Satellite broadcasting is a visible presence in everyday life and one of the faster growing sectors of the last decade or more. But in India it has largely functioned within a legislative and regulatory vacuum. This is a reality that lends itself to different interpretations. Champions of the free market would see the electronic media in India as testimony to the entrepreneurial dynamism that has been unleashed since liberalisation became the reigning ethos of economic policy. In this perception, the revolution in media matters has not come a moment too soon, since creativity has remained suppressed far too long under the meddlesome regulatory zeal of the government. Even if governments were to rouse themselves out of the inertia of incomprehension and seek to legislate for the broadcast sector, they are unlikely to get very far, since the inherent dynamism of the sector would elude all efforts at regulation.
Unsurprisingly, this version of events has held the field with little challenge, since the media, uniquely among industries, is in a position to mould public perceptions about itself. In brief and sporadic intervals, though, an alternative perspective is heard, which purports to speak on behalf of an ill-defined “public interest”. The broadcast industry has in this account, remained for too long free of constructive legislative inputs, since every effort at regulation, in part because of the ill-remembered days of the controlled economy, has swiftly come undone. In the circumstances, the broadcast industry, dominated by giant media houses, has managed to colonise the electromagnetic spectrum for private benefit, flouting an explicit judicial finding that the airwaves are the property of the public.
Since the Supreme Court's judgment of 1995 in the case of the Cricket Association of Bengal versus the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, it has become part of the orthodoxy on media regulation that the airwaves belong to the public. It is a principle that lends itself to easy and often rather passionate enunciation. Unfortunately, very little of the same passion, not to mention clarity, has been evident in negotiating two basic issues involved in translating this principle into practice: instrumentality and agency. What possible agency could operationalise the constitutional principle that the airwaves belong to the public? And what instrumentality could this agency, when it is appropriately empowered, deploy in pursuit of its mission?
Early in August 2006, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) posted on its official website, the draft of a law, titled the Broadcast Services Regulation Bill (BSRB), which sought among other things, to provide legal backing for the principle of the public ownership over the airwaves.[i] Apart from this rather laudable object, another of the stated purposes of the bill was to give legislative backing to the numerous regulatory orders pertaining to satellite broadcasting, issued since the mid-1990s.
A first evaluation of the BSRB reveals that it does not spend much time or effort on the issue of agency. Like many other legislative initiatives, the BSRB displays the conceit of governments that believe they can appropriate the mantle of speaking on behalf of the public. And where instrumentality is concerned, the BSRB displays very little creativity, falling back instead on the discredited old device of reserving for the government the arbitrary - and in the final instance, overbearing - powers of police enforcement inherited from colonial law. Judging from its fleeting appearance in the public discourse, the BSRB could well be another legislative effort defeated by a deficit of the policy imagination, not to mention the assiduous efforts of powerful lobbies.
As if to reaffirm that the power to mould public opinion suffers from a serious skew, the media industry was permitted by circumstances, to have its say on the BSRB well before the public was brought into the discussion. Public perceptions of a major legislative initiative, in short, were moulded by the industry that has the greatest stake in diluting the scope of the law and preserving the largest area of autonomy for itself. This is a situation abounding in curiosities, though there is little novelty in the media being, uniquely among business sectors, the arbiter of public opinion in matters involving itself.
Media groups have their say
Towards the end of July 2006, Delhi's leading newspaper, which has recently acquired a presence in Mumbai, carried a sequence of three articles warning that the proposed broadcast legislation was a significant threat to all the free speech guarantees of the Indian constitution. All three articles were published under the caption “Media Muzzled” and their basic purport was that the BSRB embodied a familiar pattern of official paranoia and unreason. “Every few years”, began the first of the articles, “a nervous government decides that the media has gone overboard and must be subject to regulation. Democracy and free speech do not mean spreading canard about public authority, endangering national security and allowing for obscenity, runs the argument (sic)”. With the draft of the BSRB having leaked out, the article continued, considerable “disquiet” had arisen over what looked like “another attempt ... to muzzle the media”.[ii]
Inevitably and it must be said, rather self-servingly, the media chose to highlight those provisions of the BSRB that endowed the government and its official machinery with punitive powers. There was moreover, a consistent attempt to play up the circumstances under which the media would become the target of vindictive official action. The country's largest English newspaper for instance, observed in its report, that the BSRB “expanded on the already existing draconian provisions present in the Cable Network Regulations Act and the direct-to-home (broadcasting) guidelines”. The newsreport then went on to describe, with little attention to nuance or detail, the powers of search and seizure that the BSRB proposed to invest the government with, before concluding with an account of the penalties that the media would attract if it incurred official displeasure.[iii]
A recent debutant among Mumbai newspapers, that seemingly represents the new era of cross-linked media partnerships, had meanwhile, had its say on the matter. Under a vivid and exhortatory headline, the newspaper – in which both India’s largest satellite broadcaster and the company that owns the country’s largest circulated newspaper have equity investments – urged that the BSRB be “killed”. Effortlessly conflating the rights of the media into those enjoyed by the public under the Constitution, the newspaper asked: “What is it with our officialdom that when it comes to fundamentals of democracy they can't seem to get it after five decades of experience? Their latest attempt at bullying the citizen is a Bill that the Information & Broadcasting ministry (sic) has drafted, ostensibly to restrain media monopolies but in fact to subvert freedom of the press, and therefore of the right to free expression as guaranteed by our fine Constitution drawn up in 1950”.[iv]
Sifting through this relentless campaign against the BSRB, it would be possible to discern two quite distinct currents of opinion. There is one perception that tends to view the rights of the media as a category apart, deserving protection in themselves. Then there is another, that views the media as an institution embodying the broader civil rights of the citizens of India.
Media rights are not a separate category
It is a well-established principle in Indian jurisprudence that the media enjoys rights coterminous with the public. This is quite unlike the situation in the U.S., where the First Amendment to the Constitution - whether by oversight or intent - ensured that the “press” enjoys rights that go beyond the public right to free speech.[v] In contrast, the Indian Constitution confers on the media no more and no less, than the rights due to it as an institution that benefits from the public right to free speech and expression, as enshrined in Article 19(1)(a).
Media freedom is derived from the right to free expression, which in turn is related to the public right to information. Media freedom and the public right to free speech, are coextensive in Indian jurisprudence. Commercial media institutions and the private individual derive identical rights from a single article of the Indian Constitution. But since the right to information is a counterpart right to free speech, the media's freedom is in part, the fulfilment of the public right to information. From here, it would be a short transition to a legal doctrine that media freedom is justified - in whole or in part - by the public function it performs, of informing citizens and the wider community about the various facets of their lives and the times they live in. This is the constitutional position as advanced in significant judgments involving the media, such as Sakal Newspapers versus the Union of India[vi] and Bennett Coleman and Company Ltd versus the Union of India[vii].
The latter judgment is especially significant for the insights it affords into the media as an institutional beneficiary of the public right to free speech. At issue in the Bennett Coleman case was a government directive limiting the allocation of newsprint to publishers in accordance with their reported consumption of the commodity. In a context of acute shortage, it seemed that the only means available to keep the newspaper industry functioning, was to ration the allotment of newsprint. This made it imperative that newspapers publish no more than ten pages. Those that did, were obliged to bring down their daily offering to that number. They would not be permitted to reduce circulation to maintain or increase the number of pages. To provide a full day’s complement of news, publishers could rationalise their allocation of space between editorial and advertisement material. Or they could maintain profitability by curtailing news coverage to accommodate advertisements.[viii]
All this would seem a thoroughly unwarranted intrusion into the micro-management of a newspaper. Expectedly, the entire scheme was held to be in violation of the Constitution by the Supreme Court. The majority opinion in the case, authored by Justice A.N. Ray, held that the “individual rights of freedom of speech and expression of editors, directors and shareholders, are all expressed through their newspapers”. But if this seemed too narrow a construction of a fundamental right, the Court a few paragraphs on, applied the necessary remedies, though without explaining the logic through which the rights of “editors, directors and shareholders” mutated into a right enjoyed by all citizens. “It is indisputable” said the Court, “that by freedom of the press is meant the right of all citizens to speak, publish and express their views. The freedom of the press embodies the right of the people to read. The freedom of the press is not antithetical to the right of the people to speak and express”.[ix]
This judicial formulation presented in an incipient form, a potential area of conflict in the relationship between the media and the public. In one formulation, the public is given the “right to read” all that it is provided by the “editors, directors and shareholders” of the press. In another, the public is accorded the right to “speak and express”. In its elision of the reasoning by which one species of rights is transformed into another, the Supreme Court majority in the Bennett Coleman judgment, lost an opportunity to provide some measure of clarity on this issue.
To some degree, that absence in judicial reasoning was remedied in the significant dissent entered by Justice K.K. Mathew in Bennett Coleman. Alone on the bench of five judges that heard the case, Justice Mathew spoke of press freedom in terms of the preservation of social diversity and choice. The Court had before it the challenge of ensuring that the appropriate conditions existed for bringing “all ideas into the market (to) make the freedom of speech a live one having its roots in reality”. In pursuit of this ideal, it was necessary as a first step, to recognise that “the right of expression” would be “somewhat thin if it can be exercised only on the sufferance of the managers of the leading newspapers”.
Freedom of expression, in other words, also involved the right of access to media space. And this requirement would be met only through the “creation of new opportunities for expression or greater opportunities (being provided) to small and medium dailies to reach a position of equality with the big ones”. This was as important, said Justice Mathew, “as the right to express ideas without fear of governmental restraint”.[x]
Free speech and the right of access
“Access” was one of the crucial questions raised in Justice Mathew’s dissent: access both of the public to the media environment and of the media organisation to the essential resources of its trade. Though the latter was the key issue before the bench, the dissenting judgment tied it into the larger question of the public function of a newspaper and its socially enjoined duty to reflect the diversity of its milieu.
Though these criteria are not quite so easily transported to the broadcast domain, the underlying principles have a certain universality. Newsprint in the 1970s was regarded as a scarce commodity, much as the electromagnetic spectrum was in the early years of satellite broadcasting. Newsprint has since become abundantly available, much like frequency slots for broadcast channels. Advertisement revenue, then regarded as a limited resource, has since grown enormously, though the competition between newspaper groups for cornering increasing shares of this expanded cake, has greatly intensified. And even if the proliferating broadcast channels of the last decade-and-a-half have not been very transparent in their financial accounting, the mere fact that they exist, is sufficient proof that the aggregate of advertisement spending in the Indian economy has been percolating, albeit in varying degrees, to all of them.
The principal restraint then to using the electromagnetic spectrum as a public resource, lies not in its scarcity, as in the powers and privileges that the government may have arrogated to itself. In this respect, the Supreme Court ruling in the airwaves case has been very clear: the government may have a custodian's responsibility, but no inherent right to monopolise the airwaves, since the spectrum belongs to the people. As Justice P.B. Sawant put it, in one of two concurring judgments in the case: “the airwaves or frequencies are a public property. Their use has to be controlled and regulated by a public authority in the interests of the public and to prevent the invasion of their rights”.[xi] In other words, the uppermost concern in the deployment of the airwaves would be the preservation of the peoples' right to free speech and its correlate: the right to information. In Justice Sawant’s words: “the right to freedom of speech and expression also includes the right to educate, to inform and to entertain and also the right to be educated, informed and entertained”. The challenge of regulation is to harmonise the two, one of which is the “right of the telecaster” and the other, “that of the viewers”.[xii]
In turn, this requires a regulatory response that departs from an absolutist notion of media freedom. “Broadcasting freedom”, in the words of Justice B.P. Jeevan Reddy - author of the other opinion in the airwaves case - “involves and includes the right of the viewers and listeners who retain their interest in free speech”. With public interest being dominant rather than private profit, Justice Reddy observed, “European courts have taken the view that restraints on freedom of broadcasters are justifiable on the very ground of free speech”. The reason simply, is that “freedom of expression includes the right to receive information and ideas as well as freedom to impart them”.[xiii]
The airwaves judgment in short, urges the adoption of a new paradigm that transcends the dichotomy between government control and free enterprise. On one side, it asserts in Justice Sawant’s words, the paramount need to “rescue the electronic media from the government monopoly and bureaucratic control and to have an independent authority to manage and control it”. When the electronic media is controlled “by one central agency or (a) few private agencies of the rich”, there is a need for another body, “representing all sections of society”.[xiv] Justice Reddy observed that the nature of this body was for the legislative authorities to determine. The central point simply, was that “private broadcasting, even if allowed, should not be left to market forces, in the interest of ensuring that a wide variety of voices enjoy access”.[xv]
With these being the central principles, the Supreme Court directed -- in Justice Sawant's words -- that “the Central Government shall take immediate steps to establish an independent autonomous public authority representative of all sections and interests in the society to control and regulate the use of the airwaves”.[xvi] Justice Reddy laid down the principles on which this body should function: “it is the duty of the State to see that airwaves are so utilised as to advance the free speech right of the citizens which is served by ensuring plurality and diversity of views, opinions and ideas. … The free speech right guaranteed to every citizen of this country does not encompass the right to use these airwaves at his choosing. Conceding such a right would be detrimental to the free speech rights of the body of citizens inasmuch as only the privileged few - powerful economic, commercial and political interests - would come to dominate the media”.[xvii]
Before turning again to the BSRB to examine how well it fulfils the specifications laid down by the country’s highest judicial body, it may be useful to consider two concrete policy decisions taken by the government in recent months. These could be tested for their conformity with the constitutional principles laid down in the airwaves judgment.
The record in community radio
Early in December 2006, the MIB announced detailed policy guidelines on community radio services (CRS). This was a long-delayed correction for the unduly restrictive policy introduced in December 2002, which reserved community radio for “well established education institutions”. Even so, the policy as it stands now is rife with clauses requiring CRS applicants to meet a number of stringent requirements. In the case of aspirants other than publicly funded and managed educational institutions, sanction for entering the CRS domain would be subject to clearance from the Home Affairs Ministry and the Defence Ministry, not to mention the allocation of a radio frequency by still another ministry. Programmes broadcast over the community radio should be designed to serve a “specific well-defined local community” and should be relevant to its “educational, developmental, social and cultural needs”. Broadcasts that relate to “news and current affairs and are otherwise political in nature” are specifically proscribed. Sponsored programmes would not be permitted except where the sponsor is an arm of the government. Advertisements and public announcements that yield revenue would be permitted to the limit of five minutes in an hour's broadcast. All earnings would necessarily have to be used in meeting operational and capital costs. A surplus, if available, could, with the explicit written permission of the MIB, be transferred into the primary activity of the organisation running the service.[xviii]
This regime of policy may be instructively compared with that prevalent in the realm of private radio broadcasting. In July 2005, policy guidelines were announced under which bids were invited for the second round of allocation of FM radio broadcast circles. Under the tendering principles drawn up, allocations were to be made on the strength of the entry-fee offered by each bidder. Moreover, a share of annual revenue would be paid by the operator as a form of annual fee for the use of the broadcast spectrum. Advertisements would be the principal revenue source, but there would be no limit imposed on the quantum of advertising that each broadcaster could carry.[xix]
When it came to the allocation of frequencies for FM radio broadcasting, the government seemed inclined to view the airwaves as a public resource to be auctioned off to the highest corporate bidder. After the bidding for FM radio licences that ensued, the vast majority was granted to companies or entities that were already strongly established in other sectors of the media.[xx] Entertainment Networks (India) Ltd., a company owned by the Times of India Group, which happens to be the largest enterprise in the print media, won 25 FM radio broadcast circles, to add to the seven that it was running under its brand name, Radio Mirchi. South Asia FM Ltd., a company controlled by the Chennai-based satellite broadcaster, Sun TV, won no fewer than 23 FM circles in the northern part of the country. This is quite apart from the 18 it won in the south through its affiliate company, Kal Radio Ltd. Sun TV it needs to be added, had in early-2006, bought up the Tamil daily, Dinakaran, then ranked third in terms of readership in Tamilnadu. With an aggressive price-cutting campaign, it had soon catapulted the newspaper to an undisputed second position in the market and quite possibly the first – though this remains contentious – in the readership stakes.[xxi]
Sun TV is a media entity that began in the realm of cable and satellite (C&S) broadcasting and rapidly expanded its influence into print and radio. The Times of India group, headquartered in Delhi, offers another case study of a business group of considerably greater vintage, diversifying out of print into TV, radio, internet advertising and a variety of other media ventures, with little resistance from regulatory policy.[xxii]
These two routes to media consolidation, though different, would be regarded with equal concern under any reasonable regime of supervision over the right to information. But with policy being inattentive, these are by no means the only pathways available for well-endowed business houses that seek to capture increasing shares of the space available for information transactions.
It takes only a cursory glance at the last round of licences allocated for FM radio, to see that any notion of cross-media ownership restrictions has effectively been shredded and the pathway opened up for growing business monopolies in the media. Illustratively: the Rajasthan Patrika group, a significant player in the newspaper space in Rajasthan state, was awarded four FM circles, while Malayala Manorama and Matrubhumi, the two largest newspaper groups in Kerala, were awarded four each in their home state, and the Mid-day group of Mumbai was given six circles, all of them in highly lucrative metropolitan cities. HT Media and Entertainment, a company controlled by the Hindustan Times group – with its significant print media presence in Delhi and Mumbai – was awarded radio licences in both these cities, with the two metropolitan centres of Kolkata and Bangalore also thrown in as a bonus.
Beyond this story of media consolidation, a significant new presence was entering the scene. Adlabs Films Ltd., flush with an infusion of funds after its takeover by the Reliance-ADAG group -- one of the country's biggest industrial conglomerates -- won no fewer than 45 circles in the most recent round of FM radio allocations.[xxiii]
Growing corporate control over the airwaves
These quite unconcealed concessions to corporate control over the airwaves should be seen in the context of existing global norms on cross-media ownership restrictions. These norms indeed, have been repeatedly affirmed in India by broadcast legislation that curiously, seldom makes it beyond the first draft to the stage of enactment. Though the evolution of the new media and the realities of convergence with information technology, have often allowed big media corporations to effect a flanking operation around them, cross-media ownership restrictions remain a valuable part of the statute in several countries.[xxiv] In recent years, a move by the Federal Communications Council (FCC) in the U.S. to undo some of the restraints on cross-media ownership, was met with a vigorous public signature campaign that effectively forced the regulatory body to retreat.[xxv] This is in some measure, an index of the value attached by the public to the sustenance of these norms.
