On media coverage of the India-U.S. nuclear deal and the Nandigram violence

Before I come to the specific questions on these themes, which were put to me by a student doing a college dissertation, let me try to sketch out the broader context. Nuclear energy is at the current time, a contributor to the extent of less than 5 percent to India’s total electricity needs. Nuclear weapons are likely to remain forever, an inert part of the Indian arsenal, since no government is ever going to use them.

In the mid-1980s, the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) forecast that it would have 10,000 megawatts of operational electricity generation capacity in place by the year 2000. Its achievement so far has been a mere 4,120 megawatts.

In the 1950s, the DAE drew up a three-stage plan for nuclear energy production in India: from a first stage of natural uranium fuelled reactors, to a second stage using plutonium as primary fuel, and then a third stage of thorium fuelled generation. It was implicitly argued that India had sufficient natural uranium resources to start and sustain this entire cycle of nuclear energy. It was only when the mid-term appraisal of the Tenth Five-Year Plan was published in 2005 that the DAE went public with an admission that India faced a critical shortage of natural uranium.

The DAE has been less than candid and transparent with the Indian public about the prospects for nuclear energy in the country and about its own performance. There are sufficient grounds to be sceptical about the new-found enthusiasm for nuclear energy as a viable alternative to the problems, such as global warming, posed by the carbon fuel-cycle. We have yet no credible and reliable long-term methods of dealing with the various problems posed by the nuclear fuel cycle: such as radioactive waste disposal and the decommissioning of defunct nuclear reactors.

So to set the context for my answers to the specific queries on the India-USA nuclear deal: we are essentially talking here about a deal that involves weapons that will never be used and an energy source that may not amount to much, in even the best of circumstances. Why then was so much energy expended in the coverage of the nuclear issue? I think the answer is in two parts:

First, we have not yet got out of the habits of thinking of the 1950s, which saw a country’s nuclear sector as emblematic of its national pride and technological prowess.

Second, the nuclear deal became a symbol of a new relationship between India and the “sole superpower”. After decades of mutual estrangement, this was a measure of a new cordiality and a new intent to work together for common interests and shared values. More than the tangible benefits that the deal promised, what was perhaps more important were the intangible gains expected to accrue from the official recognition by the U.S. that India merited a special status in the world.

Now to the specific questions

1. What do you think of the way in which the Left has been covered with respect to the Indo-US nuclear deal? Has the coverage been well-balanced? Did it both answer and raise questions?

I think the media created a phoney crisis in the expectation that the Left parties would either buckle under the pressure or quit the United Progressive Alliance. This would have in the estimation of the media pundits, opened the way for a mid-term election in which the Left strength would have been thoroughly marginalised. Alternatively, there was also an expectation that a “coalition of the willing” would emerge out of the wreckage of the UPA, which would be more favourably disposed towards the new strategic relationship with the U.S.

The whole procedure seemed to bear all the hallmarks of a carefully stage-managed affair. First, with the Left parties yet to take a formal position on the nuclear deal, the Prime Minister gave an interview to a journalist known to have close links with the Left, in which he spelt out his ultimatum: the Left could either like it or lump it. The following day (August 12, 2007), the Indian Express, which is among the most breathless propagandists for the new strategic relationship with the U.S., ran a front page story by its editor-in-chief, which was a virtual declaration of war against the Left, with a headline that read: “Will the bully now do what bullies usually do when their bluff is called?”

The coverage was anything but well-balanced. An editorial in the Economic Times on August 16 had this to say about the Left parties: they “inhabit a fantasy world in which India should line up alongside Venezuela, Iran’s Holocaust denying President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hamas and Hizbollah, as part of a world-wide global ‘resistance’ to ‘imperialism’.”

The strident tone of this editorial and its vocabulary make it virtually indistinguishable from the media organs of the U.S. neo-conservative lobbies, such as Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, National Review and the Weekly Standard. And it must be remembered here that these are precisely those media organisations that lied and misled the U.S. into the continuing catastrophe of the invasion of Iraq. There is indeed, a growing popular backlash against these media organisations in the U.S. today.

The coverage did not raise the crucial questions of what is the real benefit in tangible terms, to India from the nuclear deal. The key question of whether India needed a nuclear arsenal also was evaded. The patriotism and the sense of nationalist commitment of the Left parties was repeatedly impugned, which is the lowest kind of editorial strategy that any media organisation can adopt.


2. What do you think is the reason behind the unanimous support of the Indo-US nuclear deal by almost all sections of the media?

There is a numbing consensus within the Indian media today, that strategic engagement with the U.S. holds the key to India’s emergence on the world stage as a major power. This is a reading that is completely at variance with reality. The U.S. economy today is highly vulnerable. It is deeply in debt and there is no sector within it that is not suffering some degree of debt-induced distress: whether the government sector (federal, state and local tiers); the corporate sector or the household sector. Militarily, the U.S. is stuck irredeemably in the quagmire of Iraq, which is despite all the illusory gains of recent months, a no-win situation and is only likely ultimately, to work to the long-term strategic advantage of Iran. The Indian media seems oblivious to the fact that the country’s fastest growing partners in international trade today are in the east – notably China and its neighbours. And in terms of strategic questions, the best tack for India to take would be to engage with its neighbours in a spirit of realistic give-and-take, without becoming the proxy for a fading superpower’s imperial games.

3. Why is it that most of the newspapers ran a campaign in favour of the nuclear deal rather than a debate on it?

For reasons dealt with above. I think the CPI(M) General Secretary, in his first piece on the subject in the mainstream media, said in so many words that he was opposed to the nuclear deal because it involved accepting U.S. tutelage on issues of serious strategic consequence for India. It was not so much the specifics of the deal that was the issue. Yet the media chose to not engage with this question, but to bury the central questions under a barrage of invective. There probably is a consensus among English-speaking Indians and the relatively more affluent sections that this sector of the media caters to, over the advisability of a strategic engagement with the U.S. These are the same sections of the media that floated the beguiling slogan of a “shining India” in 2003-04 and simply refused to learn the lessons from the drubbing that the BJP received in the 2004 general elections.

4. The Hindu claimed to endorse the Indo-US nuclear deal. However, unlike The Times of India or the Indian Express, it did not have any editorials, articles and Op-Eds which were fiercely in support of the deal. Neither did it cover the Left in a negative manner for opposing the deal. Is it because of the so-called “leftist” tilt that The Hindu is known for?

The Hindu has always prided itself on its superior understanding of the technical issues involved in the nuclear domain. It has also been traditionally, less inclined to the kind of extremist rhetoric that other sections of the media adopted. Having said that, I think The Hindu has often been all too uncritical of the DAE’s performance in vital respects.

5. On 6 Aug 2007, The Hindu published an editorial saying that it endorses the deal. Later, another editorial was published on 20 Aug 2007 which said that the deal should be put on hold. On 22 Aug 2007, Editor-in-Chief N. Ram wrote a piece on the Op-Ed page saying that the two positions are not contradictory. Why did The Hindu change its editorial stance after the CPM became vocal in its opposition of the deal? Also, the absence of editorials on the n-deal issue from then on, is it indicative of some kind of dilemma?

I have not followed the finer print in these editorials or articles. But my impression is that there is no necessary contradiction between these positions. Firstly, the August 6 editorial dealt with the nuclear deal alone and its implications for India’s energy and strategic programs. It was very much a “narrow scope” exercise which purported to see in the deal, significant benefits to the energy program and no significant damage to the strategic component. Once the Left made its objections clear, it became evident that there was no political consensus over the issue. So the democratic course in such circumstances would have been to open a dialogue on the various ramifications of the deal with all elected representatives and try to dispel whatever misgivings they may have had. So The Hindu’s second editorial, arguing that the deal be put on hold and be thoroughly reviewed so that a consensus could be built up on its utility, was, I think, respectful of the course that a democratic polity should adopt in a matter of serious national importance.

6. What is your opinion of the coverage of the Left in the various newspapers with respect to Nandigram? Was it objective?

Without in anyway condoning what the CPI(M) cadres did in Nandigram, let me remind you that this was one among many instances of so-called “development” being imposed at gunpoint. For instance in December 2000, the police opened fire in Maikanch village in Rayagada district of Orissa, inflicting 12 deaths and several more injuries, in a corporate effort to take over mineral-rich land that happened inconveniently, to be occupied by tribal communities that insisted on retaining ownership. And then, the Kalinganagar firing in Jajpur district in January 2006, in which an equal number, if not more, were killed, again involved the reluctance of tribal communities to cede control over their land at the derisory rates of compensation decreed by the Orissa state government. Then there was the Kahalgaon firing a few weeks back in Bhagalpur district of Bihar, in which five people were killed. Kahalgaon happens to be the location of one of the country’s largest thermal power plants, and the people of that town hardly get any electricity! So this was a police firing against citizens of the town who were protesting against this patent inequity.

Ranked on a scale with all these other atrocities, Nandigram was no greater or lesser. So it is a little difficult to understand why the media was so obsessed with Nandigram and so little bothered with Maikanch or Kalinganagar or Kahalgaon. Look up the newspaper files from the relevant periods and check out how much of a moral fervour the media managed to work itself into over these incidents.

The unstated agenda was clearly to cause maximum embarrassment to the CPI(M). And in this the media succeeded.

7. While the Indian Express, The Times of India and The Hindustan Times blamed the CPI(M) for the November violence in Nandigram . The Hindu, on the other hand refrained from putting direct blame on the CPI(M). In such a case, how would the reader know what the reality is?

It is an open secret that some of the individuals who man the top editorial management positions in The Hindu have had close links with the CPI(M), both formally and informally. This applies especially, to the Editor-in-Chief of the newspaper who was at college with the incumbent general secretary of the CPI(M) and has maintained a close friendship with him since.

