Situation Report: In Troubled Environment, Media in Kashmir Force Open Several Doors

Just around daybreak on May 30, 2009, two women, Niloufer Ahangar and her sister-in-law Asiya Jan, were found dead at different spots in a stream near the district town of Shopian, 52 kilometres from Srinagar, the summer capital of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). Tension gripped the area and the local administration promptly deployed security forces in strength in an effort to deter possible mass protests. As the numerous independent news channels in the Kashmir valley – the largest of the three cultural regions that make up the state of Jammu and Kashmir – stepped up their coverage, residents of Shopian came out on the streets, protesting what they were convinced, was a case of rape and murder, in which security agencies controlled by the Indian Government were directly culpable.

The local police put out a clumsily worded press release that day which announced the two deaths but recorded that “post-mortems conducted revealed no marks on the dead bodies including private parts”. This release was reportedly withdrawn quickly, though without an alternative explanation given for the deaths. No first information report (FIR), the first recording of a suspected crime, was filed. In other words, the document that formally records the beginning of an investigation was not in existence till well after the first signs of a suspected crime emerged.

On May 31, Greater Kashmir, the most widely circulated English-language newspaper in the valley, reported the incident in the following words: “Two young women were (yesterday) found dead in mysterious circumstances in South Kashmir’s Shopian district triggering massive protests as their family and local people alleged that the duo were raped and murdered by the armed forces. The authorities clamped curfew in the town which the protesters defied. Fifty persons, including several policemen, were injured in the clashes.”

As the issue caught fire, local news channels carried lengthy reports on May 31 involving accounts from the family members of the two women. Also featured was the official explanation, given by the Divisional Commissioner of Kashmir, the top official looking after civil administration in the Kashmir valley.

For various reasons, not unrelated to intrinsic credibility, the official narration on the deaths remained subdued all through this cycle of events. The news channels and print media meanwhile, reconstructed the sequence of events leading to the death of the two women, seemingly from interviews with local residents and family members. Media accounts of the tragedy – in a situation of active information denial by the local and state authorities – mutated rapidly over the first two days, while conforming to the broad template of an atrocity perpetrated by the security forces that have been deployed in strength in the valley.

Since the atrocity came to light when Kashmir’s newspapers had closed their editions for the day, the news emerged in print only the following day. As reported in Kashmir’s three largest circulated English-language dailies – Greater Kashmir, Rising Kashmir and the Kashmir Times – the two women had gone out to the family orchard to attend to work at 5pm on May 29. When they failed to return at a reasonable hour and with darkness setting in, Shakeel Ahmad, Niloufer’s husband, set off in search for them. From various passers-by and acquaintances, he gathered that the two women had been seen on their trudge back home, till at least the time they passed an armed patrol deployed in Shopian for night-time security.

Shakeel then made an official complaint at the local police station and secured the voluntary assistance of a police constable. Together with this policeman, he and Asiya’s brother, Zahoor Ahmad, set out on a search until 3am, when they retired for two hours. Shortly after resuming the search, they found the two women, dead with serious marks of injury on their necks and heads – one on the bank of the stream and the other about a kilometre downstream on a mound of gravel near the middle of the stream’s width.

A day afterwards, with state and local authorities seemingly caught flat-footed by an eruption of public anger, this basic account acquired a few embellishments. It is not clear where they came from, but the intervention by Kashmir’s political dissidents had an undoubted role. According to the newer version that came to be accepted as authentic in most of the Kashmir valley the following day, Niloufer and Asiya were working at the orchard till just before dark on May 29. As they were returning on foot, Niloufer phoned her husband, Shakeel Ahmad, to tell him that they would soon reach home, though there was a group of uniformed personnel of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) supposedly stalking them.

For the rest, the media version that emerged on day two did not seriously amend or contradict the account of the previous day. Zahoor Ahmad’s testimony was critical in the construction of events following the discovery of the women’s bodies. Reportedly, the bodies were first taken to the local medical centre for autopsy. Zahoor was, according to Kashmir media reports, present when a team of doctors after a first examination confirmed rape. However, the medical team was soon afterwards forced to abandon its task. The police reportedly made an urgent request that the bodies be handed over to the families, since they feared that with rape being certified, there would be a serious deterioration of the situation if the last rites for the deceased were not swiftly completed. However, as the media in Kashmir reported it, there was shortly afterwards a virtual diktat by the same policeman that the doctors performing the autopsy should omit all references to rape in their report. This exceptional request reportedly leaked out to the assembled crowd since the immediate family of the two women was present when it was made. The crowd that had gathered outside the medical centre erupted in anger, forcing the doctors to abandon their autopsy.

Subsequently, another team of doctors arrived from the nearby town of Pulwama to complete the procedures. Their conclusion, despite urgent police requests that a contrary conclusion be returned, was supposedly that the fact of rape was established, before death by strangulation. For an authoritative opinion, forensic samples gathered from the bodies were referred to the Forensic Sciences Laboratory under the Home Department of the J&K State Government.

The police continued to insist that the two bodies bore no scars of injury at the moment of their discovery – other than bruises that may have been inflicted by being dragged into a river and colliding against rocks. The claims in this narration indicated death by drowning.

Blaming the messenger

An IFJ representative who met with senior officials in the Kashmir Home Department on June 1 found them virtually unanimous in holding local news channels and print media responsible for the escalation in public tensions. The media, they said, had gone beyond reasonable limits of free reporting in reconstructing the Shopian deaths and had become part of the problem, with its disinclination to respect honoured lines of distinction between reporting and editorial comment.

To the question of how the police agencies and government authorities believed the women died, the answers were equivocal. One very senior official confessed ignorance, while insinuating that the women may have strayed away from their normal routine to fulfil some assignation. The implication was that the women may have ventured into enterprises that were inherently hazardous, involving motives and passions that could put them in danger.

As stated by J&K Chief Minister Omar Abdullah at a press conference on June 1, the media had been irresponsible in putting out the worst possible stories on the deaths. They had erred in avoiding the standard convention of using the term “alleged” to describe situations where there was no firm determination of fact.

As he said in the course of a press conference that was telecast in real time by Kashmir’s numerous news channels: “Different people give different interpretations. Some say they (the women) were raped and murdered. But no one is waiting for the factual report.”

Immediately after the press conference, Kashmir’s news channels switched to Syed Ali Shah Geelani, the leading voice of the valley’s constituency for Pakistan. It is a measure of the freedom that the Kashmir media has won for itself through the years of the insurgency that Geelani, who has been under house arrest since March 25, as the Indian general elections process got under way, was able to address almost the entire media corps of Srinagar with few impediments. Nothing in what he said could have been pleasant to the ears of the administration, since he rejected the chief minister’s offer of a judicial commission of inquiry into the Shopian deaths, ridiculed the notion of a “special investigation team” set up by local police - since as he put it no agency could be a credible investigator in a case in which it was the main accused - and called for a three-day general strike in Kashmir.

On June 2, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP), which has been a major player in electoral politics and was till recently part of the coalition that ruled the state, took out a demonstration in Srinagar, marching toward the principal town square in defiance of police efforts to restrain protests. The demonstrators, who included the party’s top leadership, announced their intent to march toward Shopian the next morning to challenge the state government and compel it to come out with the truth behind the killings. On the march back to their party office, the demonstrators swerved into a police station about halfway along the route, with the obvious intent of challenging the police.

Kashmir’s live news channels - after covering the demonstrations in real time - were soon reporting the arrest of the PDP leaders as fact. This led, in the eyes of the administration, to much avoidable tension. The police officials in charge were nonplussed, since they had in their own account, no intent to detain the demonstrators and indeed, no purpose other than controlling any possible violence. But the administration’s inability to clarify the status of the demonstrators yet again badly compromised it in the public eye. A senior official of the state government’s Home Department denounced the Kashmir news channels for their coverage and denied there were any arrests. However, by the evening a top police official was describing the status of the PDP leaders as one of “protective custody”.

At his June 1 press conference, the J&K chief minister had admitted that there was a trust deficit between the administration and the people of the state. This was not specific to his tenure, since it applied to much of the state’s recent history. He also suggested that the deficit was in part a creation of the media. This was a refrain that other state officials took up all through the days of the Shopian crisis.

Restraints on the media

In practical terms, this attitude resulted in a clumsy effort to restrain journalists from going about their jobs. On June 2, journalists seeking to travel to Shopian from Srinagar, individually and in groups, found it virtually impossible to get through. Invariably, it took them more than three hours to reach the town of Pulwama, which would usually be no more than an hour away. Once there, they were typically advised to go no further, as numerous roadblocks and security cordons had been set up.

From the point of view of Kashmir’s journalists, the events unfolding after the Shopian tragedy showed yet again that any ground they claim will have to be zealously defended. Official outrage against the media invariably boils over every time there is a serious political crisis in the state, involving mass unrest and protests. In the fraught atmosphere of Kashmir, the media has held up the administration to certain standards of public accountability. The state administration, at various key moments, has failed these tests and then made a scapegoat of the media.

In the case of the Shopian deaths, the “blame the media” attitude was misplaced. Under relentless public pressure, partly arising from wide coverage of the matter by Kashmir’s media, the state government finally relented and empowered a judicial commission of inquiry to determine the facts.

Information trickled out from state sources, through selective leaks rather than open media briefings or releases. On June 8, NDTV, a news channel that broadcasts nationally in Hindi and English, ostensibly got the full story of the post-mortems conducted on the women. On that day’s main news bulletin, the channel’s Srinagar correspondent reported that the post-mortems were inconclusive, since the doctors “could not complete their report because of the hostile atmosphere”. The doctors’ reports though did confirm “the presence of semen on both bodies”, though no “firm conclusion of murder” could be drawn. All that could be said was that the deaths occurred on account of “haemorrhage and neurogenic shock”.

Great outrage ensued. NDTV reporter Nasir Masoodi was specifically targeted by political groups then in the vanguard of the agitation over Shopian, which read into his news report an insinuation that the women had been engaged in consensual sex shortly before they died. Local activists demanded that Masoodi be ostracised and expelled from the Kashmir valley. Others cast aspersions on his intentions, his supposed proximity to the J&K chief minister and his entire family genealogy.

The schism that has always been present between Kashmir’s local media and the national media came glaringly into focus at this point. On June 10, a local web-based daily, Etalaat, called the NDTV report a “twisting” of facts which severely eroded the credibility of journalism in Kashmir. The paper also accused the channel of saying something that it had not said: “that the cause of death was brain haemarage (sic) caused due to excitement”.

The following day, The Hindu, one of India’s top English language dailies, published from 12 centres including the national capital of Delhi, reported Masoodi’s travails in the strongest possible language, characterising these as “a grim illustration of the culture of unreason generated by the leadership of ongoing protests against the still-unexplained deaths of two young women in southern Kashmir last month”. In its rendering of the NDTV report though, The Hindu was selective, omitting any mention of the reference to traces of semen. Masoodi was, in this account, suffering from public opprobrium in Kashmir merely for reporting that the autopsies had been “inconclusive” and had not definitively pointed to the mob-dictated consensus that rape had preceded the murders.

On every significant detail, the media reports at the local and national levels showed sharply divergent attitudes. For The Hindu, the location where the women’s bodies were found was a “fast-flowing mountain stream”. The implication was that death by drowning was a possibility. For local journalists reporting in the national press, it did not seem credible that the women could have been drowned in “ankle-deep water”. For local journalists reporting in the local press, the question did not seem worth spending time over, at all.

What emerged with great clarity through this episode was the “blame the messenger” attitude, seemingly shared across all shades of political opinion in Kashmir. Just as the state administration began its crisis response to Shopian by blaming the media for supposedly blowing up an issue “out of proportion”, political dissidents in Kashmir showed little hesitation in targeting a particular journalist for a news report that he had obviously filed on the basis of a non-attributable briefing by state government officials.

Ultimatums to ‘behave’

Meanwhile, the Directorate of Information in the state government issued notice to all local cable TV channels to suspend their news broadcasts. This diktat, issued on June 5, was partly diluted a month later, when the channels were allowed to air the 15 minutes of news they were permitted at the time of their registration. As the editors and owners of the channels put it, they were summoned early in June and given a virtual ultimatum by the authorities that they needed to “behave properly”. Several were told that their fiduciary relationship with the the secessionist political formation, the All-Party Hurriyat Conference, was well known, and that the dossiers available with state intelligence agencies provided ample grounds for their prosecution under the special security laws in force in Kashmir.

An account of the content that was broadcast by the Kashmir news channels through those days does not establish clear grounds for this extreme action against the media. The various news channels in Kashmir may indeed have only done what the authorities failed to do: take note of a serious crime and document the public concern that those responsible be brought to account.

When the judicial inquiry into the Shopian killings by Justice Muzaffar Jan submitted its report, there were special words of censure for the media. The entire report of the inquiry commission was published on the websites of Kashmir’s main newspapers on July 11. The judge identified several instances of misreporting by the media. In an indication yet again of the divergent perceptions of the national and the regional media, The Hindu on July 12 reported that “Justice Jan’s report highlights disturbing evidence that some journalists may have fabricated elements of their stories.”