A monopoly over the airwaves was part of the initial conditions in India, in contrast with the U.S., which began with a large assortment of broadcasters that were rapidly consolidated into a handful of dominant entities. It might appear that an oligopoly of private broadcasters – however small in number – would be far preferable to a government monopoly. Interestingly though, in the doctrine of fundamental rights laid down by India’s Supreme Court, the fact of monopoly ownership over broadcast platforms does not, in itself, constitute a curb on the twin rights of information and free speech. It is only from the denial of public access to the broadcast media, that such an abridgment of the fundamental rights could be deemed to occur.[xxvi] In other words, the existence of a monopoly broadcaster does not in itself negate free speech, provided the right to public access is ensured.
The history of the legislative effort to transform a zealously guarded governmental monopoly over the airwaves into a more benign public trust is rather well recorded.[xxvii] Aside from the advisory bodies that were periodically commissioned to come up with creative solutions, the first concrete effort at legislation was the Akash Bharati bill, introduced in Parliament after much deliberation, only to lapse with the dissolution of the Sixth Lok Sabha in 1979. Its successor, renamed the Prasar Bharati bill, was enacted but not notified when the National Front government elected in 1989 – comprising numerous fragments, with one conspicuous exclusion, from the political formation that had dominated the Sixth Lok Sabha – passed into history. It took till 1997, with another avatar of the National Front in power – now called the United Front - for Prasar Bharati to be notified and thus become law.
The government that soon followed, allowed the ordinance notifying Prasar Bharati to lapse and a few months afterwards, disbanded the board of trustees that had been appointed to supervise the functioning of the public broadcaster. In all these respects, the government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) signalled that it preferred the strict control over the airwaves to the doctrine of freedom upheld by the Supreme Court. The entire episode seemed to underline a certain reality about the political tutelage that broadcasting reform has laboured under. Where governments unsure of their tenure are in power, led by political formations that are convinced of their imminent mortality, there is a possibility that the oppressive, official, hold over the airwaves will be relaxed. This is a narrow window of political opportunity that would invariably be shut tight when governments are led by parties that believe, for whatever reason, in their historical destiny as eternal wielders of political power. The Congress Party’s persistent record of default on the Prasar Bharati Act, the United Front’s restoration of the agenda of broadcasting reform and the BJP’s unceremonious termination of the experiment, bring to mind the very strong warning issued by Justice Reddy in the airwaves case: “Government control in effect means the control of the political party or parties in power for the time being. Such control is bound to colour and in some cases, may even distort the news, views and opinions expressed through the media. It is not conducive to free expression of contending viewpoints and opinions which is essential for the growth of a healthy democracy”.[xxviii]
Viewed in this context, it is rather easy to spot out the many deficiencies of the BSRB, especially when assessed against the stated purpose of operationalising the airwaves judgment. Drafted in 2006, when the government monopoly had been irreversibly eroded, the BSRB should reasonably have been expected to take into account the experience of corporate control over the airwaves and factor this into its regulatory philosophy. Though a first glance would show that the BSRB does indeed pay due obeisance to the objectives of preserving diversity of choice on the airwaves, these turn out on closer examination, to be no more than a token acknowledgment. Correlatively, the clause that vests the government with the power to curb monopolies in the media, is numerically imprecise and unaccompanied by any construction of a mode of intervention to secure the public interest.[xxix]
How the broadcast bill falls short in its newest avatar
This is to be contrasted with the Broadcast Bill mooted in 1997 as a means of ensuring a reasonable framework of rules for private broadcasters, even as the counterpart policy initiative of notifying Prasar Bharati brought government channels under a variety of public control. Drafted during a brief interlude of openness within the MIB, the 1997 bill provided for “inter-category restrictions on licences (for broadcasting) as well as on the number of licences within a category”. It restricted the “ownership and control of a broadcasting company by newspaper proprietors up to 20 percent and vice versa” and specifically prohibited religious bodies, political organisations, foreign nationals and entities, and advertising agencies from holding broadcasting licences in India. Further, it limited a single person or entity to licences in any two (or less) of the following activities: terrestrial radio, terrestrial television, satellite television or radio, direct-to-home broadcasting, and local C&S delivery.[xxx]
A prolonged legislative vacuum ensued once the 1997 draft lapsed, during which facts on the ground were altered by the country's big media players, progressively making the job of regulation more difficult. Powerful print media groups moved into the broadcast sector, and others that had begun as C&S broadcast companies, integrated horizontally into the newspaper industry. C&S companies in turn, ventured into the domain of retail distribution of television signals and succeeded in establishing their dominance in the most lucrative markets.
For reasons that have more to do with the evasion of tough decisions than with inherent difficulties, the rules evolved for radio have been immensely more stringent than those applicable to TV. This is in part because the stakes in TV broadcasting are high and the power of the medium so great, that multinational media enterprises and big domestic corporations, have always been an aggressive presence influencing policy decisions. Even if governments would like to pretend otherwise, there is little question that policy decisions in the broadcast sector broadly fit into one of two categories: they are either defensive responses to predatory moves by media corporations, particularly those of foreign origin, or signals of acquiescence in the larger designs of these corporations, dressed in the garb of pragmatism.
Towards the end of 1996, News Television India Ltd., a corporate entity owned by the global media czar Rupert Murdoch, announced its readiness to start “direct to home” (or DTH) telecasts in India. This was followed by an advertising campaign in the print media promising Indian TV viewers a new deal that would secure them their independence from the ever-unreliable local cable operator. By April 1997, this campaign had peaked and the Murdoch enterprise seemed all set to manoeuvre its way past the areas of silence in the prevalent policy, to begin an entirely new category of broadcast services. After months of silence which had been construed as acquiescence, the government in July 1997, issued a formal notification prohibiting the transmission or reception on Indian soil of any broadcast signal above the frequency range of 4800 megahertz. In effect, this prohibited the commencement of DTH broadcasts in India.[xxxi]
If this was a defensive policy response, the official attitude towards uplinking from Indian territory for broadcast through satellite, bears all the telltale scars of compliance with an agenda set by players operating beyond the reach of regulatory efforts. The story begins in May 1991 when the Hong Kong based STAR TV network began beaming programmes into India, where audience interest had already been stoked by the satellite broadcast network CNN's coverage of the Gulf War some weeks before. The first of many committees to examine possible policy and regulatory responses, constituted almost immediately afterwards, submitted its recommendations by October 1991.[xxxii]
Certain conditions were taken for granted in all the early, official, examinations of the broadcasting reform. Though thinking on autonomy for the sector had evolved over the years, there was little acceptance yet that the government monopoly over the airwaves would have to yield to new realities. The most that would be conceded was a degree of access for the public to broadcast platforms, that would nevertheless remain the exclusive domain of the government.
The number of broadcast channels beaming into India was by now proliferating. Yet the government remained unwavering in its refusal to allow any Indian entity to establish an upward link to a satellite for diffusion of broadcast signals over the country. This compelled a number of Indian broadcasters to physically transport their programmes on magnetic media to other countries - notably Singapore - from where an uplink was established for beaming signals into India.
The inherent illogic of broadcast regulation in India
This was a situation rife with ironies. Singapore till today zealously guards its airwaves, allowing incoming broadcasts only with a time delay, so that diligent censors continually monitoring the signals can screen out any material deemed objectionable. But despite all its authoritarian attitudes, the government of Singapore had little reservation early in the C&S television boom, in allowing uplinking from its territory. The Indian government in contrast, disallowed any uplinking of broadcast signals, but effectively admitted that it was powerless to monitor or regulate incoming television programmes. To draw attention to this contrast is not to endorse the Singaporean policy of censorship, or to advocate a police regime that would monitor all broadcasts for conformity with an official line. Rather, it is only to underline the inherent illogic of the Indian government's position, which remained a persistent feature for long years into the C&S television boom.
By late–1996, a minor concession was granted with domestic C&S broadcasters being allowed to uplink to satellites owned by India’s Department of Space, for the limited purpose of gathering “news feeds” from remote locations. Though successive committees had recommended that uplinking rights be granted to Indian-owned broadcasters, the government dithered endlessly over what always seemed a fairly simple issue.[xxxiii] By early-1998, the Murdoch-owned STAR TV contracted with an Indian production company to provide the feed for a 24-hour news channel. Senior officials of STAR TV, many of whom had till just prior to joining the Murdoch enterprise, been working for the MIB, were then under investigation in matters involving possible conflicts of interest and even corruption. But Prime Minister I.K. Gujral found little amiss in throwing open the premises of his official residence for the inauguration of STAR’s 24-hour news channel. Uplink rights were granted, ostensibly for a trial period of six weeks, so that the news channel could provide coverage of the upcoming general elections to Parliament.[xxxiv] And once the uplink right was granted to a foreign-owned broadcaster, there was no credible basis on which it could be denied to Indian entities.
Against this background, it is easy to guess why policy on radio continues to remain excessively restrictive: the poor cousin within the broadcasting family has simply not had any powerful lobbies arguing its case.[xxxv] A record of inconsistent – even duplicitous – standards, is especially evident in the record on community broadcasting. The concept note prepared by the MIB in 1996, by way of a preface to the legislation it proposed to bring in, mentioned community broadcasting as an “extremely useful” device in “providing voices to the local community in managing their affairs and participating in (the) overall developmental process”. It proposed moreover, to award broadcasting licences in restricted areas – “on the basis of either a restricted bid or no bid at all” -- to local organisations “to facilitate better education and communication”.[xxxvi]
Since these words were written, big business control over the airwaves has only been consolidated. In the process, the priorities of community broadcasting and public access to the airwaves have vanished from the policy discourse. It was only several months after the spectrum auction for FM radio that the Union Cabinet finally approved a policy that would open up opportunities in community radio to entities other than privileged universities and institutions of learning. And with all the changes that have grudgingly been allowed, the policy on CRS remains highly restrictive in terms of eligibility, content and revenue sources.
These multiple forms of control over CRS stands in striking contrast to the total absence of any regulation over TV broadcasts. Regulatory efforts in C&S TV in fact, are currently focused on the cable operator rather than the broadcaster. The onus of ensuring that all material broadcast is in conformity with the “programme code” and the “advertisement code” rests entirely with the cable operator. This curiosity of Indian broadcast law has been inscribed into the Cable Television Network Rules of 1994 and continues to hold the field till now. The “programme code” in turn, is a bunch of fairly vacuous strictures that have in practice been reduced to nullity.[xxxvii]
Revisiting the ratio of advertisement to subscription revenue
Where regulatory efforts threaten to have a substantive impact on media monopolies and thus on the overall ambience of the right to information and free speech, these are swiftly abandoned for reasons that should not challenge an average intelligence. A recent move by the Central Government, to limit the advertisement time that particular television channels carry, was abandoned within a month of its announcement, without any kind of public debate.[xxxviii] While the proposal may seem absurd on the face of things, it has a long and hoary vintage as a regulatory device with a vital bearing on the fundamental rights. Successive Press Commissions in India have for instance, suggested that the limitation of advertisement revenue earned by particular media organisations, though seemingly an intrusion into their rights, is a necessary evil in the larger cause of the rights to information and free speech. Both the Price-Page Schedule, which requires newspapers to price their product in accordance with number of pages printed, and the directive to limit the number of pages that a newspaper publishes, have been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the Sakal and Bennett Coleman cases[xxxix]. Yet they continue to be advocated – not just by control fanatics in the government but also by people with vital stakes in the industry – as an imperative of media regulation.
In 2003 for instance, the Indian Parliament's Standing Committee on Information Technology urged the Government to prescribe a “ratio for coverage of news contents and advertisements in newspapers”. This was necessary since, as the Committee observed, “a tendency is being noticed in the leading newspapers to provide more and more space for advertisements at the cost of news items”. Though in itself, this was not a cause for public concern, there was adequate reason to worry, that with advertisement expenditure migrating towards particular newspapers, others that catered to lower income groups - of lesser importance to advertisers - would be starved of revenues and be compelled to cut back on newsgathering expenses. This in turn, would impair the socially desirable objectives of ensuring diversity and plurality of news media.[xl]
The print media, despite all its traditions in India, is today rapidly losing its rich plurality, as the pressure mounts for conformity with the demands of advertisers and the affluent. The broadcast media because of its specific features, is more prone to surrender its autonomy when faced with advertiser interests.[xli] The public character of the airwaves as a resource, could in short, soon be completely subverted by a sustained campaign of disinformation that essentially denies the public its right to know. Circumstances perhaps have never been more appropriate than now, for a credible regulatory authority, committed to the public interest, to revisit the issue of advertisement and subscription revenue. There is also the need to examine the issue of cross-media ownership restrictions from a public interest viewpoint, rather than the governmental-bureaucratic perspective that has so far been customary in India.
The latest visitation of a law for the broadcast sector, the BSRB, proposes as a public authority to regulate the airwaves, a “Broadcasting Regulatory Authority of India” (or BRAI) that will have the final word in matters related to the broadcast spectrum. Perhaps some of the true motivations behind the BSRB as a legislative proposal would become clearer if the mandate that it invests the BRAI with were to be examined.
The BSRB conceives of a situation when the Central Government will, by notification, transfer all “proceedings pending” before the existing frequency spectrum oversight body, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (or, TRAI) to the BRAI. It is significant that over the weeks between June and August 2006 -- with the BSRB being debated in public -- TRAI had sought for the first time to go beyond its assigned job of mediating between telecom companies and adjudicating on matters of frequency spectrum allocation, to seek to establish its authority over the tariffs levied by C&S companies.[xlii] This was within TRAI's mandate as the regulator of the broadcast sector, a status it was conferred with in 2004, ostensibly to hasten the process of convergence between broadcasting, communications and information technology.[xliii] Yet it was never a secret that the MIB was particularly unhappy with this seeming encroachment into its domain. The emergence of the TRAI in its avatar as regulator of subscriber rates that C&S broadcasters could charge, created a further sense of alarm within the MIB, at the possibility that a rival body could win immense populist acclaim in ostensible pursuit of the public cause. The BSRB in other words, was no more than a temporary expedient in a long-running bureaucratic turf war. That, finally is the most charitable assessment that can be made of the last effort to provide a legal framework for the Indian broadcast sector.
December 27, 2006
[i] The text of the Broadcast Services (Regulation) Bill was for long a mystery, with one commentator going to the extent of observing as late as July 28, 2006, that despite all the comment that had been heard in public forums, the Bill was not officially “in the public domain”. This commentator, who happened to be chairperson of the Public Service Broadcasting Trust, had by his own account “requested a copy” of the bill from the MIB, and been told that he could not “legitimately” be given one. “This means”, he wryly concluded, “that all those in possession of a copy of the Bill and those writing about it are in violation of the Official Secrets Act”. (See Rajiv Mehrotra, “Social Justice on the Airwaves”, The Hindustan Times, July 28, 2006, p 11). The full draft of the bill was finally posted on the MIB website on August 11, 2006, with the stated purpose of inviting public comments on an issue of general importance. The bill and the consultation paper that explains its concepts and intents, are available at this writing at the following web address: http://mib.nic.in/informationb/POLICY/BroadcastingBill.htm.
[ii] "Media Muzzled I: Is the Broadcast Bill Media Friendly?", The Hindustan Times, Delhi, July 26, 2006, page 11.
[iii] “New Broadcast Bill just a rehash of existing provisions?”, The Times of India, Delhi and Mumbai, July 3, 2006.
[iv] “Kill this Broadcast Bill before it kills your rights”, Daily News and Analysis, Mumbai, July 1, 2006. This newspaper was launched in the Mumbai market in 2004 and its principal financial backers are the Zee Telefilms group, which operates a number of entertainment and news channels and is by far India’s largest satellite broadcaster, and the Dainik Jagaran group, publishers of the newspaper that was reckoned by the last round of the National Readership Survey, to have a readership of 21 million.
[v] The first amendment to the U.S. constitution forbids Congress from making any law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”. This has led to a considerable jurisprudential debate in the U.S. to determine whether freedom of the press is in some way a redundancy given the unequivocal fashion in which the First Amendment upholds the freedom of speech. The judicial consensus has tended to the view that it is not, which means in effect, that the press enjoys rights that go beyond the public right to free speech. This question is addressed, with appropriate referencing, in an earlier article by this author, "The Challenge to the Media", Seminar, Number 551, July 2005, pp 41-45 (available at this writing at the website: http://www.india-seminar.com/.
[vi] 1962 SCR (3) 842; this is the standard citation format, in which SCR stands for Supreme Court Recorder.
[vii] 1973 SCR (2) 759.
[viii] A fuller examination of both the Sakal and the Bennett Coleman judgments is available in a recent article by this author. See “Freedom, responsibility and regulation”, Seminar, Number 561, May 2006, pp 20-25; available at this writing through the website: http://www.india-seminar.com/.
[ix] 1973 SCR (2), p 760.
[x] Ibid, pp 803-14.
[xi] 1995 SCC (2) 161), para 124(i), SCC here refers to Supreme Court Cases in accordance with the accepted format of citation.
[xii] 1995 SCC (2) 161, para 78.
[xiii] 1995 SCC (2) 161, para 181.
[xiv] Ibid, para 107, 85.
[xv] Ibid, para 205.
[xvi] Ibid, para 81.
[xvii] Ibid, para 205.
[xviii] The policy guidelines for community radio services are available in a document posed on the website of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. See: http://mib.nic.in/informationb/CODES/CRBGUIDELINES041206.doc.
[xix] The policy guidelines for the second round of FM radio broadcast licences are available at the website of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, at the following URL: http://mib.nic.in/informationb/POLICY/frames.htm.
[xx] The details of the broadcast circles awarded after the last round of FM spectrum auctions, is available at this writing, from the website of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting: http://mib.nic.in/fm/fmmainpg.htm.
[xxi] It may not be out of place to mention here that Sun TV is a business group controlled by the family of the incumbent Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, a first-term Member of Parliament from Tamilnadu. Aside from the intrusion of monopoly elements into the media, which is an issue meriting considerable attention in itself, this also raises serious questions about conflicts of interest, which have surprisingly, not attracted much public comment or discussion. For a rare discussion in a public forum on the multiplicity of issues involved in Sun TV’s expansion, see S.R. Ramanujan’s column dated May 14, 2006 in http://www.thehoot.org/, “Why is Tamil media so biased?”
[xxii] For an account of the Times of India’s growth, consolidation and diversification, see this writer’s essay in Himal South Asia, August 2006, “The Times of India’s final frontier”, available at: http://www.himalmag.com/2006/august/essay.htm. Also see the article published in the Delhi-based magazine Hard News, “Demoting news and the reader”, December 2006, pp 17-20, available at: http://www.hardnewsmedia.com/portal/2006/12/697. Both articles in turn, are derived from a case study on the media group published by the Inter-Press Service (Asia Pacific) in December 2006. See: “Times of India: A Catastrophic Success”, in Asia Media Report, A Crisis Within, Inter Press Service (Asia Pacific), Bangkok, 2006, pp 99-110.