The reader of course would have ample reason to be dissatisfied with the coverage he is getting, from both sections of the media – both the over-the-top hysteria of the Indian Express and the over-protective approach of The Hindu. What remedies does he or she have? I think the Readers’ Editor in The Hindu confronted a spate of complaints about the quality of the coverage of Nandigram in the paper and wrote an entire column on it. His final conclusions, published in the issue of the paper dated December 19, 2007 are as follows:

There was balance in the coverage to the extent that protesting voices against what was “happening” in Nandigram got adequate representation. But what was really happening? The reader was left to guess. The Home Secretary said it was a “war zone”; Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya described what had happened in Nandigram as legal and justified and added, “we have paid back in their own coin.” These widely reported (but not in The Hindu) remarks indicated something serious had happened and it needed to be justified. Obviously it was not Maoists and Trinamool alone, who were responsible for the situation and the published reports did not make things clear.

The reporting in The Hindu was selective. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s comment on the situation (while on his way to Kuala Lumpur) did not find a place and this had to be inferred from the Chief Minister’s reaction to it. Similarly, the Chief Minister’s “paid back” remark found mention only when there were reactions to it.

The unprecedented public protest in Kolkata was well covered, but one was left wondering what was the “situation” in Nandigram against which the intellectuals and artists were protesting. As a newsman, my first priority would have been spot coverage. That media persons were denied
access to the “war zone” was unknown to The Hindu readers. The first Nandigram-datelined report, from Antara Das, appeared much after things had quietened down in the area. Nandigram did not get the detailed analysis that an explosion in tiny faraway Maldives got at the same time.

8. Also, The Hindu did try to downplay CPI(M)’s role in the Nandigram violence. Why?

For reasons dealt with above. I think the answer to the last question addresses this issue adequately.

In the interests of full disclosure, I would like to state that I was an employee of The Hindu group between December 1991 and August 2004.

Inclusive growth is no mere slogan

But can agriculture contribute a new growth momentum to the economy?

Early commentary on the budget 2008-09 has focused almost entirely on a single parameter: the aggregate level of economic growth. Missing in all the punditry has been a serious effort to engage with the sources of growth in the Indian economy.

Evidently, the recent growth dynamic has had little to do with agriculture. As the Economic Survey just preceding the budget pointed out, growth in the agricultural sector, despite favourable environmental parameters, is expected to be a disappointing 2.6 percent this year.

This would, the Survey continues, “be translated into a lower overall GDP (gross domestic product) growth”.

What the Survey does not attend to though, is the nature of the relationship between agricultural growth and overall GDP. It is no mere arithmetical relationship. And the untold story of India’s growth experience over the last decade or so, has been that it has almost entirely excluded agriculture.

As a decade in the life of a nation, the 1990s could attract a variety of descriptions. For one thing, it was the decade of liberalisation, when India, after a seeming eternity of hesitation, finally decided to engage with the global economy. For another, it was when the Indian middle class, thwarted in its ambitions for generations, carried through its revolution of rising aspirations.

With all this, the 1990s could also be remembered as the decade when agriculture fell off the radar screen. Two points in time when the Indian economy was severely buffeted by weather adversities, capture the essence of this transition.

The two worst decades over the last quarter-century in terms of weather conditions have been 1987 and 2002. In 1987-88 when agricultural GDP fell by 1.39 percent, overall growth clocked in at 3.8 per cent. In 2002-03, the impact of adverse weather on agriculture was even more catastrophic, with GDP in the sector falling by 5.99 per cent. Yet overall GDP registered a growth of almost 4 percent.

The transformations of the last decade-and-a-half have meant that agriculture, despite being the sector that hosts by far the majority of the Indian population, is of less consequence for the economy than ever before. Indeed, much of the growth over this period has been driven by the revolution of rising aspirations of the great Indian middle class.

This is a story that emerges clearly in the rapid diversification of consumption patterns. Food clothing and shelter, the traditional core of the consumption basket, now comprise a much smaller proportion of aggregate private final consumption expenditure than it did in 1990-91.

To take merely food: from almost half the aggregate consumption expenditure in the Indian economy in 1990-91, it today accounts for well under 40 percent.

Yet this is a story that has stubbornly failed to reproduce itself in the rural sector. As a 2003 survey by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) found, the average monthly per capita expenditure of farmer households was Rs 503, just moderately above the rural poverty line of Rs 349 (itself a rather modest indicator). And of the total consumption expenditure, over 55 percent went into food.

Clearly, the flagging growth momentum in agriculture has meant much more than an arithmetical failure to contribute to overall GDP growth. It has meant that the vast majority of the working population in the country has been unable to participate in the growth story, because their purchasing power has been under severe pressure.

Various strategies have been advanced over time as possible antidotes to the persistent malaise of Indian agriculture.

Virtually all are agreed that investment in agriculture, which has fallen off rapidly over the years and only shown some hesitant signs of recovery in recent times, needs to be stepped up.

Others argue that the subsidies given to agriculture in the terms of cheap fertiliser and assured output prices, should be redeployed as productive investment.

There have been increasingly urgent efforts along both these dimensions in recent times. Yet it is uncertain how successful these administratively complicated and politically difficult operations have been.

Under pressure to do something, the Finance Minister has, unsurprisingly in the light of the political pressures of the imminent electoral contests, opted for a large-scale write-off of agricultural debt.

By all indices, the crisis of indebtedness in agriculture is acute. Two surveys conducted by the NSSO in 2003 have shown that of the 89 million farm households in the country, 43 million are indebted to some or the other degree. Indebtedness is extremely high in states with well-developed agricultural practices, such as Andhra Pradesh, Punjab, Maharashtra and Tamilnadu; as also in Kerala, with its large plantation sector.

Significantly, over 42 percent of the total debt of the agricultural sector was owed to non-institutional sources such as the local village money-lender or trader. This represents a significant backward movement for the agriculture sector, which was dependent to a relatively minor degree of 30 percent on non-institutional credit sources in the early-1990s.

Evidently, Chidambaram’s loan write-off fails to address the huge problem of the non-institutional debt of the farm sector. But in alleviating debt-induced distress at least to some extent, it may generate additional purchasing power in the farm sector, which could conceivably, impart a growth momentum to the economy.

“Inclusive growth” is no mere slogan. It is perhaps a survival imperative for the Indian economy, with the growth impulse driven by the “great Indian middle class” over the last few years now flagging. Chidambaram’s seeming populism perhaps disguises certain hard-headed calculations of economic pragmatism.

Where the fiscal resources for the loan write-off will be found is of course, another question. But if the improvement that Chidambaram claims on the fiscal front is real – rather than the illusory consequence of cleverly hiving off much of the expenditure burden to public sector corporations – then the additional burden should not be insupportable.

The Gaza breakout and its aftermath

When militant elements from Hamas, the Palestinian resistance movement, began tearing apart a wall that kept the 1.5 million people of Gaza confined in a narrow space – prey to periodic armed incursions and air-strikes from Israel, unable to cross into Egypt’s Sinai region -- President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt had a choice to make.

Mubarak was proscribed by the terms of a peace treaty with Israel, from maintaining an armed presence in the Sinai. His lightly armed border police could nonetheless have taken on the Palestinian militants in armed combat, enabling him to add his name to a distinguished roster of Arab leaders – King Hussein of Jordan in 1970, President Hafez al-Assad of Syria in 1976 -- who have cracked down on Palestinian self assertion in the cause of “stability”.

Egypt held its fire. Mubarak was impelled perhaps by compassion for a people who have suffered a brutal blockade since Israel’s “unilateral withdrawal” in August 2005. Equally, he may have been anxious about the possibility of an adverse reaction within his own country, especially from truculent elements of the Muslim Brotherhood. And as Egyptian forces stood down, waves of desperate Palestinians made their way through the breached border to buy the essentials that Israel denies them.

For all of four decades and particularly since the so-called “peace process” began in 1991, the issue of Palestine has been confounded by the unilateral Israeli ability to create “facts on the ground”. With its resounding victory in the Palestinian elections in January 2006, its expulsion of the collaborationist Fatah movement from Gaza last year and now with its opening of the border to Egypt, Hamas has created some facts of its own on the ground.

The reverberations are yet to die down. U.S. President George Bush’s visit to the region in January made it abundantly clear that Israel will seek unilaterally to impose a “two-state solution” before the end of his presidency. Israeli leaders are increasingly prone now to say out in public what once seemed unutterable. If a two-state solution were to “collapse”, said Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Israel would face a “struggle for equal voting rights” by the Palestinians, which would effectively “finish” it off as a Jewish state.

Fatah has signalled that it would be a willing recipient of this unilateral imposition. This is a circumstance of some convenience, since Fatah-controlled West Bank is of greater importance from the point of view of Jewish population centres and Israel’s territorial ambitions. Gaza in contrast is an unwanted territory. Egypt declined to take it back after its negotiated peace with Israel. Israel itself has vacated its occupation and would have no further interest in Gaza if it were not for the persistence of a militant tendency in the territory.

Yet, Israel’s well-worn tactic of collective punishment and retribution, has been a conspicuous failure. To hand de facto control over to Egypt and bring back an element of Fatah oversight of the border – as seems likely now – may be for it, an acceptable way out of the conundrum.

Israel has consistently followed a rejectionist line since the peace process collapsed in 2000 on account of its bitter opposition to any form of territorial concession. In its most recent phase, this has meant a refusal to honour the Palestinian national elections and the outright rejection of numerous offers from Hamas for a negotiated ceasefire. In September 2007, Israel effectively went to war with 1.5 million civilians by declaring Gaza an “enemy entity”.