In fairness, Justice Jan did not at any point accuse the media of “fabrication”. What he did rather, was to observe that there could be occasions when “unconfirmed and incorrect information is fed to print and electronic media to flare up (sic) the sentiments of the public”. The inaccuracies that were specifically identified by the judge included:

· The report that the two women had called their homes over mobile phone to say that they would soon reach back, though they were bothered by CRPF personnel stalking them. This report had been decisively disproved by all the evidence that the commission had heard, including from members of the victims’ family. The commission, with the assistance of police investigators seconded to it, examined phone records, and in none of these was there any evidence of a call made from a “phone that may have been in the victims’ possession”.
· One constable from the police station in Shopian came in for a great deal of attention from the media, for supposedly making several calls to his superiors when the first missing persons report came in, alerting them to the possibility of an explosive situation developing. However, the phone records that had been accessed by the inquiry found that the policeman concerned “had made only four calls during the day and no calls … from 10.00pm on 29th of May to 6.00am on 30th of May 2009”, i.e., between the times that the women were first reported missing and the discovery of their bodies.
· Reports that Neelofar was pregnant at the time of her death, again widely featured in the media, were found to be untrue;
· Her body moreover, showed no visible signs of external injury, contrary to reports in the media that she bore multiple wounds;
· Although “gang-rape” was widely reported, “no (such) evidence was found by the team of medical experts.
· Finally, and perhaps most damagingly, the media had reported that Asiya had a mark of “sindoor” (a deep vermilion coloured powder regarded as a mark of female chastity in Hindu custom) on her forehead, which was found during the inquiry, to be a bleeding wound. This said, the commission, was a “shameful” distortion of the truth.

Kashmir’s media came in for serious censure from counterpart organisations at the national level for real and perceived transgressions. As The Hindu reported, “For the most part, Justice Jan found, the media misrepresented forensic evidence.” There was also an allegation in The Hindu’s interpretation that the media may have been guilty of inciting “hatred by broadcasting communal propaganda”. The suggestion that one victim’s forehead had been smeared with sindoor “suggested that the rapists were Hindus” and the rape itself “a macabre religion-driven hate crime”.

The commission’s report also included a section on the immediate family of the dead women, rife with references that the public took to be an attempt at “character assassination”. Under pressure of public questioning, the judge was quick to disclaim responsibility, ascribing the entire section to the sole responsibility of the police official seconded to assist his investigations. The police insisted that the judge was fully in the know about the inclusion of this material.

The judge may have withdrawn his remarks on the media though there seem to be two opinions on this. His report however does not identify the specific source of the report on the smearing of vermilion on one of the victims’ foreheads. None of the three English-language newspapers with significant circulation in Kashmir – Greater Kashmir, Rising Kashmir and the Kashmir Times – carried anything suggesting this in the first reports of May 31. All three seem to have taken elaborate care to record that “rape and murder” was not established, but a belief of the people of Shopian, arising from the circumstances in which the women were found and the conduct of local authorities immediately afterward. All three newspapers gave front-page prominence to the official response, represented then by a senior minister in the state cabinet, Ali Mohammad Sagar, who held out the assurance that the crime would be solved within 48 hours.

It is not feasible to scour through all the reporting that emerged on the Shopian tragedy in the print and electronic media and to identify where journalistic irresponsibility may have fuelled public anger. Justice Muzaffar Jan, for his part, does not identify any particular news organisation for the many breaches that he has identified in the norms of fair reporting.

Even the reporting on the phone calls that the victims allegedly made was not something that the journalists “fabricated”, as the inquiring judge seemed to suggest and sections of the national media seemed firmly to infer. Rather, it was a claim that had been made in a public statement by a political personality, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, which the media should have been at liberty to report. The story that a victims’ forehead had been smeared with sindoor came similarly from PDP leader Mehbooba Mufti, a politician with a considerable following in the Kashmir valley. Viewed purely in terms of a politician’s obligation that he or she should assume responsibility for words uttered in public, whether in anger or in reason, the media was entitled to report these utterances. That the media did not cross-check this account with members of the victims’ families, or indeed with anybody who might have been in the know, is a professional lapse. But considering the severe impediments to free movement faced by journalists in Kashmir during those turbulent few days, it is one that can be understood.

The Shopian issue continued to smoulder for over a month-and-a-half. Mid-August, the Forensic Sciences Laboratory in Delhi reported that the DNA samples it had been sent – ostensibly of the two victims and the four policemen who had been named after the judicial inquiry as suspects in the destruction of evidence – were all fudged. Chief Minister Omar Abdullah tendered a public apology for his administration’s mishandling of the case and vowed to bring a superior authority – the police agency controlled by India’s Union Government, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) – into the case. At the time of writing, the bodies of the two victims had been exhumed under the supervision of the CBI, after the explicit consent of the families had been granted. What course the investigations will now take, is a matter of conjecture. But the key issue that emerges is that after advancing numerous alibis and seeking to make the media a scapegoat, the state administration finally had to admit that it had hit a wall in its inquiries. Presumably, if it had listened to what the media was reporting, rather than shrink into a defensive “blame the messenger” stance, things might have been different.

Resort to threats and curbs

Early in July, another violent death in Kashmir – this time in the capital city of Srinagar – sparked a further furious round of contention between the administration and the media community. Asrar Mushtaq Dar, 19, was went missing from his home in Srinagar on July 3. His body was found on July 8, bearing marks of a brutal end. Initially believed to be a custodial killing, Dar’s murder sparked protests and strikes across the valley, which was already tense after the killings of other college students and an alleged desecration of a nearby mosque by personnel of the security forces. When the police arrested an estranged friend of his on July 15 and procured his confession, the protests ended, along with speculation from separatists and politicians that Dar was killed in police custody.

In the eight days between the discovery of Dar’s body’s and the arrest of his one-time friend, journalists in Kashmir faced the brunt of police aggression. On July 8, Fayaz Bukhari, of NDTV, was verbally assaulted by the Director General of the J&K Police for publicising allegations of Dar’s parents that their son had disappeared in police custody. On July 10, Bukhari and Rasheed Rahi, of CNS news agency, received threatening calls from various police authorities. The police had already registered an FIR against Rahi for allegedly creating panic during the Shopian murders, and he had been assaulted in the Kothi Bagh police station in Srinagar just days before.

A statement from the Srinagar Journalists’ Association noted that the police threatened Bukhari, even though he had reported the protests in a professional and balanced manner. “His fault is that he aired both police and family versions of what led to Asrar’s mysterious death,” it argued. Meanwhile, the J&K Council for Human Rights urged the administration in Srinagar to respect the working independence of Kashmiri journalists at all costs. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) issued a statement reminding the state police that “reporting all sides of any matter is part of the professional commitment of journalists”, and reiterating that there could be “no justification in any event for threatening journalists with arrest under the special security laws applicable in Kashmir”.

It must be observed here that several among Kashmir’s journalistic community are privately willing to admit their unhappiness that a similar display of unity and resolve did not follow the threats that were made against NDTV reporter Nasir Masoodi by dissident political forces in Kashmir, just a few days before.

The restraints on local cable TV channels remain in force at this writing. Explaining the restrictions, the head of local administration in Srinagar said, “As per Section 6 of the Cable Act, the local cable TV operators are not allowed to telecast any news or current affairs programs … (T)he Cable Act of 1995 and Section 6 says ‘operators cannot telecast anything which promotes violence’ … They were unabatedly showing the scenes that were not in sync with the program code. By telecasting the footage of violence continuously on their channels, they were creating a law and order problem for the government and we had to restrict them. They were showing violence against state and paramilitary forces for hours. Government will not allow them to show whatever they want. After all it’s a friendly concession that we have given to them that they are showing news, which otherwise they are not entitled to show”.

Media pressured in tense environment

Since mid-2008, Kashmir has witnessed a degree of political turbulence that brought back memories of 1989, when mass demonstrations and a long threatened and dormant insurgency broke out. The year 2008 was especially crucial in that elections were scheduled to be held by October to the state legislative assembly, and these occasions invariably feed a tense contest between the Indian Government and parties that have accepted the Indian constitutional scheme on one side, opposed by the forces that believe the political status of the state is yet unsettled. Mass disturbances over the allotment of land in the Kashmir valley to a Hindu religious trust ensured that the elections could not be held as scheduled. When held in December, the polling was relatively peaceful, with a high voter turnout.

The high degree of suspicion with which journalists are viewed was however on ample display. On December 7, a group of journalists reporting on local perceptions on the election campaign were attacked by security personnel in the northern Kashmir town of Sopore. Six of the journalists suffered injuries, two seriously. They were reporting on a street demonstration involving a number of local residents, mostly youth, who had come out in support of the ongoing campaign to boycott the state-wide elections. The IFJ was informed that a senior police official on duty instructed his men to beat the media persons covering the demonstration, supposedly as a means of dispersing the protesters. Journalists at another northern Kashmir town, Baramulla, were told the same day, to leave the area since their presence was supposedly inciting the local people to engage in demonstrations and slogan-shouting.

These incidents illustrate some of the dimensions of governmental pressure on the media to suppress an alternative narrative on the elections in J&K. The media has had to balance this out against pressure from armed militant groups, which were determined to deny the electoral process all legitimacy.

Early in November 2008, the State Government sent an advisory to all media organisations within its jurisdiction, warning against the “publication of certain objectionable material”. Recipients were put on notice that they were to “refrain from publication of such objectionable and seditious material”. Failure to comply would result in “action” under rules which allowed for the withdrawal of official advertising from non-compliant media organisations. The warning came as the nominations process was opening for the assembly elections, amid calls by certain political elements for a boycott.

The IFJ, with the support of its affiliate organisations in India and the media community in Kashmir, issued an appeal to the State Government in J&K to de-link its advertisement placement policy from the editorial stance of particular newspapers.

Close to two decades since the militancy in Kashmir erupted, the media has gone through various phases in its fraught relationship with state agencies. In 1996, when elections were under way in J&K, the only means the media had to deal with the multiple pressures it faced was to shut down. In the 2002 electoral cycle, the media managed to function with relatively little pressure, since the contest for the first time seemed to offer the people of J&K choices that went beyond the parties officially sanctioned by Delhi.

The 2008 elections took place in the aftermath of prolonged and widespread civil disturbances, following the land allotment controversy. Beginning with mass protests in the valley, the political crisis was qualitatively transformed when retaliatory actions began in the Jammu region.

On August 9, police seized all copies of an Urdu-language daily, Etalaat, for allegedly carrying a report of a village being razed by a mob in the Jammu region. At the same time, state authorities warned staff at the English-language daily Rising Kashmir not to carry certain kinds of reports. The Jammu offices of another English-language daily, Greater Kashmir, were attacked by mobs. One of Kashmir’s best-known journalists, who went out into the Jammu region for a reporting assignment, recounted how he felt compelled then to travel under a false identity card, for fear of being attacked on grounds of his religious identity.

In this context, a conclave of Kashmir valley’s most senior journalists resolved on August 9 that the state authorities should adopt a policy of complete transparency with the media and the general public in Kashmir about all ongoing incidents of violence and lawlessness in both the Jammu region and the Kashmir valley.

However, the situation deteriorated seriously and a blanket curfew was imposed in the Kashmir valley on August 23, 2008. Newspapers in Srinagar failed to print for six consecutive days on account of severe restrictions on the movement of journalists and other media employees. Security agencies also compelled local cable news channels to suspend broadcasts or to air only entertainment programs.

Fifteen journalists and media workers were reported injured on August 24 in targeted attacks by personnel of the CRPF. The injured included journalists from India’s two main news agencies, the Press Trust of India and the United News of India, who had been trying to go to their workplaces.

The IFJ’s inquiries with journalists in Srinagar revealed that security forces persistently disregarded media accreditation cards and curfew passes, in some instances snatching and destroying them. Armed CRPF personnel were reportedly heard remarking that they had orders to prevent journalists in particular from proceeding to work. Despite State Government assurances that media accreditation cards would be considered good for passage through curfew-bound areas, security forces disregarded these credentials during that turbulent period.

Three English language newspapers in Srinagar – Greater Kashmir, Etalaat and Rising Kashmir – posted notices on their websites regretting their failure to publish because staff could not travel to work. The Urdu language press was also paralysed. News websites during this period were updated sporadically only because some employees were confined to their offices by the curfew imposed in the entire Kashmir region.

At the same time, in a cycle of attacks and retaliation, copies of the Daily Excelsior, published from the city of Jammu, were burnt in a locality of Srinagar, for its ostensible indifference to the protests in the Kashmir valley.

Managing conflicting perspectives

As in most areas of conflict, Kashmir also witnesses a tendency for contesting parties to deny others a voice, except where it suits their interest. A central question confronting the media community in Kashmir is whether the voice of ordinary people has been heard through the media or stifled, all through the years of conflict and insurgency.

