The Presidency: Game Play Over, Time for Hard Decisions

In the uncertainties of the political world, today’s prophecy is tomorrow’s folly. Game-changer one day, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee was transformed in public perception into a match-fixer the following day, and the big loser shortly afterwards.

Invited to consultations on a possible consensus choice as the next President, Mamata chose to breach the norms of discretion that are observed in such matters. In emerging from her meeting with Congress president Sonia Gandhi and announcing the two names that had been in circulation for at least a month as likely nominees of the party, Mamata only reaffirmed the obvious truth that it is futile to expect any process of high-level political consultations to remain under wraps for long. Her place in the headlines had to wait till a few hours later, when she proposed, after discussions with Mulayam Singh Yadav – another regional politician with immense leverage within the shifting numerical configurations of the Indian parliament – that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was a candidate that she could support for President.

Her words threw political analysts into a frenzy of speculation and the Congress leadership into a deep and in many ways revealing, silence. The dramatic impact was not lessened by the two alternative names she put forward: former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, known to be a favoured candidate of the opposition BJP and some of its coalition partners, and former Lok Sabha speaker Somnath Chatterjee, a CPI(M) stalwart since fallen from grace. Though no reasons were given for her refusal to accede to either of the two names the Congress had fielded -- Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee and Vice President Hamid Ansari, in that order of preference – she had taken political cover. Chatterjee’s name was insurance against alienating native Bengali sentiment over her ostensible lack of enthusiasm for Mukherjee’s candidacy. And putting forward Kalam’s name was an obvious bargaining ploy, a thinly veiled warning that she would not hesitate to talk terms with the opposition if the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) continued ignoring her demands.

Mamata’s rather audacious proposition intersected in myriad ways with unstated opinions within the UPA, about the best options for the coalition to find its way out of a chronic state of crisis. That was clearly enough, the reason for the very visible initial disorientation of the Congress leadership. Her numerical clout in Parliament made Mamata a potential game-changer, with decisive power in any close contest. Her very loud suggestion that the Prime Minister who has looked increasingly at sea over the challenges of managing a fractious coalition, should move onto the gilded cage of Rashtrapati Bhavan, cast her as a match-fixer, seeking to bring to fruition agendas that dared not speak their names in the dynastic and personality-centred milieu of the Congress.

In the event, the disorientation of the Mamata moment was followed within twenty-four hours – just long enough for the news cycle to dissect its implications in minute detail – by blinding clarity. After wavering between two names for over a month and gaining the formal mandate of the party to determine who its candidate for president should be, Sonia Gandhi finally made her move. Pranab Mukherjee it was to be. Suddenly with almost mystical precision, the pieces all seemed to fall in place. Mulayam Singh signed on as did Mayawati, his principal rival in the regional context. The match-fixer now looked not merely isolated, but distinctly the loser.

Mamata has rarely in a stormy political career, shown serious discomfiture at adverse portrayals by the media or by political opponents. She reacted in character in her moment of isolation, vowing to fight on. The matter was not settled till the last vote in the presidential election was cast.

The Congress had won one round. It was an election that could potentially have been a bruising affair. And as the party leadership hesitated, squandering any possible strategic advantage it could have gained by quick and decisive action, media pundits were already bringing up images from the 1969 presidential contest, when Indira Gandhi rebelled against the official Congress candidate, preparing the ground for an epochal split in the party. Collective and individual political insecurities of the Congress satraps – and their voluntary thraldom to the “high command” – make a split an unlikely event today. But a large-scale desertion of UPA partners was a distinct possibility, as the Manmohan Singh government flounders in search of a credible response to numerous challenges. And the presidential election could have been a possible trigger for this mass shift of political allegiance.

Pranab Mukherjee’s nomination puts a seasoned political manager – the Congress’s man for every crisis – in line for the most weighty job under the Indian constitution. In that position, he could like the current incumbent, lapse into a phase of near invisibility. But circumstances are more likely to cast him as the decisive player in numerous situations of political uncertainty. His life and career as a staunch man of the party – except for a phase of oblivion during the Rajiv Gandhi years – were doubtless, the reason why the BJP had initial doubts. A man deeply steeped in the affairs of a particular party would likely have a strong partisan streak in him. It is to Mukherjee’s credit that at the moment of his nomination, he was seen more as the conciliator than the partisan.

With the presidency likely to be in the hands of a trusted insider, the Congress would have to turn its attention to numerous challenges, large and small. Ironically, the consensus on Mukherjee came on the precise day that by-election results in Andhra Pradesh were proclaiming the near complete erosion of the Congress’s most secure bastion among the major states. Andhra Pradesh is a state that the Congress won in a landslide in two successive assembly elections and in both 2004 and 2009, victory in Andhra Pradesh was the prelude to convincing performances in general elections to parliament. With the state now slipping out of its grip, the Congress faces the leadership deficit that is the inevitable outcome of years spent under the tutelage of the “high command”.

The line of succession to the party’s top spot remains clear, but the ascent of the presumptive heir is delayed – perhaps indefinitely -- by his continuing failure to make a dent in the politics of the Hindi belt. Yet since this element of the Congress’s destiny is written in stone, there is an active deterrent against the emergence of new and more credible leaders. The only solace for the Congress is the disarray in the BJP, which is perhaps even greater. It is a context in which the so-called “federal front” gains traction as a potential reality of the near future. Even for those who are philosophically reconciled to coalitions as an eternal feature of Indian politics, the “federal front”, which would be an alliance of regional parties without the solid substratum of a national party to bind them together, looks like a recipe for endless instability and misgovernance.

Key here would be the role of the president established through recent convention, to advise and counsel in the defence of constitutional and political propriety. Since the tenures of Shankar Dayal Sharma and K.R. Narayanan, general elections have not thrown up the kind of indecisive outcome that makes presidential discretion a factor. Between 1996 and 1999, three general elections were held and five governments sworn in. There may have been a miscued presidential intervention the first time around, with Sharma inviting by virtual mechanical reflex, the leader of the largest single party to form a government, only to see it fall within days. But the following four governments were sworn in only after sufficient commitments of stability were obtained from the main political actors. That these commitments were not honoured is another matter, which does not reflect on the soundness of the presidential deliberation that preceded.

There have been presidents who have at various times floated plans to deal with such contingencies. But these have seemed to intrude into the domain of executive action and possible political negotiation, instances that have in the judgment of constitutional experts, diminished the office. Instances when the power to counsel has been a salutary restraint on the rush to political excess could be cited in R. Venkatraman declining to sign an amendment to the law on MPs’ compensation in 1991, and in K.R. Narayanan urging the union cabinet to reconsider its advice on president’s rule in Uttar Pradesh, following a factional split within the ruling party in the state in 1997.

As he prepares for a presidential term, which now seems assured failing completely unforeseen political perturbations, Mukherjee would have an ample compilation of constitutional doctrine and practices to draw from. When Atal Behari Vajpayee’s BJP-led government fell on the basis of a solitary vote in the Lok Sabha in 1999, Narayanan as president deliberated long and hard over all courses open to him. The delay led to some restiveness and open accusations of partisanship by the BJP. The president’s response then was to issue a communiqué seeking to reassure the public that “all valuable comments from across the political spectrum” were being considered, and that “past precedents as well as new circumstances” were being reckoned with. The situation though was “without earlier paradigm in India” and necessitated minute examination.

As the proliferation of regional political forces changes the paradigm of politics in India, Mukherjee’s challenge would be to ensure that constitutional practice does not deviate seriously from the basic model of parliamentary democracy.

Supreme Infallibility and the Follies of the Media


The quest for a world free of error


Perhaps because the media touches several lives, everybody feels entitled to express an opinion on it and offer attentive and solicitous counsel. Or perhaps it is because of all the signs it displays of arrested development, of a failure to grow out of impetuous adolescence into mature adulthood. For these among diverse other reasons, the Indian media has had a surfeit of counsel in recent times on how it should conduct itself, some indulgent, some stern, some acerbic and scolding.