Israel has felt at liberty to raid Gaza at will and destroy all the apparatuses of governance in that besieged land, in retaliation for every perceived act of violence against it. A longer-term dilemma for Israel could arise if de facto responsibility to enforce good conduct within Gaza were to devolve upon Fatah or the Egyptian government. Neither would want to assume this responsibility if Israel were to continue applying its presumptive right to maximum retribution and collective punishment against Palestinian civilians.

At the same time, Egypt would have distinctly mixed feelings about integrating the Gaza population with its own. The peace treaty with Israel assures it of being the second largest recipient of U.S. aid, which in turn has enabled the Mubarak regime to buy a measure of domestic political stability. But the political compact at home is delicate and the entry of an element of Palestinian radicalism could seriously destabilise it. Israel’s persistent policy of denying the Palestinians their dignity could now jeopardise the cornerstone of its security, the peace treaty with Egypt.

Musharraf's Mounting Woes

A head of state who engages in a sequence of self-serving and contradictory public remarks about a matter as sensitive as the murder of his country’s former prime minister, would seem to put his chances of political survival at serious risk. Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan though, derives his authority from sources that put him beyond such mundane notions of public accountability.

Four weeks after the assassination of Pakistan Peoples’ Party leader Benazir Bhutto, the causes of her death remained a matter of bitter contestation. After his initial claim that Bhutto died from hitting her head against her vehicle’s sun-roof, Musharraf came around to an admission that she could possibly have been killed by gunfire. But he insisted as a military man with adequate ballistics expertise, that the evidence he had seen – from pictures and X-rays – did not indicate that the former Prime Minister had suffered any bullet wounds.

Yet how could a head of state be so grossly negligent of basic processes of law, as to make an issue of great public importance a matter of his word against that of the murdered leader’s husband? The answers were delivered in the course of a long interview – in parts belligerent and in parts petulant – with the U.S. magazine, Newsweek. “Somehow, in our culture, a post-mortem of a woman is not done”, he explained: “When the body was at the hospital, (Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali) Zardari himself said it could not be done; he didn't want the post-mortem done”.

Having shown an acute sense of cultural sensitivity in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, Musharraf – when under pressure -- had little hesitation with proposing an even more repugnant act under Islamic custom: the exhumation of the slain politician’s body. Here again, he warned, matters were not quite so simple as western observers would assume: “Everything is not black and white here. It (exhumation) would have very big political ramifications. If I just ordered the body exhumed, that would be careless, unless (Bhutto's) people agreed. But they will not”.

Basking in the halo of martyrdom of his wife, Zardari rose to the challenge. An exhumation would be permitted, he said, but only if the investigation into the assassination were to be handed over to the United Nations. The man who spent three terms in prison since 1993, for crimes as diverse as extortion, corruption and complicity in the murder of a troublesome brother-in-law, was obviously enjoying the opportunities he had been granted by his wife’s death, to return to political centre-stage in Pakistan. Yet he was finding his effort to make the Bhutto assassination an international issue, a difficult agenda to pursue.

The precedent that Zardari was banking upon – the murder of a former Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafiq al-Hariri, in a devastating bomb attack in Beirut in 2005 -- was proving difficult to apply, because of inconsistent western standards. As a commentator in Pakistan’s main English language daily, Dawn, wrote: In the Rafiq al-Hariri case, the U.S. and its western partners in the U.N. Security Council were the real “sponsors, promoters, organisers and financiers” of the U.N. involvement. This was for reasons “known to the world”. In Bhutto’s case though, whatever their sympathies may have been for the slain leader, “they were in effect … on the other side”. No parallel could be drawn between the two cases, because of “historical, political and legal” considerations.

With this debate raging on one flank, Musharraf faced a multitude of challenges on other fronts. Bomb blasts in Peshawar, Karachi and Islamabad, claimed innocent civilian lives in the scores. Bitter sectarian rivalries were imposing a major burden on security forces over the religious observance of Muharram. The Waziristan area was the scene of intense battles, as tribal militias repeatedly overran outposts maintained by Pakistan’s security forces. And despite official claims that the Swat valley in the North-West Frontier Province had been secured after the challenge posed by forces of the recalcitrant cleric, Maulana Fazlullah, media reports spoke of continuing turmoil, including targeted assassinations and organised attacks on Pakistan army contingents.

If they did not have enough to worry about, Pakistan’s security forces were concurrently handling a challenge of quite different dimensions on the food front. Prices of atta were spiralling, ostensibly because of speculative activity by the country’s powerful flour-milling lobby. Much valuable wheat flour was being smuggled across the border into Afghanistan. On January 13, Musharraf authorised a newly constituted Federal Food Commission (FFC) to post armed personnel from Pakistan’s Ranger Force and the military, to safeguard atta stocks around the country’s flour mills. Routes of transit from the flour mills to the country’s main urban centres were secured against unauthorised diversion of the precious food. And exports to Afghanistan were banned, till the domestic price situation stabilised.

The Afghanistan government reacted in pique by closing one of the main transit points between the two countries shortly afterwards. The food supply situation in Afghanistan, they argued, was reaching near critical levels.

With all these troubles mounting, Musharraf was given the faintest sliver of hope by the ostensible finding by British police detectives called in to assist with the Bhutto investigation, that responsibility for the crime lay with Al-Qaeda forces marshalled in Pakistan by the tribal chief in Waziristan, Baitullah Mehsud. This finding was underlined by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) shortly afterwards, in calculated leaks to the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Baitullah Mehsud was the suspect first named by the Pakistan government after the Bhutto assassination. This initial ascription of responsibility was met with a flat denial by the man concerned, who declared that the killing of women was contrary to his faith. Since then, the Pakistan government’s offensive against the Mehsud area has climbed several notches in intensity, with frequent air-strikes and the denial of transit for civilian supplies. Shortly after the CIA endorsed the finding that he was the man behind the Bhutto assassination, Mehsud reportedly issued a warning to the Pakistan military forces to stay out of his area. A jirga, or assembly of tribal elders, meanwhile, called for the lifting of the siege that was denying civilians their essential supplies, including food.

The Pakistan military’s supposed airstrikes in Waziristan were in the perception of many, a mere camouflage for more significant U.S. military action. With his country in turmoil, with bitter battles raging on its frontiers, brutal terrorism threatening its city centres and daily supplies of food becoming a matter of chance for large sections of his people, Musharraf left for an eight-day long tour of Europe, giving the word “nonchalance” a new definition. He was received with the courtesy due to a man who has been certified by the U.S. as a vital ally in what it fancifully calls the “global war on terror”. Civil society groups though, had a different perception, organising a series of protests against the growing authoritarianism of his regime.

A power sharing arrangement between Musharraf and Bhutto, was a remedy crafted in Washington DC for the country’s many ills. Ever since a meeting in Abu Dhabi last August, the two had conducted an on-now off-again dialogue, while denying any rapprochement in public. Bhutto’s rival for the democratic mantle, Mian Mohammad Sharief, meanwhile had sought to short-circuit that dialogue by arriving precipitately in Pakistan in defiance of an agreement under which he had accepted self-exile rather than imprisonment for alleged acts of “treason”. Sharief was unceremoniously bundled out, but managed to regain entry in the slipstream of Bhutto’s return last October. Today, he seeks a rapprochement with Bhutto’s party after years of bitter jealousy, which have been in no small way responsible for the repeated failures of bourgeois democracy in Pakistan.

Sharief’s peace-offering to the Bhutto camp is a “national government” that will involve all Pakistan’s political parties and shut Musharraf out. The latter objective may seem attractive to Zardari, but the man who earned the well-deserved sobriquet of “Mr Ten Percent” for his untrammelled exercise of patronage and pelf during Bhutto’s last administration, is not about to let a lifetime’s opportunity slip. A “national government”, he has said, is not appropriate at a time when elections have already been notified and campaigning is underway.

The months following Musharraf’s effort to discipline the country’s judiciary by dismissing Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhury, have been traumatic for his regime. Since the siege of the Lal Masjid in Islamabad was broken in July by heavy-handed military methods, he has suffered an even more rapid descent in public esteem. Moderate and enlightened opinion in Pakistan, which he had been counting on for support, has turned decisively against his intent to stay in office and his determination, only recently renounced, to retain his status as army chief. People are now increasingly tilting to the belief that the Lal Masjid militants were marionettes that Musharraf had self-servingly put into play, to create a climate of fear and bolster his claims to another term as Pakistan’s uniformed president. The armed confrontation that followed only proved that he was not quite in control of the forces that he chose to unleash.

The Lal Masjid confrontation was followed in short order, by a public repudiation by tribal chiefs in Waziristan, of the peace agreement that Musharraf had forged with them in September 2006. This effectively turned the clock back four years, to the military operations that Musharraf had begun in the region in the turbulent summer of 2002, when India and Pakistan were mobilising forces for what both sides vowed, would be a decisive battle, and the U.S. was pressuring the Pakistan leader into doing its bidding as a price for its continuing neutrality.
Musharraf then sent his forces into the tribal areas, only to see them suffer grievous casualties. Today, he is compelled by circumstances, to seek fresh recourse to the discredited technique of using maximal force against an adversary that is resolute and resourceful in resistance. He can count upon the cushion of political safety afforded by a newly appointed army chief, General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani, who has reportedly vowed that the Pakistan Army will not get involved in politics under his watch. How long the army’s patience will hold out, though, is anybody’s guess, even when the matter involves a former member of its top command hierarchy.

Repairing fractured polities: Equality not Identity

A Review Article

Sumantra Bose, Contested Lands, HarperCollins Publishers India, Delhi, 2007, price not stated, pp vi + 329, ISBN 978-81-7223-608-3.