One of the principal areas of concern is the relative concentration of the media community in the state’s two main cities, Jammu and Srinagar. In the Kashmir valley, journalists are concentrated in Srinagar. Among journalists in Kashmir there is recognition that the voice of the people, as reflected through the media, has been subdued to an extent. However, over the years the media community has evolved strategies of representing the local situation in a manner that has retained readers’ loyalty. This has involved multiple skills, such as evolving a particular vocabulary that will be understood by the media audience, following codes of attribution for news stories that reveal the layers of meaning that can be read into them, adopting a protocol of story placement and prioritisation that will minimise the pressures on the media from the contesting sides, and providing higher visibility to commentators who are sympathetic to the civil liberties discourse and enjoy credibility within the larger Indian media audience.

The main difficulty encountered by journalists in Kashmir is the overlapping of several narratives: the local, the national and the global. Linked to this is the narrative that emerges from Pakistan’s longstanding political intervention in Kashmir, and that country’s seemingly unending turbulence. These complicate matters further.

As in most other parts of India with a history of conflict, the state and the security agencies are a major source of news in Kashmir. Journalists are often under compulsion to report in accordance with the state’s views. This sets up a conflict in terms of ethical practice, since the inputs received from official sources are often at variance with the points of view that the press gathers from its interactions at the local level.

In reconciling these conflicts, the media community in Kashmir maintains the tough language of confrontation. But it has also had to accommodate the officially determined narrative and provide it with adequate space, though often with attributions clearly spelt out, so that the audience is clearly informed that certain stories are being featured only under duress. It has been a long and hard process of negotiation, but because of the high international visibility of the Kashmir issue and the greater degree of scrutiny that agencies in the state function under, the authorities have been compelled to yield ground. This ongoing process of negotiation does not however ensure the security of journalists. In many ways, the threats that journalists face from insurgent groups are more difficult to deal with, because it is quite often out of their hands to meet the stringent conditions on reporting that this side of the conflict imposes.

These tensions begin with the basic vocabulary of conflict reporting, in the choice between the use of “dispute” or “problem” and between “terrorist” or “militant”. Journalists’ dispatches are commonly edited, headlined and laid out on the page by colleagues in distant centres such as Jammu and New Delhi, who may not be aware of the daily compulsions faced by colleagues working on the ground.

The militancy imposes its own restrictions on journalists and the media, which often amount to censorship. News reports that inconvenience militant groups and, in particular, call into question the commitment of Pakistan to the cause, are severely restricted. When respected political leaders in Kashmir are reviled by state agencies on the other side of the Line of Control that divides India from Pakistan-controlled territory, or when training camps for militants are shut down under the pressure of coercive diplomacy by India and its western allies, media outlets in Kashmir come under pressure to ensure that public perceptions of the objectives of the militancy are not undermined. Commonly faced with the threat of lethal force for reporting in a manner that displeases one side or the other, journalists opt for self-censorship rather than truth-telling.

There are numerous cases of journalists being harassed and threatened by both sides in the conflict. However, the two deaths recorded in the state in recent months – of press photographer Ashok Sodhi on May 11 and news videographer Javed Ahmed Mir on August 23 last year – were the consequence of being caught in the crossfire in armed encounters.

Media growth and conditions

Despite recurrent threats, Kashmir’s media continues to grow. Two decades ago, there were an estimated five newspapers published from Jammu and Srinagar. Today, there are 11 English- and 46 Urdu-language dailies in Srinagar city alone which have been registered with the government and approved for placement of official advertising. If the number that have not been approved for ad placements are added, the total number of dailies in the Kashmir region would be 81. Local news and entertainment channels have sprouted, and except in situations of dire emergency, as recently seen, manage to evade the scrutiny of state security agencies. At the most recent count, there were six cable channels operating from Srinagar, all of which were in the business of broadcasting news when the situation demanded and when the authorities relaxed their vigil.

Representative of the vigorous media culture in evidence in Kashmir, a monthly magazine was launched in June 2009, with a cover story that was sharply critical of elections held under the Indian constitution as “disempowering” of Kashmiris. In addition, the inaugural issue also featured an investigative article on how some of Kashmir’s most influential political families had managed to buy up the title to the most prime real estate in the valley, in defiance of revenue rules.

Kashmir University’s Department of Mass Communications in Srinagar turns out more than 20 graduates each year. They in turn become eager job-seekers in a growing industry. However, wage scales and working conditions remain undefined for the most part, especially in Kashmir’s growing Urdu-language press.

Another feature of media growth in Kashmir has been a proliferation of “news agencies”. These are typically one-person operations in district towns, which serve as freelance news-gathering resources for newspapers in Srinagar. They are a means for newspapers to economise on news-gathering costs, since few can afford to retain journalists on their payroll outside the State’s two main cities. The provenance of the news stories emanating from these agencies though, is often problematic, though media persons in Kashmir have learnt to identify the interest groups using these as fronts to disseminate news and information..

The absence of salary structures and insurance cover for journalists and media workers is of serious concern. Additionally, certain areas, such as Uri and Tangdar, are out of bounds, even for journalists. Reporting about these places, which are close to the Line of Control where Indian armed forces face Pakistan’s in an uneasy, seemingly never-ending confrontation, is next to impossible. The news-agents who perform news gathering in these areas typically service numerous clients in Srinagar and work under conditions of extreme stress.

What to do?

There is an association of journalists in Kashmir but its membership is rather modest in relation to the large and growing community that it seeks to represent. Differences in perception on what a professional body can achieve in the circumstances that prevail in Kashmir account for the failure of the existing body to achieve wider enrolment. This issue could be dealt with through a wider dialogue among journalists and agreement over a charter that covers the various professional choices and contingencies they face. The body could then also engage the broader public, including state and non-state actors in Kashmir’s political landscape. Given the spirit of civic engagement that still remains strong in Kashmir despite two decades of insurgency, there is a possibility that a consensus could be achieved on non-coercive methods of grievance redressal in matters involving journalism. There are strong possibilities that journalists could evolve such norms and ensure their acceptance by media managements and Kashmir’s various political actors.

Issues of wages and working conditions also need to be addressed on a priority basis. The media in Kashmir has grown significantly in recent times, though unevenly. The differences in compensation that exist between the English and Urdu-language media need to be addressed. Common norms could be agreed on employment and contractual terms that eliminate some of the sense of discrimination that journalists in particular sectors may have. This would also serve to sustain the enthusiasm that the youth in Kashmir still evidently harbour for the profession of journalism.

Media, Modernity and the Minorities

Early September 2009, the Metropolitan Magistrate in the city of Ahmedabad, released his report on the killing of four suspected terrorists by the Gujarat police in June 2004. His finding was simply that the killing had been staged: that far from being an armed engagement in which the police personnel returned fire in legitimate self-defence, the four – who included a woman from Mumbai, Ishrat Jahan – had been shot dead in cold blood by the police and their bodies planted at what later was claimed as the scene of an “encounter”.

The Magistrate’s inquiry report set off reverberations across the country. Inevitably, it cast a long shadow over the one-year observance of a similar “encounter” in Batla House, a south-eastern suburb of Delhi in September 2008, in which two supposed terrorists – ostensibly responsible for a series of bombings in the city just six days prior – were killed. It also exposed a curious opportunism in the ruling party at the national level: while it was prepared to excoriate the Gujarat state government for its lawless and indiscriminate actions, it showed little willingness to concede the demand for a judicial inquiry into an event that happened under its own jurisdiction.

Counsels were divided within the Central Government on the Ishrat Jahan encounter. The Home Ministry was willing to stand by an intelligence input it had provided the Gujarat government, identifying the four persons killed in the encounter as suspected elements of the Lashkar-e-Toiba, a group with claims to involvement in various terrorist incidents. But the Law Ministry was seemingly in a hurry to condemn the Gujarat government and little inclined to entertain these reservations about shared culpability.

These uncomfortable schisms within the apparatus of governance prompted an editorial in the Indian Express, which criticised the “political opportunism” of the Central government and its “craven disregard for the sanctity of intelligence inputs”. Rather than play politics, it demanded that the Central government clarify the status of the four killed in Ahmedabad. Their possible intent to commit a terrorist act had no bearing on judging the fairness of the Gujarat police’s action in killing them in cold blood. Yet this knowledge was vital in preserving the processes of intelligence sharing that national security demanded.

These locutions show a surfeit of moral indignation, but little respect for realities. To refer to the “sanctity” of intelligence inputs is to speak of the agencies that gather and disseminate these as dispassionate, objective and neutral, devoid of any narrow, corporate interests. The intelligence agencies in other words, are the “universal class” in the Hegelian sense, without interests other than representing the general public. This would seem a rather fanciful description for anybody who is familiar with the bureaucratic jealousies, the turf battles and the evasions of responsibility that are everyday occurrences in these agencies.


“Sting” operations as an incitement to crime

Indeed, as reported in The Hindu, the story of the encounter was complex and multi-layered, involving a possible “sting” operation by the intelligence agencies to infiltrate suspected terror rings and identify individuals with the inclination to commit terrorist acts. It is now common knowledge that a sting operation is a form of entrapment. It has some legal value only if it can be proved that the target of the operation had a prior intent to commit a crime. Unless the predisposition exists, the executor of the sting operation could be held liable for instigating a crime.

This is a reality that two journalists who carried out a sting to expose the “cash for questions” scandal in the Indian Parliament recently found, when they were charged under the Prevention of Corruption Act (PCA) for abetment of an offence. There is little question over the fact that the journalists’ efforts yielded information that was in the public interest. Also, their targets had clear prior intent, to commit the offence that earned them expulsion from Parliament and indictment under the PCA. But the charging of the two journalists who carried out the sting under the same law has justifiably been condemned by all bodies concerned with civil liberties and the right to free speech.

If similar criteria are applied to the intelligence agencies, it could be asked if they have, in ensnaring participants in a plot to murder high political functionaries, really been guilty of instigating a crime. When grievances are rife and perceptions of the involvement of these functionaries in crimes against humanity are widespread, an overture of this nature from the intelligence agencies is likely – sooner rather than later – to attract some willing accomplice. In the process, the agency would have overstepped the limits of its mandate -- which is to preempt a crime -- and become an active participant in crime. From there to the criminal “encounter” is just a short step.

There are in this respect, very fine judgments of intent and responsibility to be made, and a host of delicate issues to be negotiated. Given the obsessive preoccupation over “jihadi terrorism” within the media, few of these questions are likely to be posed, far less debated in public. The intelligence and security agencies face no imminent threat that they will be subject to oversight and public scrutiny. Counter-terror operations will continue in an environment of impunity. The agencies engaged in these will continue to overstep the limits imposed by law. And as seen over the last two decades, counter-terror will be transformed into its own form of terror, fuelling an escalating cycle of indiscriminate violence. And a religious minority with ample grounds for grievance, will continue facing the brunt of the stigma that comes from being identified uniquely and solely as the source of terrorism.


Looking back to Ayodhya

The immediate precursor to this particular phase in the stigmatisation of India’s main religious minority, is quite easily forgotten. Indeed, memories of the fevered days of the Ayodhya campaign, which was perhaps the single greatest national trauma in the six-decade career of independent India, have begun to fade. But it is important to understand certain continuities between Ayodhya and the current concerns over “jihadi terrorism”, to appreciate how the media produces and reproduces images of a minority that somehow stands apart from what may be called a “national mainstream”.

Right through the Ayodhya campaign, the burden of the charge levelled against the Muslim community was that it was intent on maintaining its separate and “more equal” status, that it had little regard for the primordial identity and the cultural ethos that made the Indian nation what it is. Ayodhya left a trail of blood across the country before climaxing one infamous day in December 1992. And as the reverberations from that day of shame slowly abated, Ayodhya was banished discretely into the background, by precisely those political formations that had been in the vanguard of the campaign and found that it could not be milked for further political advantage. Yet, the issue has continued to simmer, with the potential to set off periodic eruptions of political insanity and communal violence.

The unrequited crimes of Ayodhya sowed a bitter harvest of hatred and resentment across the country. Extraordinary laws were deployed to deal not with the crimes, but with the sporadic, inchoate and rather disorganised efforts by those who were the victims of these crimes, to make their voices heard and in some cases, strike back. In the process a new stereotype of the religious minority began to take shape – as a community prone to random and insensate acts of violence, born out of its own inability to adapt and adjust to the opportunities that modernity opens up. Well before “terrorism” became a global concern, India’s Muslims were already being disproportionately targeted under the draconian Terrorism and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (or TADA) -- introduced in the early-1980s to combat violence in Punjab, but soon enough transformed into a tool for the persecution of the religious minority.

Following the September 11, 2001 attacks in the U.S., and the inauguration of the sole superpower’s “global war on terror”, the stigma cast on the community mutated rapidly. From being in denial of what made India unique as a nation, they were now deemed to be in disregard – for cultural and historical reasons -- of the civic compact appropriate to the citizens of a rapidly emerging superpower. Hence, their proclivity to engage in terrorism, wanton acts of destruction targeted at the vital nodes of civic life in urban India. Needless to say, the State, that sat back in blissful indifference through the horrific violence of the Ayodhya days, has shown extreme alacrity in applying the most draconian laws against the supposed protagonists of the new phase of terrorism.