These informal lessons in fidelity to fact and moral rectitude never seemed likely to threaten the relative autonomy of the Indian media. There have been occasions when the social dialogue through the media has led to the perilous possibility of a withdrawal of citizen consent to the State – as with how the media brought home to the news consumer, images of the terrorist siege of southern Mumbai in November 2008 and the Anna Hazare movement of 2011.


Unsurprisingly, in both instances, there were loud murmurs in official circles that statutory regulation over the media was long overdue. Yet the threats were held in abeyance: in the former case, because the media industry brought in what seemed a comprehensive self-regulatory code and mechanisms to enforce it; in the latter, because the ire of elected representatives was easily diverted to the injudicious and intemperate language Anna Hazare’s acolytes had used. The principal offenders were easily identifiable and the role of the media in transmitting and amplifying their message, was forgotten because the political establishment seemed disinclined to open two fronts in the battle to salvage a badly bruised image.


Matters may have remained at this uneasy stalemate had not the media then gone on -- with its boisterous and bumptious conduct -- to irk the highest judicial bench in the country. For reasons that still remain to be studied in depth, the media has been much more deferential towards the authority of the robed eminences in the judiciary than those who muddy themselves seeking to win popular endorsement through the electoral process. In part, this is a reflection of the power to punish for contempt, a weapon that the judiciary holds in reserve, much like legislative privilege remains uncodified and susceptible at all times to arbitrary interpretation.


Despite the deference it has always enjoyed, the Supreme Court decided at some point, that it had just about had enough. This fervour for reforming media practices was provoked by the complaint lodged by a senior Supreme Court lawyer, over reports in February which gave out details of a plan that the finance and real estate conglomerate, Sahara, had submitted to the market regulator – the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) – on how it intended to secure investor interest on a bunch of public deposits. The matter was in appeal before the Supreme Court, following a June 2011 order by SEBI, upheld by the Securities Appellate Tribunal (SAT) in October, ordering Sahara to refund some Rs 17,400 crore to the public after evidence emerged of the deposits being unauthorised and since being diverted to undeclared uses.


As it began hearing the appeal, the Supreme Court was told by the counsel for SEBI, that Sahara had floated a newly minted financial instrument – which it called the optional fully convertible debenture (OFCD) – through two group companies that did not have adequate capital to service liabilities incurred. On January 20, the Supreme Court directed the Sahara group to explain within three weeks how it intended to ensure the security of the funds mobilised. Two options were given: to either furnish a bank guarantee for the sum involved, or set aside a sufficient quantum of otherwise unencumbered assets. Evidently, the Sahara group chose the latter option and set out a list of its assets together with their valuations in a communication to SEBI, which would in the normal course, have found its way to the Supreme Court registry, to be placed before the bench hearing the case.


Sahara felt aggrieved when some details of this supposedly privileged communication were broadcast by a news channel. Petitioned for redress, the Supreme Court sternly reprimanded SEBI for its breach of propriety without really seeking the identity of the offending official. It then went on – without a clear warrant – to seek a written complaint which it intended to use as basis for evolving norms on media reporting of matters under judicial consideration.


From a public interest point of view, the reaction of the Supreme Court was strange and mystifying. Considered in its bare essentials, the Sahara-SEBI matter was one rife with several asymmetries. On one side was a regulator distracted by a multitude of cases in an environment of extreme market volatility and lax standards of corporate accountability. On the other was a corporate entity with a large advertising budget and ample recourse to other forms of “hidden persuasion”: such as a long-term sponsorship deal for the Indian cricket team. At stake were the savings of an estimated 24 million investors who had, on the basis of media reports and the efforts of Sahara’s sales force, chosen to put funds into a savings instrument of uncertain provenance.


When the media narrative is itself, in ever increasing part, constructed under the stimulus of the advertising outlays provided by the corporate sector – and by the undeniable allure of cricket as an environment within which to frame the most lucrative advertisements – there is reason to believe that it may not afford sufficient protection to investor interests. The larger context is of a volatile market where fortunes are made and unmade in days and savings multiplied or wiped out. And within this context, the principal sponsor of Indian cricket had also introduced a financial instrument of rather befuddling complexity, and insisted that it was outside SEBI’s jurisdiction in not being a “security” in any defined sense. The only redress available in the circumstances was a slow-moving judicial process which could ultimately be relied on to do the right thing, but could not secure against potential damage to investor interests in the interim.


Clearly, every glimmer of light in the obscure world of high finance would serve a purpose in raising public awareness. The putative damage that the Sahara cause suffers in the judicial forum is to be offset against the public interest served. Unsurprisingly, while eager to seek restitution for his client, the senior counsel representing Sahara, Fali S. Nariman proved amply sceptical of the judicial ambition to leverage his specific and purely contingent complaint into an overarching set of rules governing the rights of the press. The argument was very simple: press freedom was a guarantee under the fundamental rights and any abridgment proposed in the principle would involve a conflict with the “basic structure” of the constitution. Enacting a specific law for the press moreover, was not within the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. To the argument from the bench that the Supreme Court was not embarking upon the path of legislation, but merely laying out a comprehensive set of rules, the riposte was very clear: rules involving punitive sanctions against the press would be equivalent to laws, which were beyond the powers of the Supreme Court to lay down.


By this time, a Supreme Court bench headed by the Chief Justice of India, S.H. Kapadia, had swept up all complaints received about media practice over recent, remembered history and assembled them into a common docket. In August 2011, senior counsel Harish Salve had protested before the Supreme Court about reports appearing over two successive days, which grossly misrepresented his arguments in a matter under active judicial consideration. Appearing for Vodafone in a matter involving potential tax liability after its takeover of the Indian assets of another global telecom player, Hutchison Whampoa, Salve argued that his client had done no more than prudent tax planning or “avoidance”. This had been rendered in reports attributed to the news agency, the Press Trust of India (PTI), as “tax evasion”.


The agency in question responded to the judicial stricture by issuing a retraction and an apology. Informally, the PTI management also sent word that the reporter who had bungled his rendering of the fundamentals of taxation, had been taken off the Supreme Court beat.


Another matter that the Supreme Court chose to resurrect involved senior counsel K.K. Venugopal’s complaint to the bench in January 2010, that his arguments on behalf of a senior bureaucrat whose appointment as Chief Vigilance Commissioner was under judicial review, had been characterised as “absurd” by the Times Now channel. The Supreme Court had asked for a written complaint which was reportedly not submitted following an apology from the news channel.


In resuming its consideration of these seemingly settled matters, the Supreme Court has clearly signalled that ex post remedies – apology, retraction and administrative correction by impugned media organisations – are of little use when media freedom becomes a potential hazard to the administration of justice. What is required, in the perception of the highest judicial bench, is a set of rules that would impose prior conditions on modes of media reporting.


In part because of the expansive scope of the agenda the Supreme Court had taken on, its hearings stepped very rapidly beyond the narrow confines of the grievances of senior lawyers and wealthy corporate litigants. Another family of cases was drawn into the orbit, related explicitly to the rights of individuals facing criminal trials. These included media coverage of the Aarushi Talwar double murder of May 2008, which was seen to have prejudged the guilt of the parents of a murdered child.


Also brought within the hearings was a petition moved against the weekly newsmagazine India Today, for publishing a purported interview with one of the accused in the string of urban terrorist strikes of 2008. The person concerned – who fought the recent municipal elections in Delhi from jail -- had been picked up by the police after the September 2008 “encounter” at Batla House in Delhi, in which two others from his putative “terrorist cell” were eliminated. India Today’s story, which appeared at a time when the arrested person was being denied family access and legal counsel, was seen to be doctored in accordance with the diktat of the police force and to seriously undermine his chance of a fair trial.