Successive waves of decolonisation since World War II created a global mosaic of nation states, putting in place a power configuration that seemed immutable. For the authors of the nationalist revival in the Third World, their mission was nothing less than predestined. Nations that had long been denied their place in the sun despite all compelling claims derived from long and hoary histories, were finally coming into their own. There was no limit to the potential for human betterment they embodied.
It did not take long for the optimism to be dispelled, as these nations faced up to the fractures bequeathed by colonialism. Where the new nations were amenable to a coherent form of ethnic characterisation and mobilisation, they suffered these fractures along other fault-lines. But in general, the majority of such fissures emanated from the competing claims of rival sections of the national elite and in turn, acquired the colours of ethnic rivalry.
Fractured national polities being pervasive, one could ask what criteria Sumantra Bose has used in his choice of six particular countries or regions for attention: Sri Lanka, Cyprus, Jammu and Kashmir, Bosnia, and Israel/Palestine. Why not Lebanon, Iraq, Congo, the Ogaden, Kenya, or Afghanisan too? Manageability may have been a criterion. To consider all the countries and regions of the world where fissiparous tendencies are at work, often with brutal implications for human security and welfare, would be to open up a canvas that could not possibly be dealt with in one scholar’s lifetime. But then, the criteria used are as good or bad as the generalisations they yield. Does Bose manage on the basis of these five case studies of divided lands, to come up with general insights that could be applied elsewhere?
Bose’s more general conclusions, fortunately, are stated with relative clarity right up front. The origins of “divided lands” he argues, are in “rival states or mobilized ethnonational groups (claiming) sovereign power over the same territory”. It is a situation that cannot possibly be sustained, since in “an era defined by globalization and its subphenomenon, regional integration and cooperation, it is simply impossible for communities to live in hermetic segregation from one another in ethnonational ghettos”. In addressing the modalities of conflict resolution, Bose permits himself two broad generalisations: that the transition from war to peace is frequently accomplished only through “third-party engagement”, and that a strategy of “incrementalism” or “step-by-step progress” is often less likely to produce durable results than “embarking on a fast track to a comprehensive settlement”.
Both formulations merit serious attention. When “third-party engagement” is called for, it is obviously relevant to inquire into the motivations that the third-party might import into its mediation effort. In all the cases that Bose has studied, there is no clear success involving a third-party mediator. Unfortunately, in a world where might speaks more eloquently than principle, the most likely mediators in any conflict would be neighbouring powers, former colonial masters, or the regnant world hyper-power, the U.S., which is in the famous words of a former top diplomat of the country, the world’s “indispensable nation”. None of these are likely to enter the fray with an unbiased attitude or an even-handed approach.
Bose fails to recognise this and though his case studies bear testimony to several instances of third-party engagement going awry, he remains convinced of its ultimate efficacy and necessity of a mediator to compose the fissures of divided lands. In relation to the U.S. record in the Israel-Palestine peace process, he manages to summon up the stricture that it failed to meet the standard of even-handedness. This must seem a rather tepid characterisation of what has seemed to most other observers, a record of gross partisanship.
All the contested lands that Bose deals with, emerged as sovereign political entities, or part sovereign entities in the years following World War II. The retreat of colonialism in these territories seemed in many instances, to resemble a disorderly cut and run. But in truth, there were calculated efforts made to effect a transfer of power that would maintain an unchanged pecking order in world councils. Orderly transfers of power were rare. In most instances, the colonial masters left deep and bitter animosities that smouldered for long, often necessitating the intervention of the U.S. to either roll back the tide of nationalist radicalism or enforce a degree of compliance with the imperial diktat.
Third party involvement in short, is often where the problem originated. Could then, the solution lie in the same? Can imperial power be acknowledged, even potentially, as a neutral arbiter? This question in turn leads to a broader one: is the organised might of a State, especially an external power, ever used in a neutral fashion?
These questions are never really addressed in Bose’s volume, which concludes with the rather rosy prognosis that “the United States holds unique leverage and influence, globally and in particular world regions, that equip it to play the role of a constructive third party with decisive results”. If played well, “such a role can significantly enhance American interests and American prestige across the world”.
How does this square up with the actual record of interventions by the U.S. in the past? Consider Cyprus, one of Bose’s case studies of divided lands. In the narration of this book, Cyprus was a land torn between two ethnic nationalities: the majority Greeks who believed the nation’s historic destiny lay in enosis or unification with Greece, and the Turks whose formula was for taksim, or a clean break with the Greek majority and a restoration of historic bonds with mainland Turkey. These fissures deepened through Cyprus’ long and arduous struggle for freedom from colonialism, when the British masters found in the island’s Turkish population an all too willing accessory in the brutal repression of Cypriot nationalists. The constitutional formula the island-nation adopted at independence was a model of complex and multi-tiered power-sharing, a system of governance that has lately come to be theorised and extensively studied under the rubric of “consociationalism”. Yet the island continued to be riven by ethnic rivalries and antagonistic visions of its future.
In 1974, the right-wing military junta in power in Greece, instigated revanchist Greek nationalists in Cyprus to overthrew the democratically elected President, Archbishop Makarios. Suspecting that the next step would be the fulfilment of the Greek Cypriot stratagem of enosis, Turkey which was then nominally under a civilian government though in truth controlled by the military, invaded the island-nation, effecting a partition along ethnic lines that was in due course, completed through a transfer of populations.
This much is clear from Bose’s narration. But what he fails to elaborate on is the role of the U.S., which far from intervening to calm things down, chose to instigate the most uncompromising reaction from extremist elements on both sides. Recently declassified documents show Henry Kissinger, then the U.S. Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, with unparalleled authority over the diplomatic and intelligence machineries, putting into play his fanciful reading of the Cyprus problem, which saw Archbishop Makarios’ pesky neutrality and his resolute indifference to U.S. strategic interests, as the central issue. But since an armed confrontation between two such vital allies as Greece and Turkey would endanger the “southern flank of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO)”, a neat partition of tiny, unarmed Cyprus seemed an acceptable alternative.
Bose documents how the dynamics of European integration since, which have favoured (predominantly Greek) southern Cyprus, as the internationally recognised legatee State, have tended to soften the hard edges of this partition. But the very same process has induced also, a sense of complacence among Greek Cypriots, who have begun to enjoy the benefits of European integration without any of the burdens of sharing power within the State, with a truculent Turkish minority. Economic disparities have widened with the Greek south enjoying distinctly the better standards of living. After three decades of separation, there is little incentive left for reunification. Larger ambitions of enosis have been diluted by the political moderation that has reigned since the overthrow of the Greek military junta in 1974; and in large measure, European integration renders ambitions of enosis somewhat irrelevant.
In Sri Lanka, Bose provides an extended treatment of the internal political dynamics that have led to the current situation of separation and undying rancour between the Sinhala majority and Tamil minority. But perhaps because he remains committed to “third-party engagement” as an indispensable part of the solution to such schisms, he fails to delineate the full dimensions of the fatally miscued Indian intervention of 1987-90. He correctly observes that Indian support for the Tamil insurgency, which broke out in full-blown fury in 1983, was “fundamentally shallow, born of circumstances and strategic perceptions that were open to change”. There was never the slightest support at the higher-levels of the Indian government for Tamil secession, which was seen to have deep and dark implications for India’s own fragile internal cohesion. But then the Indian response to the Sri Lankan crisis was little short of absurd: with an Indian Prime Minister signing an agreement on behalf of the Sri Lankan Tamils “after murky and hasty negotiations from which all Sri Lankan Tamils were excluded”. “The problems with the agreement went beyond questions of the lack of process and inclusiveness to matters of substantive content”, Bose comments, “although undoubtedly the glaring substantive problems stemmed directly from the absence of process”.
If the agreement was crafted in such unpropitious circumstances, its subsequent implementation was catastrophic. The principal belligerents on the Sri Lankan Tamil side, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) felt completely unconstrained by the agreement and took on the Indian army contingents deployed in the island nation, ostensibly as peacekeepers, in a savage guerrilla war. The Sri Lankan president, R. Premadasa, on succeeding the architect of the agreement, made no secret of his deep resentment of the Indian troop presence. With violence escalating dangerously, he launched a brutal war of extermination against armed Sinhalese elements in the south, while secretly conspiring with the LTTE in the north and east and rendering it material support in the guerrilla campaign against the Indian army. Bose only partially narrates this story and does not enter into a discussion of how all sides in that abortive effort to resolve the Sri Lankan issue, acted in extreme bad faith. It was, in short, not the best advertisement for the efficacy of “third-party intervention” in repairing the fissures of divided lands.
Finally, there is only the U.S. intervention in Bosnia in 1995 that Bose manages to uphold as a successful instance of third party engagement. Here again, it is clear that the truce achieved through U.S. coercion cannot, by any yardstick, be described as a just peace. And only time will tell whether it will be a durable peace. The U.S. indeed, as Bose himself suggests with a lengthy quotation from Richard Holbroooke, its principal negotiator in the dispute, recognised this. In fact, the circumstances for the Dayton peace accord were achieved only by western acquiescence in a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing by Croat armed forces, which effectively emptied three large population centres of all Serbs. This was followed by waves of U.S. and allied aerial bombing of troop concentrations that decisively tilted the balance on the ground in favour of the Croat and Bosniak Muslim forces. Bose quotes a rather ambivalent judgment by Richard Holbrooke, who recorded in his memoir of those times that “the basic truth” was “not something that could be publicly stated”. But the plain fact was that the “map negotiation” which was the most “daunting challenge” facing the U.S. as a third party mediator, was taking place on the battlefield.The essence of third-party mediation in this case then, was to use the U.S. military as a force multiplier for one side in the hostilities in Bosnia, indeed, to create a shotgun coalition of Croat and Bosniak Muslims who had nothing more in common than the contingent and convergent intent of expelling the Serbs from their enclaves.
Unwittingly perhaps, Holbrooke lays out the dubious U.S. motivations in the very same memoir that Bose relies upon, just a few pages ahead of the section that he quotes. As a member of Holbrooke’s negotiating team scribbled on a note just as the mediation mission was beginning, there was no cause for excessive scruple about the methods used by the U.S.’s chosen allies. The Croats and the Bosniaks, as he said, had been hired as “junkyard dogs” because the U.S. was “desperate”: “We need to try to control them. But this is no time to get squeamish about things. This is the first time the Serb wave has been reversed. That is essential for us to get stability, so we can get out”.
Stability in other words was the object, not justice. And the regime that was crafted was a hasty patchwork operation to remedy the instability caused by the precipitate western recognition of a 1992 referendum that voted – in the face of a complete boycott by Bosnian Serbs – for the independence of the province from the larger Yugoslav federation. The western powers failed evidently, to honour the cardinal principle of stable confederations, which is that each constituent unit would have a veto over crucial policy decisions.
When structures of the state are dismantled, there should be little wonder that people fall back on ties of kinship and community as their sole bulwark against a threatening environment. Ethnic nationalism and extreme forms of historical revanchism are not natural states of being, but the contingent outcomes of cataclysmic failures of the modern political State. If the mission of repairing the polities of deeply fractured lands is partly about forging -- in place of an ethnic or communitarian sense of belonging -- a sense of civic identity, of citizenship as the sole basis of entitlements and responsibilities, then part of the strategy must embrace a radical program of social and economic equality. It is when equality is denied that identity becomes paramount. And the forging of this radical notion of substantive equality is not a task that is done in an “incremental” or “gradualist” fashion, but through a fast-track effort that clearly recognises the ultimate goal in advance. In this manner perhaps, Bose is quite right, though not perhaps in the manner that he intends.