[xxiii] On the acquisition of Adlabs by the Reliance-ADAG group, see Sevanti Ninan, “The New Moguls”, The Hindu, Sunday magazine, October 8, 2006. Details of FM broadcast circles awarded till this point have been drawn from the source cited above, i.e., http://mib.nic.in/fm/fmmainpg.htm.
[xxiv] The classic work on this issue of course, is Ben Bagdikian’s The Media Monopoly, Beacon Press, New York, 1983. Detailed rules on the cross-media ownership restrictions in force in the U.S. can be found on the website of the Federal Communications Commission: http://www.fcc.gov/ownership/rules.html. Illustratively, the rules that are currently in force prohibit “common ownership of a full-service broadcast station (television or radio) and a daily newspaper if the station’s service area completely encompasses the newspaper’s city of publication”. The FCC’s 2002 effort to relax these rules in some degree, was met with an organised show of public dissent that compelled it to put the proposed changes on hold. It could be argued that none of the FM broadcast licences given out recently is a “full-service broadcast station”, since they are all explicitly forbidden from engaging in news and current affairs. But with understanding of media economics having progressed much further since the U.S. norms were written, it should be evident that dominance over the advertisement market, particularly in concentrated pockets of high-purchasing power demographic groups, is really the material issue.
[xxv] Associated Press story, “Media ownership issues return to spotlight”, Washington DC, October 3, 2006. This story, issued just when the FCC was beginning a series of public hearings, usefully describes the level of mobilisation of consumer advocacy groups on the issue of cross-media ownership.
[xxvi] The precise formulation in Justice Sawant's judgment is as follows: “A mere creation of the monopoly-agency to telecast does not per se violate Article 19(1)(a) as long as the access is not denied to the media either absolutely or by imposition of terms which are unreasonable. Article 19(1)(a) proscribes monopoly in ideas and as long as this is not done, the mere fact that the access to the media is through the Government controlled agency, is not per se violative of Article 19(1)(a)”. 1995 SCC (2) 161, para 61.
[xxvii] A most comprehensive recent account, focused on television, is Sevanti Ninan, “History of Indian Broadcasting Reform”, in Monroe E. Price and Stefaan G. Verhulst (editors), Broadcasting Reform in India, Media Law from a Global Perspective, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1998, pp 1-21. A comprehensive survey and critique, focused on radio, is available in Kanchan Kumar, “Mixed Signals, Radio Broadcasting Policy in India”, Economic and Political Weekly, May 31, 2003, pp 2173- 82.
[xxviii] 1995 SCC (2) 161, para 199.
[xxix] Article 10 of the BSRB merely reserves for the Central Government “the authority to prescribe such eligibility conditions and restrictions with regard to accumulation of interest in the print and broadcast segments of the media as may be considered necessary from time to time, to prevent monopolies across different segments of the media as well as within the broadcast segment, to ensure diversity of news and views”. The full text of the BSRB is available at the time of this writing at: http://mib.nic.in/informationb/POLICY/BROADCASTSERVICESREGULATIONBILL.htm.
[xxx] The full text of the draft is available in Price and Verhulst (editors), op. cit., pp 191-222. Also included (pp 223-33) is a concept note circulated by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, explaining its overall approach to regulatory issues.
[xxxi] Sevanti Ninan, op. cit., p 18-9.
[xxxii] Ibid.
[xxxiii] This complex regulatory history is summarised in two articles in the fortnightly magazine Frontline. See: “Uplinking rights, The outlook for private Indian broadcasters”, November 1, 1996, pp 93-4; and “A TV debate, questions of broadcast policy”, February 21, 1997, pp 114-5.
[xxxiv] This sequence of events is covered in concurrent issues of the weekly newsmagazine, India Today, especially in the special page titled “Teletalk”, devoted to visual media issues.
[xxxv] Vinod Pavaral asks a pertinent question that still remains unanswered: “why does this government find Rupert Murdoch more trustworthy than a poor, unlettered dalit woman who wants to use a media channel to communicate?” See “Breaking Free, Battle over the Airwaves”, Economic and Political Weekly, May 31, 2003. This is the introductory piece to a collection of papers on broadcasting in India with a focus on community radio, a collection that includes inter alia, Kanchan Kumar, op. cit.
[xxxvi] Price and Verhulst, (editors), op. cit., p 233.
[xxxvii] Among other things, the programme code explicitly forbids the broadcasting of material that contains the “criticism of friendly countries” or “criticises, maligns or slanders any individual in person or certain groups, segments of social, public and moral life of the country”. Material that “denigrates children”, or projects an “ironical and snobbish attitude in the portrayal of certain ethnic, linguistic and regional groups” is also forbidden. And in a revelation that would surely be of interest to the numerous channels that begin the day with astrological predictions – and the sports channels that preface the telecast of important cricket matches with the wisdom of tarot-card readers – anything that propagates “superstition and blind belief” is also proscribed.
[xxxviii][xxxviii] The Hindu, “Decision on advertisement component in TV channels withdrawn”, August 20, 2006, available at this writing at: http://www.thehindu.com/2006/08/20/stories/2006082006131000.htm.
[xxxix] See footnotes 6 and 7 above.
[xl] Standing Committee on Information Technology, Thirteenth Lok Sabha, 63rd Report, Lok Sabha Secretariat, December 2003, pp 39-42.
[xli] The weekly newsmagazine India Today, part of a business group that includes two news channels – Aaj Tak in Hindi and Headlines Today in English – recently ran a cover story that was rather evocatively titled “Tamasha News”. The subtitle read: “Sensational, Shocking, Pervasive, Trivial”. But in a one-line summation of the purport of its story, the newsmagazine refrained from exercising its judgment on the merits of the phenomenon, perhaps because it could not be seen in public to be engaged in an act of self-condemnation. “Intense competition has compelled news channels to feed the voyeuristic appetite of today’s viewers”, it said, “for better or worse”.
[xlii] The Hindu Businessline, "Pay Channels @ Rs 5 per month", September 1, 2006, page 1.
[xliii] See the Press Trust of India story, posted on the website of The Economic Times on January 10, 2004, available at this writing at: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/415625.cms.
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Symbolism and rage as political resources in the Dalit movement
The symbolism of Dalit politics is a tactical response to the threat of violence lurking beneath the surface of Indian democracy (but the benevolent tolerance that caste Hindu society affects, may well be misplaced)
In January 2006, Bant Singh, a Dalit peasant and community organiser, was assaulted near his home village in Mansa District of Punjab state. Left for dead by his assailants, he was denied attention at the district hospital, except on payment of an inducement that was plainly beyond his means. His condition deteriorated badly and three of his limbs had to be amputated when he was finally placed under competent medical care. Even as news of the shocking crime filtered out, there was little hint that the perpetrators, known to be two former headmen of Bant Singh’s village, would ever be brought to justice. In a zone where the liberties guaranteed by the Indian Constitution are little more than a phantasm, and the hierarchical privileges of caste and class the reality, Bant Singh had been found guilty of an unforgivable crime. He had shown faith in the rule of law, and sufficient persistence to fight a prolonged legal battle to bring to justice three men guilty of the sexual assault of his young daughter (See Himal October 2006, “The Dalit sword of Mansa”).
In September, as Surekha Bhotmange prepared an evening meal for her family in Kherlanji village of Bhandara District in Maharashtra, a mob of local thugs broke into her house. She was dragged outside, along with her daughter Priyanka and two sons, Roshan and Sudhir, one of whom is visually handicapped. The women were lashed to a bullock cart and brutally gang-raped, before all four were murdered. Witnesses to the grisly carnage were sworn to secrecy. Their assent was easily secured, since they had just witnessed a crime that left few boundaries intact between observation and participation. Surekha’s husband Bhaiyyalal lived to tell the story, but his complaints at the local police station went unrecorded until the four charred bodies of the victims were discovered the following day.
The Bhotmanges belonged to the Mahar caste of B R Ambedkar, and saw themselves as heirs to the great tradition of cultural rebellion that he represented. Their faith in the social mobility that education could bring, and their resistance to all efforts to snatch away part of their property for a water scheme that would bring them no conceivable benefit, was seen as a challenge to the casteist status quo. Like Bant Singh, they too fell victim to the alternate system of conflict resolution that prevails as the final bulwark of an ascriptive, hierarchical social order.
When atrocities against the living remain unrequited, it might occasion some shock that supposed outrages against idols should provoke violence and calls for retribution. On 30 November, when news broke of a statue of B R Ambedkar being vandalised in Kanpur District of Uttar Pradesh, Dalit organisations mobilised for a day of protests. Violence was reported from diverse parts of the country, but the most demonstrative incidents were in Maharashtra, where one of the Indian Railways’ most prestigious commuter trains was set aflame between Bombay and Pune. Nobody was killed in the incident, though sporadic clashes elsewhere in the state did claim two lives.
Symbolism over substance?
The realities of a world where little is achieved without conflict, compel the new Dalit movements to make certain tactical choices. The hazards of pursuing their interests with necessary zeal cannot be discounted, since violence lurks just beneath the surface of India’s democratic order. But the pursuit of accommodation is not a sufficient answer, since that entails the risk of yielding on core Dalit interests.
Partly in response, a delicate compromise has been fashioned which places symbolism above substance. A statue of B R Ambedkar, installed at a prominent vantage point in the smallest town or village, is often regarded as a sufficient triumph – one that would sustain the solidarity of the movement, even as substantive gains remain elusive. It is this precise phenomenon that has led to a proliferation of statues of the man revered today as one of the great Indians of the 20th century. These rather hastily fashioned icons have proven offensive to the sensibilities of some, especially those with an ideological predilection towards the Hindutva strain of politics. What they fail to realise is that the iconography of Ambedkarism is a safety valve for the long accumulated grievances of Dalit politics. Were this symbolism not available, the reaction of caste Hindu orthodoxy to the new Dalit assertion, would go far beyond mere aesthetic distaste.
The months just passed witnessed two significant anniversaries connected with the man whose life-story has become a part of the lives and struggles of the Dalits of India. October 2006 saw the 50-year anniversary of Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism. It was a climactic act of cultural rebellion, and the fulfilment of a vow made in 1927 after a Satyagraha he led to assert Dalit rights to a water source, invited the furious reprisals of upper-caste orthodoxy. And 6 December was the 50-year anniversary of Ambedkar’s death.
As journalist Jyoti Punwani wrote in a recent opinion piece, for all the significance of these anniversaries for the Dalits, it was as if they did not exist for the mainstream press. On 5 December, Punwani observes, a prominent newspaper in Bombay “carried on page one, pictures of two residents who live near Mumbai’s Shivaji Park, ready to leave home with bags packed”. They were leaving their homes temporarily because of the compelling need to “avoid the influx of Dalits to Shivaji Park on 6 December, Dr Ambedkar’s death anniversary”. It was not as if the residents of the area were strangers to large and disorderly gatherings. The Shiv Sena had been laying waste to their neighbourhood for at least 40 years during the Dussehra observances, charged by their leader Bal Thackeray’s oratory. In comparison, the annual assembly of Dalits on the occasion of Ambedkar’s death anniversary had invariably been a model of sobriety and civic responsibility.
In the media narration again, the Kherlanji atrocity existed not as a brutal crime that called out for punitive sanctions, but as a looming presence that somehow enhanced the aura of menace hovering over the Ambedkar death anniversary observance. The media, Punwani argued, had shown admirable tenacity and commitment in holding the rather negligent system of justice to account for the deaths of Priyadarshini Mattoo and Jessica Lal – two young women of the urban middle class murdered by men who believed they enjoyed absolute impunity on account of their social circumstances. Priyanka Bhotmange’s was no less poignant a case, demanding as much if not more commitment on the part of the press.
The reasons why Priyanka did not merit the same treatment as someone like Priyadarshini, are fairly clear. Shortly after the violent affrays over the vandalisation of an Ambedkar statue, a prominent English-language news channel ran an hour-long programme of debate and discussion centred on a single question: Are Dalits becoming pawns in a larger political game? Of the invited audience in the studio, 85 percent voted affirmatively, and among those who phoned in their responses, a still larger proportion concurred.
It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that elite opinion – even in the upper- and middle-class strata that do not have reason to feel directly threatened by the assertive new strains in Dalit politics – tends to view the Dalits as a people who have not yet attained the political maturity to act on their own behalf. This perception, clearly, is derived from the elaborate symbolism of Dalit politics, particularly in relation to the iconography of Ambedkar. Yet, in drawing the facile conclusion that Dalit politics is yet to attain maturity, elite opinion may well have mistaken contingent tactical adjustments with inherent characteristics.
A recent report on the status of India’s Muslims, prepared by a commission headed by the eminent jurist Rajinder Sachar, pointed out that on several vital counts, India’s principal religious minority is perhaps as poorly off as the Dalits. But Dalit assertion, even if it has been met with violent reprisals every so often, has a legitimacy that the Muslim struggle for recognition has lacked, on account of the complex history of India’s nationalist movement. This is a narrative that includes, among other things, Ambedkar’s historic pact with Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress party in 1932, when the Muslim League and its leadership seemingly remained intent on underlining differences rather than shared interests.
In later years, Ambedkar came to regret having yielded to Gandhi’s magnificent paternalism, but there is little question that the terms of the reconciliation between Dalits and caste Hinduism that he authored have provided a stable underpinning for the politics of independent India. It is also true that by making the assertion of identity an object in itself and consecrating the principle of unequal treatment under the law as a means of redressing centuries of institutionalised inequality, the Dalit compact has led to a peculiar brand of politics, where substantive interests and the pursuit of equality have often been subordinated to identity. It is unsurprising then, that the established order is able to respond to Dalit assertions of identity with a variety of tolerant benevolence, though the pursuit of substantive equality has been known to call forth extreme violence.
Coercive focus
It would be evident that identity has been the main concern of the Dalit party that has, in three recent episodes, exercised power in India’s largest state of Uttar Pradesh. These intervals in power were invariably terminated due to the fickleness of the parties with which that main vehicle of Dalit politics in UP – the Bahujan Samaj Party, or BSP – was compelled to enter into coalitions. But running through all the BSP’s efforts was an agenda that was followed to the point of obsession: to pack the administration with trusted functionaries, from the state capital on down. Particular attention was placed on the police forces, to ensure that functionaries of the law at the local level were amenable to the diktat of the party.
This is a rather chastening reality. Under a political dispensation where the welfare commitments are professedly strong, the most powerful incentive in contesting elections should be to gain control over the welfare mechanisms – like health and education -- rather than the apparatus of coercion. Substantive economic progress for the Dalits would presumably come from enhanced welfare expenditures, channelled through the social infrastructure. The reality in India, as manifest in the administrative actions of the BSP, seems the opposite. The overwhelming concern of a party of the oppressed, during its brief interludes in power in the largest state in the country, is not to augment welfare, but to capture the instruments of coercion.
This seems to suggest two rather significant points about the Dalits’ social situation. The first is the general one that under globalisation, the space for manoeuvre available -- to increase welfare expenditure, for one thing -- is becoming dangerously constricted. The second is that substantive progress through increased public spending on the welfare sectors would only be possible if the instruments of coercion are taken over, or at the very least, neutralised. Failing this, the coercive mechanisms of tradition would come into play, to overwhelm the Dalit pursuit of substantive equality.
To be critical of the Dalits’ seeming disdain for constitutionalism and liberal democratic principles would be easy. But the experience of Uttar Pradesh – and indeed other parts of the country -- is testimony to an undeniable fact. The rights of the oppressed may verbally be championed by various political formations eager to harvest their votes. But in a situation of direct confrontation between Dalit rights and entrenched privilege, the apparatus of the State becomes an accessory of power and wealth. The ongoing litany of atrocities against Dalits, not to mention the failure of the apparatus of law and justice to provide them restitution, is continuing reminder of this.
In January 2006, Bant Singh, a Dalit peasant and community organiser, was assaulted near his home village in Mansa District of Punjab state. Left for dead by his assailants, he was denied attention at the district hospital, except on payment of an inducement that was plainly beyond his means. His condition deteriorated badly and three of his limbs had to be amputated when he was finally placed under competent medical care. Even as news of the shocking crime filtered out, there was little hint that the perpetrators, known to be two former headmen of Bant Singh’s village, would ever be brought to justice. In a zone where the liberties guaranteed by the Indian Constitution are little more than a phantasm, and the hierarchical privileges of caste and class the reality, Bant Singh had been found guilty of an unforgivable crime. He had shown faith in the rule of law, and sufficient persistence to fight a prolonged legal battle to bring to justice three men guilty of the sexual assault of his young daughter (See Himal October 2006, “The Dalit sword of Mansa”).
In September, as Surekha Bhotmange prepared an evening meal for her family in Kherlanji village of Bhandara District in Maharashtra, a mob of local thugs broke into her house. She was dragged outside, along with her daughter Priyanka and two sons, Roshan and Sudhir, one of whom is visually handicapped. The women were lashed to a bullock cart and brutally gang-raped, before all four were murdered. Witnesses to the grisly carnage were sworn to secrecy. Their assent was easily secured, since they had just witnessed a crime that left few boundaries intact between observation and participation. Surekha’s husband Bhaiyyalal lived to tell the story, but his complaints at the local police station went unrecorded until the four charred bodies of the victims were discovered the following day.
The Bhotmanges belonged to the Mahar caste of B R Ambedkar, and saw themselves as heirs to the great tradition of cultural rebellion that he represented. Their faith in the social mobility that education could bring, and their resistance to all efforts to snatch away part of their property for a water scheme that would bring them no conceivable benefit, was seen as a challenge to the casteist status quo. Like Bant Singh, they too fell victim to the alternate system of conflict resolution that prevails as the final bulwark of an ascriptive, hierarchical social order.
When atrocities against the living remain unrequited, it might occasion some shock that supposed outrages against idols should provoke violence and calls for retribution. On 30 November, when news broke of a statue of B R Ambedkar being vandalised in Kanpur District of Uttar Pradesh, Dalit organisations mobilised for a day of protests. Violence was reported from diverse parts of the country, but the most demonstrative incidents were in Maharashtra, where one of the Indian Railways’ most prestigious commuter trains was set aflame between Bombay and Pune. Nobody was killed in the incident, though sporadic clashes elsewhere in the state did claim two lives.
Symbolism over substance?
The realities of a world where little is achieved without conflict, compel the new Dalit movements to make certain tactical choices. The hazards of pursuing their interests with necessary zeal cannot be discounted, since violence lurks just beneath the surface of India’s democratic order. But the pursuit of accommodation is not a sufficient answer, since that entails the risk of yielding on core Dalit interests.