The logic of the judicial quest for a media domain free of error, impelled a further expansion of the hearings, into the consideration of a civil society organisation’s petition seeking restraints on the telecast of content with explicit images of sex and violence. Having assembled this unwieldy docket, the Supreme Court was told by a galaxy of senior lawyers that it was engaged in a futile quest. Shanti Bhushan suggested that the most constructive course for the Chief Justice would be to dissolve the bench, as a predecessor, A.N. Ray, had done when his effort to write the doctrine of the “basic structure” out of the constitutional scheme floundered in 1975. Other senior lawyers – Anil Divan and Rajeev Dhavan – were emphatic in underlining the lack of a constitutional mandate for the Supreme Court’s effort to narrowly define and circumscribe Article 19, which guaranteed the right to free speech.


Senior advocates P.P. Rao and K.K. Venugopal provided qualified endorsements of the Supreme Court endeavour. Rao pointed out that the mandate of the Press Council of India (PCI) established the principle of self-regulation by the print media, which needed to be extended to the electronic media. Venugopal offered the opinion that the rights assured by article 19 could conceivably be regarded as less than absolute when there was a perceived conflict with the rights to life and liberty, guaranteed under article 21. The PCI in an institutional intervention, affirmed that the positive value of a code of conduct would stem from its moral rather than punitive force.


A crucial element that was missed out in this ensemble of legal wisdom, is the distinction between prior restraint and post facto correction. Prior restraint of any sort on the right to free speech is considered to be the indispensable prop of an authoritarian political dispensation – indeed as the first step towards censorship. Post facto correction in accordance with clearly defined legal norms, in contrast, is an indispensable element in any democratic system, where liberty is exercised with responsibility.


Unfortunately, just as the Supreme Court was hearing arguments about its intent to introduce a media code, the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court issued a decree which seemed suspiciously like a prior restriction. Hearing a petition from ironically enough, a “right to information” activist based in Lucknow, the bench banned any form of media coverage on the January 16 military exercises conducted by units of the Indian army based in Hissar in Haryana and Mathura in Uttar Pradesh. These had been reported in an overblown and highly colourable fashion by the Indian Express on April 4, as evidence of serious strife between the military command and the civilian political leadership.


In the furore that ensued after the Indian Express report, the newspaper was held guilty at worst, of extreme gullibility and poor editorial judgment. The source of the alarmist report was identified – accurately by all accounts – in elements within the intelligence services, which had established a dubious alliance with sections of the higher military command to bring down a serving chief of staff of the Indian army. In decreeing its ban on any further reporting on the matter, the Allahabad High Court held that the “issue of movement of Army troops is not a matter of the kind which requires public discussion at the cost of official secrecy and the security of the country”.


The immediate impact of the order was to prohibit considered analysis or reporting on the public spat in the higher military command and its possible ramifications for the integrity of defence procurement decisions. A matter of legitimate public concern, was through a panicky and hyper-sensitive judicial order, rendered into a state secret.


Reactions to the Allahabad High Court order have not rendered the scenario any clearer. PCI Chairman Justice Markandey Katju, resolved to challenge the order in the Supreme Court, but in a talk-show on primetime news -- where he frontally challenged a former army chief, V.P. Malik, to “grow up” -- conceded that it may have merit, even in peacetime, when involving troop movements in border regions.
This picture of what is right and wrong, rendered by the PCI chairman, is rather vacuous because it is innocent of fact. Under a protocol agreed in 1988 to ensure that mutual misconstrual does not end in an outright shooting war, the first agency to be notified of peacetime Indian troop movements on the border would be the Directorate of Military Operations of the Pakistan army. Further, all media reports on troop movements and peacetime military exercises are based on attributable briefings by spokesmen of the defence forces. The Indian Express report of April 4 was a conspicuous exception because of its origin in an unsavoury contest between rival factions seeking to control defence procurement procedures. To ban media content on the matter is to ban legitimate citizen engagement with decisions on defence procurement, made on the backs of loyal taxpayers.


To retain any level of public support for its project to enact a media code, the Supreme Court would need to firmly put down this effort by the Allahabad High Court to silence legitimate debate. That matter though, will not swim within the span of attention of the highest bench, till it is forcibly introduced. And in this legal vacuum, several other modes of silencing legitimate public debate have flourished, which have utilised archaic provisions of the law, such as “official secrets”, “sedition” and various others.


“Reasonable restrictions” on the right to free speech were introduced under the first amendment to the Indian constitution. Yet till date, there is no clear or consistent norm laid down by the judiciary on how “reasonableness” is to be assessed. In this conceptual vacuum, a variety of abuses have flourished against legitimate press reporting and exercises of the right to free speech.


In June 2008, the commissioner of police in the city of Ahmedabad, brought charges of sedition and criminal conspiracy against two journalists and the Times of India. This followed a series of reports in the newspaper, noting serious complaints against the newly appointed police official and indicating that the inconclusive inquiries that had followed, made him ineligible for the top post in the city. The two journalists and the publisher were granted bail pending the full hearing of the case. Evidently, the purpose of the aggrieved police official was not to punish, but to silence the public discourse. It was a form of censorship through legal injunction, which the Gujarat High Court, as this article goes to press, has quashed, though the longer term implications remain to be determined.


K.K. Shahina, then a reporter with the weekly news magazine Tehelka, was charged with criminal conspiracy to intimidate witnesses, after a story she published cast doubt at the prosecution of a prominent Islamic cleric and political figure on terrorism charges in December 2010. Shahina’s story was based on interviews with key witnesses cited in the case made by Karnataka state police against Abdul Nasar Mahdani, an Islamic cleric who heads the Peoples’ Democratic Party, active mainly in neighbouring Kerala. Mahdani has been arrested and charged by Karnataka police for conspiracy to detonate a series of low-intensity bombs in Bengaluru city in July 2008. Shahina’s story cited several of the witnesses named by the Karnataka police as saying that their testimony has been misinterpreted or distorted in making out the charges against Mahdani. An example of investigative reporting in short, was transformed into the basis for criminal prosecution against the journalist who had done the hard work to bring this abuse of power to light.


In May 2011, Tarakant Dwivedi, alias Akela, then a reporter with Mumbai city’s morning tabloid, Midday, was arrested under India’s Official Secrets Act, after he reported on poor security conditions in the metropolis’ main railway terminus. The Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (referred to in common local parlance as VT), a hub of both suburban and long-distance railway traffic, was among the first targets to be hit in the terrorist attack on Mumbai that began on November 26, 2008. Soon afterwards, the Government Railway Police (GRP), tasked with maintaining security at all major facilities of the Indian Railways, procured an array of sophisticated weaponry to deal with extreme future contingencies. On June 28, 2010, the daily Mumbai Mirror published a report under Akela’s byline, headlined “Leaks in CST armoury put new anti-terror arms under threat”. The report documented how newly procured equipment was being stored in a room with a leaky roof, making their efficacy in an emergency situation highly questionable. Akela’s arrest, itself conducted under highly suspicious circumstances, was believed to be direct retribution for this reporting.


Silencing the media discourse is not so much the issue here, as allowing it more freedom and space. When the judiciary proves unable to curb censorship through criminal prosecution of public-spirited journalism, but shows inordinate concern over its own image as projected through the media, it ceases being an institution acting for the larger good. And it could well take into account the dictum that the only remedy for the abuse of free speech is to allow even freer speech. There is no better antidote to the irresponsible exercise of free speech by the corporate media than to accord the right to those denied it.

Religion, Nationalism and the State

Cease the Hostile Rhetoric Against Sri Lanka’s Journalists

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and other global press freedom bodies have strongly condemned the escalation in hostile rhetoric against some of Sri Lanka’s leading journalists and human rights defenders.

Suffused with dire threats of reprisal, the rhetoric has risen several scales since the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva adopted a resolution on March 22, censuring Sri Lanka for possible war crimes during the last phase of its long civil war and underlining the need for credible steps towards reconciliation between the country’s main ethnic groups. Amplified through the state-controlled media, this chorus of denunciation, could pose a clear and present danger to the physical security of the many journalists who courageously argue the case for national reconciliation.