Manufacturing consent

The coercion of a minority cannot take place without the consent of the majority, in some cases willing, in most cases forced. And that consent is created through the media. Two days after the deadly September 13, 2008 bombings that struck busy commercial areas in Delhi, an editorial in the country’s largest circulated English daily pronounced a rather sombre assessment, while also sounding a call to action: “We are at war. The string of blasts (in Delhi) .. which killed 30 people and injured 90 is the fourth attack by terrorists on a major Indian city in the span of four months”. The people of India, the newspaper advised, should get used to the idea of surrendering some of the liberties they had become accustomed to. This was a necessary, short-term sacrifice, since the enemy they faced was an even greater threat to human freedom.

This was not the first time that Indians had been fed the narrative that they would necessarily have to give up a few of their civic freedoms in order to defeat a mortal threat to all civilisational values. Few paused to question how real the freedoms they enjoyed were and whether these were shared and experienced equally by all social classes and strata.

The atmosphere of impunity and overwrought nationalism was best represented after a so-called “encounter” in Delhi in November 2002, in which two alleged terrorists – supposedly of Pakistani origin – were shot dead. Though the sequence of events as narrated by the Delhi police challenged the meanest intelligence, the uniformed personnel who carried out the operation remained in high standing in the force. Civil rights advocates and activists who demanded greater transparency and accountability, were ticked off in no uncertain terms by the political powers of the time; the Union Minister for Law describing them rather famously, as the “overground face” of the terrorist underground.

Thus it was that soon after the Delhi blasts of September 2008, amid a mass of confusing and speculative stories in the media, the Special Cell of the Delhi Police, raided a fourth-floor flat in a tenement in Batla House, neighbouring the campus of the Jamia Millia Islamia university. The “encounter”, elements of which were covered in real time by the electronic media, resulted in the killing of two youths, Bashir alias Atif, aged in his mid-twenties and Sajid, aged in his mid-teens. Another person of twenty and odd years, Mohammad Saif, was taken captive. And to square the account, since the supposed intelligence report that led to the police raid had identified five known terrorists hiding out, the Delhi Police admitted with great regret, that two of their quarries had escaped their cordon.

Beyond this summation of results from the dramatic swoop on terrorism, a tale emerged of the Batla House operation that verged on unimaginative fantasy. And the media continued to peddle the fantasy because it was consistent with the reigning narrative of “jihadi terrorism”.

As reported in one of Delhi’s newspapers, the team of the Delhi Police “Special Cell”, numbering about 60 – all draped in bullet proof vests – entered the “fifth-floor flat” at 10:15 that morning, accompanied by commandos of the National Security Guard. In the vanguard of this expedition into the unknown was Inspector Mohan Chand Sharma of the Special Cell, who went knocking on all the doors in the tenement. As the report puts it: “Around 10:30 a.m., the door to (flat number) L-18 opened and Sharma was shot thrice”. A gun-battle ensued in which the Delhi Police fired 22 rounds to register two kills and one capture. Eight rounds in all were fired by the opposing side.

The encounter at Batla House in the construction that soon afterwards emerged from the Delhi police, rendered the closure that citizens had long been waiting for, to the cycle of violence that began with serial bomb attacks in Jaipur on May 13 and Ahmedabad on July 26. The September 13 atrocity in Delhi was in this construction, the third in a sequence executed by the same dastardly plotters.

This claim was embroidered and amplified by the media, which however, seemed to have little inclination to look at the troubling inconsistencies in the narrative. At the centre of the narrative was the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), a once obscure body of uncertain provenance, vaguely believed to be affiliated to the Jamaat-e-Islami-e-Hind, banned in 2001 and except for a brief interlude following the change of government at the Centre, an outlaw organisation ever since. As a series of fine investigative articles in the weekly magazine Tehalka documented through July 2008, every notification renewing the ban on the organisation for the maximum period allowed under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, had been a virtual copy of the earlier one. No additional evidence, in other words, had been produced to support the ban, other than the material in the original notification of 2001.


Inconsistencies feed public scepticism

When Safdar Nagori, the SIMI general secretary, was arrested in March 2008, a security analyst well-known for his feverishly speculative commentary, observed that “SIMI cadre have been involved in almost every Islamist terror strike since (2000), ranging from the Mumbai serial bombings of 2003 and 2006 to attacks in Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Delhi”.

Despite the seeming certainty behind this pronouncement, obviously inspired by driblets of information leaked by the intelligence agencies, a tribunal constituted to review the extension of the ban, held on August 5, 2008, that there simply was no evidence connecting SIMI with terrorism. The Central Government on that occasion, secured a face-saving stay from the Supreme Court on the application of this ruling. Media comment was muted and the public, still under the pall of fear spread by the Jaipur and Ahmedabad bombings, remained indifferent to finer points of legality and fairness.

The pursuit of the terrorists picked up momentum with the mid-August arrest of Abu Bashar Qasmi, a 25-year old cleric, snatched from his home in Azamgarh district of Uttar Pradesh by four men who came visiting on the pretext of exploring a matrimonial alliance. Taken immediately to Gujarat, he was identified by the state police as the man behind July’s Ahmedabad attacks. He also reportedly, confessed to an undefined role in the Jaipur bombing. The media meanwhile, had tied in the name of Abrar Ali, a medical student in Jaipur into the plot, with fanciful epithets such as “doctor of terror” being freely floated. Yet, within five days of his detention, the Rajasthan police felt compelled to release Ali since there was no evidence against him.

On August 24, the Rajasthan police announced the arrest of Shahbaz Husain, a computer software expert who ran a small business in Lucknow. As the Lucknow-based civil rights campaigner Sandeep Pandey recalls, the house that Shahbaz shares with his parents, was raided by about 50 personnel of the Anti-Terrorism Squad of Rajasthan Police. Apart from impounding a computer, the raiding party took away all the literature they could find, as also some currency and a cheque made out in favour of Shahbaz’s business. The next day, the same team revisited and compelled Shahbaz’s father, Abdul Moid, to sign two blank sheets of paper.

Pandey visited the local police station the following day to ask what possible use the blank sheets of paper would be put to, only to be unceremoniously turned out. Press reports that he later saw, blazoned the claim of the Rajasthan Police that sophisticated electronic chips and circuits of bombs resembling those used in Surat had been found in Shahbaz’s premises.

With Shahbaz’s firm implication in terrorism, an elaborate chain of linkages began to be drawn between the Jaipur and Ahmedabad blasts. Nagori, Shahbaz and Qasmi – the media reported -- were all reportedly, members of a secretive cell that underwent explosives training in camps as far afield as Kerala and the jungles of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. Brooding over the whole conspiracy was the presence of Mohammad Altaf Subhan -- later identified as Abdul Subhan Quereshi, and variously described by the alternative names, Taufeeq and Tauqeer, by which he was allegedly known in jihadi circles -- a computer hardware specialist missing from his home in Mumbai’s distant suburb of Mira Road, since 2006.

Subhan is supposed to have been the technical brain behind the ingeniously designed bombs and the e-mail messages -- replete with graphics and intense Islamic religious symbolism -- sent out celebrating each terrorist strike in the heart of urban India. When Delhi was gutted by three simultaneous bombings on September 13, 2008, Subhan – or “Tauqeer” which had emerged as the consensus name within the media -- was the chant on every investigating agency’s lips. Working its way through the chain that connected Subhan with Qasmi and Shahbaz, the Delhi police quickly identified the other links in the terrorism plot, all from Uttar Pradesh: Abdul Rajib, Mujib, Alamjed Afridi and Qayamuddin. Acting in concert with their Gujarat counterparts, the Delhi police secured access to Abu Bashar Qasmi for a round of interrogation.

When the Delhi Police began their operation in Batla House on September 19, the media were convinced that “Tauqeer”, the ultimate trophy of the terrorist hunt was being sought and would soon be eliminated. When the dust had settled, the story took a dramatic twist: it was no longer Tauqeer, but Atif – one of the two youths killed that day – who was the terrorist mastermind.

A month later, a senior policeman from Maharashtra’s anti-terrorist squad could claim, with complete insouciance, that Tauqeer was a fiction, a creation indeed, of the media.


Media creations and police disavowals

This bland disavowal of the fiction that the police had been instrumental in creating and feeding to a credulous media, followed the Maharashtra police’s own rewriting of the script, just a few days after the Batla House killings. With the arrest of five in Mumbai on September 24, the Nagori-Qasmi-Shahbaz chain of culpability, was history. The Maharashtra Police now definitively identified 31-year old Sadiq Sheikh, a resident of the Cheetah Camp slum sprawl near the city’s north-eastern suburb of Chembur, as the inspiration and the mentor for all the terrorist actions of the preceding months. Four others were arrested alongside, including a computer software expert, an alleged car thief, and supposed specialists in bomb making and in rigging the circuitry for explosive devices.

The media needless to say, has repaid the stinging rebuke that it was administered in the Tauqeer matter, with even greater loyalty, living up ever more abjectly to its accustomed role as a lapdog of the police. If a public that is united and well-informed is the key requirement for a successful struggle against terrorism, the media clearly is doing its very best to ensure the opposite circumstances. And despite the many contradictions in the official narrative on terrorism and its protagonists, the police agencies have successfully managed to evade any serious scrutiny by the media, and derivatively, the public.

“Made for media” investigations, rather than building confidence that the authorities have a proper grasp over the problem of terrorism, are creating a public hysteria and betraying the cause of justice. But because the overarching narrative – of “jihadi terrorism”, of a community that is averse to modernity and resentful of the positive changes that liberalisation and globalisation have brought – is consistent with the hegemonic narrative created by the U.S.-led “war on terror”, it passes muster with the media.

Terrorism has been a frequent visitor to Indian shores over the last two decades and more. And each visitation has been an instantaneous blow that has stunned and staggered. It is conceivable that in the aftermath, the media and the public may be disoriented, unable to attain their bearings and regain focus on basics. To give the media the benefit of the doubt, the pattern of misreporting on terrorism could be attributed to this. And with one news cycle being typically isolated from another, and news-reporters living for the moment on account of the institutional modes of functioning of the media, there is very little opportunity for media persons to connect the dots, to iron out the anomalies and to demand answers for all the tough questions that tend naturally to arise.

There is no denying though, that there are other forces in play which skew the portrayal of the religious minorities in a manner that meshes with a priori notions among the media audience. There are certain social exclusions and conditional inclusions, that are unstated premises of media functioning. It is not necessary to go any further than the news coverage and editorial comment on the Rajinder Sachar committee report, submitted in 2006, on the status of India’s Muslims, to grasp the processes through which this works.


Sachar report and after

The presentation of the Sachar report in Parliament coincided with an outbreak of violence in Maharashtra over the vandalisation of a statue of B.R. Ambedkar in Uttar Pradesh. The country’s largest English-language newspaper, the Times of India (ToI), confined the Sachar report to the news digest section, occupying about 3 column-centimetres on the first page. Considerably more attention was devoted to the violence of the Dalit protests in Maharashtra, with the picture of a train that had been set afire between Mumbai and Pune getting marquee space on the front page.

Both the Sachar committee and the Dalit protests earned significant space in the inner pages of the ToI that day, with the latter enjoying by far the greater prominence. What the ToI chose to put front and centre in its coverage of Sachar was the government’s uncertain resolve about introducing reservations in education and employment for the minorities. Thus the issue of the institutionalised discrimination suffered by the Muslim minority was transformed in the ToI discourse into a concern over keeping India’s enclaves of modernity secure from the ingress of the underprivileged.

There could be various alibis offered for the relative inattention with which the report was received by the media. It could well be argued that the social and educational handicaps of the Muslim community are not exactly a news flash. But then, neither was the choice of the Indian cricket team a news flash. In a situation that involves a choice between two supposedly jaded news items such as these, the tie-breaking vote belongs to the advertiser. And unlike the Indian cricket team, the minorities in India do not enjoy the patronage of a corporate sponsor with a generous advertising budget.

Those familiar with the dynamics of competition in the newspaper business, might ascribe the relative neglect of the Sachar committee by the ToI to another factor. The Indian Express (IE), a rival newspaper, even if much more limited in reach, had as the media jargon has it, “scooped” the main findings of the Sachar committee well over a month before its report was formally presented. The IE coverage appeared in a compact series of articles on the front page, through the last week of October 2006.

IE newspaper began this series of articles with an editorial flagging the danger that the committee’s findings could be used as a basis to argue for reservations for the religious minority in employment opportunities. It chose to pronounce its final editorial verdict on the issue by urging the political leadership to acknowledge the undeniable verity, that economic growth was the way out of social backwardness. In effect, the IE succeeded in submerging the complexities of the Sachar committee’s findings in a simplistic nostrum much favoured in today’s neo-liberal climate.

While the IE was constructing this narrative of discrimination on its news pages and editorially paying obeisance to the virtues of globalisation, a quite different picture of willing thraldom to superstition and stubborn refusal to adopt basic norms of modernity, was being assembled in another quarter of the print media. Between October 24 and 29, the ToI carried no fewer than 6 articles – both news reports and comments, of which two were on the front-page and one on the editorial page – on the case of Imrana, the young woman who had been raped by her father-in-law and stigmatised by the Muslim clergy for her temerity in seeking to bring the criminal to account.

