitimate invasion and next, the dishonourable retreat.
It turns out that the rest of the world is already bearing a significant burden of the costs of the Iraq war. Every war that the U.S. or any other country has fought, has involved a burden of taxation. Johnson’s greatest worry as he renounced the presidency in 1968, was that, despite the tax surcharge he had decreed to pay for Vietnam, the U.S. budget was slipping rapidly into the red, making the sustenance of the dollar as a credible world currency, a virtual impossibility. His successor, Richard Nixon, though committed to a regime of low taxes, repudiated any possibility that the surcharge would be repealed, since there could be nothing more irresponsible for a country at war.
Contrast that with the current situation, when Bush is liable to characterise any suggestion of raising taxes as an act to treason. Between Johnson and Bush, (or between Vietnam and Iraq) there has been something that has changed, which has made nonsense of old-style economic orthodoxy. Simply put, the brutal reality is that the entire U.S. hegemonic drive today is financed through borrowed money. S&B recognise this fact, which they say, makes no difference to their basic arguments, since the borrowed money will have to be repaid. But is that really a reasonable belief?
This needs going back a bit in time to the Johnson abdication in 1968 and his decision to sue for peace in Vietnam, in part, because he thought the U.S. dollar was in jeopardy. And though Nixon refused to do away with the taxes that paid for Vietnam, he did make a decision in 1972 that would have momentous consequences for the future of the U.S. dollar. He took the U.S. currency off the system under which its value was calibrated with a certain weight in gold. From that point on, the dollar had to sink or swim on the strength of its acceptance by other economies. This required that all countries hold their national savings in dollars and that furthermore, transactions in the most widely traded commodities, such as petroleum, should be denominated in dollars.
Discussions of currency values, taxation, expenditure and the national debt tend to be confined to an esoteric corner where only supposed experts are allowed. Unfortunately, S&B, both charter members of that narrow enclave, do not venture into that discussion. Aside from providing an accounting of the Iraq war, they choose to avoid the broader political-economic motivations and consequences. It was not much talked about in expert circles then, but just over a month before the invasion of Iraq took place, the U.S. Treasury Department formally notified the U.S. Congress that the government had reached the limits of borrowing allowed under the law and was in danger of default on debt. The U.S. government, then hot and feverish for war, needed to borrow to merely service its national debt. How could a nation contemplate war in these circumstances?
The drama of raising borrowing limits had been enacted the previous year too and at various times over the preceding decade. The U.S. Congress has been remarkably hospitable to right-wing lunatics who describe tax cuts as a patriotic duty, argue for unending war in the next breath, and then quietly acquiesce in the raising of the national debt limit. It is an interesting coda to S&B’s analysis that between the beginning of the war in Iraq and now, the U.S. national debt has gone up by well over $3 trillion.
How is this figure going to be drawn down? How if ever, is this debt going to be repaid? S&B do not venture in to that territory, except to insist that the debt must be repaid. But finally, they remain blind-sided by the faulty assumptions of contemporary economic analysis. They fail to recognise that the danger Lyndon Johnson warned of -- as far back as 1968 -- is now an accomplished fact: the U.S. dollar as the cornerstone of world trade and finance is in its death throes. In seeking to designate every cost of war in terms of the U.S. dollar, S&B suffer several moral qualms, but never really deviate from their belief that the U.S. dollar provides an invariant standard of value. They prove unable in other words, to look beyond this conceit of the U.S. economy.
S&B put down the huge increase in oil prices in recent months to a variety of causes: the Iraq war, they cautiously say, accounts for just $10 out of the total increase of about $70 in the price of a barrel of oil (at the time this book was sent to press). The rest, in their estimation, could be put down to factors such as increased demand from China and India.
This argument is typical of the kind of loose practices that economics as a discipline is rife with. It offers the Bush administration precisely the alibi it needs, since it obscures the rampant speculation that is driving prices. And the forces behind this speculative drive are themselves part of the political-economic substratum of the Iraq war: briefly put, the dependence of the U.S., since the 1980s, on continuing infusions of world savings to support current consumption. The speculative increase in oil prices, contrary to the effort to cast it in terms of the supposedly neutral, apolitical forces of global supply and demand, is integrally related to the decline in the value of the U.S. dollar and the need to prime the pump that drives a large chunk of global cash surpluses into investments in U.S. government debt and other financial instruments. And yet, despite this priming of the pump, including through patently illegitimate exercises of military power, the mighty dollar continues to plunge in value. This in itself, is a circumstance that should deflate the S&B effort to construct a picture of the “true costs” of the Iraq war in terms of the invariant standard of the U.S. dollar.