Similar such outbursts of verbal aggression contributed to a wave of attacks and a climate of intimidation so severe that several of Sri Lanka’s leading journalists went into exile during the first half of 2009, as the civil war entered its final phase.

On March 23, Sri Lanka’s Minister for Public Relations, Mervyn Silva addressed a public demonstration against the UNHRC resolution, threatening to “break the limbs” of any of the exiled journalists should they set foot in the country. Among the journalists mentioned was Poddala Jayantha, who suffered a brutal assault in Colombo city in June 2009, leaving him with permanent disabilities. General Secretary of the Sri Lanka Working Journalists’ Association at the time, Jayantha and has lived in exile since January 2010.

Silva has been known for several bruising encounters with the media in recent years and was in July 2009, reported to have publicly claimed credit for “fixing” both Jayantha and Lasantha Wickramatunge, the Sunday Leader editor murdered in January that year. Though he later disavowed the statement, Silva’s record as a media baiter has always caused deep unease. In what seemed a deliberate affront to journalists, President Mahinda Rajapaksa in May 2010 appointed him Deputy Minister for Mass Media and Information, before a storm of protests compelled his transfer to another portfolio.

Government officials seemingly began the latest phase of verbal warfare when the possibility emerged early this year that Sri Lanka’s dismal human rights record could lead to international censure and the withdrawal of trade concessions. On January 26, senior minister Keheliya Rambukwella was quoted in Dinamina, the Sinhala-language daily from the state-owned Associated Newspapers (or Lake House) group, describing exiled journalists campaigning for human rights and reconciliation as “traitors” who were bringing the country into “disrepute”.

Later, the English-language daily from the Lake House group, the Daily News, reported that human rights defenders, including press freedom campaigner Sunanda Deshapriya, were betraying Sri Lanka and continuing to work with the terrorist rump of the defeated Tamil insurgent group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

In an editorial on March 16, Dinamina described human rights defenders as “degenerates” and denounced Deshapriya as a “mouthpiece of the LTTE”. It warned that in a country like Iran, “these kinds of bastards would be stoned to death”.

Veteran media trade unionist Dharmasiri Lankapeli has been targeted by the state-owned media in attacks that have become particularly harsh since the country’s main professional associations and journalists’ bodies joined hands for a “black January” observance this year, to protest against the continuing climate of impunity for attacks on free speech. The attacks have also extended to social scientists and political commentators such as P. Saravanamuttu, Nimalka Fernando and Sunila Abeysekara, and prominent figures of the church who have argued for national reconciliation. The IFJ has learnt that vivid photo-montages have been circulated by various political actors, which represent journalists and other prominent human rights defenders as terrorists and traitors, working at the behest of alien forces.

The dangers are clear and imminent and the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, has issued a public warning against reprisals that target Sri Lanka’s journalists and human rights defenders.

Evidence has recently emerged from the citizen journalism website Wikileaks, of high-level culpability in some of the worst atrocities against the media during Sri Lanka’s civil war. In January 2006, S. Sukirtharajan, a photographer with the Tamil daily from Colombo, Sudar Oli¸ was shot dead by assailants on motorcycles, just days after he published photographs suggesting that five Tamil students found dead in the eastern city of Trincomalee had been victims of an execution by state security agencies. A cable from the U.S. ambassador to Sri Lanka at the time has now come to light, which records Basil Rajapaksa, brother and senior advisor to the President, expressing his belief that the “Special Task Force” of the Sri Lankan military carried out the killing of the five students.

Sukirtharajan was probably killed because he got the story right.

In August 2006, the Jaffna office of the Tamil daily Uthayan – part of the same group as Sudar Oli – was attacked with fire bombs and seriously damaged. As narrated to the U.S. ambassador by Basil Rajapaksa, this attack was in all probability carried out by the Sri Lankan Navy, in league with a Tamil political party that is close allied with President Rajapaksa.

The report of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC), a body appointed by President Rajapakse, was published late-2011 and offers certain compelling observations in the limited space it devotes to media freedom. It records that it has been “deeply disturbed” by persisting reports, even after the end of the war, about “attacks and obstacles placed on journalists and media institutions”. These difficulties have been experienced even by “news websites”. Taking note of a record of murderous violence against journalists, the LLRC remarks that the failure to “conclusively” investigate and bring “perpetrators” to justice does little credit to the Sri Lankan government.

The LLRC’s recommendations include the recognition of the “pivotal role” that “freedom of expression and (the) right to information”, play in “any reconciliation process”. “Restrictions placed on media freedom”, the LLRC records, “would only contribute to an environment of distrust and fear within and among ethnic groups”. The five specific actions that the LLRC urges, include “deterrent punishment” against those who attack media personnel and institutions; the proper investigation of such incidents from the past; the assurance that media personnel would have freedom of movement through the northern and eastern provinces of Sri Lanka, which bear the deepest scars of the war; and the enactment of a law protecting the right to information.

The IFJ and its global partners conclude with extreme regret that the Sri Lankan government’s continuing disregard of these wise counsels of moderation, suggest not a desire for national reconciliation, but its very opposite.

Judicial Populism and Political Expediency: How the Quest for Virtue has Damaged Institutional Integrity

In the early years of what is today called the “European enlightenment”, the political philosopher Montesquie famously identified “virtue” – or respect for the law – as the widely shared spirit within a society that made democracy as a system of governance possible. Even if widely shared, virtue is a frail and delicate attribute, which needs to be securely enshrined in institutions that would be immune to abuse. Virtue would surely perish if power were to be exercised arbitrarily and the law abused. And since excessive power, vested in any individual or institution is the surest road to the collapse of democracy, the separation of powers is essential to safeguard virtue. Every institution of governance would enjoy autonomy within its own realm, but no licence to intrude into another’s territory. In their mutual independence and adversarial tension, the executive, legislature and judiciary would ensure a system of administration that upheld the sovereignty – and nurtured the virtue -- of the citizen.

Indian democracy seems set on a rather different course. Virtue is seen not as a widely held attribute but the monopoly of a chosen few. Far from honouring the separation of powers, legislature, judiciary and executive are seen, in a self-serving and sordid deal, to be making accountability the principal casualty.

The Anna Hazare movement, which caused spasms of anxiety in the political establishment through three visitations in 2011, was a powerful representation of elite disgruntlement at the state of governance. Its dominant motif was a forthright sense of disdain, loudly proclaimed, at the functioning of the institutions of representative democracy. And its programme was to secure democracy against a reign of iniquity by endowing the virtuous few with powers that trumped all others.

Anna Hazare promised messianic deliverance from the difficulties ordinary people face. But the sea refused to part as his chosen people were led to the water’s edge and the constituency for messianism remains unappeased. The residual impact still remains on the institutions of governance, which feel compelled to respond to the elite clamour by making sweeping decisions that jump across institutional boundaries.

The recent Supreme Court ruling assigning culpability for the abuse of power in the gift-wrapping of a valuable public resource – the telecom spectrum – for a clutch of companies of dubious credentials, addressed questions of political accountability in a rather strange fashion. While identifying the individual who held the telecom portfolio in the Union Cabinet at the time, the Supreme Court bench absolved the Prime Minister of all blame. It did however, censure the Prime Minister’s office for the numerous acts of omission and commission that contributed to the epic scandal.

This lesson in political morality abounds in curiosities. It shreds the principle of collective responsibility which is a fundamental premise of the Cabinet system of governance. And in this respect, it holds out a lifeline to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who has for long taken the alibi that “coalition compulsions” prevent effective oversight over ministerial malfeasance. It was a rather weak argument but one that found traction with sections of the media that seemed anxious to protect Manmohan Singh, as his credibility went into free fall following a severe indictment of the spectrum sale by the Comptroller and Auditor-General (CAG).