On October 25, the ToI ran a story on Imrana on page one, right alongside another one on the confusion within the Muslim community about when precisely the Eid festivities were to be observed. This latter story led off with a description of the subjectivity underlying the precise date on which the most significant of Muslim religious observances is celebrated and the tension that this set up with modern notions of scientific objectivity.

The Imrana story and the accompanying article on Eid enjoyed roughly the same priority in terms of space allocation and placement. But these stories were topped off by a large photograph, occupying marquee space on the front page, which showed the touring Pakistani cricket team offering Eid prayers at their port of call in Chandigarh. The picture was rather boldly captioned “Champions of the faith?”. With this rather mystifying juxtaposition of stories and visuals, the ToI managed within about a third of the space on its front page, to reinforce several stereotypes about the Muslim community.

Yet the ToI could not remain oblivious to the news emerging from another quarter on the findings of the Sachar report. On November 4, 2006, it ran an editorial giving its take on the main findings. It began by deprecating the policy of reservations as a “blunt instrument” that failed to reach the core of the problem. Instead, other forms of “positive discrimination” could be thought of, including building “quality schools” and “providing healthcare” in “backward districts” that have high settlement densities of Muslims, dalits or tribals. Government contracts again, could be preferentially allocated to these disadvantaged social groups, to “facilitate their participation in the modern economy”. In turn, the ToI chose to place a special onus on the “Muslim leadership” to “encourage the community to take to modern education in larger numbers”.

On November 8, 2006, the ToI carried an article on Islamic schools or madarsas on its editorial page. Titled “Beyond Terror”, the article argued that the debate on these institutions had been confined too long within the issue of terrorism. Because the Muslim community was under pressure in a time of global concern, it had responded with a spirited defence of these institutions and the learning they imparted. This attitude in turn simply evaded the reality that the madarsas have a tendency to “promote a narrow, insular mindset”. And as long as security concerns remained the principal impulse behind the debate, there was little chance that matters of immense import to the “welfare of millions of children studying in madarsas” would be addressed.

Though not formally released at the time this article was published, many of the key findings of the Sachar committee were in the public domain by then. On the issue of madarsas, the committee’s conclusions were fairly clear: fewer than 4 percent of Muslim children in the school-going age group attended these institutions; at an all-India level, their number is not the “millions” as the commentator in the ToI suggested, but just marginally over one million, of which three-quarters were in the primary stage. Far from being an institution of choice, madarsas were “often the last recourse of Muslims especially those who lack the economic resources to bear the costs of schooling, or households located in areas where ‘mainstream’ educational institutions are inaccessible”. And for all the odium heaped on them, madarsas had very often been found to “have indeed provided schooling to Muslim children where the State (had) failed them”.

Granted, the commentator in the ToI could not possibly have reflected the complexity of these findings which were at that time unavailable in the public domain. But in his sweeping denunciation of madarsas he seemed intent to not let a few inconvenient facts stand between him and a compelling narrative of social backwardness by choice among the Muslim community.

It was mid-November by the time the ToI returned on its news pages, to the theme of the Sachar committee. On November 17, it reported that the committee’s recommendations had put the ruling coalition, the United Progressive Alliance, in a “fix”. The following day, it frontpaged a report arguing that the committee’s recommendation that the Muslim share in several vital sectors be increased, would in effect “give rise to the demand for a community quota leading to a fullscale political confrontation”. Having begun its coverage of the Sachar report by viewing it through the narrow frame of the reservations issue, the ToI undoubtedly saw no reason to change course when more details of its findings were available.

To look at the media today is to consider a quantitative explosion unaccompanied by qualitative change for the better. The explosion of news channels has not led to a diversity of choices for audiences – rather every channel seems locked into an imitative mode of programming – which consistently seeks out the lowest common denominator of audience tastes.

In its approach to religious sectarianism, the media may well have ironed out some of the rough edges visible in the early-1990s. That was the time that the Muslim minority was deemed to bear responsibility for the numerous injuries that had been inflicted on India’s original cultural identity in times distant past. Today, the same minority is portrayed as an impediment to the glittering promises of modernity that lie ahead for India.

It was this predisposition to view an entire religious community as unsuited to the onerous tasks and responsibilities of national progress, that was ramped up several notches in the context of the “war on terror”. Investigations into the recent terrorist attacks in India, with all the media spectacle they afford, have done little else than fuel public hysteria. The process of the law has been wilfully shredded while a case is made for broader powers of detention and investigation for the police. As contradictions in the official narrative on terrorism and its protagonists become manifest, public confidence will inevitably be eroded. And if a united and well-informed people are the only guarantee of public security, then the heavy-handed approach in evidence today seems designed to open the door towards greater terror. Tragically, the media which could have administered the necessary antidotes to the growing culture of impunity in the law enforcement agencies, seems intent on playing along.

Afghanistan's election and its uncertain aftermath

President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan has reason to take much for granted. It cannot be easy redeeming a country that has been identified as the antithesis of all that western civilisation stands for. And anybody who bears that onerous mantle, can claim a certain latitude. He may occasionally stray and cause his patrons some concern. But his long-term promise is that he is the only bulwark against chaos.

The elections to the national presidency and the provincial councils on August 20 were intended to mark the consecration of Hamid Karzai as Afghanistan’s leader. Though there were murmurs of dissent and disgruntlement from all parts of the country, he was still expected to enjoy a solid advantage over all his rivals. Rather than vote their tribe or ethnicity, most of Afghanistan’s electorate was expected to endorse Karzai’s leadership as a gesture of faith in the transition that he symbolised.

The outcome in fact has been the reverse. Never since the most recent western intervention in Afghanistan began eight years ago, has the prospect of catastrophic failure been so real. And even if the election results, which are yet to be formally declared, seem to indicate a decisive victory for Karzai, his erstwhile patrons in the west are deeply alarmed and his opponents within seething in rage.

Despite formidable odds, Afghanistan’s electoral process could have passed the test of fairness had Karzai and his allies not willed otherwise. Over the year or more preceding the elections, Afghanistan’s small but vigorous independent media was reporting a conspicuous lack of popular interest in the voter registration process. Closer to the election day, there were open allegations of fraud in the issue of voter identity cards. Surprisingly though, on election day itself, all the overt suggestions were that polling had concluded smoothly, with little violence and for the most part, fairly. Early expectations were upbeat as U.S. President Barack Obama certified the whole process a resounding success.

It turned out though, that the U.S. had a particular script in mind, that Karzai was unwilling to play by. The U.S. believed that Karzai did not have the popular backing to win a clear majority of the popular vote in the first round and would be forced into a run-off with his nearest opponent. That in its perception, would compel him to work out broader alliances and to cement the foundations of future cooperation with Afghanistan’s more credible political figures.

Karzai though was in a hurry, obviously believing that he had done all that was needed to win in the first round. The difficulty was that he had in the process, brought onto his slate, allies that the west found thoroughly unacceptable. And as evidence pours in before the country’s Electoral Complaints Commission, it is becoming increasingly obvious that he took ample recourse to the safeguard of stuffing the ballot, to ensure that he was not inconvenienced by a run-off election.

The new Afghanistan of Hamid Karzai looks very much like the old. Back in business are all the warlords and tribal chieftains who could not quite stop their violent bickering after the collapse of the Soviet-backed regime in 1992 and triggered a devastating civil war that made the advent of the Taliban in 1996 seem – for a while at least – like a form of deliverance. The only person missing from the star-cast is the Pashtun leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose close associates though, have regained places of honour in Afghanistan’s politics.

One key difference now is that the west is committed to continuing engagement, unlike in the early-1990s, when they absent-mindedly subcontracted the Afghanistan enterprise to Pakistan, once having achieved their main objective of defeating Soviet strategic designs. But it is increasingly becoming painfully evident that the western focus and strategy are all wrong in terms of their fundamentals.

According to the annual report of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) on the protection of civilians in armed conflict, civilian deaths in 2008 rose almost 40 percent over the previous year. Of the total number of 2,118 civilian casualties recorded in the country, 55 percent were attributed to anti-government forces or the “bad” side and 39 percent to the “good” side represented by pro-government forces. The remaining six percent could not be clearly attributed.

UNAMA statistics have their critics and are believed to err on the side of the “good”. Even so, the figures that are available show that in terms of concern for civilian life, the good side is not scoring very much higher than the bad. And further note should be taken of the fact that air-strikes by the U.S. and allied forces account for 68 percent of all civilian casualties caused by pro-government forces.

The “action at a distance” strategy preferred by the western powers – with its use of smart bombs, unmanned drones and all those other eye-catching technological gizmos -- has the attraction of minimising military casualties on their side. But contrary to its early billing as the most precise and painless of warfare techniques, it is proving a blunt instrument, exacting a heavy toll of innocent civilian life in Afghanistan. And each air-strike that kills indiscriminately, is a moral victory for the insurgents that the west is engaged in mortal combat with.

With the inauguration of the Obama administration, the U.S. signalled a change in strategy, represented by the deployment of many more troops. The consequences in terms of plain statistics are clear: over the first six months of this year, civilian deaths in Afghanistan rose 24 percent over the same period of 2008. But the culpability of the good side in these was markedly lower. Just 30 percent of 1,000 civilian casualties were attributable to their actions over this period, representing for the first time since 2007, a significant moral advantage for the “good” over the “bad”. Yet, two-thirds of the casualties inflicted by pro-government forces were on account of air-strikes, signifying that their preferred technique still remained of dubious value.

Unsurprisingly, coalition military casualties have increased since this strategy came into play. The toll in July 2009 alone was estimated at 76, a quarter of the total number killed over 2008. A deeper U.S. engagement on the ground is considered vital to shoring up the flagging commitment of western allies to the continuing operations in Afghanistan. But with higher military casualties being virtually foretold, its inevitable political consequence would be the final splintering of an already fragile domestic consensus for war.

Jaswant Singh and the Complexities of the US-India Engagement

Review Article (From January 2005)

Strobe Talbott, Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb, Penguin, Viking, pp 268, Rs395.

A “transformation” is the term of art applied to the outcome of diplomatic processes between India and the U.S. over the last few years. That indeed was the theme of a brochure issued by the U.S. embassy in India late in the summer of 2004. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell introduced the publication with references to the pivotal roles played by Atal Behari Vajpayee as Prime Minister of India, and U.S. President George Bush, in effecting the change. Quoting Vajpayee with evident approval, Powell in effect endorsed the sentiment that the U.S. and India were “natural allies” in a range of commitments: “political freedom, tolerance, representative government and the fight against terrorism”.

In the official narration, the makeover in relations is a testament to the magical alchemy of the nuclear bomb. The irony of a country blasting its way into the diplomatic affections of the U.S., is not lost on the authors of the brochure. And in their excitement at this quirk of geopolitics, they mix metaphors with complete abandon: “When India blasted its way out of nuclear ambiguity in May of 1998, it would have taken more than an optimist to predict that in a matter of a few years, the chain reaction from the Pokhran tests would reach critical mass with the United States and India signing a landmark agreement to work together in the fields of civilian nuclear technology, space, high-tech trade and missile defence”.

In an interesting rendition of the nuclear fission process, a chain reaction comes after a blast, and in turn, is followed by a critical mass. If the tortured metaphor were to be retained for the sake of argument, then Strobe Talbott – the former Time magazine journalist who served as Deputy Secretary of State in U.S. President Bill Clinton’s second term -- was among the principal catalysts of the chain reaction.

In recording his experiences of engagement with India, Talbott admits that the outcome does him less credit than his principal interlocutor, Jaswant Singh, who served in the initial phase of the dialogue as Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, before assuming the more apposite portfolio of Minister for External Affairs. “As one of the architects of the Indian strategy”, Talbott writes, “Jaswant (Singh) came closer to achieving his objective …. than I did to achieving mine”. Talbott though, does not grudge India this seeming triumph. Indeed, the story he narrates is by his own admission, “an exception to (American diplomat) Dean Acheson’s maxim that the author of a memorandum of conversation never comes out second best”.

Talbott’s book deals with some of the most consequential discussions that Indian foreign policy has ever engaged in. And it is an eloquent comment on the spirit in which this bargain was conducted, that the first reasonably complete account should come from an American source.

Jaswant (as Jaswant Singh will be referred to here, not because of any social intimacy, but merely because the alternative of “Singh” is altogether too contrived in the Indian context) enters the strategic dialogue about a month prior to the Pokhran tests. As an indication of his keenness to improve relations with India, Clinton in April 1998 sent his ambassador to the United Nations, Bill Richardson, for a set of preliminary meetings with the newly installed Vajpayee government. Every top functionary Richardson met seemed eager to turn the page on past bitterness. Feeling his way around an unfamiliar milieu, Richardson sought to probe for the hidden significance of the campaign promise Vajpayee and his colleagues in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had held out, that the nuclear weapon would be inducted at an early stage into the Indian arsenal. The responses he got were in Talbott’s account, uniformly vague. But in a private conversation with India’s Defence Minister George Fernandes, the U.S. envoy did seek -- and obtain -- a firm clarification that a nuclear test was not imminent.