Partly in response, a delicate compromise has been fashioned which places symbolism above substance. A statue of B R Ambedkar, installed at a prominent vantage point in the smallest town or village, is often regarded as a sufficient triumph – one that would sustain the solidarity of the movement, even as substantive gains remain elusive. It is this precise phenomenon that has led to a proliferation of statues of the man revered today as one of the great Indians of the 20th century. These rather hastily fashioned icons have proven offensive to the sensibilities of some, especially those with an ideological predilection towards the Hindutva strain of politics. What they fail to realise is that the iconography of Ambedkarism is a safety valve for the long accumulated grievances of Dalit politics. Were this symbolism not available, the reaction of caste Hindu orthodoxy to the new Dalit assertion, would go far beyond mere aesthetic distaste.
The months just passed witnessed two significant anniversaries connected with the man whose life-story has become a part of the lives and struggles of the Dalits of India. October 2006 saw the 50-year anniversary of Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism. It was a climactic act of cultural rebellion, and the fulfilment of a vow made in 1927 after a Satyagraha he led to assert Dalit rights to a water source, invited the furious reprisals of upper-caste orthodoxy. And 6 December was the 50-year anniversary of Ambedkar’s death.
As journalist Jyoti Punwani wrote in a recent opinion piece, for all the significance of these anniversaries for the Dalits, it was as if they did not exist for the mainstream press. On 5 December, Punwani observes, a prominent newspaper in Bombay “carried on page one, pictures of two residents who live near Mumbai’s Shivaji Park, ready to leave home with bags packed”. They were leaving their homes temporarily because of the compelling need to “avoid the influx of Dalits to Shivaji Park on 6 December, Dr Ambedkar’s death anniversary”. It was not as if the residents of the area were strangers to large and disorderly gatherings. The Shiv Sena had been laying waste to their neighbourhood for at least 40 years during the Dussehra observances, charged by their leader Bal Thackeray’s oratory. In comparison, the annual assembly of Dalits on the occasion of Ambedkar’s death anniversary had invariably been a model of sobriety and civic responsibility.
In the media narration again, the Kherlanji atrocity existed not as a brutal crime that called out for punitive sanctions, but as a looming presence that somehow enhanced the aura of menace hovering over the Ambedkar death anniversary observance. The media, Punwani argued, had shown admirable tenacity and commitment in holding the rather negligent system of justice to account for the deaths of Priyadarshini Mattoo and Jessica Lal – two young women of the urban middle class murdered by men who believed they enjoyed absolute impunity on account of their social circumstances. Priyanka Bhotmange’s was no less poignant a case, demanding as much if not more commitment on the part of the press.
The reasons why Priyanka did not merit the same treatment as someone like Priyadarshini, are fairly clear. Shortly after the violent affrays over the vandalisation of an Ambedkar statue, a prominent English-language news channel ran an hour-long programme of debate and discussion centred on a single question: Are Dalits becoming pawns in a larger political game? Of the invited audience in the studio, 85 percent voted affirmatively, and among those who phoned in their responses, a still larger proportion concurred.
It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that elite opinion – even in the upper- and middle-class strata that do not have reason to feel directly threatened by the assertive new strains in Dalit politics – tends to view the Dalits as a people who have not yet attained the political maturity to act on their own behalf. This perception, clearly, is derived from the elaborate symbolism of Dalit politics, particularly in relation to the iconography of Ambedkar. Yet, in drawing the facile conclusion that Dalit politics is yet to attain maturity, elite opinion may well have mistaken contingent tactical adjustments with inherent characteristics.
A recent report on the status of India’s Muslims, prepared by a commission headed by the eminent jurist Rajinder Sachar, pointed out that on several vital counts, India’s principal religious minority is perhaps as poorly off as the Dalits. But Dalit assertion, even if it has been met with violent reprisals every so often, has a legitimacy that the Muslim struggle for recognition has lacked, on account of the complex history of India’s nationalist movement. This is a narrative that includes, among other things, Ambedkar’s historic pact with Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress party in 1932, when the Muslim League and its leadership seemingly remained intent on underlining differences rather than shared interests.
In later years, Ambedkar came to regret having yielded to Gandhi’s magnificent paternalism, but there is little question that the terms of the reconciliation between Dalits and caste Hinduism that he authored have provided a stable underpinning for the politics of independent India. It is also true that by making the assertion of identity an object in itself and consecrating the principle of unequal treatment under the law as a means of redressing centuries of institutionalised inequality, the Dalit compact has led to a peculiar brand of politics, where substantive interests and the pursuit of equality have often been subordinated to identity. It is unsurprising then, that the established order is able to respond to Dalit assertions of identity with a variety of tolerant benevolence, though the pursuit of substantive equality has been known to call forth extreme violence.
Coercive focus
It would be evident that identity has been the main concern of the Dalit party that has, in three recent episodes, exercised power in India’s largest state of Uttar Pradesh. These intervals in power were invariably terminated due to the fickleness of the parties with which that main vehicle of Dalit politics in UP – the Bahujan Samaj Party, or BSP – was compelled to enter into coalitions. But running through all the BSP’s efforts was an agenda that was followed to the point of obsession: to pack the administration with trusted functionaries, from the state capital on down. Particular attention was placed on the police forces, to ensure that functionaries of the law at the local level were amenable to the diktat of the party.
This is a rather chastening reality. Under a political dispensation where the welfare commitments are professedly strong, the most powerful incentive in contesting elections should be to gain control over the welfare mechanisms – like health and education -- rather than the apparatus of coercion. Substantive economic progress for the Dalits would presumably come from enhanced welfare expenditures, channelled through the social infrastructure. The reality in India, as manifest in the administrative actions of the BSP, seems the opposite. The overwhelming concern of a party of the oppressed, during its brief interludes in power in the largest state in the country, is not to augment welfare, but to capture the instruments of coercion.
This seems to suggest two rather significant points about the Dalits’ social situation. The first is the general one that under globalisation, the space for manoeuvre available -- to increase welfare expenditure, for one thing -- is becoming dangerously constricted. The second is that substantive progress through increased public spending on the welfare sectors would only be possible if the instruments of coercion are taken over, or at the very least, neutralised. Failing this, the coercive mechanisms of tradition would come into play, to overwhelm the Dalit pursuit of substantive equality.
To be critical of the Dalits’ seeming disdain for constitutionalism and liberal democratic principles would be easy. But the experience of Uttar Pradesh – and indeed other parts of the country -- is testimony to an undeniable fact. The rights of the oppressed may verbally be championed by various political formations eager to harvest their votes. But in a situation of direct confrontation between Dalit rights and entrenched privilege, the apparatus of the State becomes an accessory of power and wealth. The ongoing litany of atrocities against Dalits, not to mention the failure of the apparatus of law and justice to provide them restitution, is continuing reminder of this.
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Globalisation, Citizenship and Nationhood: A review article
Rounding off his account of Nations and Nationalism, the historian E.J. Hobsbawm, in a work widely recognised – even 15 years after it was published – as one of the most authoritative in recent times, firmly stated his belief that the phenomenon of nationalism may have exhausted its energy as a historical force. “The owl of Minerva” which brings wisdom, he says, “flies out at dusk”, invoking Hegel’s famous pronouncement that “philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process”. The mere fact then, that the “owl of Minerva” has now begun to circle the nation-state, indicates that nationalism has completed its formative process.
Hobsbawm’s prognosis that nationalism is unlikely to be a vector for major historical changes in future, may seem rather reckless since it was authored at a time when a new wave of ethnic and cultural assertion was wreaking havoc with the mosaic of nation-states that had seemingly been cast in stone after World War II. Evidently though, he has in mind a different phase of nationalism, when people looked for unity in larger units, when small was disdained and no ethnicity or culture seemed so valuable that it needed to be preserved against the imperatives of unification within larger units.
Yet the gravitational pull towards integration within larger units is also an undeniable part of contemporary reality. This is a process commonly expressed in the term “globalisation”, a word unknown and virtually unspoken till fifteen years back and yet now an indispensable part of the political and economic vocabulary. What are these contrary pulls and pressures that the world economy is beset by and what do they portend for the future of much of the world’s people? Prem Shankar Jha’s recent volume is an effort to answer these questions at least in some measure. In its eloquence, his title draws a direct correlation between the hastening demise of the nation-state as a form of political organisation and the process of globalisation. But this is no easy transition. Rather, war is the midwife of the new global order and chaos is its attendant.[i]
In contrast to the rose-tinted views of globalisation as an unqualified agency of human progress, Jha presents an alternate thesis: that technology bears little inherent potential to “transform the world for the better”. Rather than take its transformative potential for granted, it would be more prudent for the greater common good, that “deliberate human intervention” be directed towards slowing down “the pace of economic transformation sufficiently to give the social, political and international institutions upon which civilisation depends time to adapt”.
The task is of immense importance in Jha’s estimation, because the forces of technological change when unfettered show a persistent tendency to burst the banks of established institutions. Capitalism evolves within the confines of a “container”, which could be understood as the “social, economic and political unit that is large enough to organise and contain all the interrelated functions of capitalism: finance, production and marketing”. Technology in turn, is the agency that propels the relentless growth in the scale and scope of the container of capitalism. But left to its own pace, technology will tend at epochal turning points in human history, to burst through the space afforded by the container.
The current phase of capitalist evolution on a global scale has brought economic change “into conflict with the deeply embedded institutions of nation state-based capitalism”. Intensified conflict and rising levels of insecurity have been the inevitable outcome. Within states, globalisation has “triggered conflict between the new winners and new losers in society. Not just individuals, but entire classes of people that enjoyed an assured status, some degree of affluence and, above all, security, have been robbed of all three, and found themselves scrabbling frantically to retain their place in society. At the same time, ethnic, occupation and social groups…. who were treated with condescension or reviled under the older dispensation, have shot up in status. Such dramatic changes are bound to be resisted and have often led to rebellion and bloodshed”.
Jha then proceeds to document with great diligence and rigour, all the consequences of these chaotic, uncontrolled changes: a slackening of economic growth, stagnant levels of industrial productivity, rising inequality between nations and within them, and a growing army of the unemployed who have essentially lost all hope of ever being productive members of society. Capitalism has of course, periodically shown a tendency to burst its banks. The Italian city-state was an adequate container for all the ambitions and potentialities of the system in its early phase of growth. But in a subsequent phase, the city-state of Amsterdam needed to bolster its claims to being the centre of world capitalism by drawing upon the sustenance of a substantial hinterland, in a sense creating the first inkling of a “national” form of organisation. This too proved an ephemeral triumph, since capitalism required for the next phase of its growth, to be nurtured within the confines of a true nation-state, rather than an uneasy hybrid between city and nation. That was when Britain emerged as the dominant economic power, only to yield pre-eminence to the U.S.A. when capitalism once again demanded a transition from a relatively small nation to a truly gargantuan one.
At the next phase of its expansion, capitalism demands all the world as its stage and lacking the means to win consent, imposes its will through military coercion. Jha sees as a shallow pretence, the claim that the current U.S. rampage through diverse corners of the world is a justified response to terrorism. He argues rather, that the trigger for the U.S. to embark upon this program of remaking the world, to create the globalised conditions for the sustenance of the capitalist system, was the end of the Cold War in 1989. The aerial war against Serbia in 1999, Jha suggests, was the first rehearsal for empire. And the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a final gesture of contempt by the capitalist superpower for a world order built on the sovereignty of nation-states.
If the world is not to descend into a phase of terminal despair, human civilisation needs to step back from this world order being crafted under the tutelage of the U.S., and build its institutions afresh. New supranational bodies ensuring the fair and equitable governance of global affairs need to be put in place. And this endeavour would naturally enough, need to engage with the resistance of the world hegemon and overcome all its efforts at sabotage.
These are arresting formulations but they do not quite grapple with the crucial issue of agency. Who among the diverse peoples of the world today would be the architects of the new world order that secures justice for all? This elision in turn could be the outcome of Jha’s broader failure to identify human agency within his narration of capitalist evolution, raising the disembodied force of “technology” to the status of the main protagonist.
Historians have seen in the forging of nationhood in Britain – and more so in France’s epochal revolution of 1789 – a process of contention between an emerging mercantile elite, or bourgeoisie and a traditional aristocratic class. They have seen capitalism and its inseparable companion, imperialism, develop as a consequence of competition between national bourgeoisies. In turn, the emergence of new nations in the crucible of the struggle against imperialism has been seen in terms of new forms of elite solidarity in the periphery, which have successfully contested the pre-eminence of metropolitan capitalism.
All these complexities are subsumed by Jha under the narrative of the rise and fall of the Westphalian world order. This effectively reduces a complex three-century long evolution of the global economy to a rather simplistic formulation. It could credibly be argued that the Westphalian world order, named after the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which put an end to the 30-year war and guaranteed the mutual recognition of the sovereignty of monarchs, never really existed. Westphalia recognised that sovereignty vested not merely in the person of the monarch but in the aggregation of his territorial holdings. The nation still remained a territorially defined entity. It was only till the French Revolution forged a notion of a citizenship of equals that the “nation” was infused with the vital component of popular participation. Yet the French Revolution was untrue to its proclaimed ideals from the moment of its birth. Despite its professions of the universal values of freedom and equality, revolutionary regimes lost little time before plunging into military adventures abroad – first in the cause of revolutionary defence and then in the cause of conquest.
A Westphalian world order in the sense that Jha means it, perhaps existed only briefly, in the years following 1947, when Indian independence heralded a phase of decolonisation across the world. But this world order of relative autonomy for the new nation-states was eroded by factors both internal and external to them. The regimes that came to power in the euphoria of liberation, promised their citizens a dispensation of fairness and equity, where no person would suffer discrimination on grounds of race, ethnicity, gender or religion. Since few of these countries could afford to give excessive sway to the corrosive forces of free competition, they made a conscious decision that the state would function as the arbiter of a system of fairness and equity. This apart, the state would also be the agent of development, of ensuring not merely that existing resources were deployed equitably, but of securing access to opportunities for all citizens.
These were the basic commitments of the developmental state, as it came into existence in several newly liberated countries. By the 1980s, these promises were proving impossible to deliver on. Ethnic strife engulfed some of the newly liberated nations, and a financial crisis, which discredited – when it did not directly indict -- the ruling elites, was beginning to play havoc with policy autonomy in some of the newer nation-states. By the late-1980s, the nation-state as constituted in the struggle against colonialism, was being challenged from above and from below. The demands of international finance were draining it of precious capital. And burgeoning strife between communities – ethnic, linguistic and religious – accentuated by the famine of resources, had begun to seriously erode the democratic commitments that these states were founded on. What has been called the decade of “globalisation” could also be viewed as a conjunction of two crises – of the welfare state and the developmental state.
These dual crises have sharply accentuated disparities, constricted creative thinking on the possibilities of human betterment, and enforced a mindless conformity with the neo-liberal economic policy consensus. To address the issue of agency once again, it may be foolhardy to believe that older nationalist elites which are responsible for current global predicaments, will have the intellectual resources and political courage to steer the world community out of them. That task may well require new forms of solidarity between communities, widely dispersed over the world, who share the misfortune of being at the receiving end of the worst of globalisation.
Prem Shankar Jha, in addition to being a prolific writer, has been a teacher of economics and a senior editor at some of India’s leading newspapers. He also held the post of media advisor in the office of the Indian Prime Minister, during the all too brief tenure of V.P. Singh. Interestingly, the current incumbent in that post, whose resume shares several other significant features with Jha’s has also published a book dealing with broadly a similar canvas of issues, though in a more limited geographical and historical frame.[ii] Sanjaya Baru’s book is a collection of newspaper columns and conference papers written over the years when he was an active media practitioner. It consists of no fewer than 63 distinct pieces and offers Jawaharlal Nehru’s speech to the Indian Constituent Assembly in December 1947, spelling out a vision of “India’s emergence in world affairs”, as an appendix.
In some measure, Baru’s book may have benefited from an additional editorial effort to reduce the proliferation of its articles to a more manageable number. That would have trimmed the overall length of the volume and also eliminated the repetition of ideas and phrases that is inevitable in newspaper articles written over a longish timespan. It would also have helped to cut out certain logical dissonances. For instance, for a book published in 2006, the prognosis that India, while not a “major power today”, is “capable of becoming one within the first half of the next century”, might seem an unnecessary burden on the reader’s powers of imagination, since nobody is likely to survive long enough to see that happy outcome. But if a text written long years back has been preserved unamended for publication now, then it has to justify itself in terms of insights and its ability to account for all that has ensued in the intervening period.
The issues that Baru addresses are interesting in themselves. For instance in his opening two essays, he addresses the counterpart themes of the “strategic consequences of India’s economic performance” and the “economic dimension of India’s foreign policy”. He then turns his analytical gaze towards the issue of “conceptualising economic security” before engaging with the issue of “national security in an open economy”. He tells us for instance, that India’s fiscal and foreign trade policies since 1991, which have underlined a re-engagement with the west and with the larger Asian neighbourhood, has been an entirely pragmatic and unavoidable response to the end of the Cold War. We are also told that with a share of world trade that is considerably less than 1 percent, India’s strategic influence still remains way below potential.
There are a number of interesting questions that arise from Baru’s projection that India would need to increase its share in world trade significantly to gain an appropriate measure of strategic clout. How for instance, would this increasing share be obtained? There is a belief afloat – integrally related to the neoliberal economic policy consensus – that a rising tide lifts all boats. One country’s economic dynamism in other words, can create the conditions for all others to grow. But this does not necessarily mean that the relative position of one with respect to the other – in terms of share in world trade for instance – should be altered. An absolute increase in India’s share of world trade though, implies a zero-sum game, in which for every gain that India makes there has to be a loser. This raises the possibility that raising India’s profile in the global marketplace is itself a process involving strategic competition. Rather than being an end-point from where India can begin to exert its strategic influence, it is a process that requires strategic calculations at every stage. So who would be the countries that India would need to engage in this strategic competition and what would be the consequences? These are questions that still remain to be addressed by advocates of the new economic paradigm. Perhaps more fundamentally, considering the evidence available today on the multifarious problems and iniquities that globalisation has thrown up, they cannot take for granted the premise that the way forward lies in strategic competition, rather than cooperation.
[i] Prem Shankar Jha, The Twilight of the Nation State: Globalisation, Chaos and War, Vistaar Publications, Delhi, 2006, pp xx + 373, Rs480..
[ii] Sanjaya Baru, Strategic Consequences of India’s Economic Performance, Academic Foundation, Delhi, 2006, pp 496, Rs 795.
Hobsbawm’s prognosis that nationalism is unlikely to be a vector for major historical changes in future, may seem rather reckless since it was authored at a time when a new wave of ethnic and cultural assertion was wreaking havoc with the mosaic of nation-states that had seemingly been cast in stone after World War II. Evidently though, he has in mind a different phase of nationalism, when people looked for unity in larger units, when small was disdained and no ethnicity or culture seemed so valuable that it needed to be preserved against the imperatives of unification within larger units.