Viewed dispassionately, Manmohan Singh’s alibi would appear to be a gigantic evasion. The rules of engagement in a coalition government, he was in effect arguing, involved granting every partner a certain degree of latitude. By implication, even if there was a gross abuse of power, individual rather than collective responsibility would apply.

If coalition compulsions necessitate a dilution of the principle of collective responsibility within the Union Cabinet, the Prime Minister’s office clearly is a very different kind of space. This is where the Prime Minister enjoys the virtually untrammelled privilege of nominating key aides and officials. In holding the Prime Minister guiltless in the abuses that his handpicked staff colluded in, the Supreme Court constructs yet another peculiar notion of political accountability.

The spirit that suffuses the Supreme Court’s recent findings on the 2G scam is expediency rather than principle. That same attitude was evident in the intervention of P. Chidambaram, then the Union Finance Minister, who for long insisted that an auction involving all those seeking to launch second-generation (or 2G) telecom services would be the right procedure, but then acquiesced in the decision made by a Cabinet colleague, to sell the spectrum in terms of a dubious “first come first served” policy. In a recorded minute in his hand, he urged then that the matter be treated as “closed”. Chidambaram was in other words, disinclined to enter into conflict with a Cabinet colleague, because the consequences could possibly destabilise the ruling coalition.

A judicial forum is no place to settle questions of political morality. The Supreme Court’s recent decisions on the allocation of blame in the 2G scandal, honour this principle. But they also explicitly endorse the dubious construction of political morality – in terms of its limitations in a context of coalition governance – that has emerged from the government of the day. They seek to offset these expedient concessions to the morality deficit of the Manmohan Singh government, by decreeing with a self-righteous flourish, the cancellation of all telecom licences granted under the 2G spectrum allocation.

Even those absolutely convinced of the righteousness of the decision must harbour a certain disquiet at the manifest failure of due process here. The Supreme Court has basically rendered a judgment that penalises entities that were not named in the petition it was hearing, without so much as giving them the opportunity to be heard.

Summary justice, for a constituency that seeks messianic deliverance, may seem the need of the hour, when political institutions have loudly proclaimed their failure. Above all, this is a failure of credible oppositional politics. Political morality is determined within the realm of politics, in the contestation between ruling and opposition factions. Since the first whiff of the 2G scandal, the political opposition has been seeking extraordinary remedies. It paralysed the functioning of Parliament when the ruling benches refused to institute a joint committee to investigate the 2G scandal before a thorough debate on the CAG report. It has since sought to shelter behind the maverick effort by Subramanian Swamy, a renowned political adventurer with distinctly dubious political commitments, to enforce morality through the courts.

That effort suffered a setback with a Delhi court refusing Swamy’s insistent plea to sanction the criminal prosecution of Chidambaram, the incumbent Union Home Minister. The trajectory however, has been set, and the opposition is unlikely to retreat from its confrontational posture, which sinks politics into further odium.

The unappeased constituency for messianism clearly, is unlikely to sit back and allow this dubious political morality play to proceed. A swift resumption of the elite rebellion against representative politics is virtually foretold. And this quest for a virtuous order free of all irksome burdens of representative democracy, is likely to inflict lasting damage. In place of a detested political order, this uprising of the privileged will substitute a regime of absolute authoritarianism.

Syria in Turmoil: Prelude to Wider Battles in the Arab World

Early February, the U.N. Security Council’s effort to stamp its approval on an Arab League peace plan for Syria foundered on the dual veto of Russia and China. Fears were freely expressed that Syria was sliding towards civil war. Using terms rarely heard in recent diplomatic exchanges, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. vented her “disgust” at the collusion in the Syrian bloodbath of two global powers. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denounced the stance of the two Security Council recalcitrants as a “travesty”. “Freedom-loving” people everywhere, she declared, should join the effort to sustain and arm the Syrian liberation struggle.

By the standards of the last two decades, this has been a rare moment of discord among the Security Council grandees. Yet, the breakdown of the oppressive consensus that allowed the U.S. and its allies to interpret every U.N. resolution in a manner of their convenience was long foretold.

Estimates of the number of casualties caused by the year-long turmoil in Syria, even as the U.N. Security Council broke up in acrimony, stood at between 6,000 and 7,500. Of these, between a quarter and a fifth were thought to have been from the ranks of the state security forces. It was disproportionate warfare, but not quite as bad as the U.S. war in Iraq, which has killed just under 5,000 U.S. servicemen, while claiming upwards of a hundred thousand Iraqi civilians, not to mention an untold number of those who could be classified as “insurgents”. Yet the grim statistics from Syria would establish that civil war is very much the accomplished reality there, not merely the potential outcome of a failure to intervene.

A Conflict Without Witness

Syria’s civil war is a conflict without witness. Information has been sporadic and images sparse, allowing no basis for a considered judgment. The global community sees images of a country in turmoil with ordinary people fearful for their lives and no longer sure of their daily routines. The dominant global narrative puts this down to the desperate effort by the Syrian regime to suppress a wholly legitimate upsurge of political protests. Harsh repression has turned a peaceful mass movement into an urban guerilla operation, with poorly organised but highly motivated groups of partisans seeking to bring to account the seemingly eternal dictatorship of the al-Assad dynasty.

Inured to a high degree of control over citizen loyalty and having for long trusted in repression as a fair alternative to widening the circle of consent, the al-Assad regime for its part has responded to the new realities by striking heavy hammer blows at civilian centres, often targeting entire urban populations for collective punishment, as in the city of Homs. The strategy has served the regime well at least once before in its tortured existence, when Hafez al-Assad – father of the current president -- suppressed a revolt by the Ikhwan al-Muslimeen (or Muslim Brotherhood) in the city of Hama in 1982 by calling in the air-force and the artillery to reduce it to rubble.

President Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime has in recent months responded to the new imperatives of openness, by taking out a few conducted tours for international journalists. These have been, unsurprisingly, tailored towards reinforcing the picture the regime has constructed, of a heroic homeland of Arab civilisational glory under siege from malevolent neighbours serving the agenda of a distant imperialist power. This account holds the attack on Syrian sovereignty as the desperate acts of isolated saboteurs who have infiltrated from hostile neighbouring states such as Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. Those of infirm loyalty are wreaking their vengeance on Syria for its steadfast leadership of the “resistance front” which opposes a dishonourable Arab peace with Israel.

It would be reckless to deny the elements of truth in this story-line, though Syrian leadership of the “resistance front” has not been untainted by a number of sordid deals with Israel and the U.S. The incitement in Syria moreover, does not come from the near neighbourhood, since Jordan and Lebanon, strategically vulnerable and small, are merely staging posts for a wider game. Syria is now the cockpit of a large-scale collision of interests which obviously involves the U.S., because it is difficult for the global superpower to stay out of any intrigue in the Arab world. But with its capacity for direct intervention compromised since getting tangled up in a no-win situation in Iraq, the U.S. has to implement its diktat through proxies, with all the possible dilution in strategic intent that this involves. This accounts for the sudden metamorphosis of the Arab League – a decrepit body of squabbling potentates that has failed virtually every serious test of credibility in the recent and distant past – into a body that pretends to have the capacity to deal with the Syrian crisis.

A New Reactionary Blend

Behind the new and manifest sense of purpose of the Arab League is the growing insecurity of its richest regimes, which now find themselves strategically constricted, by the legacy of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the wave of popular rebellion sweeping the Arab world. The blend of military authoritarianism and Islamic orthodoxy, the ideological confection devised to stem the tide of rebellion, has proved of rather dubious efficacy. A whole year after the Hosni Mubarak dictatorship was toppled, with elections conducted and the Muslim Brotherhood securely entrenched as the most significant political force in the country, Egypt continues to be restive. Popular calls for overturning the military oligarchy and turning over real power to the people have been rebuffed by the Muslim Brotherhood, wedging further apart the diverse elements of the coalition that drove the Mubarak dictatorship out.