Outside the official cycle of his engagements in Delhi though, Richardson received an unscheduled visitor. Jaswant went alone to this meeting, with none of the supporting cast that is customary at formal meetings. And his message was simple. If there was anything the Clinton administration needed to convey in confidence to India, then he would serve as the conduit. He could bring any proposal to the attention of the highest political quarters. That would be a way of protecting any innovation in diplomatic thinking from entrenched habits of bureaucratic thought.

This was April 1998 and in Talbott’s reconstruction, Jaswant was one among a handful of functionaries within the Vajpayee government who knew that the Pokhran tests were imminent. Talbott attaches little significance to Jaswant’s formal designation then as Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission. With understandable naivete, he infers from the shared prefix with Jaswant’s designation, that they were equals in protocol terms. Eight months into the Vajpayee ministry’s tenure, when Jaswant was moved to the post of External Affairs Minister, Talbott spent not a little time worrying that protocol might force him to opt out of the dialogue in favour of the U.S. Secretary of State. This ignorance is understandable, but not Jaswant’s pretended magnanimity in seemingly waiving protocol to continue his dialogue with Talbott.

It may be immaterial from Talbott’s point of view that the shift from Deputy Chairman to Minister is merely a lateral movement in terms of status. The issue indeed, was not of protocol but of functionality. It was only eight months into the Vajpayee government’s tenure, that Jaswant was formally put in charge of an area of government functioning where he was till then an interloper. The formal jurisdiction of the Planning Commission does not reach beyond the territorial boundaries of India. In this sense, Jaswant functioned on the mandate handed down by Prime Minister Vajpayee, who held the external affairs portfolio in the months following the Pokhran tests. Yet, this still does not explain why he particularly, was thought suitable for the assignment, when others with functional authority and expertise, would have been more appropriate.

The answer is to be found partly in philosophical belief and temperament, and partly in the public persona of the man. Like several of his peers within the Vajpayee ministry, Jaswant held the traditional precepts of Indian foreign policy – non-alignment and the dual commitments to peace and disarmament – in a fair amount of disdain. But he was different, in that he brought a gift for florid speech to the bargaining table.

Talbott pays grudging tribute to this quality and acknowledges its utility in diplomatic exchanges. His interlocutor, Talbott notes, was given to a “slightly orotund, yet elegant” mode of articulation, which took “some unpacking” to get to the bottom of. He also had a proclivity for using “double negatives” that did not quite add up to a positive. And for all that, Jaswant’s idiom served the vital function of deflecting public scrutiny for as long as it took. Talbott celebrates the many joint press conferences at which they “dodged and weaved to avoid providing much information about what was going on” between them “in private”. And he acknowledges his interlocutor’s formidable powers of mystification, for throwing the media off course with statements that “had no discernible meaning”. Journalists he records, “dutifully scribbled down” Jaswant’s “oracular utterances”, “never asking for clarification or amplification”. They then “reported them to their readers as though they provided insight into what was going on in the talks”.

But with all the effort, what was the objective? Jaswant was at pains to ensure that the process was never described as a “negotiation”, since the word conveyed a suggestion of shifting from “basic and immutable national positions”. But when asked how he intended to sustain the process and where he sought to take it, Jaswant served up a cryptic folk aphorism from Rajasthan: “Don’t ask the way to a village if you don’t want to get there”.

Once he had “unpacked” the term, Talbott realised the difficulties inherent in the journey his interlocutor was proposing. The village Jaswant sought did not exist on the American map. It was a destination in his Indian partner’s imagination, where the “estrangement” of the cold war would be left behind and a new global order forged, to replace the polarities of that phase of human history with a hierarchy of power and civilisational virtues. Among other things, this involved, in Jaswant’s reckoning, U.S. recognition of India as a “major power with an internationally recognised right to bear arms”. Though not unsympathetic, Talbott was realistic. Unfortunately, he says, the world of the U.S. was circumscribed by the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which accorded only five States the right to bear nuclear arms.

With all these constraints, Talbott was keen to take the dialogue forward with the single objective of securing India’s signature on the Comprehensive (Nuclear) Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). This was the central plank of the Clinton administration’s agenda to secure a global nuclear security regime that would consolidate on the gains of the indefinite extension of the NPT. U.S. good faith in sponsoring the CTBT was never evident, since it remained grossly in breach of its commitment under article VI of the NPT, to work “in good faith” towards global nuclear disarmament. But global opinion by near consensus, had accepted that the CTBT, though deeply flawed and limited as a contribution to disarmament, could be a modest and incremental step in that direction.

As early as September 1998 in Talbott’s account, Jaswant held out an assurance that India could sign. Vajpayee himself spoke of engaging with key global interlocutors and bringing India in line with the main stipulations of the comprehensive test ban. An initial deadline laid down for “a decision regarding adherence” was September 1999. In U.S. calculations, accession to the CTBT was to be the first of several steps that India would need to take, to acquire membership in the anti-proliferation fraternity. If this entailed the possession of nuclear weapons – and the U.S. came grudgingly to accept that it would – then it was keen on knowing the number that would be inducted and the state of their deployment.

A key moment arrived with the August 1998 bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa. A fortnight later, the U.S. launched simultaneous air strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan, aimed ostensibly at Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network. Arriving in Washington just a few days after, Jaswant was not about to let the didactic value of the moment pass. At the fourth sitting in their “dialogue”, Talbott was treated to a “history lesson” that he had heard before, though not with the same “intensity and detail”. U.S. policy towards Pakistan, said Jaswant, had been premised upon “a grave error about its very nature”. Pakistan had never been a “cohesive nation or a viable state and never would be” -- it was “an artificial construct, structured out of hate, a stepchild of Uttar Pradesh”.

Talbott disagreed strongly and refused to countenance the Indian suggestion that Pakistan should be declared an outcaste among civilised nations. But Jaswant’s disquisitions were having an impact for reasons unrelated to his persuasive gifts. Among the many occurrences on the wings, influencing the events that Talbott recounts, was the progressive U.S. disillusionment with Pakistan. The U.S. had initially been favourably disposed towards the sponsorship of the Taliban in Afghanistan, eagerly sending its oil industry representatives to that country to negotiate pipeline transit rights from the Central Asian fields. But a few months into Clinton’s second term, a serious policy breakdown was signaled by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who chose a visit to a refugee camp in Pakistan, to denounce the Taliban and reject its claims to being a legitimate government in all of Afghanistan. Albright’s hosts in Pakistan were livid, and prominent editorialists commented – with no reference to the linkages – that the U.S. was shifting its favours towards India.

It was a moment that the United Front government then could not quite capitalise on. The BJP a few months later, sought not merely to build on the moment, but to smuggle in the tacit recognition of India as a nuclear weapons state into the bargain. Significantly, Jaswant also made a pointed reference, during his history tutorial with Talbott in Washington, of two Republican senators from the U.S. who had visited India in the preceding weeks, and “publicly gloated” about their ability to checkmate the Clinton administration on a variety of issues, including the ratification of the CTBT.

At a meeting in November 1998 in Rome, Jaswant continued with the tutorial, supplementing his lessons on Pakistan as the “avatar of evil” with instruction on the benign notion of governance that the BJP’s reigning philosophy of “Hindutva” embodied. Talbott was left unconvinced, particularly since attacks on religious minorities in India, had escalated sharply in the preceding weeks. The more Jaswant “elaborated on his thesis”, he records: “the more resistant to it I became”. Indeed, he found in the narration he was given, “either a denial of ugly facts… or a resort to casuistry to blur their ugliness and call into question the accuracy of published reports”.

April 1999, Vajpayee was voted out of office by Parliament and the U.S. itself was shifting its attention to other geostrategic threats, notably the civil war in the Balkans. With India in election mode, Jaswant had an alibi for deferring delivery on his promise to sign the CTBT. And the Pakistan military – operating by all accounts in defiance of civilian control -- was surreptitiously sending troops across the Line-of-Control in the Kargil sector, provoking a conflict with India that took a heavy toll in lives and destroyed whatever diplomatic credibility Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharief had.

By October, Vajpayee had won a renewed mandate in national elections, and was ironically enough, ceremonially sworn in the same day that the civilian government in Pakistan was swept aside by a military coup, and the CTBT, denied even the dignity of a simple majority at the moment of its death, was overwhelmingly rejected by the U.S. Senate. It was a triple conjunction that miraculously unburdened Jaswant of the commitments he had made. The circumstances were ripe for a quite unequivocal U.S. tilt in favour of India, signaled formally in Clinton’s visit to the subcontinent in March 2000, when he spent six days in India and fewer hours in Pakistan.

Jaswant worked hard to have even this token concession to Pakistani sensitivities revoked. When that failed, Talbott records him as explaining that India had little objection to the U.S. seeking to retrieve Pakistan from the morass it had sunk into, though the effort had to be based on “realism” rather than “self-delusion”.

And yet for all the triumphs that came his way during the formal dialogue process, Jaswant had to perform feats of diplomatic calisthenics outside the reach of Talbott’s narrative to achieve whatever he did. He visited Israel in July 2000, and standing decades of commitment to the Palestinian cause on its head, decried the prolonged alienation from Israel as an outcome of “vote-bank” politics pandering to Muslim sentiment in India. In May 2001, with Clinton and his relatively benign vision of globalisation supplanted by the decidedly more menacing worldview of the second Bush, Jaswant reacted to an announcement on U.S. plans to deploy a “national missile defence” system with exuberant applause. A world which was grappling with scarcely concealed reservations with the prospect of a new upward spiral in the nuclear arms race, looked on in bemusement as India publicly tore up its long-standing commitment to the cause of disarmament.

The reward has come in the shape of a waiver of all hard questions on India’s nuclear intentions. But the U.S. has resolutely refused to deliver on the other side of the bargain that India has sought. Quite to the contrary, the U.S. has, far from banishing Pakistan from its attention, raised it to the highest status among its strategic partners. This has been a galling experience for Jaswant and the BJP, though they have concealed their bitterness reasonably well. Talbott’s book does not dwell upon the role the U.S. played in pushing India and Pakistan towards peace negotiations, first in February 1999, then in July 2001 and again in January 2004. But he does, without intending to, shed a rather unflattering light on the sincerity with which the Vajpayee government embarked upon each of these initiatives. It is much too early to say whether the peace process will be invested with a greater sense of purpose with Jaswant out of the way. But two of the principal premises of his stewardship of foreign policy – that the U.S. will decisively shift towards India in settling neighbourhood disputes, or at the very least, favour India’s claims as the regional power with presumptive rights to dictate terms to Pakistan – have been rather rudely exploded. Going beyond his quite transparent and authentic sense of esteem for Jaswant, this seems finally to be the upshot of Talbott’s narration.

(ENDS)

Identity, Nationalism and the Recovery of the Secular

Despite all the energy that has been spent in its dissection, “identity” remains an elusive entity – both as concept and practice. Historians argue unendingly over when the notion became an ingredient in political mobilisation, and political scientists wonder about its unique power to move masses to great acts of destruction.

The power of “identity” has waxed and waned over much of modern history and its current trajectory cannot be accurately predicted. In the last quarter-century though, “identity” has been an important, even an incendiary presence in world politics. It may be currently on low ebb, but all the portents suggest that “identity” could soon again rear its head with renewed malevolence.

As an aspect of life as really lived, “identity” is heavily infused with affect and emotion, and not easily addressed through rational processes of thought. “Who am I?” is a question that every thinking adult asks himself at least once in a lifetime. Perhaps because it involves the quest for an anchorage that will outlast finite individuals, the search for “identity” often remains unfulfilled.

Apart from the finitude of human existence, every individual has to cope with the constant awareness that the putative god of his beliefs has created only a limited expanse on planet earth for his habitation. The primary question of identity – “who am I?” – is typically conjoined with another one: “where do I belong?”

This is a quest in part for a physical milieu, a territorial expanse on god’s finite earth, where an individual can assert a rightful claim, mandated by his creator. And to establish this divinely ordained right, he also has to be sure that all who share his living space, share and honour his sense of identity too. “Where do I belong?” is a question not merely about the physical milieu, but also about the social network within the individual subsists.

Nationality provides an answer, contingent and deeply flawed, to both these deep questions of “identity”. And in the manner that it has been constructed, nationhood also comes with the affirmation of a strong territorial claim. A “nation” is in other words, the exclusive territorial domain of persons who share an “identity”, however that may be constructed.

The fusion of identity – understood as a primordial sense of belonging together -- with an exclusive territoriality conforms to the construction of the “nation” as a quasi-religious ideal, rather than a living entity continually being created and recreated by breathing, struggling and finite humans, trying their best to live in solidarity and mutual understanding. People who emerged out of colonialism in the latter half of the 20th century and constituted themselves into “nations”, swore an implicit oath, that they would allow no room for the identity battles that had blighted Europe’s pioneer nations for a century-and-a-half, and led to two so-called “world wars”. Both world wars were fought to resolve issues of identity and territorial conquest and involved deaths in the millions. But despite their appellation, neither involved the willing consent of more than a minuscule fraction of the world’s population.

Nationalism had already revealed its face as predatory imperialism by the time India began its career as an independent nation. The threat that newly independent nations faced as decolonization gained momentum following World War II, was of an inward collapse of nationalism and its transformation into a doctrine of exclusion and differential rights in highly diverse and plural societies. Despite the traumas of partition though, India began its life in freedom with the explicit resolve that it would not allow the baneful amalgam of identity and territoriality to blight the existence of its citizens.