When Reconciliation is the Object, Does the Truth Matter?

A Review Article

Iraq, Preventing a New Generation of Conflict, Markus E. Bouillon, David M. Malone and Ben Rowswell (editors), a project of the International Peace Academy, Viva Books, New Delhi, 2007, pp xiv + 351, price not stated.

There could be no quarrel with the stated theoretical endeavour of this book. Iraq is a country that has gone through a quarter-century of war: first against a neighbour, then against the whole world, now against itself. A generation in the country has grown up with unhappy memories of isolation from the world. And any Iraqi who had the wherewithal to cast his or her eyes beyond the country’s borders, would have witnessed a variety of demonisation of the country and its leadership that grossly overstepped all bounds of reasonable discourse. Iraq now witnesses a virulent upsurge of ethnic enmities that are in part, the self-fulfilling outcome of relentless western propaganda. It is a situation that necessarily calls for not merely peace-making, but an effort at looking forward, to a vision that might enable a future generation to leave behind the bitter animosities of the last quarter century.
But beyond this statement of the obvious, a number of questions arise. Is reconciliation achieved through historical amnesia? Or is remembrance, the acknowledgment of error, and forgiveness the answer? If reconciliation is the object, is the truth at all germane? Does it matter, in other words, that the tragedy of Iraq – from the war of destruction waged in 1991, through the campaign of attrition by sanctions, to the climactic act of the U.S. invasion and the current state of internal meltdown – was constructed on a foundation of western duplicity and falsehood?
In an early contribution to this volume, Jon Pedersen warns against the temptation to “ascribe the socio-economic situation of present-day Iraq solely to the sanctions period, invasion, subsequent occupation and insurgency”. Playing safe in terms of the dominant wisdom, he places these episodes of an unfolding catastrophe in a continuum with all of Iraq’s “turbulent modern history”. This situation has not been helped by either the Iraqi regime or the international community, which in mutually adversarial reactions, have created a state “that relied on buying political support and quelling unrest through direct transfers and subsidies”. Such a state, says Pedersen, “is inherently unstable, because it rests on its ability to continue paying for the loyalty of the population”.
Soon afterwards, Pedersen states the self-evident truth, that the “shocks to which Iraq and its people have been exposed have had dramatic consequences for virtually every aspect of life”. All indicators testify to the fact that in 1990, in the uneasy interim between the conclusion of the war against Iran and the beginning of the war of destruction by the U.S., “Iraq had the second highest development score among its neighbours in the Middle East, behind only the United Arab Emirates”. With the first stage of the U.S. project consummated in the ejection of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, Iraq’s development indicators began a rapid descent. Within a decade, Iraq was registering the region’s second worst scores, next only to Yemen. This was, Pedersen concludes, “a sobering development for the country that had the fastest increase in literacy in the world between 1970 and 1985”.
What fate is likely to befall a state that allows its citizens access to the benefits of human development, while refusing to yield any powers that it may have concentrated within itself? The plain answer is that the state becomes an anachronism. Once the level of social development exceeds the limits that are prescribed by a repressive state -- and the regime begins to be seen as an impediment to further progress -- the fetters must be broken. Dictatorships seldom survive the rising awareness and aspirations of subject peoples.
In other words, the conditions for a democratic transformation were being created in Iraq as far back as the 1980s. The sanctions that the country suffered for 12 years following the Gulf War, effectively choked off this possibility, throttling the burgeoning confidence of its middle class, destroying hope and initiative, and concentrating immense powers in the Iraqi state, almost as a survival imperative for the country and its people. The U.S. invasion in 2003 completed the destruction of the Iraqi state.
Toby Dodge points out in a contribution titled “State Collapse and the Rise of Identity Politics”, that Iraqi society has been dominated since the day U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad, by a “profound security vacuum”. Indeed, the “opportunities provided by the collapse of the state and the disbanding of the Iraqi army were seized upon by a myriad of groups deploying violence for their own ends”. A foretaste of the ethnic animosities brewing under the facade of Iraq’s liberation, came with the bombing in August 2003 of the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf – a revered site of the Shia Muslim faith – which killed over a hundred, including Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (now the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq or SICI). Forces of ethnic hatred were perhaps unleashed then, though they were yet to attain their most virulent expression. That indeed, happened in February 2006, when the Al Askariya shrine in Samarra was bombed.
“The main driving force behind violence in Iraq is the absence of state institutions”, says Dodge. Iraq on the eve of the 2003 invasion, he points out, was a state on the verge of collapse. Enervated through wars and sanctions, the Iraqi state could not handle the additional pressures generated by the invasion and plunged rapidly towards complete breakdown.
This reading clearly merits reassessment. By early 2001, when the Bush administration brought a cabal of neo-conservative conspirators into the portals of power in Washington DC, the policy of sanctions against Iraq had been thoroughly discredited. Its enormous toll in human suffering was a matter of public record, through successive reports from multilateral bodies. And the silent protests of earlier years were rapidly yielding to acts of conscience by international volunteers, intent on breaking the sanctions regime and exposing its illegitimacy.
It was this alarming prospect that Bush managed to checkmate in the explosive aftermath of the September 11 attacks in the U.S., which endowed him with the moral authority to pronounce an anathema on Iraq as part of a supposed “axis of evil”. The revelations that have emerged about the Bush cabal’s instinctive reaction to September 11 -- and the frenetic efforts that followed to build a case for war against Iraq -- lead definitively to the inference that the dismantlement of the Iraqi state was not an unintended consequence, or the spontaneous outcome of internal infirmities, but very much part of the U.S. design.
Dodge makes a persuasive case against partition, which is a policy that has been gaining an increasing number of advocates on the liberal end of the U.S. political spectrum. He argues that ethnic separatism is not the issue, but the “absence of institutional and coercive state capacity across the whole of central and southern Iraq”. While constructing this case, Dodge omits a crucial point: the advocates of partition, who today tend to be from the liberal end, are only echoing a proposal made as far back as 1999 by the arch neo-conservative, David Wurmser, in a breathlessly perfervid book titled “Tyranny’s Ally: America’s Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein”. Partition, or more euphemistically put, confederation, was curiously, also the formula advanced in 1995 by King Hussein of Jordan, who made an abrupt switch that year, immediately after signing a peace agreement with Israel, from being a sympathetic but helpless witness to the tragedy of a neighbouring state, to being an active proponent of its dismemberment.
When structures of the state are dismantled, there should be little wonder that people fall back on ties of kinship and community as their sole bulwark against a threatening environment. Abdul Salem Sidahmed points out that an element common to all the political groups that have established themselves in the post-invasion environment, is “their subscription to Islamism”. In this respect, the political parties that matter are of the same stripe as the insurgency, often enough, the front organisations of groups that are pursuing “politics by other means”. A closer look indicates though, that “Islamism” for most political groups, is “more a vehicle for mobilisation than a vision to reconstruct the state and society”. Pan-Islamism however, cannot really be a formula for unifying the fractured country, since the “multiple identities” of modern Iraqi society were built around quite distinct narratives and “actual or perceived grievances vis-a-vis the state or other communities”.
Iraqi nationalism too does not amount to a formula for composing the ethnic enmities unleashed by the occupation, says Sidahmed. This is because Iraqi nationalism has always been a “conflict-driven” ideology, fuelled by the various wars the country has been engaged in, among which the U.S.-inspired sanctions count as "war by other means". Moreover, Iraqi nationalism in the current context is built on a foundation of hostility to the Shia-Kurdish alliance that has been the dominant force in determining the country’s new constitutional shape.
Given all these constraints, Sidahmed is at pains to underline the virtues of modesty in framing political objectives. There is nothing modest though, about the nature of the task involved, which is nothing less than winning broad consent for a secular political dispensation, a civic nationalism that recognises “citizenship as the basis of all rights and entitlements”. Among several other things, this necessitates the fair and equitable distribution of the country’s resources.
Such a regime, simply put, remains a remote possibility, given the potentiality inherent in the new constitutional order for the secession of the Shia south and the Kurdish north. David Cameron points out that the 2005 constitution adopted by a national assembly conspicuously lacking in Sunni representation, exhibits a “pronounced decentralist bias”. It has a relatively short list of federal powers and a limited number of shared responsibilities between the centre and the provinces. All other powers rest with the provinces and where authority is shared with the centre, it is explicitly stated that the provinces enjoy paramountcy. There is also a provision in the constitution that allows provinces to determine, through popular referenda, their mutual aggregation into “regions”. The Kurdish “region” in Iraq, a reality in fact since the U.S. cordoned off the area in 1991 and declared it a "no-fly zone", became a reality in law in 2005. There is also a strong possibility that the Shia dominated provinces in the south will opt in the not too distant future, to group themselves into a distinct “region”.
There are contributions in this volume on the role of the Sunni militants, as also the Shia vigilante groups that have become major players on the Iraqi political scene. After remaining united on a program of rejectionism in the earlier period, the Sunni groups we learn, split into two distinct tendencies in a later phase, one deciding upon a process of engagement with the new constitutional order. This decision was driven as much by the fear of being fatally marginalised, as by the possibilities of collaboration that were opened up by schisms within the Shia groups and the emergence of an Arab nationalist strain that opposed the growing dependence on Iran.
The political reality in Iraq is far more complex than the media can really comprehend, given its dependence on shorthand descriptions like Sunni, Shia and Kurd. As this volume documents, southern Iraq in fact, witnessed pitched battles between rival Shia militias. But a significant development since, is that the Mahdi Army of the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, representing a political tendency relatively autonomous of Iran, has stood down, allowing the rival Badr Brigade effective pre-eminence in the south. The pilgrimage city of Najaf, in turn, has emerged as the de facto citadel of Shia power, securely within the influence of the al-Hakim clan and its patrons in Iran.
Clearly, the Shia south is increasingly asserting its independence of the central authority, even without invoking the constitutional provisions for regional autonomy. The Kurdish north enjoys a greater measure of autonomy, though it lacks the capital city of its ambitions. The Iraqi constitution in one of its most contentious clauses, provides for a referendum, to determine the future of the city of Kirkuk, a hub of the oil industry and the putative capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. It was widely recognised at the moment the constitution was adopted, that this would be a flashpoint in the evolution of the Iraqi polity. That indeed has turned out to be the case, with the sensitivities involved being so acute, that the constitutional deadline of December 2007 has passed without the modalities for the future referendum being agreed.
One of the contributions in this volume looks at Kirkuk as a laboratory for peace-making. But the reality, becoming increasingly apparent today, is that it is more likely to be the point at which the geopolitics that the new Iraq is supposed to be central to, will unravel. Far from gaining control over Kirkuk, Iraq’s Kurds in December 2007 suffered the mortification of seeing Turkish forces engage in a series of major armed raids on their territory, including air strikes, to destroy what were allegedly, safe havens for Kurdish guerrillas operating in Turkey. These actions were carried out with full U.S. approval and possibly the provision of “actionable intelligence”. On a damage control visit to Kirkuk on December 17, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice was refused a meeting with the deeply offended Iraqi Kurd leadership.
This clearly is the moment at which the objectives of restoring peace and redressing the grievous damage suffered by generations in Iraq, needs to reckon with the imperatives of the truth. The U.S. misadventure has seriously unsettled strategic equations in one of the world’s most combustible regions. And the law of unintended consequences has kicked in with a vengeance, greatly adding to the strategic power of Iran – another of the countries in Bush’s fancifully named “axis of evil” – and enhancing the strategic vulnerability of Turkey, a vital U.S. ally. Ever since the Gulf War of 1991, U.S. policy in Iraq had been stalemated by an uneasy awareness of these possible outcomes. But unbridled neo-conservative arrogance and the vengefulness unleashed by September 11, meant effectively that more sober counsels were discarded in the urge to reorder the world. In the process, the people of Iraq, no strangers to suffering, have been visited with a more acute phase of their collective trauma. How the authors of this tragedy have escaped public scrutiny and sanction for conduct that can only be deemed criminally racist, is perhaps a question that needs closer examination, if the ultimate object is the restoration of peace in Iraq.