Unable to summon up sufficient resources of political legitimacy, the Egyptian military has conjured up an alliance with the Islamic parties, unleashing animosities along numerous other axes. Bitter street battles in October killed dozens among the country’s Christian minority as the state-owned media cheered the rioters on. And the football riots of early February furnish a sharper insight into the Egyptian army’s strategy of securing for itself a pivotal role by fomenting civil strife on a vast scale. As the first anniversary of the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt came around on February 14, a tense standoff was in evidence between the Islamic parties now in the ascendant and other parties that are insistent on an end to military tutelage over the political transition.

Neighbouring Libya, which has dropped out of the international headlines since the grisly lynching of longtime dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi and the public display of his decaying corpse, remains in a state of indecision and uncertainty. Squabbling tribal groupings have staked claims to sovereign enclaves and revenge attacks continue against those suspected of residual loyalty to the older regime.

For the many months in 2011 that the uprising against Muammar al-Gaddafi raged, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and other allies among the cabal of oil-rich kingdoms, managed to keep their sponsorship of the rebellion a relatively well-guarded secret. The western powers soon stepped in, expansively interpreting a U.N. resolution as a mandate for offensive air sorties and political assassination. It was only after final victory was declared with Gaddafi’s murder that Qatar stepped up to claim responsibility in moral and material terms for sustaining the rebellion.

Democracy is a hazard that the oil sheikhs have taken ample precaution to safeguard themselves from. In March 2011, the movement for reforms in Bahrain was brutally crushed in a joint military operation directed by the reigning monarch and the Saudi Arabian dynasty. And the political reforms proposed by a subsequent inquiry into the unrest remain unimplemented for fear of the precedent that would create for the absolute power of sheikhs elsewhere. There was perhaps no inherent element of sectarianism in the Arab uprisings that began early in 2011. But the opportunism visible in abundant measure from the oil sheikhs has brought the sectarian element to the foreground, where it merges with a wider strategic rivalry between Shi’a Iran and the Gulf kingdoms. In turn, this factor compounds older sources of instability arising from the Palestinian issue and the implosion of Iraq as a state following the U.S. invasion of 2003.

Syria as Arab Recalcitrant

If Libya can be allowed to fester in anarchy and disorder, Egypt presents a very different picture, merely because it is the largest Arab country and borders Israel, the indispensable pivot of western strategy in the region. Syria is likewise of crucial strategic consequence as a frontline state with Israel, with a long unresolved territorial issue over the Golan heights, but also because it is a flank of the Arab world through which a deep fissure runs. That fissure in the Arab world could be papered over, even through years of Syrian support for Iran when it fought a brutal war with Iraq. But it has since the U.S. occupation of Iraq, acquired strategic dimensions that could spell potential danger for the entire Arab world’s sense of identity.

As he surveys the horizon from his besieged perch in Damascus, the Syrian President may find an element of comfort from the stated position of the Iraqi government that it will not be party to any manner of punitive actions against Syria. This is a significant change in strategic equations since Iraq and Syria could be counted on, all through the years that they were divided by the shared ideology of Ba’ath socialism, to oppose each other in every matter of consequence. Syria’s reward in 1991 for standing by and watching Iraq being pummelled into the stone age by the U.S. and its allies, was the tacit, though provisional recognition of Lebanon as its exclusive sphere of influence. It was a status that Syria had worked hard to win, beginning with its brutal suppression at U.S. and Israeli behest, of Palestinian freedom fighters based in Lebanon in 1976.

Syria has not in the eyes of the Palestinian liberation movement yet requited its guilt. Its patronage of the Hamas Islamic resistance, as against the Fatah movement favoured by the Gulf Arab states, has deepened the suspicion with which it is viewed in some circles. And in Lebanon, the growth of the Shi’a Hezbollah under its benign gaze has compounded its image as an Arab recalcitrant.

Matters may yet have settled into a permanent state of mutual suspicion had the turmoil in Iraq following the U.S. invasion, not led to a significant accretion to Iran’s strategic influence within the country. And when the new Iraqi constitution was promulgated in 2005, with its pronounced bias towards decentralisation and its provisions for sub-national regions to be constituted with a high degree of autonomy, there were serious worries in the Gulf states that the “Arab character” of the country was at stake, that indeed, Iraq could be taken permanently out of the Arab orbit.

Lebanon had meanwhile become another theatre of confrontation and the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005 caused an upwelling of sentiment that compelled Syria to withdraw its forces from the country. But Syria has continued to wield enormous clout through the Hezbollah, which had gained sufficient military capability to compel Israel’s withdrawal from a self-proclaimed security zone in 2000 and to repulse a massive Israeli air and artillery attack in 2006.

The Gulf kingdoms are aware that they need to neutralise the appeal that Syria retains by virtue of its supposed monopoly over the spirit of resistance in the Arab world. Syria’s principal constituency among the Palestinians, the Hamas Islamic movement, recently concluded a treaty with the Fatah movement, actively brokered by Qatar. Considerably discomfited by the developments in Egypt, Israel denounced the new alignment as a fatal blow to the prospects of renewed peace negotiations. The top leadership of Hamas, despite their dependence on Syrian patronage, then undertook a tour of Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, all states seen to be ranged on the opposite side. But to ensure that it would not be accused of turning its back on more steadfast allies, the Hamas leader from Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh also visited Tehran and obtained an undertaking of continuing support from Iran.

The New Player: Turkey

This is just one among several rearrangements that have occurred on the Arab strategic chessboard in recent months. In Iraq, Vice-President Tareq al-Hashmi, leader of the Sunni bloc in the governing coalition in Baghdad, fled to the Kurdish region in the north of the country, after his arrest was ordered by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, on charges of running death squads that carried out a number of political assassinations. Al-Hashmi has lived ever since in the northern town of Sulaimaniyah, under the protection of the Kurdish regional government dominated by Massood Barzani and his allied clans. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani’s tribe – which competes with Barzani for influence in the Kurdish region -- has endorsed the charges made against al-Hashmi and ordered that he be handed over to the authorities in Baghdad for trial.

These developments are all deeply immersed in the regional rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia. And to complicate the scenario, a powerful third element has entered the picture in the shape of Turkey. Al-Hashmi has made it clear that he will seek refuge in Turkey if the Kurdish regional government in Iraq is compelled to withdraw the safe haven he now enjoys. This speaks of a new manner of relationship being forged within the region between Turkey and the sub-national Kurdish unit in Iraq, a strategic offset that Iraq’s Kurds are fashioning to growing Iranian influence over the Shi’a south.

For Turkey, which has for long fought an insurgency against its own Kurdish minority, this is a rather strange place to be in. Indeed, fearful of the consequences for its own internal stability, Turkey has for long bitterly opposed any hint of autonomy for Iraq’s Kurdish regions. But the shifting strategic alignments in the region now mean that it has to go beyond older formulae and seek advantage in an accommodation of convenience with the sub-national Kurdish unit in Iraq.

At least for the first six months of the uprising in Syria, Turkey was allied with the al-Assad regime, seeking stability on its eastern flank rather than an unending cycle of violence. But a flow of refugees into its territory may have set off calculations of strategic advantage, leading to a change of tone by about October 2011. Turkey then moved rapidly to garner the moral advantage of allying with the uprising in Syria, imposing unilateral sanctions on the regime and closing its territory for arms traffic into the country.

The two-way strategic contest between Iran and the Gulf states was in quick time transformed into a three-cornered competition, with the Kurdish region of Iraq, home to some of the country’s richest oilfields, a potential ally of Turkey. The Syrian regime has a comfort zone in the territorial continuum stretching through the Shi’a south of Iraq to Iran. It could also use its allies in Lebanon to send out a message to the Gulf states and the west. And any manner of activism by Hezbollah today would probably draw a response from Israel.