Yet the gravitational pull towards integration within larger units is also an undeniable part of contemporary reality. This is a process commonly expressed in the term “globalisation”, a word unknown and virtually unspoken till fifteen years back and yet now an indispensable part of the political and economic vocabulary. What are these contrary pulls and pressures that the world economy is beset by and what do they portend for the future of much of the world’s people? Prem Shankar Jha’s recent volume is an effort to answer these questions at least in some measure. In its eloquence, his title draws a direct correlation between the hastening demise of the nation-state as a form of political organisation and the process of globalisation. But this is no easy transition. Rather, war is the midwife of the new global order and chaos is its attendant.[i]
In contrast to the rose-tinted views of globalisation as an unqualified agency of human progress, Jha presents an alternate thesis: that technology bears little inherent potential to “transform the world for the better”. Rather than take its transformative potential for granted, it would be more prudent for the greater common good, that “deliberate human intervention” be directed towards slowing down “the pace of economic transformation sufficiently to give the social, political and international institutions upon which civilisation depends time to adapt”.
The task is of immense importance in Jha’s estimation, because the forces of technological change when unfettered show a persistent tendency to burst the banks of established institutions. Capitalism evolves within the confines of a “container”, which could be understood as the “social, economic and political unit that is large enough to organise and contain all the interrelated functions of capitalism: finance, production and marketing”. Technology in turn, is the agency that propels the relentless growth in the scale and scope of the container of capitalism. But left to its own pace, technology will tend at epochal turning points in human history, to burst through the space afforded by the container.
The current phase of capitalist evolution on a global scale has brought economic change “into conflict with the deeply embedded institutions of nation state-based capitalism”. Intensified conflict and rising levels of insecurity have been the inevitable outcome. Within states, globalisation has “triggered conflict between the new winners and new losers in society. Not just individuals, but entire classes of people that enjoyed an assured status, some degree of affluence and, above all, security, have been robbed of all three, and found themselves scrabbling frantically to retain their place in society. At the same time, ethnic, occupation and social groups…. who were treated with condescension or reviled under the older dispensation, have shot up in status. Such dramatic changes are bound to be resisted and have often led to rebellion and bloodshed”.
Jha then proceeds to document with great diligence and rigour, all the consequences of these chaotic, uncontrolled changes: a slackening of economic growth, stagnant levels of industrial productivity, rising inequality between nations and within them, and a growing army of the unemployed who have essentially lost all hope of ever being productive members of society. Capitalism has of course, periodically shown a tendency to burst its banks. The Italian city-state was an adequate container for all the ambitions and potentialities of the system in its early phase of growth. But in a subsequent phase, the city-state of Amsterdam needed to bolster its claims to being the centre of world capitalism by drawing upon the sustenance of a substantial hinterland, in a sense creating the first inkling of a “national” form of organisation. This too proved an ephemeral triumph, since capitalism required for the next phase of its growth, to be nurtured within the confines of a true nation-state, rather than an uneasy hybrid between city and nation. That was when Britain emerged as the dominant economic power, only to yield pre-eminence to the U.S.A. when capitalism once again demanded a transition from a relatively small nation to a truly gargantuan one.
At the next phase of its expansion, capitalism demands all the world as its stage and lacking the means to win consent, imposes its will through military coercion. Jha sees as a shallow pretence, the claim that the current U.S. rampage through diverse corners of the world is a justified response to terrorism. He argues rather, that the trigger for the U.S. to embark upon this program of remaking the world, to create the globalised conditions for the sustenance of the capitalist system, was the end of the Cold War in 1989. The aerial war against Serbia in 1999, Jha suggests, was the first rehearsal for empire. And the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a final gesture of contempt by the capitalist superpower for a world order built on the sovereignty of nation-states.
If the world is not to descend into a phase of terminal despair, human civilisation needs to step back from this world order being crafted under the tutelage of the U.S., and build its institutions afresh. New supranational bodies ensuring the fair and equitable governance of global affairs need to be put in place. And this endeavour would naturally enough, need to engage with the resistance of the world hegemon and overcome all its efforts at sabotage.
These are arresting formulations but they do not quite grapple with the crucial issue of agency. Who among the diverse peoples of the world today would be the architects of the new world order that secures justice for all? This elision in turn could be the outcome of Jha’s broader failure to identify human agency within his narration of capitalist evolution, raising the disembodied force of “technology” to the status of the main protagonist.
Historians have seen in the forging of nationhood in Britain – and more so in France’s epochal revolution of 1789 – a process of contention between an emerging mercantile elite, or bourgeoisie and a traditional aristocratic class. They have seen capitalism and its inseparable companion, imperialism, develop as a consequence of competition between national bourgeoisies. In turn, the emergence of new nations in the crucible of the struggle against imperialism has been seen in terms of new forms of elite solidarity in the periphery, which have successfully contested the pre-eminence of metropolitan capitalism.
All these complexities are subsumed by Jha under the narrative of the rise and fall of the Westphalian world order. This effectively reduces a complex three-century long evolution of the global economy to a rather simplistic formulation. It could credibly be argued that the Westphalian world order, named after the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which put an end to the 30-year war and guaranteed the mutual recognition of the sovereignty of monarchs, never really existed. Westphalia recognised that sovereignty vested not merely in the person of the monarch but in the aggregation of his territorial holdings. The nation still remained a territorially defined entity. It was only till the French Revolution forged a notion of a citizenship of equals that the “nation” was infused with the vital component of popular participation. Yet the French Revolution was untrue to its proclaimed ideals from the moment of its birth. Despite its professions of the universal values of freedom and equality, revolutionary regimes lost little time before plunging into military adventures abroad – first in the cause of revolutionary defence and then in the cause of conquest.
A Westphalian world order in the sense that Jha means it, perhaps existed only briefly, in the years following 1947, when Indian independence heralded a phase of decolonisation across the world. But this world order of relative autonomy for the new nation-states was eroded by factors both internal and external to them. The regimes that came to power in the euphoria of liberation, promised their citizens a dispensation of fairness and equity, where no person would suffer discrimination on grounds of race, ethnicity, gender or religion. Since few of these countries could afford to give excessive sway to the corrosive forces of free competition, they made a conscious decision that the state would function as the arbiter of a system of fairness and equity. This apart, the state would also be the agent of development, of ensuring not merely that existing resources were deployed equitably, but of securing access to opportunities for all citizens.
These were the basic commitments of the developmental state, as it came into existence in several newly liberated countries. By the 1980s, these promises were proving impossible to deliver on. Ethnic strife engulfed some of the newly liberated nations, and a financial crisis, which discredited – when it did not directly indict -- the ruling elites, was beginning to play havoc with policy autonomy in some of the newer nation-states. By the late-1980s, the nation-state as constituted in the struggle against colonialism, was being challenged from above and from below. The demands of international finance were draining it of precious capital. And burgeoning strife between communities – ethnic, linguistic and religious – accentuated by the famine of resources, had begun to seriously erode the democratic commitments that these states were founded on. What has been called the decade of “globalisation” could also be viewed as a conjunction of two crises – of the welfare state and the developmental state.
These dual crises have sharply accentuated disparities, constricted creative thinking on the possibilities of human betterment, and enforced a mindless conformity with the neo-liberal economic policy consensus. To address the issue of agency once again, it may be foolhardy to believe that older nationalist elites which are responsible for current global predicaments, will have the intellectual resources and political courage to steer the world community out of them. That task may well require new forms of solidarity between communities, widely dispersed over the world, who share the misfortune of being at the receiving end of the worst of globalisation.
Prem Shankar Jha, in addition to being a prolific writer, has been a teacher of economics and a senior editor at some of India’s leading newspapers. He also held the post of media advisor in the office of the Indian Prime Minister, during the all too brief tenure of V.P. Singh. Interestingly, the current incumbent in that post, whose resume shares several other significant features with Jha’s has also published a book dealing with broadly a similar canvas of issues, though in a more limited geographical and historical frame.[ii] Sanjaya Baru’s book is a collection of newspaper columns and conference papers written over the years when he was an active media practitioner. It consists of no fewer than 63 distinct pieces and offers Jawaharlal Nehru’s speech to the Indian Constituent Assembly in December 1947, spelling out a vision of “India’s emergence in world affairs”, as an appendix.
In some measure, Baru’s book may have benefited from an additional editorial effort to reduce the proliferation of its articles to a more manageable number. That would have trimmed the overall length of the volume and also eliminated the repetition of ideas and phrases that is inevitable in newspaper articles written over a longish timespan. It would also have helped to cut out certain logical dissonances. For instance, for a book published in 2006, the prognosis that India, while not a “major power today”, is “capable of becoming one within the first half of the next century”, might seem an unnecessary burden on the reader’s powers of imagination, since nobody is likely to survive long enough to see that happy outcome. But if a text written long years back has been preserved unamended for publication now, then it has to justify itself in terms of insights and its ability to account for all that has ensued in the intervening period.
The issues that Baru addresses are interesting in themselves. For instance in his opening two essays, he addresses the counterpart themes of the “strategic consequences of India’s economic performance” and the “economic dimension of India’s foreign policy”. He then turns his analytical gaze towards the issue of “conceptualising economic security” before engaging with the issue of “national security in an open economy”. He tells us for instance, that India’s fiscal and foreign trade policies since 1991, which have underlined a re-engagement with the west and with the larger Asian neighbourhood, has been an entirely pragmatic and unavoidable response to the end of the Cold War. We are also told that with a share of world trade that is considerably less than 1 percent, India’s strategic influence still remains way below potential.
There are a number of interesting questions that arise from Baru’s projection that India would need to increase its share in world trade significantly to gain an appropriate measure of strategic clout. How for instance, would this increasing share be obtained? There is a belief afloat – integrally related to the neoliberal economic policy consensus – that a rising tide lifts all boats. One country’s economic dynamism in other words, can create the conditions for all others to grow. But this does not necessarily mean that the relative position of one with respect to the other – in terms of share in world trade for instance – should be altered. An absolute increase in India’s share of world trade though, implies a zero-sum game, in which for every gain that India makes there has to be a loser. This raises the possibility that raising India’s profile in the global marketplace is itself a process involving strategic competition. Rather than being an end-point from where India can begin to exert its strategic influence, it is a process that requires strategic calculations at every stage. So who would be the countries that India would need to engage in this strategic competition and what would be the consequences? These are questions that still remain to be addressed by advocates of the new economic paradigm. Perhaps more fundamentally, considering the evidence available today on the multifarious problems and iniquities that globalisation has thrown up, they cannot take for granted the premise that the way forward lies in strategic competition, rather than cooperation.
[i] Prem Shankar Jha, The Twilight of the Nation State: Globalisation, Chaos and War, Vistaar Publications, Delhi, 2006, pp xx + 373, Rs480..
[ii] Sanjaya Baru, Strategic Consequences of India’s Economic Performance, Academic Foundation, Delhi, 2006, pp 496, Rs 795.
Friday, October 13, 2006
Nuclear North Korea
North Korea’s nuclear ambitions have been a long-running saga, but there is much room for speculation over why it should have chosen to foreground them at this stage, ensuring that they become the most immediate strategic priority for the U.S. and its global allies. It is certainly a material circumstance that the Kim Jong Il regime announced its intention to test a nuclear weapon just over a week after a new Prime Minister took office in Japan.
With the first intimations of its intent given on October 3, North Korea allowed sufficient time for world powers to summon up every manner of monitory warning to deflect it off course. On October 8, just as Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was touching down in Seoul after a summit meeting in Beijing, North Korea came out with the triumphal announcement that it had indeed ventured beyond a threshold only eight other countries have dared cross.
Till well after that event, forensic experts remained undecided about just how credible the North Korean claim was. Seismic readings from the location of the putative test yielded conflicting estimates of the power of the explosion. Russia put it at between 5 and 15 kilotons, the rather generous margin for error being an inevitable outcome of a complete lack of knowledge about the geological formation in which the test was carried out. Readings recorded in the U.S., spoke of an explosive yield of considerably less than one kiloton. Signals picked up by monitoring stations in France and South Korea, though, seemed to indicate a still lower yield of 0.2 kilotons. This fell seriously short of the four kiloton test that North Korea reportedly warned China it intended to carry out, twenty minutes before detonation. It is also nowhere near the 10 to 15 kiloton yields that India and Pakistan claimed from their tit-for-tat explosions in 1998.
A final verdict must await the results obtained through atmospheric assays now underway. The principal powers with stakes in the Korean peninsula hesitated though, to make much of the suspicion of a failed nuclear test. With the U.S. and Japan leading the way, the U.N. Security Council was rapidly being called into session, to frame an appropriate response that would leave North Korea few avenues of evasion.
The first impulse of the U.S. was to demand a resolution under article 42 in chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, permitting among other things, the interdiction of sea and air-borne cargos into the country. China in contrast, was tilting towards economic and diplomatic sanctions under the more pacific article 41. Signalling its impatience with the prospect of a prolonged diplomatic wrangle, Japan had meanwhile imposed its own unilateral sanctions, effectively terminating every manner of economic link with North Korea.
As with the provocative missile tests it conducted last July, which raised hackles in Japan and the U.S., but induced far more moderate reactions in China and South Korea, the Kim Jong Il regime is gambling on the sustenance and perhaps, the widening, of these differences in perception. Though few suggestions of any strategic intent have emerged from the secretive labyrinths of Pyongyang, it is a fair conjecture that North Korea is well aware of the growing impatience in the region with the U.S.’s obsessive, almost theologically motivated, approach to international diplomacy.
It is indicative of the relatively weak hand that the U.S. has to play, that the North Korean nuclear tests have stirred up a bitter partisan debate between President Bush’s Republican party and his predecessor Bill Clinton’s Democrats. At issue is the policy of engagement with North Korea that began in 1994, only to be abruptly terminated by Bush within a month of his assumption of office.
The responsibility for this reversal of course was then laid at the doorstep of the North Korean regime, which the Bush cabal insisted, had proved itself incapable of abiding by any agreement concluded in good faith. This jibe was delivered as a frontal rebuke to the visiting South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, a Nobel laureate and architect of the “sunshine” policy of reconciliation with the north, when he visited Washington in March 2006. And like much else that Bush has said in public, it was rapidly proven absolutely false. Under questioning, spokesmen for the Bush administration conceded that North Korea had not reneged on any deal concluded since 1994. That indeed, they said, had not been the sense of the President’s remarks, which pertained more to future agreements.
The plain reason for the change of tack was the unilateralist urge that had a second and more virulent awakening under Bush. Also relevant was the Bush administration’s compelling need to ramp up military budgets and provide for technologically improbable missile defence system. A threat had to be invented to justify this budgetary profligacy and the doctrine of “rogue states” which designated North Korea in a stellar role came in handy in this respect.
In the mandated “Nuclear Posture Review” sent to the U.S. Congress in December 2001, the Bush administration identified the “immediate contingencies” that the U.S. needed to prepare for as “an Iraqi attack on Israel or its neighbors, a North Korean attack on South Korea, or a military confrontation over the status of Taiwan”. North Korea and Iraq were characterised as “chronic military concerns” and with the benefit of now knowing what the standards of truth were in the case of Iraq, the world should have a better idea of the significance of the threat from North Korea. The same standard of truth of course, would also need to be applied to Bush’s infamous characterisation in January 2002, of Iraq, Iran and North Korea, as the “axis of evil” that the U.S. was intent on dismantling.
The U.S.’s most recent quirky change of direction came in September 2005, when it imposed sweeping financial sanctions against North Korea, just four days after signing a six-party agreement involving China, Russia, South Korea and Japan, on the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula. Selig Harrison, one of the few western commentators with access to the inside track of policy in Pyongyang, has gathered that this was read by North Korea, as final confirmation of the “dysfunctionality” of the Bush administration and its inability to honour any agreement.
As the U.S. prepares its final push to secure a U.N. mandate for decisive action, perceptions among all its prospective partners, with the exception of a rather uncritical Japan, are likely to be coloured by its track-record of agreements wantonly violated and commitments not delivered on. And unlike Iraq in 2003, when it rushed into battle in defiance of world opinion, borne along by a messianic belief in its invincibility, matters are rather different now.
India has reasons to be concerned that the North Korean tests endanger the global nuclear architecture and in particular the recent modifications undertaken as a special favour by the Bush administration. Having got one foot in the doorway of the exclusive club of “nuclear weapons states”, India cannot be happy at the prospect of a competitive nuclear weapons spiral in east Asia.
Japan though, has been quick to disavow any possibility of amending its policy of neither possessing nuclear weapons nor permitting their location on its soil. But a lingering suspicion about Japan’s longer-term intentions is a factor behind the Chinese reaction. The North Korean tests could be just the trigger that the right-wing element in Japan needs to raise the pitch of its campaign for national rearmament. South Korea meanwhile, has seen a surge in domestic support for its own nuclear program, which included a uranium enrichment experiment as recently as 2000. But South Korea is also aware that the “sunshine policy” has brought it undoubted gains. And as an increasingly self-confident democracy, it is anxious to leave behind the legacy of the Cold War and its own years under military dictatorship.
North Korean “regime change” is inherent in the “sunshine policy”, since the gradual opening up of contacts on the peninsula would induce a change in the political culture and modes of economic organisation in the world’s most secluded state. But the U.S. views the North Korean tests as an opportunity to impose “regime change” on terms that it would unilaterally like to dictate. Without the active endorsement of China and South Korea though, the game-plan is unlikely to proceed very far. And certainly neither of these countries is anxious to set off a political implosion in its near neighbourhood.
With the first intimations of its intent given on October 3, North Korea allowed sufficient time for world powers to summon up every manner of monitory warning to deflect it off course. On October 8, just as Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was touching down in Seoul after a summit meeting in Beijing, North Korea came out with the triumphal announcement that it had indeed ventured beyond a threshold only eight other countries have dared cross.
Till well after that event, forensic experts remained undecided about just how credible the North Korean claim was. Seismic readings from the location of the putative test yielded conflicting estimates of the power of the explosion. Russia put it at between 5 and 15 kilotons, the rather generous margin for error being an inevitable outcome of a complete lack of knowledge about the geological formation in which the test was carried out. Readings recorded in the U.S., spoke of an explosive yield of considerably less than one kiloton. Signals picked up by monitoring stations in France and South Korea, though, seemed to indicate a still lower yield of 0.2 kilotons. This fell seriously short of the four kiloton test that North Korea reportedly warned China it intended to carry out, twenty minutes before detonation. It is also nowhere near the 10 to 15 kiloton yields that India and Pakistan claimed from their tit-for-tat explosions in 1998.
A final verdict must await the results obtained through atmospheric assays now underway. The principal powers with stakes in the Korean peninsula hesitated though, to make much of the suspicion of a failed nuclear test. With the U.S. and Japan leading the way, the U.N. Security Council was rapidly being called into session, to frame an appropriate response that would leave North Korea few avenues of evasion.