That pledge has of course been repeatedly breached, though never with quite the same tragic and potentially fateful repercussions, as in the Ayodhya moment. For close to a decade, “Ayodhya” ceased being a physical location and a locus of popular faith. It became instead, a metaphor for all that could possibly go wrong in a post-colonial State, all that could threaten the coexistence of cultural diversities on the basis of a civic compact.

This book deals with that fevered phase of Indian politics from a variety of perspectives. It brings together the contributions of distinguished scholars, who joined the war of ideas that Ayodhya spawned. Written in the heat of battle, these contributions succeeded in opening up new vistas and enlarging the strategic options available to those committed to defeating the menace that stalked the land with little challenge from mainstream politics.

Ayodhya was the moment in independent India’s history, when a fresh identity was actively sought for a nation troubled by a history of colonialism and a bloody partition. Alongside the ghosts of history yet to be laid to rest, immediate worries from the sphere of politics were emerging. The early promise of the “developmental State”, which assured all citizens of equal opportunity and a chance for material advancement in the space of a generation or two, had been belied. Though there had been some efforts at retrieving State authority after a profound crisis in the mid-1960s, the conceit that the activist State could improve the lot of the poor by directing the use of resources from a high perch, was done in by an elite rebellion and a succession of economic crises through the 1970s.

The “Ayodhya” moment in Indian history begins in the early-1980s and the fever mounts and convulses the entire body politic in the years that follow, arriving at a final catharsis late in 1992.

Ayodhya then becomes a simmering menace, a background issue in every subsequent electoral contest, consigned there by deliberate design. After enacting its tableau of destruction, the political party that had made the issue its own, was following a different tack. It took an electoral debacle in 1993, almost exactly coinciding with the first anniversary of the demolition at Ayodhya, to cause this shift of strategy. That was when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which had grown enormously in national vote share all through the years of Ayodhya, grasped the galling reality, that the “identity” it was seeking to graft onto the diverse people who called themselves “Indians”, repelled just as surely as it attracted. The numerical balance, far from working to the advantage of the party that was invoking the faith of a putative “majority”, was rapidly turning adverse to its electoral calculations.

Ideological purity in the quest of the new Indian identity, defined as “Hindutva”, was swiftly abandoned. The BJP now determined that it was better served by an active courtship of regional parties, which shared none of its belief in a unitary cultural inheritance that the whole nation must necessarily subscribe to. This was a compulsion born out of electoral politics, since the BJP’s appeal outside the Hindi-speaking region remained limited, despite the effort to construct a broader coalition of social forces on the strength of its seemingly irresistible appeal to “Hindutva”.

Despite the restraints imposed by the policy of cohabitation, the BJP did try on various occasions to push through its unilateral agenda on Ayodhya. The most fateful such attempt was in the early months of 2002, when a campaign was crafted in the time-worn pattern, of mobilising the faithful in diverse parts of the country and getting them to converge at Ayodhya to claim the hallowed spot as the inalienable patrimony of the Hindu faith. The fervour was conspicuously lacking this time around, despite the deliberate effort to fuse the mobilisation with the growing backlash against “Islamic terrorism”, which began with the attacks on U.S. territory on September 11, 2001.

This involved importing the terms, the concepts and the entire discourse of the global superpower into the native idiom, making the so-called “war on terror” one of India’s central concerns. The years since the Ayodhya demolition had been a period of awakening for the Indian middle-class, now freshly aware of its undeniable destiny as a serious player on the world arena. Primordial bonds of Hindutva were momentarily forgotten, as the main elite preoccupation shifted to the negotiation of honourable terms of entry into global councils, if not as an accredited superpower, then at least as a reliable understudy to one. This required, in place of the primordial bonds that were actively sought just years before, a common commitment to civic virtue as the source of unity.

It was this civic pretence of the globalising Indian elite which collapsed with the last great atrocity of the Ayodhya campaign through March 2002, as rioters ruled the streets in Gujarat, killing, maiming and destroying at will, as the agencies of the State sat back in mute witness and officials tasked with enforcing the law partook gleefully in the pogrom.

Many of the essays in this volume originated as lectures in the months and years after the demolition that shook the nation. They continued as public interventions by concerned scholars – historians, economists and political scientists – who saw the Ayodhya campaign as a betrayal of all the values, scientific norms, and social commitments they had lived by. Some of them, written in the days after the Gujarat pogrom, bear reference to this greatest threat to the idea of secular India since the Ayodhya demolition.

From a scholarly point of view, these essays represent significant new explorations into the social and political processes through which “identity” is crafted. The term “Hindu” which seems so obvious in terms of its application to the religious majority in India today, is in reality, an identity that has evolved over time through the use of multiple symbols and campaigns.

Among the many challenges that secularism as a principle and a practice in India faced, was its supposed indifference to native cultural idioms. Ayodhya was nothing if not a campaign of outrageous inversions and logical effrontery. Thus, the BJP, which in every other party’s estimation, embodied the menace of communalism, was in its own self-image, a resolute votary of secularism -- only it purported to be the true and unspoiled face of secularism, unlike all other parties, which had chosen the term as a façade to disguise their hostility to the unique cultural inheritance of the Indian nation.

Secularism against primordial culture – that was the first of the challenges that the principle has to face. The received notion that social identities are as old as history has a powerful influence. Scholarly works that draw attention – as the historian E.J. Hobsbawm has done -- to the “shifting, fuzzy and ambiguous” nature of the criteria utilised in identity fixation, and lay bare the “artefact, invention and social engineering” that underlie the crystallisation of modern political identities, invariably elicit a reaction of outrage or disbelief. Certain claims of identity are considered so intrinsic to social existence, that any interrogation of their foundations would be dismissed without so much as a pretence at reasoned argument. It is this seemingly axiomatic, self-evident character of the “Hindu” appellation, and its apparent centrality to the existence of the vast majority in India, that contributed in great measure to the ideological appeal of the BJP.

The essays here draw out how the term “Hindu” referred for long, to an ascriptive identity and was used purely as a territorial marker, devoid of significant religious or cultural content. The constitution of Hinduism as a religion indeed, takes place in medieval times though arguably on an incomplete basis. The “Hindu community” is projected as a political entity, a viable collective with identifiable and shared beliefs and customs, only in modern times. This was one among many strands of thinking that propelled political mobilisation during India’s freedom struggle. As during medieval times, this assertion of a new religious orthodoxy, led to multiple social fissures and vigorous movements of resistance against the totalising and hegemonising tendencies it laid bare.

The hegemonic identity that Hindutva sought to craft was itself suggestive of origins in an ill-remembered chapter of 20th century history. And in its successful portrayal of a religious minority -- which had suffered systematised and institutionalised discrimination since independence -- as the beneficiary of undue official favour, the Hindutva political formations successfully emulated another feature of the brutal fascist interlude in Europe.

Despite the lapse of many years since they were written, the relevance of these essays remains undiminished, since the political pathogens that engendered that phase of crisis and struggle have not been banished. They have only mutated and acquired another form.

The battle to reconquer the birthplace of a founding hero of the Hindu faith lost its resonance once the offending monument that had supposedly usurped the hallowed space was effaced. A last effort to rekindle the fervour, ended in the bloodbath of Gujarat in 2002, and though this has seemingly brought the BJP local electoral advantages that it continues to milk till today, it suffered an intolerable degree of public odium both globally and on the broader political arena.

Hindutva political formations have ever since the days of Ayodhya, had wavering electoral fortunes, now winning, now losing. But in no national election has it won substantially more than a quarter of the votes cast nationwide. With all the alliances it has struck, mostly based on political convenience, its total share of the national vote has never remotely approached 40 percent. It assumed power in 1998 after an election which every other political formation did its best to lose. Unable to manage an alliance of diverse parties with nothing other than political convenience to bind them, it went into another mid-term electoral contest in just over a year. By then it had rearranged its strategic alliances and also created a nationwide mood of triumphalism after a successful military campaign against the efforts by Pakistan to rearrange the political topography of Jammu and Kashmir.

Towards the end of its first full term in national authority, the party of incendiary identity politics faced an opposition in disarray and a public mood of seeming euphoria -- orchestrated by a compliant corporate media -- over India’s successful debut in world councils as an emerging superpower. That cocky confidence was seriously dented through the election campaign and decisively demolished when the votes were counted. The next nation-wide general elections brought the Hindutva party an even more severe drubbing. On a superficial viewing, it might seem that the circumstances in national politics are greatly more settled, that identity politics has lost its currency and been subsumed under a new civic compact.

A nation, above all, has to be cohesive and to provide all its inhabitants with an equal sense of belonging. The moment an older social formation, such as an imperial colony, transforms itself into a “nation”, there is an implicit recognition that rules of status and hierarchy no longer apply. In their place, will come a new definition of how people associate among themselves, purely on the basis of a shared sense of identifying themselves with the highest ideals of nationhood.

Early constructions of the “nation” in the wake of the French Revolution, saw it as a solidarity of individuals based on an identity of political beliefs. But an alternative construct of the “nation” as an identity of primordial belonging was never far from the surface. Indeed, this construction has often overwhelmed the more generous understanding based on belief and commitment.

Yet, primordialism is never quite primordial; and traditions are rarely traditional. Identities are invented, as are traditions. The past is never dead. Indeed, as famously stated by an American novelist, it is not even past. It is constantly being created and recreated in the light of contemporary concerns. And identities are invented and reinvented as different social groups contend for power and influence in the modern political arena.

A nation remains viable so long as it is able to negotiate a viable civic compact between its diverse groups. But economic adversity invariably has a tendency to strain the best crafted civic compact. And the most enlightened civic compact that a modern liberal-democratic state has been able to put in place, is fundamentally premised upon the principle of respecting and safeguarding “cultural autonomy”. In periods of expanding economic opportunity, “identity” questions remain subdued since there is seemingly room for everybody to seek his place in the sun. “Identity” in fact remains unimportant, since the nation looks capable of credibly delivering on its promises of equality and opportunity.

In junctures of shrinking economic opportunity, “identity” is often offered by national states as an alternative anchorage for citizens to cling onto, when the promise of equality seems evasive. But this ceases to be a credible assurance, when “identity” is the basis for inequality – as with the religious minorities in India. National states often prove unable to influence deeper processes at work within civil society and to correct deep-seated patterns of discrimination. And majoritarian political groups can whip up their own brand of political turmoil by portraying “cultural autonomy” as an effort by privileged minorities to stay outside the mainstream of the nation while partaking of all its benefits.

An excavation of historical facts that strips away layers of ideological debris, would perhaps reveal that the basic concept of “cultural nationalism”, evolved in a negative dialectic with the popular, revolutionary striving for the democratic reform of the state. Lenin warned prior to the First World War, that the doctrine of “national cultural autonomy” was a distraction from the real task of consistently reforming the state in a democratic fashion – at least to the limits possible in a capitalist order – since that alone could ensure peace among the nationalities. Lenin used the term “nationalities” in a manner that was closely akin to ethnic groups, but his intent was clear. If the “State” was to be preserved against the fissiparous potentialities of “national” identities, it would need to be reformed in a thoroughly democratic fashion.

War and the willing participation in it of the putatively socialist parties of Europe – with the distinguished exception of the Bolsheviks – meant that “cultural nationalism” prevailed over the revolutionary democratic impulse. This is a history though, that does not begin with the First World War. Its antecedents could well be traced back a century and more.

Since it commenced its career as a full-blown idea in India, the politics of identity has mutated rapidly, from a state of bipolar opposition between two religious communities to one of proliferating multipolarity. It seemed for a while that the effort to knit together a country of diverse faiths, plural identities and syncretist traditions under the banner of Hindutva, would yield rich political dividends. But for those attuned to underlying social realities, it may have been apparent that these gains would be ephemeral.

The unitary “nation”, which both the Congress and the BJP promoted as a governing notion in their distinctive ways, has today become a wild congeries of conflicting interests. And the “State” which was supposed to embody the “nation” and its spirit, stands reduced to a shell. The coercive power of the State continues to play a vital role in confining the scope of dissent within clearly defined bounds, but there are large zones of the public domain where the State has ceded its monopoly of legitimate violence to locally dominant group. For the vast majority of the people of India, the apparatus of the State today is an alien presence, and the procedures of governance which were supposed to establish a framework of equal opportunity, are seen to serve no purpose other than the defence of privilege.

Hindutva, in its effort to construct a hegemonic identity for all Indians, unleashed a multitude of little identities. Conceptually, political thinking has responded to the proliferation of identities by devising the doctrine of casteism, which is considered quite distinct of communalism. Part of the rationale for this conceptual separation is the immediacy of recent political experience. The menace of Hindutva mobilisation, conveniently represented under the shorthand description of “mandir politics” began to acquire its most menacing proportions towards the end of the 1980s. Launched in full force in 1990, the ideology of “Mandal politics” which asserted quite a different viewpoint – that Hinduism, far from providing a common basis for action to retrieve the spirit of nationalism, was in fact a dagger in the soul of democracy – blunted the appeal of the mandir campaign.