The atmosphere is not rendered any more congenial by the loud thinking currently underway in Israel about the most opportune time to mount an attack on Iran’s nuclear assets. While publicly distancing itself from the Israeli war talk, the U.S. has also been sending out a signal that it would be powerless to restrain Israel from unilateral action. The Gulf Arab states have stayed out of this conversation but Saudi Arabia was revealed in 2010, in leaked U.S. diplomatic cables exposed by the Wikileaks website, to have called for “smashing the head of the Iranian serpent” through a quick surgical strike against its nuclear facilities.

Iran for its part has responded to the rhetoric by vowing to hit at U.S. and Israeli interests at any place of its choice. With powerful and well-armed proxies in Iraq and Lebanon – not to mention Afghanistan – few would doubt Iran’s capacity to deliver on the promise. Clearly, the Syrian civil war is not merely about that country any more. If it continues for any further length of time, it could draw in virtually every country of consequence in the wider region. In this, it could well be the prelude to a civil war involving the entire Arab world. And that would be potentially, a fatal challenge to the key principles of western geopolitics in the region: to keep Iran out, Arab nationalism down and Israel on top.

From the Annals of Hagiography: A Slight and Forgettable Addition to the Shelves of Nehruana

Review Article
Nehru Centre, Witness to History, Transition and Transformation of India, 1947-1964, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2011, pp xiv + 162, Rs 445.

A basic existential question would virtually leap out at the reader, a few pages into this volume. Does India’s first prime minister deserve another celebratory volume? Jawaharlal Nehru is acknowledged as an epochal figure in the struggle against colonialism, with perhaps the most successful record among the leaders of national liberation, in building a polity that functions by basic norms of democracy. The high tide of the celebration of his life and times, was his centenary year over two decades back. It has since been recognised that the time for celebration – or for its opposite – has long passed.

Yet the mood of celebration stretches on, bearing testimony perhaps to the ample funding available for burnishing the image of a statesman who remains a source of legitimacy for the country’s dominant political dynasty. Further, there are signs that the political forces claiming most ardently to protect Nehru’s legacy are unsure of their footing and unclear about strategy. A powerful argument meanwhile builds up, which puts down the prevalent mood of turmoil and anxiety in the country entirely to Nehru’s legacy.

Veteran journalist Inder Malhotra expresses an anguish felt by all who retain the faith: “…there is a group of people that are full of hatred for Nehru and his philosophy and legacy. Ideologically driven, they are determined to dismantle his greatest achievements – the founding and nurturing of the modern, democratic and secular Indian society and Indian State, committed to protecting and preserving the country’s plurality and its inclusiveness”. The ideological offensive against the Nehruvian bequest of secular statecraft, he concludes, has failed. The mass hysteria over the Ayodhya issue, the rants about “minority appeasement” and the barbs freely hurled about the Congress party’s alleged “softness on jihadi terrorism”, have failed as political ploys. Indeed, says Malhotra, the “voters’ overwhelming verdict” in the country’s most recent parliamentary general elections must be regarded as an “endorsement of Nehru’s legacy”.

It may be of some interest to pursue this inquiry. How far can one electoral verdict be construed as an endorsement of secularism, when several reliable accounts – the most recent being the Sachar committee’s – have shown that the State remains in default on the broader promises inherent in the principle, such as equal treatment under the law and fair opportunity for all? Malhotra does not pause over this question, but rather, moves on to a defence of Nehru against the two critiques most often levelled against him: his policy on China and his indecisiveness on Kashmir.

The charge that he was no statesman but a trusting naïf in respect of China is brushed away with a few extracts from the diary of G. Parthasarathi, at the time India’s ambassador to that country. The Nehru that emerges in this narrative is a robust and realistic judge of geopolitical realities, clearly aware of the dangers of Chinese duplicity and the conflict potential inherent in its looming presence across the Himalayas. He is recorded even urging Parthasarathi to keep V.K. Krishna Menon, a trusted lieutenant whose judgment on China he had reason to doubt, out of key deliberations.

In terms of utility, this manner of anecdotal evidence could be seriously questioned, especially in the evaluation of a world statesman on the broad sweep of historical time. But that unfortunately is the status of Nehru scholarship today. As far as his legacy is concerned, the past is not quite dead. It is not even past. It lives on in contemporary political contests.

Unsurprisingly, Nehru’s record on Kashmir comes in for extensive attention. India’s first Prime Minister is often faulted for an inadequate military response to Pakistan’s provocative tribal raid into Kashmir during the cataclysmic partition of the sub-continent. Critics believe that he stopped military operations rather too early, without evicting the marauders from the entire territory of Kashmir (as it existed then). To have then taken the matter to the United Nations was to grievously compound the error.

Rehashing a fantasy that refuses to die, journalist M.V. Kamath says that Nehru should “have waited for the Indian Army to capture Lahore and then (asked) Pakistan to come to terms”. This version of history enjoys a certain vogue in circles committed to a muscular military posture in neighbourhood relations. Yet there is no escape from its utter naivete and wilful disregard of a point that K. Natwar Singh alludes to in his contribution: that the armies of both India and Pakistan functioned under British command and Governor-General Louis Mountbatten had managed to foist himself on both as Chairman of the Joint Defence Council.

Malhotra finds the critique of Nehru’s record on Kashmir seriously askew. But the reasons he advances offer an oblique and unflattering commentary on aspects that remain for the most part unexplored by Indian commentators. The complete eviction of Pakistan’s tribal raiders from Kashmir, even if feasible in a narrow military sense, would have been political folly, he argues. To a crucial degree, India depended for its legitimacy in Kashmir on Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, leader of Kashmir’s liberation movement against the Dogra monarchy in the state. And the Sheikh by Malhotra’s account, advised against a complete mopping up operation in the state, since his following was confined to the Kashmiri linguistic community in the valley. Pushing beyond the territory of the valley would have been a gamble on the loyalty of the Punjabi speakers in the region now called “Azad Kashmir”.

Rather carelessly, without great regard for the broader implications, Malhotra compares the possible outcome of an aggressive military strategy to the very palpable disaster that Israel’s occupation of all Palestine has become. By presumable analogy then, taking all of Kashmir in 1948 would have burdened India with a restive population and a long-term security headache.

It is an unintended irony here that the situation in Kashmir, without quite approaching the dimensions of the existential struggle in Palestine, has today plunged into a state of endemic unrest. If this has been the outcome of what is today read as Nehru’s strategic foresight in 1948, the reader could be forgiven for wondering how much worse things could be. P.C. Alexander, the long-serving bureaucrat whose career began in the years immediately following independence, reflects rather dolefully on the current situation: “Kashmir continues to be a problem even sixty years after Nehru chose this path”.

Alexander leaves the final judgment on Kashmir for a future generation, but unsurprisingly, virtually every other contributor to the volume has an opinion to vent. On the referral to the U.N., Malhotra argues that there was no real choice. If India had not, other interested parties, notably Britain and Pakistan, would have exercised that option. Alexander believes that Nehru’s decision was made under pressure from Governor-General Mountbatten and its legacy has been uncertain, in part because the U.N. as a collective body, was never inclined to give India a fair hearing.

For Natwar Singh, a former diplomat and member of the union cabinet, Nehru’s handling of Kashmir was among the least edifying aspects of his leadership. He was hustled into a reckless course by Mountbatten, whose record Natwar Singh judges to have been extremely dubious in this and various other respects. It took Nehru’s passing from the scene in 1964 for a more robust policy to emerge. And Natwar Singh identifies 1965 as a key moment, when India’s foreign minister led his delegation out of the U.N. Security Council in protest at his Pakistan counterpart Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s strident assertion of a claim on Kashmir. The U.N., Natwar Singh says, never took up the issue of Kashmir at any point after that.

Jagmohan, another bureaucrat who later found a successful niche in politics, thinks differently. Though the initial referral was an unequivocal mistake, Nehru showed a sure touch and deep conviction in every subsequent action. He knew that the U.N. was compromised and bitterly polarised by Cold War calculations and avoided these with practised assurance. And in doing all this, he never retreated from a deeply held conviction that Kashmir belonged with India.