The first impulse of the U.S. was to demand a resolution under article 42 in chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, permitting among other things, the interdiction of sea and air-borne cargos into the country. China in contrast, was tilting towards economic and diplomatic sanctions under the more pacific article 41. Signalling its impatience with the prospect of a prolonged diplomatic wrangle, Japan had meanwhile imposed its own unilateral sanctions, effectively terminating every manner of economic link with North Korea.
As with the provocative missile tests it conducted last July, which raised hackles in Japan and the U.S., but induced far more moderate reactions in China and South Korea, the Kim Jong Il regime is gambling on the sustenance and perhaps, the widening, of these differences in perception. Though few suggestions of any strategic intent have emerged from the secretive labyrinths of Pyongyang, it is a fair conjecture that North Korea is well aware of the growing impatience in the region with the U.S.’s obsessive, almost theologically motivated, approach to international diplomacy.
It is indicative of the relatively weak hand that the U.S. has to play, that the North Korean nuclear tests have stirred up a bitter partisan debate between President Bush’s Republican party and his predecessor Bill Clinton’s Democrats. At issue is the policy of engagement with North Korea that began in 1994, only to be abruptly terminated by Bush within a month of his assumption of office.
The responsibility for this reversal of course was then laid at the doorstep of the North Korean regime, which the Bush cabal insisted, had proved itself incapable of abiding by any agreement concluded in good faith. This jibe was delivered as a frontal rebuke to the visiting South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, a Nobel laureate and architect of the “sunshine” policy of reconciliation with the north, when he visited Washington in March 2006. And like much else that Bush has said in public, it was rapidly proven absolutely false. Under questioning, spokesmen for the Bush administration conceded that North Korea had not reneged on any deal concluded since 1994. That indeed, they said, had not been the sense of the President’s remarks, which pertained more to future agreements.
The plain reason for the change of tack was the unilateralist urge that had a second and more virulent awakening under Bush. Also relevant was the Bush administration’s compelling need to ramp up military budgets and provide for technologically improbable missile defence system. A threat had to be invented to justify this budgetary profligacy and the doctrine of “rogue states” which designated North Korea in a stellar role came in handy in this respect.
In the mandated “Nuclear Posture Review” sent to the U.S. Congress in December 2001, the Bush administration identified the “immediate contingencies” that the U.S. needed to prepare for as “an Iraqi attack on Israel or its neighbors, a North Korean attack on South Korea, or a military confrontation over the status of Taiwan”. North Korea and Iraq were characterised as “chronic military concerns” and with the benefit of now knowing what the standards of truth were in the case of Iraq, the world should have a better idea of the significance of the threat from North Korea. The same standard of truth of course, would also need to be applied to Bush’s infamous characterisation in January 2002, of Iraq, Iran and North Korea, as the “axis of evil” that the U.S. was intent on dismantling.
The U.S.’s most recent quirky change of direction came in September 2005, when it imposed sweeping financial sanctions against North Korea, just four days after signing a six-party agreement involving China, Russia, South Korea and Japan, on the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula. Selig Harrison, one of the few western commentators with access to the inside track of policy in Pyongyang, has gathered that this was read by North Korea, as final confirmation of the “dysfunctionality” of the Bush administration and its inability to honour any agreement.
As the U.S. prepares its final push to secure a U.N. mandate for decisive action, perceptions among all its prospective partners, with the exception of a rather uncritical Japan, are likely to be coloured by its track-record of agreements wantonly violated and commitments not delivered on. And unlike Iraq in 2003, when it rushed into battle in defiance of world opinion, borne along by a messianic belief in its invincibility, matters are rather different now.
India has reasons to be concerned that the North Korean tests endanger the global nuclear architecture and in particular the recent modifications undertaken as a special favour by the Bush administration. Having got one foot in the doorway of the exclusive club of “nuclear weapons states”, India cannot be happy at the prospect of a competitive nuclear weapons spiral in east Asia.
Japan though, has been quick to disavow any possibility of amending its policy of neither possessing nuclear weapons nor permitting their location on its soil. But a lingering suspicion about Japan’s longer-term intentions is a factor behind the Chinese reaction. The North Korean tests could be just the trigger that the right-wing element in Japan needs to raise the pitch of its campaign for national rearmament. South Korea meanwhile, has seen a surge in domestic support for its own nuclear program, which included a uranium enrichment experiment as recently as 2000. But South Korea is also aware that the “sunshine policy” has brought it undoubted gains. And as an increasingly self-confident democracy, it is anxious to leave behind the legacy of the Cold War and its own years under military dictatorship.
North Korean “regime change” is inherent in the “sunshine policy”, since the gradual opening up of contacts on the peninsula would induce a change in the political culture and modes of economic organisation in the world’s most secluded state. But the U.S. views the North Korean tests as an opportunity to impose “regime change” on terms that it would unilaterally like to dictate. Without the active endorsement of China and South Korea though, the game-plan is unlikely to proceed very far. And certainly neither of these countries is anxious to set off a political implosion in its near neighbourhood.
Monday, October 02, 2006
India and Pakistan Agree on a Joint Mechanism on Terrorism
For two countries that have disagreed so bitterly on basic definitions in the past, a joint "institutional mechanism" to combat terrorism must seem the height of wishful thinking, of vaulting political ambition seeking in vain to reach beyond limits imposed by mechanisms of governance and enforcement. But such has been the promise of the Havana joint statement between India and Pakistan, issued after an encounter between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Pervez Musharraf on the sidelines of September's Non-Aligned Movement summit.
There could be different opinions about how far this statement departs from the long list of surprise outcomes to high-level encounters between the two countries. Early speculation centred around the possibility that, as in recent such dramatic turnarounds in relations between India and Pakistan, there had been an unseen hand guiding the course of events. Clearly, since the jealous competition between the two countries for the affections the U.S. ended in stalemate, it has become evident that a superpower tilt will not be a decisive factor in resolving neighbourhood issues. That would leave accommodation on mutually agreed terms as the only possible recourse. Though Manmohan Singh has been anxious to dispel the impression, it is likely that, as with the Indian Prime Minister's border crossing to Lahore in February 1999 and the Pakistani President's odyssey to Agra in July 2001, the two countries were pushed towards their current engagement by a gentle nudge from the U.S.
On India's part, the Havana statement represents a recognition that the diplomatic strategy of the stiff demarche served on Pakistan every time there is a terrorist atrocity on Indian soil, is beginning to look increasingly unconvincing. By characterising Pakistan too as a country that has been at the receiving end of terrorism, India has seemingly gone a long way towards an approach to the issue that it has so far disdained: of seeking the underlying causes of terrorism and recognising that forces of moderation on both sides have equal stakes in reining in extremism.
A first requirement of a credible "joint institutional mechanism" would be at least a semblance of mutual agreement on what constitutes terrorism. The challenge here is enormous, since no other border has bristled with quite the same antagonism over the distinction between "terrorism" and "freedom struggle". And this is not merely a phenomenon confined to the Kashmir issue, long derided within India as Pakistan's singular and solitary obsession in international forums. Viewed from the other end , Pakistan has been deeply irked in recent months by what it views as India's undue interest in the Balochistan insurgency and its overwrought concern over the brutal strike that killed the traditional feudal overlord of a part of that province, Sardar Akbar Khan Bugti. Pakistan has been convinced that the problem in Balochistan has acquired its current dimensions only after India opened four consulates in Afghanistan. This level of diplomatic representation, it has argued, has little to do with neighbourly intimacy and everything to do with India's strategic interests in the wider region of south and central Asia.
Even if an agreement on principle can be forced through an exertion of political will at the highest level, it would require to filter through the security and intelligence apparatuses on both sides of the border to be of any substantive value. Beyond the sharing of information between intelligence services that have been bitter opponents in the past, and indeed, derive a great deal of their institutional legitimacy from the depredations – both real and imagined – of the other side, this would also require the coordination of operations between security agencies that share an equally tortured relationship. Finally, it would require cooperation between India and Pakistan in the legal and judicial realm.
The record here on both sides has been undistinguished. Pakistan has routinely declared several of the militant formations that operate in its territory unlawful and placed their leaders under legal restraints. But in most cases a mere change of nomenclature has sufficed in keeping these outfits on the right side of the law.
Though Pakistan's omissions are often highlighted and adversely commented upon in the Indian media, there is no denying that on any objective reading, the record back home has been dismal. Significant figures within the ranks of the Kashmir militancy have been held without charge in Indian prisons for years. Major anti-terrorist operations by the security forces, such as the supposed encounter in which the guilty of the Chittisinghpora massacre of March 2000 were eliminated, were rapidly proven to have been random acts of reprisal against innocent civilians. And highly publicised preemptive actions, such as the elimination of all the intending authors of a June 1 terrorist plot against the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) headquarters in Nagpur, have been surrounded by more than a whiff of suspicion.
It cannot again do very much good for public confidence in the security and intelligence agencies' commitment to the task, that the only prosecution launched under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), now lapsed, concluded with distinctly ambivalent results. Indeed, of the four persons who were arrested after the December 13, 2001 attack on New Delhi's Parliament premises and swiftly convicted, the charge of involvement has stuck only against one. And he was a surrendered militant, obliged by the terms of his capitulation, to keep regular contact with the anti-insurgency wing of the Jammu and Kashmir Police.
More than anything else, a joint institutional mechanism that deals with terrorism would require on both sides of the border, that security and intelligence agencies be subject to certain strict norms of public accountability. This is a process that has to be politically driven. And it is really questionable how far political establishments on both sides, that ostensibly derive their legitimacy from the people, but finally depend far too much on covert agendas to sustain themselves in power, can respond to this challenge.
There could be different opinions about how far this statement departs from the long list of surprise outcomes to high-level encounters between the two countries. Early speculation centred around the possibility that, as in recent such dramatic turnarounds in relations between India and Pakistan, there had been an unseen hand guiding the course of events. Clearly, since the jealous competition between the two countries for the affections the U.S. ended in stalemate, it has become evident that a superpower tilt will not be a decisive factor in resolving neighbourhood issues. That would leave accommodation on mutually agreed terms as the only possible recourse. Though Manmohan Singh has been anxious to dispel the impression, it is likely that, as with the Indian Prime Minister's border crossing to Lahore in February 1999 and the Pakistani President's odyssey to Agra in July 2001, the two countries were pushed towards their current engagement by a gentle nudge from the U.S.
On India's part, the Havana statement represents a recognition that the diplomatic strategy of the stiff demarche served on Pakistan every time there is a terrorist atrocity on Indian soil, is beginning to look increasingly unconvincing. By characterising Pakistan too as a country that has been at the receiving end of terrorism, India has seemingly gone a long way towards an approach to the issue that it has so far disdained: of seeking the underlying causes of terrorism and recognising that forces of moderation on both sides have equal stakes in reining in extremism.
A first requirement of a credible "joint institutional mechanism" would be at least a semblance of mutual agreement on what constitutes terrorism. The challenge here is enormous, since no other border has bristled with quite the same antagonism over the distinction between "terrorism" and "freedom struggle". And this is not merely a phenomenon confined to the Kashmir issue, long derided within India as Pakistan's singular and solitary obsession in international forums. Viewed from the other end , Pakistan has been deeply irked in recent months by what it views as India's undue interest in the Balochistan insurgency and its overwrought concern over the brutal strike that killed the traditional feudal overlord of a part of that province, Sardar Akbar Khan Bugti. Pakistan has been convinced that the problem in Balochistan has acquired its current dimensions only after India opened four consulates in Afghanistan. This level of diplomatic representation, it has argued, has little to do with neighbourly intimacy and everything to do with India's strategic interests in the wider region of south and central Asia.
Even if an agreement on principle can be forced through an exertion of political will at the highest level, it would require to filter through the security and intelligence apparatuses on both sides of the border to be of any substantive value. Beyond the sharing of information between intelligence services that have been bitter opponents in the past, and indeed, derive a great deal of their institutional legitimacy from the depredations – both real and imagined – of the other side, this would also require the coordination of operations between security agencies that share an equally tortured relationship. Finally, it would require cooperation between India and Pakistan in the legal and judicial realm.
The record here on both sides has been undistinguished. Pakistan has routinely declared several of the militant formations that operate in its territory unlawful and placed their leaders under legal restraints. But in most cases a mere change of nomenclature has sufficed in keeping these outfits on the right side of the law.
Though Pakistan's omissions are often highlighted and adversely commented upon in the Indian media, there is no denying that on any objective reading, the record back home has been dismal. Significant figures within the ranks of the Kashmir militancy have been held without charge in Indian prisons for years. Major anti-terrorist operations by the security forces, such as the supposed encounter in which the guilty of the Chittisinghpora massacre of March 2000 were eliminated, were rapidly proven to have been random acts of reprisal against innocent civilians. And highly publicised preemptive actions, such as the elimination of all the intending authors of a June 1 terrorist plot against the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) headquarters in Nagpur, have been surrounded by more than a whiff of suspicion.
It cannot again do very much good for public confidence in the security and intelligence agencies' commitment to the task, that the only prosecution launched under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), now lapsed, concluded with distinctly ambivalent results. Indeed, of the four persons who were arrested after the December 13, 2001 attack on New Delhi's Parliament premises and swiftly convicted, the charge of involvement has stuck only against one. And he was a surrendered militant, obliged by the terms of his capitulation, to keep regular contact with the anti-insurgency wing of the Jammu and Kashmir Police.
More than anything else, a joint institutional mechanism that deals with terrorism would require on both sides of the border, that security and intelligence agencies be subject to certain strict norms of public accountability. This is a process that has to be politically driven. And it is really questionable how far political establishments on both sides, that ostensibly derive their legitimacy from the people, but finally depend far too much on covert agendas to sustain themselves in power, can respond to this challenge.
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Vande Mataram: Nationalism and its Precursors
September 13, 2006
Well into the recent political rumpus over Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Vande Mataram, it was established that the whole controversy had been ignited by a serious misreading. September 7 as a date has no historic significance in the life of Bankim’s best-known poem. Though there is little dispute over the fact that Vande Mataram as a political slogan, acquired a certain resonance in the years 1905 and 1906, the effort to commemorate the poem in isolation from the wider events that it was part of, would seem a rather questionable decision. A centenary observance of the Swadeshi movement may well have been an occasion for looking back on some of the more significant episodes in India’s long march to freedom. But India’s political establishment remains, at best, ambivalent about these commemorations, as its indifference to the upcoming 150-year anniversary of the 1857 uprising clearly suggests.
Vande Mataram was, as authoritative commentaries have shown, authored between 1870 and 1875. It was subsequently enlarged and expanded, with explicit religious imagery entering what could, till then, have been construed as worshipful obeisance towards a nurturing motherland. It remained confined within select audiences in Calcutta for years together and became in its entirety, the motif and inspirational theme of Bankim’s novel Anandamath, whose serialisation began in a Calcutta journal in 1882. It was set to music in the mid-1880s by Rabindranath Tagore and the musical score was included in the third edition of Anandamath published in 1886, evidently as an indication of Bankim’s approval. As the eminent historian Sabyasachi Bhattacharya puts it, all this suggests that the song had by the late 19th century, begun receiving a fair degree of “appreciation in a limited circle of connoisseurs and enthusiasts”. But its career as an anthem of rebellion and an articulation of nationalist aspirations begins with the Swadeshi movement of 1905 (Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Vande Mataram, The Biography of a Song, Penguin Books, Delhi, 2003).
Bande Mataram, the English language newspaper that represented the most radical trend within the Swadeshi movement, began publishing in August 1906, edited first by Bepin Chandra Pal and later by Aurobindo Ghosh. And the Bande Mataram Samproday, set up with the principal aim of raising funds through public renditions of Bankim’s poem, dates from April 1906 (Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903-08, Peoples Publishing House, Delhi, 1973).
In 1937, Rabindranath Tagore claimed in a letter to Jawaharlal Nehru, that “the privilege of originally setting (Vande Mataram’s) first stanza to the tune was mine when the author was still alive and I was the first person to sing it before a gathering of the Calcutta Congress” (Bhattacharya, page 21). Bankim died in 1894 and the Calcutta Congress session of 1896 where Tagore gave his rendition of the song was held, as was customary, in December.
However it is examined, there is no historic significance for September 7 in the life of Vande Mataram. That indeed has now been conceded in a spirit of contrition, by the Congress party itself. First the Congress disclaimed all responsibility for the Government announcement that September 7 would be a day of commemoration in schools across the country. Shortly afterwards, the Union Minister for Human Resources Development, Arjun Singh, himself conceded the point. The entire controversy in short, which revisited well-trodden ground and offered little by way of fresh insights, had been an unnecessary diversion from other more pressing tasks.
Vande Mataram was by a decision of the Constituent Assembly, given the status of a “national song” equal in status to the national anthem. This is a curiosity of Indian history since the rendition of the national anthem – like the salutation of the national flag – is an act of allegiance that every nation has a right to demand of its citizens. There cannot by definition, be another song or flag that has the same status. The decision to put Vande Mataram on par with the national anthem, in fact, reflected an uneasy compromise. There were several who insisted that the special status of Vande Mataram as a hymn to the motherland that inspired the Indian freedom movement, entitled it to be declared the national anthem. Equally, there were others within the nationalist leadership, who were uneasily aware that several of the nation’s citizens would find the many cultural and historical associations of the song, deeply discordant with their own beliefs.
The constitutional position in India as laid down by the Supreme Court in the famous case of Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1986, is that no citizen can be compelled to sing even the national anthem, should he or she consider it contrary to deeply held personal belief. Jehovah’s Witnesses are a sect within Christianity that forbids the worshipping of any being other than the one they deem to be the creator. The three children who were expelled from a school in Kerala for refusing to join the daily rendition of the national anthem, were reinstated by the Supreme Court, on the grounds that their rights to freedom of expression and belief, had been seriously violated by the expulsion. The Court found that though they refused to partake of the rendition, the children showed no disrespect to the national anthem. They stood up for their beliefs without in any way offending another’s.
If this is the situation with regard to the national anthem, then Vande Mataram, as a “national song” reflecting an uneasy political compromise, can enjoy only a secondary claim to the loyalties of the Indian citizen. And since a citizen of this country can decline to partake of a rendition of the nation anthem, it is the settled position in the law of the land, that he or she can exercise his freedom of choice in relation to any lesser song. But while declining to partake in any public rendition or homage, he or she is obliged not to insult or dishonour another’s beliefs.
Following the initial gaffe in calling for nationwide celebrations on September 7, the Ministry for Human Resource Development did nothing more or less than affirm this well-established point of law. Those who shared in the reverence for the song could sing it at the appointed time and day. Those who had reason to believe it antithetical to their faith, could refrain from joining the rendition, though not disrupt or dishonour the proceedings.