With ample reason, S&B dismiss any notion that the Iraq war may have entailed benefits that could even remotely mitigate the severity of the multi-trillion dollar bill it has served up. What then was the motivation for the war? With all the critical literature produced in the U.S., there has yet been no credible public reckoning of this question. Perhaps the reason was that Iraq remained, with its fabled oil wealth, a recalcitrant element. Or perhaps it was because, quite in contrast to the subservience displayed by other major oil producers, Iraq made little secret of its belief that the U.S. dollar was no invariant standard of human value, but an instrument of U.S. cultural-economic hegemony.
The true cost of the Iraq war is not to be computed in monetary terms, certainly not in U.S. dollar terms. Nobody has yet begun the exercise of adding up the human costs of this enormous atrocity. And as these costs are totalled and as the U.S. dollar continues to slide in value – in part as a consequence of the bill that the Bush administration has run up in pursuing its fantasies in Iraq – it will become increasingly obvious that the invariant standard of value that S&B use, is really a very fickle measure. It will become increasingly obvious, in other words, that the claims made on behalf of this supposed standard of value are themselves a serious impediment to appreciating the true human consequences of war.
Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War, The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, Allen Lane (Penguin Books), London, 2008, pp 311, Rs 595; ISBN 978-1-846-14128-7
It was election year in the U.S. and the country was trapped in what seemed an endless war. Confronted with a colossal loss of public confidence in his leadership and widespread revulsion at the tableau of destruction he was staging in a faraway land, the U.S. President took to the airwaves, vowing that he would utilise every forum and opportunity, to discuss “means of bringing (an) ugly war to an end”.
The moral dimension, explicit in the use of the term “ugly”, was not the only consideration. The war as the U.S. president put it, was taking a heavy toll of government finances. Failing the imposition of fresh taxes or stringent expenditure restraints, the U.S. budget deficit would spiral up -- and out of control -- putting at risk the foundation of the nation’s unparalleled prosperity since World War II: the role of the U.S. dollar “as the keystone of international trade and finance”.
If George W. Bush had been capable of acknowledging error, if he had in him the human capacity for contrition, this script could well have been written for him in 2004. In reality, it was the scenario played out by Lyndon Johnson in March 1968, as he renounced his candidacy for a second full term in the U.S. presidency and determined that his remaining days in office would be devoted to ending the Vietnam war (it is quite another story though, that his effort proved futile, partly on account of sabotage from within).
Bush in 2004 followed a rather different script, defying all polls to eke out a narrow win and in that moment of dubious triumph, announcing that he had surmounted a crucial moment of accountability and would not hesitate to make an already ugly conflict positively repellent. What followed was a slash-and-burn offensive through the Iraqi city of Fallujah, borrowed straight from the World War II playbook.
Despite a display of military machismo that reduced Iraq’s city of mosques to smouldering ruins, the insurgency showed little sign of yielding. And even if Bush’s bravado remained undimmed, his approval ratings began a rapid downward plunge.
If this accidental president had at all been interested in arresting the free-fall in his credibility, he could have sought a pathway back from the fatal error of Iraq. As Stiglitz and Bilmes (hereafter S&B) point out in this important book, Bush was given his best opportunity when the report of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group was submitted, shortly after his Republican party was pummelled in the mid-term elections of November 2006. He passed that moment by with no explanation, repudiating the findings of an expert group he had appointed and entrusted with a broad mandate.
Ever since, the U.S. President has used a familiar trope to deter all talk of withdrawal: to reverse course, he has said, would be to dishonour the sacrifices made by U.S. soldiers in a noble cause. With a wealth of documentation on all current and future human costs of the Iraq war, S&B conclusively establish that this is one of the most cynically insincere pleas ever advanced. The most significant contribution that S&B make to the accountancy of the Iraq war, perhaps, is in their treatment of the burden borne by U.S. military personnel – those killed who have families to be provided for, those incapacitated, who need lifelong care, those returned time and again to the field of battle, who progressively lose their capacity to deal with “normality” because of accumulated traumas.