A World Without Scapegoats

The U.S. and Israel confront new realities

There could be differing opinions on when the war of manoeuvre between the U.S. and Iran began. The most recent phase of conflict could however, be dated from a few weeks after U.S. President George Bush landed in the full uniformed regalia of a fighter-pilot on an aircraft carrier anchored off the California coast, to declare “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq.

Though mutual intelligibility is never a concern with sides engaged in battle -- whether of the diplomatic or military type -- a coherent argument is called for if broader support is required. It was always a struggle for the U.S. Suspicions had been aroused by the manner that intelligence on Iraq was concocted intelligence to fit a preconceived policy. And nobody seems anxious to take the same course in Iran.

Evidence that the U.S. intelligence agencies were disinclined to go along with the “neocon” gameplan emerged on December 3. In the opacity of the Bush administration’s internal procedures, it is yet unclear how the public release of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear programme came to be authorised. The consequences though, have been immense.

Iran’s nuclear programme had abandoned weapons ambitions as far back as 2003, the NIE concluded, as the world asked: what took them so long? From all the investigations and inquiries by the authorised nuclear watchdog body, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), it seemed undeniably the case, that Iran was a long way from being nuclear weapons capable.

Both the U.S. and Iran studied the NIE and declared victory. In Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad observed at a celebratory public rally, that the principal intent of the NIE was to extricate the U.S. from an impasse of its own creation. The NIE, said the Iranian president, was a “confession of error”, even a “declaration of surrender”. But since the U.S. could not bring itself to admit error, it had chosen to say the same in other words.

An admission of error is what Bush is particularly averse to. Having spoken as recently as late-October, of the Iranian nuclear programme as the surest road to “World War Three”, Bush needed to show unaccustomed agility to fend off inconvenient questions. He was, as in previous such conjunctures of political awkwardness, assisted by a compliant media in transforming adversity to advantage.

Bush claimed first, that the core finding of the NIE vindicated his approach since 2003, of orchestrating world opinion and maintaining pressure on Iran. And in making the dire prediction that Iran could plunge the world into cataclysmic conflict, he had been faithful to all the intelligence then available. In a general sense, he had been aware that some new findings on Iran were available when he made his apocalyptic speech. But these findings were only then being analysed for veracity and a final assessment was yet to reach him.

In the days and weeks preceding the NIE, there was little in the public conduct of either Bush or his principal advisors, to suggest a departure from their ingrained habit of using every fragment of information in patently self-serving fashion. On November 15, the IAEA published a report on its most recent inspections and inquiries in Iran. Among other things, it established that the declarations made by Iran in respect of uranium enrichment, were consistent with findings the IAEA had arrived at through independent inspections. The overall summation of the IAEA was that “Iran (had) provided sufficient access to individuals and (had) responded in a timely manner to questions and provided clarifications and amplifications on issues raised in the context of the (IAEA) work plan”.

The IAEA did add the cautionary warning that Iran had not stopped its uranium enrichment activity and had perhaps achieved a 4 percent level of enrichment (against the 90 percent required for weapons grade material). Though formally at variance with a U.N. Security Council resolution demanding that Iran halt uranium enrichment, this finding put the Iranian programme within the parameters of peaceful ends and intentions, casting a stain of illegality over the U.N. demand.

These subtleties were obviously lost on the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Zalmay Khalilzad – an erstwhile oil industry functionary and patron of the Afghan Taliban – who joined in, soon after the IAEA report, with calls for another punitive resolution on Iran, backed by credible threats of the use of force.

Against this backdrop, it occasioned no surprise that Bush came out, soon after the NIE was released, with a rose-tinted retrospect on the efficacy of U.S. policy. The U.S. president has ceased to surprise. It is still interesting though, that U.S. intelligence agencies, till recently completely pliant to the political diktat, should have shown the conviction to state what is the case.

If Bush sought to put a brave face on matters, there were signs of disquiet within his inner cabal. Zalmay Khalilzad came out with the regretful assessment that the U.S. had in publicising intelligence, scored a spectacular “own goal”. His predecessor John Bolton, considered too obstreperous for the job even by a U.S. Congress that Bush had a firm grip on, spoke of a “quasi-putsch” by the intelligence agencies against the political leadership. In like vein, the neocon guru Norman Podhoretz, warned ominously of a sinister plot to undermine the Bush presidency.

Israel for its part, rejected the findings of the NIE and insisted that its attitude would remain unchanged. The following week, it called for consultations with the U.S. on the new situation. To avoid undue attention, a meeting was agreed at a relatively junior level, not involving ministerial level contacts.

There was a curious moral inversion in the manner that the right-wing establishment in the U.S. went about the challenge posed by the NIE. The intelligence services, conveniently made the scapegoat for the unending disaster of Iraq, were yet again the target. Having allegedly over-stated the case against Iraq, the agencies were held guilty of fatally under-stating the case against Iran. Two commentators in that neocon bastion, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, put it rather well: intelligence agencies had failed at every juncture, to arrive at an understanding of potentially hostile countries’ intentions, stretching back to the first nuclear tests of the Soviet Union, through the Iraqi program of the 1980s, and the Indian and Pakistani tests of 1998. There was hence just no cause to take their assessment on Iran seriously.

The omission in this entire narrative would be obvious to a school-child. In Iraq, for at least a decade preceding the 2003 U.S. invasion – not to mention in Iran since then -- the IAEA has had access to all sites of interest. Unlike other assessments, which have been drawn from unreliable testimonies of defectors, hard-to-interpret electronic signals or remote sensing data, the IAEA has been able – like it was in Iraq in 2003 -- to probe Iranian conduct through an actual presence on the ground.

The truth about Iraq, obscured from public view by a shameful record of acquiescence by the U.S. media and political opposition, is simply that it was not about a failure of intelligence. It was all about a failure of professional integrity and the capitulation by intelligence agencies to political pressure from a neocon cabal intent on war.