In kicking up a furore over a fairly simple point, the BJP and its affiliates have yet again shown their eagerness to coercively apply their articles of faith on those of other persuasions. Their noisy declamations indeed, have done little honour to the traditions of the freedom movement and only highlighted how certain aspects of what have been considered the seamless web of Indian nationalism, need reconsideration today. Vande Mataram has been a sentimental favourite for the most ardent of Indian nationalists. But clearly, the recent fracas, itself inseparable from the long and contentious history of the song, shows that it needs to be treated not as an anthem of the nation, but of the nation seeking to come into being. It bears in short, the unmistakable scars of its birth in historical circumstances when the “nation” was an alien concept for all of India.
In the novel Anandamath, Vande Mataram serves as the invocation of a group of ascetics who call themselves the Santans, or the “children” of the Mother. Early in the development of the novel, a leader of the band, Satyananda, is captured by the rulers’ troops. One of his followers, Jnanananda, then vows to have him released from the rulers’ fort. He exhorts a group of Santans for the task in the following manner: “We have long contemplated breaking this nest of pernicious birds, totally destroying this Mussalman city and throwing it into the river… Come, let us go and reduce to dust that city of the Mussalmans. Let us purify with fire that den of swine and cast it into the river”. After the assault is successfully concluded and Satyananda is set free, the Santans set off on a rampage. And “wherever they found the home of a Mussalman, they burnt it”.
This is merely one among several recurrent passages through Anandamath, where the theme of violence against “Mussalmans” is explicitly foregrounded. The historian Sumit Sarkar, in his authoritative account of the Swadeshi movement, argued that this may have been because Bankim, as an official of the British raj, was anxious to avoid punitive action and needed to use the “Mussalmans” as a surrogate for the British. But in a piece written in the context of the recent controversy, he clearly seemed to reconsider this position: “Not perhaps an entirely convincing plea, for censorship, except on the public stage, was not really very stringent before the Swadeshi days. In any case, one needs to separate the possible intentions of the author, from the likely responses of readers. Is it really irrational for Muslims – and by no means Muslims alone – to object to the compulsory imposition of a song that collapses the country into a specific Hindu deity, and forms part of a novel full of apparently communal passages?”
No consideration of this question would quite be complete without looking at the purposes that Vande Mataram, as a political slogan, have served. It was in reaction to the political abuse of the slogan that Mahatma Gandhi remarked in 1947, that it should never become a “chant to insult or offend the Muslims”. What had once been in his perception a “beautiful national song” had been transformed in time, into a “purely political cry” with a clearly sectarian appeal. From the invocation of a motherland suffused with divine grace, Vande Mataram had become the slogan of rioters and arsonists.
This was a reality that Tagore portrayed with an abundance of creative passion and acuity in his novel Ghare Baire. Among those shown resisting the Swadeshi movement’s insistence on boycotting foreign-made goods, is a small trader who obviously is a person from outside the caste hierarchy. He meets the demand of his aristocratic zamindar, that he destroy his bales of cotton cloth to prove his fealty to the spirit of Swadeshi, with outright refusal. Under pressure, he sets down the condition that the zamindar should compensate him for the financial investment he had made in the cotton bales. But this is read as unforgivable effrontery, most unbecoming of a lower-caste person. His cotton bales are destroyed by the zamindar’s agents, who in his account of the event, were numerous and “kept shouting Bande Mataram”.
Clearly, just as long as it has been a call to battle in the cause of the nation, Vande Mataram has also been a slogan of provocation and coercion. It was this dual character of Bankim’s legacy that Nehru and Tagore had occasion to reflect upon in 1937, when Congress governments were in place in several provinces of British India and communal tensions were rapidly rising. The compromise solution, to raise the first two stanzas of the song to an exalted status and effectively banish the rest into oblivion, was hammered out in part through their intervention. Both Nehru and Tagore were aware of the provocative use of the slogan by certain kinds of political forces, but helpless in restraining it. Beyond the terrain of principled liberalism where they conducted their debate, the Hindutva parties and their affiliates were pursuing the issue in the street. Authenticity in history and aesthetics has been trampled upon in this brand of politics. Inevitably, Vande Mataram has also become a living testament to India’s failure to overcome the sectarianism of “cultural nationalism” and evolve a brand of civic nationalism that all citizens can identify with.
Well into the recent political rumpus over Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Vande Mataram, it was established that the whole controversy had been ignited by a serious misreading. September 7 as a date has no historic significance in the life of Bankim’s best-known poem. Though there is little dispute over the fact that Vande Mataram as a political slogan, acquired a certain resonance in the years 1905 and 1906, the effort to commemorate the poem in isolation from the wider events that it was part of, would seem a rather questionable decision. A centenary observance of the Swadeshi movement may well have been an occasion for looking back on some of the more significant episodes in India’s long march to freedom. But India’s political establishment remains, at best, ambivalent about these commemorations, as its indifference to the upcoming 150-year anniversary of the 1857 uprising clearly suggests.
Vande Mataram was, as authoritative commentaries have shown, authored between 1870 and 1875. It was subsequently enlarged and expanded, with explicit religious imagery entering what could, till then, have been construed as worshipful obeisance towards a nurturing motherland. It remained confined within select audiences in Calcutta for years together and became in its entirety, the motif and inspirational theme of Bankim’s novel Anandamath, whose serialisation began in a Calcutta journal in 1882. It was set to music in the mid-1880s by Rabindranath Tagore and the musical score was included in the third edition of Anandamath published in 1886, evidently as an indication of Bankim’s approval. As the eminent historian Sabyasachi Bhattacharya puts it, all this suggests that the song had by the late 19th century, begun receiving a fair degree of “appreciation in a limited circle of connoisseurs and enthusiasts”. But its career as an anthem of rebellion and an articulation of nationalist aspirations begins with the Swadeshi movement of 1905 (Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Vande Mataram, The Biography of a Song, Penguin Books, Delhi, 2003).
Bande Mataram, the English language newspaper that represented the most radical trend within the Swadeshi movement, began publishing in August 1906, edited first by Bepin Chandra Pal and later by Aurobindo Ghosh. And the Bande Mataram Samproday, set up with the principal aim of raising funds through public renditions of Bankim’s poem, dates from April 1906 (Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903-08, Peoples Publishing House, Delhi, 1973).
In 1937, Rabindranath Tagore claimed in a letter to Jawaharlal Nehru, that “the privilege of originally setting (Vande Mataram’s) first stanza to the tune was mine when the author was still alive and I was the first person to sing it before a gathering of the Calcutta Congress” (Bhattacharya, page 21). Bankim died in 1894 and the Calcutta Congress session of 1896 where Tagore gave his rendition of the song was held, as was customary, in December.
However it is examined, there is no historic significance for September 7 in the life of Vande Mataram. That indeed has now been conceded in a spirit of contrition, by the Congress party itself. First the Congress disclaimed all responsibility for the Government announcement that September 7 would be a day of commemoration in schools across the country. Shortly afterwards, the Union Minister for Human Resources Development, Arjun Singh, himself conceded the point. The entire controversy in short, which revisited well-trodden ground and offered little by way of fresh insights, had been an unnecessary diversion from other more pressing tasks.
Vande Mataram was by a decision of the Constituent Assembly, given the status of a “national song” equal in status to the national anthem. This is a curiosity of Indian history since the rendition of the national anthem – like the salutation of the national flag – is an act of allegiance that every nation has a right to demand of its citizens. There cannot by definition, be another song or flag that has the same status. The decision to put Vande Mataram on par with the national anthem, in fact, reflected an uneasy compromise. There were several who insisted that the special status of Vande Mataram as a hymn to the motherland that inspired the Indian freedom movement, entitled it to be declared the national anthem. Equally, there were others within the nationalist leadership, who were uneasily aware that several of the nation’s citizens would find the many cultural and historical associations of the song, deeply discordant with their own beliefs.
The constitutional position in India as laid down by the Supreme Court in the famous case of Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1986, is that no citizen can be compelled to sing even the national anthem, should he or she consider it contrary to deeply held personal belief. Jehovah’s Witnesses are a sect within Christianity that forbids the worshipping of any being other than the one they deem to be the creator. The three children who were expelled from a school in Kerala for refusing to join the daily rendition of the national anthem, were reinstated by the Supreme Court, on the grounds that their rights to freedom of expression and belief, had been seriously violated by the expulsion. The Court found that though they refused to partake of the rendition, the children showed no disrespect to the national anthem. They stood up for their beliefs without in any way offending another’s.
If this is the situation with regard to the national anthem, then Vande Mataram, as a “national song” reflecting an uneasy political compromise, can enjoy only a secondary claim to the loyalties of the Indian citizen. And since a citizen of this country can decline to partake of a rendition of the nation anthem, it is the settled position in the law of the land, that he or she can exercise his freedom of choice in relation to any lesser song. But while declining to partake in any public rendition or homage, he or she is obliged not to insult or dishonour another’s beliefs.
Following the initial gaffe in calling for nationwide celebrations on September 7, the Ministry for Human Resource Development did nothing more or less than affirm this well-established point of law. Those who shared in the reverence for the song could sing it at the appointed time and day. Those who had reason to believe it antithetical to their faith, could refrain from joining the rendition, though not disrupt or dishonour the proceedings.
In kicking up a furore over a fairly simple point, the BJP and its affiliates have yet again shown their eagerness to coercively apply their articles of faith on those of other persuasions. Their noisy declamations indeed, have done little honour to the traditions of the freedom movement and only highlighted how certain aspects of what have been considered the seamless web of Indian nationalism, need reconsideration today. Vande Mataram has been a sentimental favourite for the most ardent of Indian nationalists. But clearly, the recent fracas, itself inseparable from the long and contentious history of the song, shows that it needs to be treated not as an anthem of the nation, but of the nation seeking to come into being. It bears in short, the unmistakable scars of its birth in historical circumstances when the “nation” was an alien concept for all of India.
In the novel Anandamath, Vande Mataram serves as the invocation of a group of ascetics who call themselves the Santans, or the “children” of the Mother. Early in the development of the novel, a leader of the band, Satyananda, is captured by the rulers’ troops. One of his followers, Jnanananda, then vows to have him released from the rulers’ fort. He exhorts a group of Santans for the task in the following manner: “We have long contemplated breaking this nest of pernicious birds, totally destroying this Mussalman city and throwing it into the river… Come, let us go and reduce to dust that city of the Mussalmans. Let us purify with fire that den of swine and cast it into the river”. After the assault is successfully concluded and Satyananda is set free, the Santans set off on a rampage. And “wherever they found the home of a Mussalman, they burnt it”.
This is merely one among several recurrent passages through Anandamath, where the theme of violence against “Mussalmans” is explicitly foregrounded. The historian Sumit Sarkar, in his authoritative account of the Swadeshi movement, argued that this may have been because Bankim, as an official of the British raj, was anxious to avoid punitive action and needed to use the “Mussalmans” as a surrogate for the British. But in a piece written in the context of the recent controversy, he clearly seemed to reconsider this position: “Not perhaps an entirely convincing plea, for censorship, except on the public stage, was not really very stringent before the Swadeshi days. In any case, one needs to separate the possible intentions of the author, from the likely responses of readers. Is it really irrational for Muslims – and by no means Muslims alone – to object to the compulsory imposition of a song that collapses the country into a specific Hindu deity, and forms part of a novel full of apparently communal passages?”
No consideration of this question would quite be complete without looking at the purposes that Vande Mataram, as a political slogan, have served. It was in reaction to the political abuse of the slogan that Mahatma Gandhi remarked in 1947, that it should never become a “chant to insult or offend the Muslims”. What had once been in his perception a “beautiful national song” had been transformed in time, into a “purely political cry” with a clearly sectarian appeal. From the invocation of a motherland suffused with divine grace, Vande Mataram had become the slogan of rioters and arsonists.
This was a reality that Tagore portrayed with an abundance of creative passion and acuity in his novel Ghare Baire. Among those shown resisting the Swadeshi movement’s insistence on boycotting foreign-made goods, is a small trader who obviously is a person from outside the caste hierarchy. He meets the demand of his aristocratic zamindar, that he destroy his bales of cotton cloth to prove his fealty to the spirit of Swadeshi, with outright refusal. Under pressure, he sets down the condition that the zamindar should compensate him for the financial investment he had made in the cotton bales. But this is read as unforgivable effrontery, most unbecoming of a lower-caste person. His cotton bales are destroyed by the zamindar’s agents, who in his account of the event, were numerous and “kept shouting Bande Mataram”.
Clearly, just as long as it has been a call to battle in the cause of the nation, Vande Mataram has also been a slogan of provocation and coercion. It was this dual character of Bankim’s legacy that Nehru and Tagore had occasion to reflect upon in 1937, when Congress governments were in place in several provinces of British India and communal tensions were rapidly rising. The compromise solution, to raise the first two stanzas of the song to an exalted status and effectively banish the rest into oblivion, was hammered out in part through their intervention. Both Nehru and Tagore were aware of the provocative use of the slogan by certain kinds of political forces, but helpless in restraining it. Beyond the terrain of principled liberalism where they conducted their debate, the Hindutva parties and their affiliates were pursuing the issue in the street. Authenticity in history and aesthetics has been trampled upon in this brand of politics. Inevitably, Vande Mataram has also become a living testament to India’s failure to overcome the sectarianism of “cultural nationalism” and evolve a brand of civic nationalism that all citizens can identify with.
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
India and the WTO
August 31, 2006
In some part, the career of globalisation – both as a phenomenon and as a term -- is congruent with that of the World Trade Organisation. In the early-1990s, when multilateral trade negotiations under the Uruguay Round were mired in seemingly irreconcilable differences between the industrialised countries, “globalisation” as a term featured but rarely in the policy lexicon. Key breakthroughs in the negotiations occurred in 1993, following which the final act of the Uruguay Round -- which among other things established the WTO -- was signed in April 1994. Since its genesis on January 1, 1995, the WTO’s life of just under twelve years has seen “globalisation” become an integral part of the policy vocabulary in all parts of the world.
Partly on this account, the WTO has become emblematic of the hopes and anxieties that surround the process of globalisation, in both the policy discourse and the dissenting view. The sharp polarisation of views on the WTO as an institution has again been evident since the ongoing round of trade negotiations -- under what is called the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) -- ran aground in July. Critics have reacted with grim satisfaction, rehashing their well-worn line that no deal is better than a bad deal. Champions of free trade as the best prescription for growth have, in equal measure, been dismayed that the only hope developing countries had to escape the poverty trap, is rapidly receding because of the deadlock in the global negotiations.
Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Laureate economist, has few doubts about who bears the responsibility for the current impasse. The European Union and the U.S., he says, have long since “reneged on the promises they made in 2001 at Doha to rectify the imbalances of the last round of trade negotiations”. And in the lead-up to the mid-term elections to the U.S. Congress, the George Bush administration has in Stiglitz’s words, proven more attentive to the “25,000 wealthy cotton farmers” in the country, and the “10,000 prosperous rice farmers”, than to the many millions of the world’s poor. When bold decisions were called for, the U.S. political establishment has chosen to play along with the “corrupt system of campaign-contributions-for-subsidies”.
The sixth ministerial conference of the WTO at Hong Kong produced a final declaration only because expectations had quite deliberately been moderated – in the words of WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy, “recalibrated” -- over the preceding weeks and months. For most part, the December 2005 conference remained deadlocked over the developing countries’ insistence – represented by a group of twenty countries including India and Brazil – that an end-date for export subsidies in agriculture be written into the final declaration. The E.U., which saw itself as the main target of this demand, responded by putting the onus on the U.S., Australia and other major agricultural exporters to commit themselves to ending their disguised export subsidies.
In the event, the E.U. conceded a provisional end-date for export subsidies, but insisted that it would be inoperative if modalities were not agreed on the parallel elimination of all other forms of unfair practices. The deadline for agreed modalities was put at April 30, 2006. Effectively, the EU, the US and other developed country exporters, gave themselves four months to unravel a conundrum that has defied solution for four years or more.
That effort was preordained to fail. The April 30 deadline passed with agreement nowhere in sight and it took an extraordinary appeal by leaders of the group of eight industrialised countries (the G8), to bring six big negotiators in the WTO – the U.S., the E.U., Japan, Australia, Brazil and India -- to Geneva in July for another effort at breaking the logjam. Expectedly, agriculture proved the main hurdle and the Geneva conclave did not have an opportunity to begin addressing the other issue of “non-agricultural market access” (or NAMA, which in WTO-speak, refers in the main to industrial goods).
Bitter recriminations followed the breakdown of talks and both Brazil and India tilted towards the E.U. in holding the U.S. responsible. The U.S. demand that all other countries should ensure significantly higher market access – by sharply cutting tariffs in agricultural products – in return for a reduction in subsidies, failed to win much favour. Under the Uruguay Round’s Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), every WTO member is obliged to maintain its “aggregate measure of support” in the sector below a specified level. This commitment is laid down in terms of “final bound commitment levels”, which leave a generous amount of head-room for developed countries. At Geneva, the U.S. offered to cut farm subsidies by 53 percent – referring of course, to the final bound level. This meant reducing the allowable ceiling from $ 48.2 billion to around $ 22.5 billion, when the most reliable data available with the WTO indicate that aggregate support to U.S. agriculture has increased since the AoA entered into force, but remained well within the mandated ceiling. Indeed, aggregate support has grown from $ 6.2 billion in 1995 to $ 14.4 billion in 2001, and the figure for the last U.S. accounting year stands at around $ 19.7 billion – still well below the final bound level that the U.S. has consented to.
There will in short, be no effective cut in U.S. domestic support for agriculture. And for this phantom concession, the U.S. demands from the rest of the world, a significant increase in market access for agricultural products. The E.U. reportedly was asked to reduce tariffs in the sector by upto 66 percent, since that would provide the benchmark for market access commitments on the part of the developing countries. India for one, has agreed that it is prepared for a tariff cut equivalent to two-thirds the magnitude of that agreed by the rich countries. The standards of market access established in agriculture were in turn, expected to set the framework for talks on NAMA. But with the negotiations failing to clear the first hurdle, there was no opportunity to even approach other significant issues.
Needless to say, India was among the countries most outraged by the U.S. demand. Commerce Minister Kamal Nath accused the U.S. of cavalier disregard for the subsistence needs of many millions in India who depend on agriculture. This reflected the longstanding complaint of the developing countries – where an estimated 90 percent of the global population dependent on agriculture live – that they can compete with U.S. farmers, but not with the U.S. treasury. As Kamal Nath said after the Geneva failure, the very idea that market access should be a price that developing countries pay to secure a cut in rich country subsidies, speaks of a “gap in mindset”. The subsidies that the developed countries hand out to their farmers have no business being there in the first place.