These costs however, do not go into the headline figure of $3 trillion (or $3,000 billion), which earned S&B the instant attention of those who inhabit the rational fringe in the U.S. and the instant derision of the vociferous band of right-wing commentators and Bush supporters, who called it a lame attempt to coin a “catchphrase”. Contrary to what the diminishing but voluble band of Bush partisans may say, the “three trillion” estimate is arrived at on the basis of very cautious and conservative assumptions. S&B take all the known appropriations that have been made for the war and add them up. This process does not involve any arithmetical operation more complicated than addition.
Bookkeeping procedures in the U.S. defence department, though, are infamously – and deliberately – muddled and this compels S&B to undertake a fine-tooth search to factor in costs that may be hidden elsewhere. Once they track down all those elusive numbers, they add on costs that will likely be incurred in restoring the U.S. armed forces to the state they were in before the war – in terms of munitions replaced, equipment repaired and long deferred maintenance procedures implemented.
War imposes costs on all sectors of society. Higher energy costs, S&B argue, have meant that the U.S. economy has suffered serious harm. But the extra money paid by energy consumers do not figure in the $3 trillion price tag. S&B do however, factor into their cost calculations the consequences – in terms of lower tax accruals to the public exchequer – of the economic slowdown that soaring energy costs has caused.
With the profusion of assumptions, numbers and calculations that S&B lay out, it is often difficult to retain attention on essential distinctions. The headline number of “three trillion”, they explain, relates only to the budgetary costs borne by the U.S. federal government. After full budgetary costs are added, S&B take on board the interest component and then add what they call the “macro-economic costs”, which refer to the benefits the economy has foregone because money has unaccountably gone into the pursuit of war. Finally, S&B add on the costs of the U.S. operations in Afghanistan.
When S&B declare that this process is “conceptually simple” they perhaps take too much for granted. To begin with, some of the costs they total up are real: they are actually paid out of the public exchequer. Others are notional, the outcome of “what might have been” calculations, such as revenues that have been lost to the public exchequer. Matters are not rendered any easier, by the authors’ choice of “three trillion” as shorthand. At no stage of the reckoning, does the total reach that comfortably rounded sum. Indeed, that sum turns out to be a compromise between two scenarios that the authors construct: strict budgetary costs and total economic costs. S&B could as well have titled their book “the five trillion dollar war”, since that is what they estimate “total economic costs” at. No reason is offered for the choice of the lower number, though this should be deemed a minor omission, since both figures are equally beyond ordinary human comprehension, whether as astronomical distances or dollar sums.
The larger part of S&B’s work is about costs that are outside the boundaries of both “budgetary” and “economic” costs – such as the costs to U.S. community life, and the costs to the two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, which have to their misfortune been designated the principal theatres of the civilisational mission of the U.S. Exercises such as this, inevitably, involve several counter-factual assumptions. Besides, S&B face a considerable moral dilemma in transporting the standards applied in the valuation of the life of a U.S. soldier to a different milieu. S&B seek heroically to grapple with this dilemma: they recognise every estimate that has been made of the deaths in Iraq since the war began, and also take on board humanitarian consequences of exile and internal displacement. They occasionally throw up their hands in despair at the accounting complexities of reckoning with all these human tragedies. But their intent remains, firmly, on putting a dollar value on the consequences of the Iraq war.
So what does it involve to recognise the 100,000 and perhaps 500,000 Iraqi deaths from the U.S. invasion? Parenthetically, one may ask: what does it mean to acknowledge the one million casualties from the sanctions against Iraq that were so zealously enforced by the Clinton administration, which both the authors of this book loyally served?
S&B recognise some of the moral difficulties. But they have little problem branding Bush’s plea of honouring the sacrifices made by the U.S. armed forces, as a cynical ploy and an evasion of responsibility. It is a conspicuous failure of all systems of accountability, even in the most professedly perfect democracy, that decision makers rarely have to face the full consequences of their blunders. Corporate executives who make the most disastrous strategic choices while in authority can always count upon a golden parachute and a comfortable severance package when they leave their cosy billets. Similarly, no U.S. president has ever had to deal with the stigma of defeat in a military adventure that he started.
Discerning the cynicism of Bush’s strategy of leaving the reckoning with Iraq to his successor, does not mean yet, that the U.S. public, or for that matter, the global public, would consent to walking away from the disaster of Iraq. The public also need also to be convinced that this abdication will not entail consequences even more disastrous. S&B offer a simple moral pathway out of the conundrum, summed up in an age-old aphorism: “let bygones be bygones”. This aphorism, they say, also has a foundation in economic theory, in the concept of “sunk costs”.