The opposition seemed for a while to be fundamental – a Mandal versus mandir polarisation was undeniably one of the principal forces driving politics in the first half of the current decade. But the Mandal proponents turned out to be a fractious crew, yielding ground steadily to the advocates of the mandir.

The lower caste coalitions that cut at the foundations of Hindutva have proven all too prone to fission. And many of the breakaway groups, which remain anchored in specific configurations of caste loyalties in their pockets of influence, have made common cause with the BJP in a supposed quest of good governance.

When the polarisation was at its sharpest between Mandal and mandir, there may have been a case for viewing casteism and communalism as analogous principles that by a fortuitous twist, happened to be espoused by opposing social groups. Mandal seemed for a while to provide an opportunity for a broad-ranging coalition of the underprivileged castes that would infuse a new momentum into participative democracy. But in subsequent years, it has fallen away in another variety of sectarianism, that is easily portrayed as different only in degree rather than kind from communalism.

Yet there are basic differences. As a marker of social differentiation, the religious divide pervades all of national life, whereas a caste grouping, construed strictly in the sense of the endogamous grouping or the jati is a localised phenomenon. A caste conflict in one region remains confined there – it may have repercussions in other parts of the linguistic culture area, but scarcely beyond. Inter-religious strife in any one region, in contrast, strikes up malignant resonances in others. The experience of the Ayodhya campaign was all about how the violence against the religious minority in one part of the country could engender a contagion effect, spreading rapidly to others. But Gujarat in 2002 was about how a horrific pogrom remained a localised affair, engendering if anything, only a deep revulsion and a determination to prevent similar violence in other parts of the country.

Yet fundamental asymmetries in the use of State power to redress injustices remain. The Indian State has for too long tolerated the application of violence by agents in civil society against the minorities and those excluded from the high table of the “nation”. This has led to the widespread belief that the “nation” understood in terms of a civic compact, belongs to a relatively few, that its civic institutions do not work for the protection and benefit of the powerless.

The “global war on terror” has brought new threats. In the days of Ayodhya, ethnic and religious groups suffered discrimination and exclusion since they were held guilty of disregarding the primordial identity that made the Indian nation what it is. The stigma cast on these groups is now different in kind: from being in denial of what made India unique as a nation, they are now deemed to be in disregard – for cultural and historical reasons -- of the civic compact appropriate to the citizens of a rapidly emerging superpower. Hence, their proclivity to engage in terrorism, wanton acts of destruction targeted at the vital nodes of civic life in urban India. Needless to say, the State, that sat back in blissful indifference through the horrific violence of the Ayodhya days, is now known to apply the most draconian laws against terrorism, with little regard for due process.

A necessary basis for upholding the secular character of the State would be its ability to preserve its monopoly of legitimate violence in matters concerning the relations between religious communities, and of course, castes.
Secularism celebrates diversity, pluralism and tolerance, while nationalism as it has been handed down since its origins in the French Revolution, privileges homogeneity, conformance and solidarity against all who fail to meet the definitions of belonging.

Secularism in India is sui generis -- it is not a principle that has been institutionalised in politics but one that has to be fought for, a principle that is in continuous process of definition and refinement. It is a fight in which all resources have to be summoned from history, politics and the social sciences. The essays in this volume seek in some degree to do precisely that. They may not exhaust all the creative responses that came forth from the secular ranks to the challenge of communal politics, but they present a very representative cross-section. And though crafted in response to the very specific challenges that were posed over the last two decades, they will remain valuable resources for the struggles that lie ahead.

Getting Real About Peace with Pakistan

Perhaps it is the environment of the Non-Aligned Summit that induces mood swings of great amplitude in India’s top political leadership. Perhaps there are other forces at work, quietly and unobtrusively, compelling shifts of strategy and direction in the engagement between India and her troubled western neighbour.
When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari in Yekaterinburg, Russia, on the sidelines of a regional summit in June, he made little effort to be polite. All he had to talk to Pakistan about, was the use of her soil by militant groups engaged in terrorist violence against India, he said, to great consternation, verging on outrage in Pakistan over his suspension of normal diplomatic niceties.
Though expectations were low, the Indian Prime Minister managed to turn his mid-July meeting with his Pakistani counterpart on the sidelines of the Non-Aligned Summit in Egypt, into a virtual feast of concord. Landing back in India, Manmohan Singh has found the glow fading rapidly, as he has confronted outraged cries of betrayal by the main opposition party and a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm within his own fold.
The art of diplomacy is built in part, on turning a delicate phrase to obscure the true intentions of both sides. But it has taken a special clumsiness in language to make a good outcome appear a near disaster. A key formulation of the Joint Statement that came out of the Prime Ministerial meeting at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Shaikh, is the supposed removal of the linkage between the “Composite Dialogue” the two nations have been engaged in, and their own battles against terrorism.
The “Composite Dialogue” has had a fitful career since it began more than a decade ago, but there is no disguising the fact that it has failed to address even the more tractable among the disputes that have bedevilled relations between India and Pakistan. That it has nevertheless acquired a mystique quite independent of its actual yield of political dividends, is a consequence of a peculiar kind of mindset in Indian thinking on Pakistan. Dialogue has become an end in itself and a reward for Pakistan showing sufficient seriousness in tackling militant groups using its soil for attacks on India.
The unstated premise here is that terrorism is India’s special concern and Pakistan’s special responsibility. And if Pakistan faced up to its responsibilities, India would be magnanimous enough to talk, though with little assurance of yielding any ground.
With this spurious linkage removed, Pakistan will now presumably continue to combat terrorism even if the rewards it obtains in terms of the returns on the composite dialogue are meagre. And the Sharm el-Shaikh statement does record significant forward steps, as well as a convergence of perceptions between the two countries in bringing to justice the perpetrators of last November’s terrorist outrage in Mumbai
There is in other words, a perfectly reasonable construction that can be placed on this aspect of the Sharm el-Shaikh joint statement, which undermines all claims that it constitutes a betrayal of India’s long-standing position. The political hysteria rather seems to be born of a quite different cause, indeed, with an aspect of it that mentions what has for long been unmentionable in Indian strategic circles.
An official statement issued after a high-level political engagement between national governments, cannot afford to leave stray sentences around, unattached by either logic or syntax with its main body. For this reason, it is difficult to give any credence to editorial comment, which has tended to portray the reference to the trouble in Balochistan province of Pakistan, as something devoid of long-term consequence. Immediately after affirming that the two governments would “share real time, credible and actionable information on any future terrorist events”, the statement records the Pakistan Prime Minister as having “mentioned” that certain “threats” existed in Balochistan and other areas. The implication, clearly, is that India could do something about these.
To nobody’s surprise, this one line in the statement has shocked and horrified the Indian intelligence community. Beyond all the simulated outrage over the supposed delinking of the composite dialogue from action against terrorism, this is the line that could have fateful political consequences in the years ahead.
The template for high-level political engagement between India and Pakistan has for years seemingly been cast in stone. India has held fast to the course of blaming Pakistan for every terrorist outrage that occurs on its soil. And Pakistan has said quite simply, that credible movement forward in the “core issue” of Kashmir would bring about a miraculous cessation of terrorist activity in India. Never before has the lethal political contest between the countries’ intelligence agencies, seeking to outdo the other in the pain it can inflict, been mentioned in a political communiqué. The Sharm el-Shaikh declaration alters that reality.
When India and Pakistan agreed, on the sidelines of the Havana Non-Aligned Summit of 2006, on a joint institutional mechanism to combat terrorism, there were scarcely concealed grimaces within the intelligence agencies, which saw the prospect of information sharing with counterparts across the border, as a fatal infringement of their autonomy. That mechanism has had expectedly, a rather dismal track record ever since. The Sharm el-Shaikh statement resurrects that process and idea and explicitly acknowledges that terrorism is both a shared concern and responsibility. That really is its long-term significance. Whether long-term dividends will flow from this new approach however, depends decisively on how far intelligence agencies on both sides of the bristling border can be compelled to accept new norms of political accountability.

A new U.S. line on Palestine - don't bet on it

In perhaps one respect, U.S. President Barack Obama’s recent speech at Cairo lived up to its advance billing as a historic overture to the Islamic world. Hidden within its characteristic eloquence, were frequent admissions of error by the U.S., hitherto the unquestionable bearer of the mantle of righteousness. Obama fortunately is grounded in reality, rather than theological faith. That crucial difference already has made for some changes in the U.S. approach to the question of Palestine.
Beyond bogus analogies with the 1930s and dire imprecations about the futility of “appeasement”, what the Zionists and the U.S. right-wing found least acceptable about Obama’s speech was probably its use of the term “Palestine” at no fewer than two junctures. U.S. presidents in the past have in occasional moods of compassion, acknowledged the problem of “refugees”, though of no particular cultural or political stripe. They have in more recent times, grudgingly accepted that a people known as the “Palestinians” exist, with the undeniable right to constitute themselves into a state. Seldom has a U.S. president mentioned “Palestine” as a historical, a cultural and a putative political entity. And Obama’s reference to this identity was explicit: “Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel's right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine's”.
But where would this identity find the territorial space to overcome years of denial, where could it possibly establish itself and grow, when historic Palestine is now claimed by another people as its god-given right? The historian and political commentator Tony Judt describes Zionism today as “an uncompromising ethno-religious real estate pact with a partisan God, a pact that justifies any and all actions against real or imagined threats, critics, and enemies”. And indeed, to enforce this real estate pact, the partisan God has to lean on the support – financial, military and moral – of a superpower blinded by prejudice.
It was this prejudice that was expressed by Obama’s predecessor in a speech to the Israeli Knesset last May, marking the 60-year anniversary of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the creation of the Jewish state. “Israel's population may be just over 7 million”, said George Bush: “But when you confront terror and evil, you are 307 million strong, because America stands with you”. That was where all reason ceased: the seemingly unbreakable identification of Palestinians with terrorism.
The basic principles of the peace in Palestine were laid out in the “roadmap” to a permanent two-state solution, agreed between all major stakeholders in April 2003. Though a markedly asymmetric document, which expects the Palestinians to live up to virtually impossible criteria, Israel has baulked at accepting it, since it clearly requires the dismantling of all settlements built in occupied territories since March 2001 and the freezing of all further growth, including what is euphemistically referred to as “natural growth”.
Expectedly, within a year of the roadmap being agreed, it was amended through an “exchange of letters” between Bush and the then Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon. The headline news about this round of correspondence between the two soulmates in the struggle against “terrorism” was the Israeli plan to supposedly disengage from Gaza. But its true purpose was to secure the U.S.-Israeli compact on two points: that Palestinians were yet to establish their credentials as a partner for peace and that West Bank territory seized in the 1967 war of aggression would be sliced and carved up by Israel in a manner of its choosing.
In an unguarded moment following this exchange of letters, Sharon’s top aide, Dov Weissglass, spelt out what the purpose of the disengagement from Gaza was: to put the peace process in “formaldehyde” and take the prospect of a Palestinian state permanently off the bargaining table.
With Obama now stating categorically, though with seeming design, that the U.S. “does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements”, a question naturally arises about his attitude towards the ones that already exist as “facts on the ground”. Yet even with this element of ambiguity introduced with obvious regard for Israeli sensitivities, the arch-Zionist administration of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has brusquely dismissed the U.S. posture. Indeed, Netanyahu’s principal focus, ever since the Obama presidency began, has been to change the subject and solicit U.S. interest in a military strike to decapitate Iran’s supposed nuclear weapons programme.
Israel is counting on the endorsement for its plans against the Islamic Republic, of its secret allies in the Arab world – the conservative oil sheikhdoms, Jordan and the newly-elected Lebanese ruling coalition – which are all deeply worried about the growing strategic clout of Iran. Yet the U.S. is uneasily aware that its own recent misadventures have contributed to this outcome, and that a military engagement with Iran would recoil on it very badly, perhaps dooming it to certain failure in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover, in the moral sense, it would be yet another vivid demonstration of U.S. double-standards and contempt for the Arab and Islamic world, that the fading superpower can ill afford.
In his infamous interview explicating what the hidden purpose of the 2004 Bush-Sharon exchange of letters was, Dov Weissglass remarked that the endorsement of the sole superpower was all Israel needed to go its own way in unilaterally determining future frontiers in Palestine. The point was reaffirmed by Ehud Olmert, Prime Minister of Israel during Bush’s visit of May 2008: what the superpower says, goes. Somehow, that arrogant presumption has failed to survive the global tide of revulsion that Israel’s successive assaults on the Palestinians have engendered. Global public opinion though could be denied and fobbed off, but not the shockwaves of the global financial meltdown, which have crippled and perhaps, permanently incapacitated the sole superpower.
Yet, the more things change, the more they remain the same. When Denis Mitchell, the U.S. President’s special envoy for Palestine, visited Israel shortly after Obama’s Cairo speech, he was at pains to emphasise that despite all the seeming changes in the idiom, the U.S. remained bound by the Bush-Sharon exchange of letters. Evidence, if any were needed, that despite the bad odour that surrounds them, the Israel lobby and the neo-conservatives who have contrived a geostrategic mess of unprecedented proportions, still retain a degree of influence within the U.S.