These reactions prove how seriously the WTO continues to be scarred by the circumstances of its birth. Between 1990 and 1992, the Uruguay Round negotiations were deadlocked by the rival perspectives of the U.S. and the E.U. on agricultural trade. The Blair House agreement in 1992, which was no more than an attempt to circumvent the problem by defining it differently, took care of that. After sealing a limited deal on subsidies payable to oilseeds growers, the U.S. and the E.U. agreed on numerous other artifices to break down the issue of agriculture into a complicated, quasi-legal maze that would defy the best efforts at comprehension. Thus, subsidies were classified into three colour-coded entities, and limits specified under each of these. A de minimis level of domestic support was permitted and a “peace clause” agreed, under which domestic support in agriculture would not be cause for WTO complaint except under pressing circumstances.
Developed countries in other words, agreed to limits on their agricultural subsidies, which were well above the actual sums paid. Calculations done then, showed that agriculture in most developing countries was in contrast, negatively subsidised. The rich countries gained the freedom to increase subsidies, while the developing world remained under compulsion to cut them. In return for significant concessions on intellectual property rights and industrial trade, the developing world got nothing by way of additional space for agriculture. And the only substantive gain for it was a heavily “back-loaded” agreement on textiles that deferred most of the purported gains to the very end of a ten-year implementation period.
Stiglitz’s assertion that the foremost priority of the Doha agenda should be the removal of the imbalances of Uruguay, resonates strongly with the view that India has long held. Indeed, prior to the launching of the Doha agenda, India had, in league with a group of developing countries, insisted that more than a new round of trade negotiations, attention needed to focus on issues in the implementation of existing trade agreements. The Uruguay Round had produced agreements that covered a large number of areas, but in many of these, the experience of the developing countries had been far from happy.
India's insistence that these glitches, both major and minor, need to be ironed out as a matter of priority failed to stem the tide of defections to the cause of a new trade round. Singapore, which hosted a meeting of a smaller group of the world’s major economies just prior to the Doha ministerial conference of the WTO, produced what was delicately described as a “quasi-consensus” on implementation issues: to discuss these in most part within the framework of a new round of trade negotiations. Indeed, in an elaborate concession to global sensitivities on the issue, the minister from Singapore who chaired the meeting, urged that future negotiations should seek to move towards working out a global “development agenda”. India’s reservations were assuaged in other words, by merely calling the new trade round by another name.
The fourth ministerial conference of the WTO at Doha in 2001 almost collapsed over agriculture. Till the dying hours of the conference, the E.U. had insisted on playing hardball and resisting any reference to the objective of phasing out export subsidies in agriculture. And despite being the only recalcitrant on this issue, the E.U. was playing for high stakes on other fronts, demanding an explicit acknowledgment that negotiations on a bundle of issues of special interest to European corporations would begin no later than the fifth Ministerial Conference scheduled for 2003.
Developing countries were equally adamant then, that there could simply be no presumption that the WTO could venture into these areas - investment, competition policy, government procurement and trade facilitation – which were potentially deeply intrusive on national decision-making processes. But as the clock was stopped and the conference went into overtime, the E.U. conceded that it would not be averse to the objective of phasing out export subsidies, provided there would be no “pre-judgment” of the issue. Partly in response, a number of developing countries began softening their stand on the four new issues that the E.U. wanted in the WTO agenda.
India then stood well and truly isolated. If ever there was a moment when India’s relations with the WTO reached breaking point, that was it. Early on the morning of November 14, 2001, India was presented a draft declaration that put in place all the issues that it had spared no effort to remove from the WTO agenda. Crunch time had come and the Indian delegation without further heed to diplomatic delicacy made known that its intention to vote with its feet. Commerce Minister Murasoli Maran, as the leader of the delegation, informed the conference that India would not be party to the purported consensus. The situation was only retrieved when the host government, as chair of the conference, issued a declaration that said among other things, that the four new issues would only be taken up for negotiations on the basis of an “explicit consensus” at the fifth ministerial meeting.
These issues in turn, proved the deal-breaker at the 2003 ministerial conference in Cancun. This was a surprise in itself, since the pre-conference expectation had been that agriculture had reserved that role for itself. India and Brazil had prior to the conference, taken the initiative in constituting the G20 which brought together a number of major developing countries on a joint platform to frontally challenge the insincerity of the rich countries on agriculture. The immediate provocation had been an effort by the U.S. and the E.U. in the lead-up to Cancun, to reprise the dubious record of the 1992 Blair House accord and present the developing countries a virtual fait accompli. All through the five-day conference at Cancun, it was agriculture that dominated discussions. And the four new issues that the E.U. in particular wanted on the agenda, only proved decisive because many countries did not want the talks to clear that hurdle. That would have brought the focus of discussions perilously close to their strong protectionist interests in agriculture.
The proposals on agriculture submitted by India and other countries at Cancun, were remarkable in seeking to harmonise the interests of developing country exporters and economies that have a strong defensive interest in protecting their markets. India counted itself quite decisively in the second category, whereas Brazil fell unequivocally in the first. That the unity forged in Cancun has, despite this strong divergence in interest, lasted right till the Hong Kong conference and beyond, speaks of a determination to ensure that the errors of the Uruguay Round are not repeated.
In the days since the breakdown at Geneva, India has expressed an interest in joining negotiations towards creating a mega-trade bloc involving the ten ASEAN nations, Japan, China, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. It has been a feature of the years since the creation of the WTO, that RTAs – which in most instances, institutionalise a “WTO plus” model of trade liberalisation -- have increasingly tended to dominate world trade. Yet India has failed to integrate itself into a strong regional trading arrangement, reflecting in part the adverse political and economic circumstances in its own neighbourhood, as also the strong defensive trade interests it continues to have. Though talks are still at a very preliminary state, trade observers are unsure that India has any realistic prospect of joining the proposed Asian trade bloc. Typically, the East and South-East Asian models of trade liberalisation operate with very limited “negative lists” of products and if India is to go on board, it would only be with a rather long list of exempted items.
There are political sensitivities involved. Early in April, Sonia Gandhi as president of the ruling Congress Party, wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, urging that ongoing bilateral negotiations on possible free trade arrangements be put on hold. The farm sector, she pointed out, was going through an acute crisis. And the last thing the country needed was an influx of cheap imports – quite possibly subsidised by source country governments – that would deprive the Indian farmer of the few market opportunities he had.
It does not take very much knowledge of the Indian farm scene, to figure out that a major increase in imports has not been a serious concern. The problem rather is more a consequence of declining investment, a drying up of institutional credit, and the absence of appropriate marketing infrastructure. Though India has since the Uruguay Round, earned a reputation for being a forceful and well-informed negotiator in world trade councils, the sustenance of this role would require at the least, that these infirmities of domestic economic policy be addressed. This is especially the case since regional free-trade agreements seem to suit India’s interests even less than a multilateral arrangement.
In some part, the career of globalisation – both as a phenomenon and as a term -- is congruent with that of the World Trade Organisation. In the early-1990s, when multilateral trade negotiations under the Uruguay Round were mired in seemingly irreconcilable differences between the industrialised countries, “globalisation” as a term featured but rarely in the policy lexicon. Key breakthroughs in the negotiations occurred in 1993, following which the final act of the Uruguay Round -- which among other things established the WTO -- was signed in April 1994. Since its genesis on January 1, 1995, the WTO’s life of just under twelve years has seen “globalisation” become an integral part of the policy vocabulary in all parts of the world.
Partly on this account, the WTO has become emblematic of the hopes and anxieties that surround the process of globalisation, in both the policy discourse and the dissenting view. The sharp polarisation of views on the WTO as an institution has again been evident since the ongoing round of trade negotiations -- under what is called the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) -- ran aground in July. Critics have reacted with grim satisfaction, rehashing their well-worn line that no deal is better than a bad deal. Champions of free trade as the best prescription for growth have, in equal measure, been dismayed that the only hope developing countries had to escape the poverty trap, is rapidly receding because of the deadlock in the global negotiations.
Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Laureate economist, has few doubts about who bears the responsibility for the current impasse. The European Union and the U.S., he says, have long since “reneged on the promises they made in 2001 at Doha to rectify the imbalances of the last round of trade negotiations”. And in the lead-up to the mid-term elections to the U.S. Congress, the George Bush administration has in Stiglitz’s words, proven more attentive to the “25,000 wealthy cotton farmers” in the country, and the “10,000 prosperous rice farmers”, than to the many millions of the world’s poor. When bold decisions were called for, the U.S. political establishment has chosen to play along with the “corrupt system of campaign-contributions-for-subsidies”.
The sixth ministerial conference of the WTO at Hong Kong produced a final declaration only because expectations had quite deliberately been moderated – in the words of WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy, “recalibrated” -- over the preceding weeks and months. For most part, the December 2005 conference remained deadlocked over the developing countries’ insistence – represented by a group of twenty countries including India and Brazil – that an end-date for export subsidies in agriculture be written into the final declaration. The E.U., which saw itself as the main target of this demand, responded by putting the onus on the U.S., Australia and other major agricultural exporters to commit themselves to ending their disguised export subsidies.
In the event, the E.U. conceded a provisional end-date for export subsidies, but insisted that it would be inoperative if modalities were not agreed on the parallel elimination of all other forms of unfair practices. The deadline for agreed modalities was put at April 30, 2006. Effectively, the EU, the US and other developed country exporters, gave themselves four months to unravel a conundrum that has defied solution for four years or more.
That effort was preordained to fail. The April 30 deadline passed with agreement nowhere in sight and it took an extraordinary appeal by leaders of the group of eight industrialised countries (the G8), to bring six big negotiators in the WTO – the U.S., the E.U., Japan, Australia, Brazil and India -- to Geneva in July for another effort at breaking the logjam. Expectedly, agriculture proved the main hurdle and the Geneva conclave did not have an opportunity to begin addressing the other issue of “non-agricultural market access” (or NAMA, which in WTO-speak, refers in the main to industrial goods).
Bitter recriminations followed the breakdown of talks and both Brazil and India tilted towards the E.U. in holding the U.S. responsible. The U.S. demand that all other countries should ensure significantly higher market access – by sharply cutting tariffs in agricultural products – in return for a reduction in subsidies, failed to win much favour. Under the Uruguay Round’s Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), every WTO member is obliged to maintain its “aggregate measure of support” in the sector below a specified level. This commitment is laid down in terms of “final bound commitment levels”, which leave a generous amount of head-room for developed countries. At Geneva, the U.S. offered to cut farm subsidies by 53 percent – referring of course, to the final bound level. This meant reducing the allowable ceiling from $ 48.2 billion to around $ 22.5 billion, when the most reliable data available with the WTO indicate that aggregate support to U.S. agriculture has increased since the AoA entered into force, but remained well within the mandated ceiling. Indeed, aggregate support has grown from $ 6.2 billion in 1995 to $ 14.4 billion in 2001, and the figure for the last U.S. accounting year stands at around $ 19.7 billion – still well below the final bound level that the U.S. has consented to.
There will in short, be no effective cut in U.S. domestic support for agriculture. And for this phantom concession, the U.S. demands from the rest of the world, a significant increase in market access for agricultural products. The E.U. reportedly was asked to reduce tariffs in the sector by upto 66 percent, since that would provide the benchmark for market access commitments on the part of the developing countries. India for one, has agreed that it is prepared for a tariff cut equivalent to two-thirds the magnitude of that agreed by the rich countries. The standards of market access established in agriculture were in turn, expected to set the framework for talks on NAMA. But with the negotiations failing to clear the first hurdle, there was no opportunity to even approach other significant issues.
Needless to say, India was among the countries most outraged by the U.S. demand. Commerce Minister Kamal Nath accused the U.S. of cavalier disregard for the subsistence needs of many millions in India who depend on agriculture. This reflected the longstanding complaint of the developing countries – where an estimated 90 percent of the global population dependent on agriculture live – that they can compete with U.S. farmers, but not with the U.S. treasury. As Kamal Nath said after the Geneva failure, the very idea that market access should be a price that developing countries pay to secure a cut in rich country subsidies, speaks of a “gap in mindset”. The subsidies that the developed countries hand out to their farmers have no business being there in the first place.
These reactions prove how seriously the WTO continues to be scarred by the circumstances of its birth. Between 1990 and 1992, the Uruguay Round negotiations were deadlocked by the rival perspectives of the U.S. and the E.U. on agricultural trade. The Blair House agreement in 1992, which was no more than an attempt to circumvent the problem by defining it differently, took care of that. After sealing a limited deal on subsidies payable to oilseeds growers, the U.S. and the E.U. agreed on numerous other artifices to break down the issue of agriculture into a complicated, quasi-legal maze that would defy the best efforts at comprehension. Thus, subsidies were classified into three colour-coded entities, and limits specified under each of these. A de minimis level of domestic support was permitted and a “peace clause” agreed, under which domestic support in agriculture would not be cause for WTO complaint except under pressing circumstances.
Developed countries in other words, agreed to limits on their agricultural subsidies, which were well above the actual sums paid. Calculations done then, showed that agriculture in most developing countries was in contrast, negatively subsidised. The rich countries gained the freedom to increase subsidies, while the developing world remained under compulsion to cut them. In return for significant concessions on intellectual property rights and industrial trade, the developing world got nothing by way of additional space for agriculture. And the only substantive gain for it was a heavily “back-loaded” agreement on textiles that deferred most of the purported gains to the very end of a ten-year implementation period.
Stiglitz’s assertion that the foremost priority of the Doha agenda should be the removal of the imbalances of Uruguay, resonates strongly with the view that India has long held. Indeed, prior to the launching of the Doha agenda, India had, in league with a group of developing countries, insisted that more than a new round of trade negotiations, attention needed to focus on issues in the implementation of existing trade agreements. The Uruguay Round had produced agreements that covered a large number of areas, but in many of these, the experience of the developing countries had been far from happy.
India's insistence that these glitches, both major and minor, need to be ironed out as a matter of priority failed to stem the tide of defections to the cause of a new trade round. Singapore, which hosted a meeting of a smaller group of the world’s major economies just prior to the Doha ministerial conference of the WTO, produced what was delicately described as a “quasi-consensus” on implementation issues: to discuss these in most part within the framework of a new round of trade negotiations. Indeed, in an elaborate concession to global sensitivities on the issue, the minister from Singapore who chaired the meeting, urged that future negotiations should seek to move towards working out a global “development agenda”. India’s reservations were assuaged in other words, by merely calling the new trade round by another name.
The fourth ministerial conference of the WTO at Doha in 2001 almost collapsed over agriculture. Till the dying hours of the conference, the E.U. had insisted on playing hardball and resisting any reference to the objective of phasing out export subsidies in agriculture. And despite being the only recalcitrant on this issue, the E.U. was playing for high stakes on other fronts, demanding an explicit acknowledgment that negotiations on a bundle of issues of special interest to European corporations would begin no later than the fifth Ministerial Conference scheduled for 2003.
Developing countries were equally adamant then, that there could simply be no presumption that the WTO could venture into these areas - investment, competition policy, government procurement and trade facilitation – which were potentially deeply intrusive on national decision-making processes. But as the clock was stopped and the conference went into overtime, the E.U. conceded that it would not be averse to the objective of phasing out export subsidies, provided there would be no “pre-judgment” of the issue. Partly in response, a number of developing countries began softening their stand on the four new issues that the E.U. wanted in the WTO agenda.
India then stood well and truly isolated. If ever there was a moment when India’s relations with the WTO reached breaking point, that was it. Early on the morning of November 14, 2001, India was presented a draft declaration that put in place all the issues that it had spared no effort to remove from the WTO agenda. Crunch time had come and the Indian delegation without further heed to diplomatic delicacy made known that its intention to vote with its feet. Commerce Minister Murasoli Maran, as the leader of the delegation, informed the conference that India would not be party to the purported consensus. The situation was only retrieved when the host government, as chair of the conference, issued a declaration that said among other things, that the four new issues would only be taken up for negotiations on the basis of an “explicit consensus” at the fifth ministerial meeting.
These issues in turn, proved the deal-breaker at the 2003 ministerial conference in Cancun. This was a surprise in itself, since the pre-conference expectation had been that agriculture had reserved that role for itself. India and Brazil had prior to the conference, taken the initiative in constituting the G20 which brought together a number of major developing countries on a joint platform to frontally challenge the insincerity of the rich countries on agriculture. The immediate provocation had been an effort by the U.S. and the E.U. in the lead-up to Cancun, to reprise the dubious record of the 1992 Blair House accord and present the developing countries a virtual fait accompli. All through the five-day conference at Cancun, it was agriculture that dominated discussions. And the four new issues that the E.U. in particular wanted on the agenda, only proved decisive because many countries did not want the talks to clear that hurdle. That would have brought the focus of discussions perilously close to their strong protectionist interests in agriculture.
The proposals on agriculture submitted by India and other countries at Cancun, were remarkable in seeking to harmonise the interests of developing country exporters and economies that have a strong defensive interest in protecting their markets. India counted itself quite decisively in the second category, whereas Brazil fell unequivocally in the first. That the unity forged in Cancun has, despite this strong divergence in interest, lasted right till the Hong Kong conference and beyond, speaks of a determination to ensure that the errors of the Uruguay Round are not repeated.
In the days since the breakdown at Geneva, India has expressed an interest in joining negotiations towards creating a mega-trade bloc involving the ten ASEAN nations, Japan, China, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. It has been a feature of the years since the creation of the WTO, that RTAs – which in most instances, institutionalise a “WTO plus” model of trade liberalisation -- have increasingly tended to dominate world trade. Yet India has failed to integrate itself into a strong regional trading arrangement, reflecting in part the adverse political and economic circumstances in its own neighbourhood, as also the strong defensive trade interests it continues to have. Though talks are still at a very preliminary state, trade observers are unsure that India has any realistic prospect of joining the proposed Asian trade bloc. Typically, the East and South-East Asian models of trade liberalisation operate with very limited “negative lists” of products and if India is to go on board, it would only be with a rather long list of exempted items.
There are political sensitivities involved. Early in April, Sonia Gandhi as president of the ruling Congress Party, wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, urging that ongoing bilateral negotiations on possible free trade arrangements be put on hold. The farm sector, she pointed out, was going through an acute crisis. And the last thing the country needed was an influx of cheap imports – quite possibly subsidised by source country governments – that would deprive the Indian farmer of the few market opportunities he had.
It does not take very much knowledge of the Indian farm scene, to figure out that a major increase in imports has not been a serious concern. The problem rather is more a consequence of declining investment, a drying up of institutional credit, and the absence of appropriate marketing infrastructure. Though India has since the Uruguay Round, earned a reputation for being a forceful and well-informed negotiator in world trade councils, the sustenance of this role would require at the least, that these infirmities of domestic economic policy be addressed. This is especially the case since regional free-trade agreements seem to suit India’s interests even less than a multilateral arrangement.
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