Yet, what seem like “sunk costs” to the economist may well appear to those who have borne the brunt of U.S. military aggression, as a case for reparations. Even if withdrawal is the strategy of choice for the U.S., the rest of the world would have to reckon with the costs of, first, the illegitimate invasion and next, the dishonourable retreat.
It turns out that the rest of the world is already bearing a significant burden of the costs of the Iraq war. Every war that the U.S. or any other country has fought, has involved a burden of taxation. Johnson’s greatest worry as he renounced the presidency in 1968, was that, despite the tax surcharge he had decreed to pay for Vietnam, the U.S. budget was slipping rapidly into the red, making the sustenance of the dollar as a credible world currency, a virtual impossibility. His successor, Richard Nixon, though committed to a regime of low taxes, repudiated any possibility that the surcharge would be repealed, since there could be nothing more irresponsible for a country at war.
Contrast that with the current situation, when Bush is liable to characterise any suggestion of raising taxes as an act to treason. Between Johnson and Bush, (or between Vietnam and Iraq) there has been something that has changed, which has made nonsense of old-style economic orthodoxy. Simply put, the brutal reality is that the entire U.S. hegemonic drive today is financed through borrowed money. S&B recognise this fact, which they say, makes no difference to their basic arguments, since the borrowed money will have to be repaid. But is that really a reasonable belief?
This needs going back a bit in time to the Johnson abdication in 1968 and his decision to sue for peace in Vietnam, in part, because he thought the U.S. dollar was in jeopardy. And though Nixon refused to do away with the taxes that paid for Vietnam, he did make a decision in 1972 that would have momentous consequences for the future of the U.S. dollar. He took the U.S. currency off the system under which its value was calibrated with a certain weight in gold. From that point on, the dollar had to sink or swim on the strength of its acceptance by other economies. This required that all countries hold their national savings in dollars and that furthermore, transactions in the most widely traded commodities, such as petroleum, should be denominated in dollars.
Discussions of currency values, taxation, expenditure and the national debt tend to be confined to an esoteric corner where only supposed experts are allowed. Unfortunately, S&B, both charter members of that narrow enclave, do not venture into that discussion. Aside from providing an accounting of the Iraq war, they choose to avoid the broader political-economic motivations and consequences. It was not much talked about in expert circles then, but just over a month before the invasion of Iraq took place, the U.S. Treasury Department formally notified the U.S. Congress that the government had reached the limits of borrowing allowed under the law and was in danger of default on debt. The U.S. government, then hot and feverish for war, needed to borrow to merely service its national debt. How could a nation contemplate war in these circumstances?
The drama of raising borrowing limits had been enacted the previous year too and at various times over the preceding decade. The U.S. Congress has been remarkably hospitable to right-wing lunatics who describe tax cuts as a patriotic duty, argue for unending war in the next breath, and then quietly acquiesce in the raising of the national debt limit. It is an interesting coda to S&B’s analysis that between the beginning of the war in Iraq and now, the U.S. national debt has gone up by well over $3 trillion.
How is this figure going to be drawn down? How if ever, is this debt going to be repaid? S&B do not venture in to that territory, except to insist that the debt must be repaid. But finally, they remain blind-sided by the faulty assumptions of contemporary economic analysis. They fail to recognise that the danger Lyndon Johnson warned of -- as far back as 1968 -- is now an accomplished fact: the U.S. dollar as the cornerstone of world trade and finance is in its death throes. In seeking to designate every cost of war in terms of the U.S. dollar, S&B suffer several moral qualms, but never really deviate from their belief that the U.S. dollar provides an invariant standard of value. They prove unable in other words, to look beyond this conceit of the U.S. economy.
S&B put down the huge increase in oil prices in recent months to a variety of causes: the Iraq war, they cautiously say, accounts for just $10 out of the total increase of about $70 in the price of a barrel of oil (at the time this book was sent to press). The rest, in their estimation, could be put down to factors such as increased demand from China and India.