Bush officials had spun a number of stories of Iraqi deceit in the weeks preceding the U.S. invasion. Two in particular, of these numerous fairy-tales, deserve attention. The first describes in sordid detail, a supposed attempt by Iraq to buy uranium from Niger; and the second speaks darkly, of the potential uses of a consignment of aluminium tubes that Iraq had imported.

The first of these fictions was elevated to the status of official doctrine in Bush’s state of the union address to the U.S. Congress in January 2003. The second found mention in Secretary of State (as he was then) Colin Powell’s address to the U.N. Security Council in February the same year.

How did these insults against the world’s intelligence escape scrutiny? As early as October 2002, the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) had laid out its doubts on both these claims. “The activities we have detected”, it recorded in an assessment that found its way into the National Intelligence Estimate filed that month “do not .. add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing … an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons”. This judgment was reinforced by the U.S. Department of Energy -- the nodal agency for nuclear weapons related expertise – which found that the aluminium tubes found in Iraq were not intended for uranium enrichment.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), similarly, had sought to get to the bottom of the “uranium from Niger” claim by commissioning a visit to all the sites indicated, by a diplomat with extensive knowledge of Africa. Based on his inputs, the CIA sent two memos, urging that the accusation be deleted from Bush’s public rhetoric.

Yet these accusations continued to be flaunted, to be in fact, the underpinning of Bush’s programme in Iraq. This campaign of public disinformation was occasionally diluted by the petulant outburst against the U.S. intelligence agencies for supposedly misleading the political leadership.

The background to this involves an assessment afresh of how intelligence serves politics and vice versa.

On May 1, 2005, The Times of London published the entire transcript of a secret memorandum written in 2002 by a top political aide to the British Prime Minister, several months before the war in Iraq began. Referring to a visit to Washington by the chief of U.K. intelligence, the memorandum recorded that “military action” against Iraq was “inevitable”. And the British official’s professional assessment was that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around (this) policy”.

Fixing intelligence and facts around a policy of war has proved an enormously expensive indulgence. Embarking on a similar course with Iran could well be fatal for the U.S. These mortal perils arise from a number of other “facts” which now crowd in, demanding the attention of even the most obsessive ideologues in the Bush administration, and resisting the most resolute attempts to “fix” them.

Uncounted hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died as a direct consequence of the U.S. invasion, though this statistic is of less consequence to Bush than the 4,000 U.S. servicemen who have perished. And as the U.S. becomes more deeply embroiled in a no-win situation, its reluctant allies have chosen to pull out. Spain and Italy have left; Poland and Australia have announced their intention to leave. And the U.K., that most loyal among serfs, recently handed over security responsibilities in Basra province to Iraqi forces.

What perhaps is most mortifying for the U.S., is the fact that as British troops pack up, they leave southern Iraq in the secure grip of Iran’s surrogates. The Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq (formerly known as the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq) has established itself as a formidable power in the central administration in Baghdad. But if its powers in Baghdad are restrained by the compulsions of political cohabitation with rival militias and ethnic groups, few such fetters are operative in Shi’a dominated southern Iraq. If anything, the only challenge to its preeminence comes from the Mahdi Army of the Shi’a cleric, Moqtada Al-Sadr, who tilts towards an Arab-nationalist posture and is even more implacably opposed to the U.S.

“Weapons of mass destruction” was the veil of deception that the U.S. spun to cloak the true motivations of its invasion of Iraq. Those motives remain unstated and unanalysed to this day, shamefully for the putative “free media” in the U.S. There has however, been much informed comment from the alternative media and from dissenting academics on the possible concerns that impelled the U.S. into its misadventure.

The security of Israel has been read by the political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, as a significant concern. Making the Arab world safe for client regimes was another compulsion, as too, was the need to control the energy reserves that hold the key to shoring up the precarious dollar.

In all these respects, the U.S. confronts a moment of decisive importance. The dollar is in free-fall against major world currencies, energy prices are soaring, and the U.S. economy now teeters on the verge of what is with appropriate dread, called a “depression”.

On quite another plane, Israel faces, just when its military supremacy seems absolute, a crisis of identity and legitimacy. It is a crisis best summed up in Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s plea that a “Palestinian state”, once something that Israel needed as badly as a pox, is now an existential necessity for the Jewish state. Failure to grant the Palestinian people their aspirations to independent statehood, said Olmert, would inevitably invite upon Israel the unwanted accusations of “apartheid”.

The term “apartheid”, as also anything suggesting affinity with the racist South African republic, was once anathema in Israel. An Israeli Prime Minister’s introduction of a deeply stigmatised term into the political discourse, indicates that the Jewish state today faces a moment of reckoning. All efforts at re-engineering the near neighbourhood – the war of destruction against Lebanon, the threats and imprecations against Syria – have conspicuously failed. And as one failure has followed another, the temptation to destroy Iran, supposedly the source of all evil, rises.

The ideologues though, have at some stage, to confront reality. And the plain fact is that the U.S. project in West Asia, even counting Israel, has run out of steam. To take on Iran in an armed confrontation, would be to write the final obituary of this project.

Sukumar Muralidharan,
December 18, 2007

The violence of democracy and the democracy of violence: a review article

Amrita Basu and Srirupa Roy (editors), Violence and Democracy in India, Seagull Books, Calcutta, 2007, pp 266, price not stated; ISBN 1 9054 2 231 8

As a principle, democracy is hard to argue with, not least because of the claim that it affords conflict resolution methods that prevent the all too ready recourse to violence. However, there is no arguing as well, with the reading that democracies invariably are born in historical intervals of extreme violence: as with the Jacobin reign of terror and the Napoleonic wars, and the American civil war.

In practice again, democracy in its varying idioms is applied across a physical space that claims for itself the status of a cultural unit, or nation. And democracy as a principle is embodied in specific institutions and processes of the political State. The State in turn centralises within itself all the legitimate means of coercion in a democratic political order. It holds, to quote a well-worn characterisation, a monopoly over legitimate violence.

Yet with all these agreed principles, the cultural unit of the “nation” is often defined in a manner that fails to accommodate all real and imagined communities of language, religion or ethnicity. Anthony D. Smith, for one, has pointed out how “many earlier ethnies disappeared, or were absorbed by others or dissolved into separate parts” as particular “national” identities were consolidated. And these processes were rarely gentle. They involved more often than not, large-scale warfare, and the ethnic cleansing and re-engineering of whole territories.

It would then seem that inquiries into the sources of violence in a democracy would need to be posed in another fashion: how well has a nation-state succeeded in effacing the violent circumstances of its birth from public memory? Where historical amnesia is accomplished with reasonable success, violence would be reduced to a minimal strain. But where memories survive, they are sustained and strengthened through successive bouts of violence. The virtuous cycle fostered by historical amnesia – of democracy growing and consolidating itself – would be replaced by the vicious cycle of history being reconstructed and relived in ever more malign fashion.

In short, the institutions of a modern democracy are not merely about enshrining certain values, drawn from a shared construction of “national” history. They are also about forgetting the more unsavoury episodes of nation formation. The “exceptionalism” of violence in democracies, in turn, is a consequence of this institutionalisation of agreed norms and practices within civil society, which clearly lays out what can be spoken about and what cannot. Once that consensus is established, the State can sheath its sword, confining its use of coercive violence to only the most extreme violations of the nationalist compact.

Yet the experience in India has been of the State’s monopoly on violence being repeatedly breached, of the State in fact, being unable or unwilling in repeated contexts, to defeat this challenge to its authority.

A current of opinion today professes itself thoroughly unimpressed by the Indian record in sustaining a democratic system of governance six decades into its life as an independent nation. Indian democracy in this reading is a shallow pretence. The mere fact that a country goes through regular elections does not make it an authentic democracy. Without internalising the liberal ethos, a nation that follows every procedure prescribed in the rule-book of democracy, would still be prone to periodic ruptures in the political consensus, bringing forth subterranean social impulses and a quite brazen recourse to coercive modes of dispute settlement.

In this respect, violence is not an “exceptional” circumstance for democracy, but a feature of its weakly institutionalised or de-institutionalised variants. As the editors note in their introductory essay to this volume, this much has become part of academic commonsense, owing in no small measure to theorists and ideologues such as Samuel Huntington. However, Basu and Roy, as the editors of the volume, share the larger concern of interrogating this commonsense and moving beyond the notion of “exceptionalism”. Their reading of India’s most recent experiences with large-scale political violence is quite simply, that democracy can quite often nurture the most virulent pathologies. Rather than remain isolated in mutually exclusive domains, “the aberration of holocaustian politics and the norm of democratic politics may well have significant points of convergence” (page 7).

This volume’s enterprise of transcending “exceptionalism” is driven by the proximate worries induced by recent political experiences in India, in particular by the communal conflagration of Gujarat in March 2002. Theory has begun to view violence from a perspective of “democratic exceptionalism”. In like manner, practical politics has internalised a view of the Gujarat bloodbath as an aberration, rather than part of the grain of democratic politics.

Gujarat 2002, in the perception of the editors meets several of the criteria of “genocide”. And the reading that this was no “exception”, is underlined by the fact that Narendra Modi, a constitutionally elected chief minister of Gujarat, was widely recognised to be the principal architect of the bloodbath and yet suffered no sanction or punitive action, whether through the processes of the law, or of electoral politics. Indeed, he was if anything rewarded, with a significant electoral triumph in December 2002.