This argument is typical of the kind of loose practices that economics as a discipline is rife with. It offers the Bush administration precisely the alibi it needs, since it obscures the rampant speculation that is driving prices. And the forces behind this speculative drive are themselves part of the political-economic substratum of the Iraq war: briefly put, the dependence of the U.S., since the 1980s, on continuing infusions of world savings to support current consumption. The speculative increase in oil prices, contrary to the effort to cast it in terms of the supposedly neutral, apolitical forces of global supply and demand, is integrally related to the decline in the value of the U.S. dollar and the need to prime the pump that drives a large chunk of global cash surpluses into investments in U.S. government debt and other financial instruments. And yet, despite this priming of the pump, including through patently illegitimate exercises of military power, the mighty dollar continues to plunge in value. This in itself, is a circumstance that should deflate the S&B effort to construct a picture of the “true costs” of the Iraq war in terms of the invariant standard of the U.S. dollar.
With ample reason, S&B dismiss any notion that the Iraq war may have entailed benefits that could even remotely mitigate the severity of the multi-trillion dollar bill it has served up. What then was the motivation for the war? With all the critical literature produced in the U.S., there has yet been no credible public reckoning of this question. Perhaps the reason was that Iraq remained, with its fabled oil wealth, a recalcitrant element. Or perhaps it was because, quite in contrast to the subservience displayed by other major oil producers, Iraq made little secret of its belief that the U.S. dollar was no invariant standard of human value, but an instrument of U.S. cultural-economic hegemony.
The true cost of the Iraq war is not to be computed in monetary terms, certainly not in U.S. dollar terms. Nobody has yet begun the exercise of adding up the human costs of this enormous atrocity. And as these costs are totalled and as the U.S. dollar continues to slide in value – in part as a consequence of the bill that the Bush administration has run up in pursuing its fantasies in Iraq – it will become increasingly obvious that the invariant standard of value that S&B use, is really a very fickle measure. It will become increasingly obvious, in other words, that the claims made on behalf of this supposed standard of value are themselves a serious impediment to appreciating the true human consequences of war.
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
No censorship through mob violence, says the Delhi High Court
Few realms of artistic or scholarly excellence were spared the fallout of India’s bitter communal polarisation of the 1990s and beyond. Circumstances were especially hazardous for artists and scholars who drew their inspiration from the rich syncretism of Indian folk traditions. And as events have proven, few were more vulnerable than Maqbool Fida Husain, whose work has been an ongoing and intense engagement with popular culture.
Whether Husain is observant or otherwise of the faith he was born into is immaterial. For the cultural police squads that arose on the wave of neo-nationalist zealotry, the name he bears was sufficient cause to question his entire body of work. No person whose overt social identity was quite so alien to the intrinsic and primordial cultural character of the Indian nation -- as it was then portrayed -- could be permitted the audacity to produce a body of work suffused with the iconography of the Hindu pantheon.
The epigraph to the landmark judgment by the Delhi High Court, dismissing the summons issued Husain to answer criminal charges in cases filed from literally all parts of the country, quotes the legendary Pablo Picasso on the necessarily subversive quality of art. “Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared”.
Picasso was not, most assuredly, making a case for keeping art in sequestration from the lay public and preserving it as a domain for the specialist. That indeed, would be a spirit impossible to reconcile with his work. More particularly, it would be contrary to Husain’s own creative ethos, which as he explained in a recent interview with the weekly magazine Tehelka, is all about art for the people: “I never wanted to be clever, esoteric, abstract. I wanted to make simple statements. I wanted my canvases to have a story. I wanted my art to talk to people”.[i] Clearly, in Husain’s creative universe, there are no ignorant or unwashed masses needing tutelage.
Ignorance perhaps is not so much the issue as the cloistered mind and a sensibility that allows finer perceptions to be overwhelmed at the slightest sniff of political opportunity.
The arguments for and against Husain have been rehearsed endlessly ever since he became the focus of Hindutva ire in the mid-1990s. That the right to free speech does not constitute the right to cause offence or to inflame social sensibilities is of course a well accepted principle of liberal jurisprudence. But when does an act cease being a rightful exercise in free speech and begin to be a provocation? Does the nude depiction of figures from a religious pantheon, in a manner that is integrally connected with classical iconographic traditions, constitute an offence to social sensibilities? Campaign groups arguing Husain’s case, seeking to end his hapless years of exile from India, have been arguing precisely that.
The riposte, as in many such matters, has come from the ideological obermeister of the Hindutva flock, Arun Shourie.
Prefacing his damning remarks with some semblance of compassion, Shourie recently wrote of Husain: “He is a kindly man, and a prodigiously productive artist. There is no warrant at all for disrupting all his exhibitions”. Indeed, Shourie allows Husain the further concession that his depictions of Hindu goddesses “in less than skimpy attire” could pass muster on grounds of sensibility and inspiration, if only it did not leave unanswered a crucial question: “How come in the seventy-five years Husain has been painting, he has not once felt inspired, not once, to paint the face of the Prophet? It doesn’t have to be in the style in which he has painted the Hindu goddesses. Why not the most beautiful, the most radiant and luminous face that he can imagine? How come he has never felt inspired to paint women revered in Islam, or in his own family, in the same style as the one that propelled his inspiration in regard to Hindu goddesses?”[ii]
An artist in a free society is at liberty to choose the motifs that he would like to represent, the cultural lineages that he draws from, and the forms and idioms that he would like to emulate, develop and (if possible) enrich through his practice. In suggesting that Husain should have remained bound by the cultural symbols and traditions of the faith he was born into, or that in the midst of his aesthetic wanderings, he should occasionally have visited Islamic motifs, Shourie betrays a familiar, totalitarian mindset. He also dishonours Husain’s engagement with his craft and with the people of India in such epic political adventures as Rammanohar Lohia’s Ramayan Mela of the 1960s
Besides, there is an answer to Shourie’s question that is so evident, that it could not possibly have escaped the comprehension of even one so culturally obtuse. Simply put, there is nothing like an equally vivid tradition of iconography in any other cultural tradition that Husain may have been exposed to. To hear Husain narrate the story of his early years as an artist of the people is to realise how deep has been his empathy with the diverse folk traditions of the country. “In 1948”, he recalls in the recent interview, “ I exhibited my work publicly for the first time in the Bombay Arts Society show. I had already been painting and practising for years. .. I took the classical images of the Gupta bronzes -- the tribhanga form; the sensuous and erotic colours of Pahari paintings -- its deep maroons, blacks, haldi; and the nine rasas. I wanted my format to be classical, yet retain the innocence of the folk. (Francis) Souza came and asked me excitedly, from where have you got this? I didn’t tell him, I said, you go search it. This is what lies at the heart of the artistic enterprise. .... It is in picking from what has gone before. In India, there have been so many high periods -- Tanjore, Chola, Gupta… Centuries of seeing lie behind that. You cannot reinvent the wheel -- your individuality, your creative eye lies in what you pick”.
But wait, the moral precept of Hindutva is as Shourie very lucidly explains, “deceit towards the deceitful” and “wickedness towards the wicked”. The practical implications of this moral symmetry are clear. If Muslims have the liberty to engage in street protests and demand the withdrawal of cartoons denigrating the prophet of their faith, Hindus enjoy a like privilege.
Muslims worldwide mobilised in February 2006 against a Danish newspaper’s deliberately provocative publication of a series of cartoons representing the figure of the prophet of Islam as an accomplice in terrorism. Far from being an exercise in the right to free speech, the Danish newspaper was by its own boastful claim, engaged in an effort to rub in the superiority of western culture. Clearly, this was the ideological or unarmed component of the “global war on terror” that was then ostensibly being waged between the forces of civilisation and barbarism.
A key issue that emerged from the controversy was that of intent. In all such matters involving rival perceptions of the right to free speech and expression, intent matters. The Danish newspaper had made no secret of its intent to cause offence.
Husain in contrast has never had any intent except to connect to the people in a purely aesthetic form.
Another implication of Shourie’s moral symmetry was laid out by a spokesman for Hindutva, who reacted in fury to the industrialist Vinay Bharat Ram’s defence of Husain. Would “pseudo-secular intellectuals”, asked the agitated propagandist for Hindutva, show the same “breadth of vision and understanding towards the work of an unknown Hindu artist called Kailash Tewari from Bhopal”. This unknown hero, it transpires, was in June 2007, asked to take down an exhibition for its inflammatory representations of the people of another faith. Asked about the incident, the aggrieved painter argued: “My exhibition titled The Face of Terror depicts the truth. I am not talking about Muslims, but unfortunately all terrorists turn out to be Muslims”. [iii]
Thus the many hued richness of Husain’s work, with its characteristic imprint of playfulness, its homage to diverse traditions, and its signature qualities, which are now perhaps the most widely recognised in Indian art, is equated on a moral plane, with the output of a paintbrush hack with political motivations and abundant reserves of social bigotry. It could be said that this is the reductio ad absurdum of Hindutva aesthetics.