Having drawn their lessons from the experience of Gujarat, Basu and Roy express their conclusions with extreme forthrightness: “In sum, the structures and logics of electoral democracy can often enable rather than prevent the institutionalisation of normatively reprehensible political-ideological formation. … (I)t is a tired truism that formal democracy has no necessary relationship with substantive democracy … .The story of how Narendra Modi became the chief minister of Gujarat as well as the sequel to the story – how and why he continues to be the honourable chief minister despite the events of 2002 – is directly linked to that universal shorthand for the democratic principles of liberty and popular sovereignty: direct elections” (page 9).

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Basu and Roy, while reacting with justified shock and aversion to Gujarat 2002, read rather too much into that particular trauma of Indian democracy. They cite “many observers” who have endorsed the description of Gujarat 2002 as “post-colonial India’s first organised pogrom or even genocide”. But on a continuum that includes Ahmedabad in 1969, Bhiwandi in 1970 and 1984, Nelli in 1983, Delhi in 1984, Meerut in 1987, Bhagalpur in 1989, Mumbai in 1993 – the events of Gujarat in 2002 may not really seem “exceptional”.

There is no denying though, that Gujarat 2002 was India’s first pogrom in the age of globalisation. It was televised nationally and observed globally. And it represented an international public relations disaster for a Hindu nationalist government that was just beginning to strut its stuff on the world stage as a reliable and responsible ally of the U.S. in the so-called “global war on terrorism”.

Gujarat’s “exceptionalism” perhaps lies in these features, rather than the ones identified by Basu and Roy. Far from being “genocidal”, the purpose of Gujarat 2002 – like other outbreaks of violence against the minority Muslims of India – was perhaps didactic in its intent. In other words, to merely teach the minority that the constitutional guarantees of equality under the law were just so much fiction and that they should, in the interests of self-preservation, accept the status of non-citizens in the Indian republic.

Indeed, if the catalogue of similar episodes of violence were to be stretched back, post-colonial India’s first “didactic” attacks on the minorities occurred in 1964, as part of a cycle of events involving the disappearance of a sacred relic from a Muslim shrine in Kashmir. As the news spread, reprisals began against the Hindu minority in what was then East Pakistan, impelling a vast influx of refugees into India. Those fleeing the communal rampage in East Pakistan, in turn, proved to be vectors of the spirit of retaliation. Wherever they went, there were retaliatory actions against Muslims, which enveloped in their baleful embrace, places as far afield of the original source of the disturbances as West Bengal, Bihar and Orissa.

These occurrences though not part of Willem van Schendel’s valuable essay in this collection, need to be recalled as perhaps the first clear case of the violence arising from the “territorial ambiguity” of nation-states formed in the retreat of colonialism. Van Schendel identifies three kinds of nationalist anxieties stemming from the ambiguity of India’s borders – McMahonian and Radcliffian (after the British bureaucrats who respectively, laid out the borders with China and Pakistan) and Kashmirian (arising from the circumstances of that region’s accession to India). Each of these has generated a particular kind of violence, visible most sharply in the borderlands, where the natural affinities of community and kinship have entered into violent confrontation with the territorial imperatives of separate nations.

The didactic quality of communal violence is underlined in Raka Ray’s study of Gujarat and her unpacking of one of the characteristic locutions of its principal architect. For Narendra Modi, the electoral outcome of Gujarat in 2002 was “a slap in the face of the pseudo-secularists”.

“Pseudo secularists” is of course a term with a long history in the Hindu nationalist discourse, as a description of the allegedly deracinated class that insists on fair treatment of the religious minorities in India, supposedly at the expense of undermining the primordial genius of the Hindu nation. The slap has a cultural significance as a duly earned right to administer a public humiliation to another. By this measure, the electorate in Gujarat had in giving Modi his victory, also administered a stinging public rebuke to the entire deluded community of Indian “pseudo-secularists”.

Martha Nussbaum provides a fascinating psychological deconstruction of the violence in Gujarat as a deeply symbolic act of asserting the power of nationhood, by penetrating and violating the deepest recesses of another’s value system. There is the identification of the nation with the woman. And the elaborate obeisance rendered to the virtues of the woman as mother and nurturer, is accompanied by the deliberate violation of the dignity of a perceived “other” nation’s womanhood, through brutal and elaborately choreographed acts of sexual violence.

Usha Zacharias and J. Devika explore an upsurge of violence in a coastal village of Kerala, where a social group excluded by custom from the Hindu fold, became an instrument of Hindutva’s vengeance against the cultural blot of Islam. It was an incident in which the newly empowered community saw itself pitted against the State, which was represented as the political embodiment of Muslim aggression. And yet, the assertion of solidarity with a larger cultural whole, was riddled with ambiguities. Despite all its manifest fervour, it failed to escape the exploitative relationship that Hindutva both crafted and capitalised on.

The volume also includes essays by Ravina Aggarwal on Ladakh, and by Paula Chakravarty and Srinivas Lankala on the construction of communal identities by the Indian media, a particularly valid concern in the context of the ongoing “global war on terrorism” sponsored by the U.S.

Zoya Hasan considers the failure of all mechanisms of accountability for atrocities against the minorities, and concludes that the so-called “commissions of inquiry” are no more than an elaborate ritual to buttress the perceived, as opposed to the substantive, authority of the State. At the same time, she suggests, Gujarat 2002 brought to the fore certain interesting departures from the tired old pattern: in particular, in the independence of will displayed by supposedly autonomous institutions of the State, such as the higher judiciary, the Election Commission, and the National Human Rights Commission.

Dina Siddiqi rounds off the collection with an analysis of minority politics in Bangladesh, of how the Hindu minority in that country is frequently reduced to the same plight that the Muslims in India suffer, almost in a reciprocal, action-reaction sequence. Though it departs significantly from the scope of the volume as depicted in the title, this essay provides valuable closure to its main themes. But in the magnitude of its deviation from the stated aims of the volume, the concluding essay underlines the difficulties of assembling a single hold-all volume from all the disparate approaches that seminar participants are likely to adopt, when asked to address a subject with quite so capacious a scope as “violence and democracy”. To say finally, that this is a volume strewn with valuable insights that just fail to be knit together into a coherent narrative thread, would perhaps be a fair assessment.

Ramar Setu: politics of mythology and mythologies of politics

The political frenzy that ensued from a recent affidavit filed by the Archeological Survey of India in the Supreme Court, threatened briefly like it could take the country down a road recently travelled, with deeply traumatic results. All the ingredients that made the Ayodhya controversy such a lethal cocktail were present: the aggressive protestations that faith necessarily trumped reason, the identification of one particular tradition – of the many that make up the living cultural tapestry of the country – as the unique marker of the Indian national identity, and a craven political order that buckles under at the first signal of turbulence and fails to stand by the conscientious actions of its officials.

There are a number of sound reasons why the Sethusamudram project has stirred unease and anxiety in some quarters. Cutting a navigation channel by dredging up the shallow ocean floor in the Palk Straits may hasten communications between India’s eastern and western seaboards. But fishing communities will probably suffer an irreparable loss of livelihoods and the ecologically diverse and sensitive Gulf of Mannar may be irreversibly damaged.

Yet the petitioners who have sought a judicial directive against the project as it is presently conceived, are unconcerned about these all too real issues. Their concern rather is with preserving a cluster of limestone shoals that lies roughly halfway across the narrowest passage between the Indian and Sri Lankan coastlines. Alternately called Adam’s bridge (after the primal figure of the Semitic faiths) and Ramar Sethu (after a central figure of Hindu legend), the limestone shoals stretch over a length of roughly 50 kilometres. Since the depth of the sea diminishes rapidly in its vicinity, Ramar Sethu has long been seen as a hindrance to efficient navigation. But the petitioners, relying on textual references from some of the many renditions of the legend of Ram, purport to see the origin of the undersea ridge in the historic crossing of the ocean by the armies of the good, as they embarked on their mission of conquering the ungodly lands where the forces of evil reigned.

In responding to this petition, the ASI did what any professional body that is true to its ethos, would do: it weighed up all the available evidence and found that the claim was unsustainable. The submission it made before the Supreme Court, acknowledged the deep significance of the legend of Ram in Indian life, but insisted that Ramar Setu was formed through natural processes of “tidal action and sedimentation”. Indeed, the body of epic literature on Ram, though vast, could not be deemed in any of its variants, to refer to any specific historical figure or pertain to any geographical area.

How these dispassionate and clinical observations gave rise to a political firestorm within a matter of hours, is partly about media functioning in a deeply polarised political milieu. And the government reaction, beginning with the suspension of two ASI officials, the deletion of certain paragraphs from an affidavit placed before the Supreme Court, and the commitment to reexamine the scope of the Sethusamudram project, is a case study in the politics of cowardice and infirm convictions.

The predictable disavowals of responsibility for the ASI affidavit followed and ministers vied zealously with each other to proclaim their faith in Ram, as both divinity and history. The Hindutva forces meanwhile, sharpened their knives to prepare for another assault on the foreign origins of the chairperson of the ruling coalition at the centre. And the mastermind of the Ayodhya campaign, L.K. Advani, seemed to recover his long-lost facility for turning a catchy slogan: to its long record of “pseudo-secularism”, he claimed, the Congress party had now added “sadism secularism”.

One constituent of the ruling coalition though, seemed disinclined to join the ostentatious public display of contrition. The DMK, which is in power in Tamil Nadu, has made a heavy investment of its political credibility in seeing the Sethusamudram project through to completion. And its feisty chief minister, M. Karunanidhi, reprised some of the iconoclastic rhetoric of his party’s formative years, in debunking the claims made on the Ramar Setu.

Retribution came immediately in the form of an attack on a near relative’s home in the city of Bangalore. As with the Ayodhya campaign, the Hindutva fanatics have proven once again that they can act with extreme belligerence and little thought for political niceties. And yet again, the supposedly secular political formations have shown that they have no stomach for a fight on matters that touch at the very core of India’s future as a multicultural democracy.