The judgment of the Delhi High Court, delivered May 8, 2008 by Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul, in the matter of Maqbool Fida Husain versus others, dismissing the summons issued Husain in a diverse number of cases filed by individual litigants, is valuable in bringing the focus back on intent and dispelling several of these absurd moral equivalences. There were two grounds on which the petitioners from places as far afield as Pandharpur (Husain’s home village in Maharashtra), Bhopal and Delhi, had filed petitions for the criminal prosecution of Husain: “obscenity” which warrants prosecution under articles 292 and 294 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), “causing offence to religious sensibilities”, which is covered under articles 295 and 298, and “creating ill-will among communities on religious grounds” which is covered under article 153.
Since “intent” is the point under discussion, it might be good to first take up the charge of “causing offence to religious sensibilities”. Justice Kaul has clearly held that the charge under these sections of the IPC must establish the intent to cause such offence. In other words, the untitled painting rendered by Husain at some point in the distant past, which passed into a private collection and was brought out to the public domain in 2006 under the title “Bharat Mata” as part of an art auction for the victims of the Kashmir earthquake of October 2005, does not establish any such intent. As Justice Kaul observes in paragraph 107 of his judgment: “the impugned painting cannot form the basis of any deliberate intention to wound the religious feelings of the complainants since the figure, on the basis of the identity alleged, represents an anthropomorphic depiction of a nation as also that to hold a person liable under the above said section, mere knowledge of the likelihood that the religious feelings of another person may be wounded would not be sufficient.”
When it comes to the charge of “obscenity” though, the test of intent does not apply. From an extended review of case law on “obscenity” Justice Kaul concludes that “Knowledge is not a part of the guilty act. The offenders knowledge of the obscenity of the impugned matter is not required under the law and it is a case of strict liability”. In other words, whether he had the intent or not, whether the knowledge existed or not, if an act, an utterance, a song, or a representation by an individual meets the criterion of “obscenity” in a social framework, that individual is liable to strict punishment.
Within this strict standard though, Justice Kaul points out in paragraph 70 of his landmark judgment, that “to fall within the scope of ‘obscene’.. the ingredients of the impugned matter/art must lie at the extreme end of the spectrum of the offensive matter. The legal test of obscenity is satisfied only when the impugned art/matter can be said to appeal to an unhealthy, inordinate person having perverted interest in sexual matters or having a tendency to morally corrupt and debase persons likely to come in contact with the impugned art”.
The complainants against Husain had sought to buttress their charge of “obscenity” on the basis of “the nudity of the figure depicted in the painting and the identity of the figure alleged as ‘Bharat Mata’”. But Justice Kaul concludes in paragraph 72 after weighing all the evidence, that “the alleged identity of the figure has no bearing on the alleged obscenity of the said painting. The alleged ‘Bharat Mata’ painting in issue was at no given point in time either given a title or publicly exhibited by the petitioner. The petitioner had no involvement in any manner with the said on-line auction for charity”.
All these are significant contributions to the right to free expression. But where Justice Kaul perhaps makes his most significant jurisprudential breakthrough for this age of the worldwide web, the internet and all its possibilities of instant communications, is in the matter of jurisdiction. A nonagenarian artist with no greater ambitions than living out the rest of his years in peace and tranquillity, has for over a decade been venomously targeted and forced to flee the milieu that he has loved and flourished in, merely because political circumstances have made his variety of celebratory, eclectic art a taboo. And the wide diffusion of his work through the new modes of communication available, has made it easier for politically motivated individuals to target him.
In this context, Justice Kaul warns that the “criminal justice system”, “ought not to be invoked as a convenient recourse to ventilate any and all objections to an artistic work”. This makes the role of the magistrate who first receives the complaint, not merely “discretionary” but “obligatory”. The magistrate is obliged to “scrutinise each case in order to prevent vexatious and frivolous cases from being filed” and to ensure that litigation is not used as “a tool to harass the accused, which (would) amount to a gross abuse of the process of the court”. Where private complaints are involved, they should typically not be admitted without prior investigation.
May 19, 2008
[i] Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 4, Dated Feb 02, 2008
[ii] Arun Shourie, “Hindutva and Radical Islam: Where the twain do meet”, The Indian Express, Delhi, Friday, December 28, 2007
[iii] This specific link is available at http://www.ivarta.com/columns/070625-mf-hussen-paintings.htm; it can also be accessed through the website set up by a revanchist body of non-resident Indians, with the specific intent of taking down M.F. Husain: http://www.hindujagruti.org/activities/campaigns/national/mfhussain-campaign/.
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