Karan Singh from his unique perspective as a scion of Kashmir’s ruling dynasty, identifies Nehru’s misplaced belief in Sheikh Abdullah as a problem. While the Sheikh had a loyal following in the Kashmir valley, the region under dispute was larger and more complex. To have viewed the entire issue through the prism of Kashmir did little justice to the interests and aspirations of the distinct cultural units of Jammu and Ladakh. Karan Singh is unsure about matters of detail, such as the composition of the States Reorganisation Commission appointed in 1953, dismissing the matter with a regal “if I remember right”. But he is positive that the far-reaching recommendation made by the commission on the creation of linguistic states, was key to the consolidation of the Indian Union. For the commission to have stopped at the borders of Jammu and Kashmir, ostensibly “because it had a separate situation”, was a grievous error.

Approaching this issue from a rather different perspective, Balraj Puri, the veteran political activist and public intellectual from Jammu, suggests a gaping democracy deficit as the root of the problem. The dominant Indian historical narrative puts the problem down to the Dogra Maharaja’s indecisiveness and Pakistan’s effort to settle the issue by force of arms. Puri looks deeper and finds a more complex reality, in which the upsurge of communal violence in Jammu at the time of the Indian partition figures as a determinant influence. This aspect is generally left out of the official Indian narrative, but was at the time significant enough for Mahatma Gandhi to publicly question the legitimacy of the Dogra monarchy and demand that all power be yielded to the ultimate sovereigns: the people of Jammu and Kashmir.

Quite plainly, the tribal incursion from Pakistan, then a nation in process of formation and self-definition, did not occur in a political vacuum. Reasonable observers have inferred that a state without a clearly established chain of political or military authority could not have undertaken the agenda of snatching territory by force, even less of entrusting this project to tribal raiders unlikely to submit to any form of civilian control (as understood in the modern sense).

Any reader who exercises the limited privilege of stretching the valuable insights offered by Puri’s contribution, would see that the armed raid into Kashmir was part of a sequence of events in which the Dogra dynasty’s perceived atrocities against the Muslims in Jammu was an inescapable ingredient, quite possibly a trigger. Over the years that followed, Puri points out, Nehru allowed his robust democratic instincts to be trumped by the palpable sense of insecurity occasioned by the circumstances of Kashmir’s accession. In seeking to square the impossible circle of Sheikh Abdullah’s rebellion and the Dogra dynasty’s long discredited claims to pre-eminence, Nehru allowed the voice of the people of Kashmir to be drowned out.

There was evidently a calculation underpinning this sequence of questionable decisions by a sworn democrat, whose respect for parliamentary institutions and procedures is the subject of a celebratory contribution by Subhash Kashyap. What could that calculation possibly have been? There was a larger Nehruvian world-view within which all contingent decisions were justified with an abundance of hope, if not with complete democratic conviction. And the Nehruvian vision of India involved the evolution of a modern enlightened citizen with no greater loyalty than the civic bond with fellow citizens. Narrow identities of religion and language would be submerged in the march towards that end, in a shared pursuit of “progress” as defined in European enlightenment terms. To quote a rather telling Nehruvian locution from the 1930s: “the real thing to my mind is the
economic factor. If we lay stress on this and divert public attention
to it we will find automatically that religious differences recede to
the background and a common bond unites different groups”.

This book of rather loosely organised reminiscences has little space for the Nehruvian legacy on economic planning. In a rare moment when the critical instinct triumphs, Natwar Singh describes Nehru’s understanding of economics as “inadequate” and frets over his failure to inject this element into foreign policy calculations all through the seventeen years he held the portfolio. Striking a contrary note, Muchkund Dubey looks back on the philosophical underpinnings of Nehru’s foreign policy and celebrates its cardinal principles of fairness and equity, in which the economic dimension was integral. But as he scans the horizon of world affairs today, Dubey is assailed by a sense of alarm. The Cold War has ended, but military force continues to be the currency of global politics. “The nuclear arms race”, he warns, “has acquired ominous proportions” and “India itself has emerged as a de facto nuclear power”. Diplomacy itself leaves little room for the ethical element and is a slave of narrow calculations.

With all these despairing pronouncements behind him, Dubey affirms the need for a retrieval today of the Nehruvian vision. As with all other contributions to this volume, this is a statement made in faith, without any manner of engagement with the reasons why the optimism and idealism of a newly independent nation -- embodied in the personality of its first prime minister -- has through cycles of crisis and retrieval, ended up as a scarcely recognisable mutant.

This book of often contrary views is given an element of coherence only by the deep reverence towards its subject that all contributions share. The anecdotes and personal remembrances that it strings together might interest the serious student of the Nehru years, but need better sourcing and authentication to be of enduring value. This book will add bulk to the overflowing shelves of Nehruana without seriously raising the average quality of scholarship. Though all uniformly well-intentioned and devoted to a worthwhile political cause, few among the contributors has achieved the distance and dispassion that would that a possibility.

Explaining the Mundane, Excluding Voices of Dissent

Review Article
Harsh V. Pant, The US-India Nuclear Pact: Policy, Process and Great Power Politics, Oxford University Press, Delhi, Delhi, 2011, pp xii + 150, Rs 450; ISBN 0-19-807396-8.

Early in this book, Harsh V. Pant, a lecturer at King’s College, London, does a subtle but fairly effective job of puncturing some of the more fanciful conceptions of nuclear nationalism. “Nuclear weapons do retain their relevance in international politics”, he writes, “but it is increasingly a very limited one”. If there is any reason why major world powers retain nuclear arsenals, it is for political purposes rather than with intent to use them. This being the case, “India’s nuclear doctrine of credible minimum deterrence serves its interests well in the near to medium term”. However, any “over investment either intellectual or financial, in this realm, might even be counterproductive”.

No further clarity is offered on the soundness of the Indian nuclear doctrine, perhaps because that is peripheral to the main focus of this book. Pant’s approach is to study the dialogue between the U.S. and India that began soon after the Indian nuclear tests in 1998, and gained traction after Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to the U.S. in July 2005. That visit opened up the first glimmer of a pathway out of the uneasy limbo that India had long inhabited in the global nuclear order. And among the first steps that India needed to take along that pathway, was to clearly distinguish between its military and civilian nuclear facilities.

The analysis in this volume considers the trajectory of India’s negotiations with the U.S., which culminated in what was then described as a “historic” agreement on nuclear technology and trade. Pant proceeds along three different levels at which he sees the deal being consummated: the international strategic context, the domestic political domain in the two countries, and finally, but very importantly, the commitments and concerns of specific individuals.

Mundane events and processes are often rendered profound by merely adding to them the prefix “nuclear”. The “nuclear” dialogue between India and the U.S. consumed much of the time and attention of the strategic establishment through Manmohan Singh’s first term as Indian Prime Minister. The media too caught the infection, transforming the public discourse into an echo chamber where dissent was given little space and the official dialogue, faithfully reproduced. And all this was about a weapons capability that virtually everybody recognised, would never be used and an energy source that contributed less than three percent to the country’s total electricity generation.

By what criterion then, could the public debate over the U.S.-India nuclear agreement be considered a worthwhile investment of time and intellectual effort? Pant is sceptical about the practical utility of nuclear weapons and does not venture into the patchy record of nuclear energy generation in India. Yet he sees the nuclear deal as important in symbolic terms, since after years of estrangement, it provided a point of convergence for the strategic interests of the U.S. and India.

Do the potential benefits emanating from this symbolism, justify the effort and political capital invested in bringing the deal to fruition? Pant recognises that the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan may cast a pall over the ambitious targets drawn up by India’s Department of Atomic Energy (DAE). But then in one of many passages where his own authorial judgment blends seamlessly into the claims made by the political leadership that negotiated the deal, he prounounces that “India cannot realistically hope to ignore nuclear power in the future and making electricity from nuclear power remains far less damaging to human health than making it from coal, oil, or even lean-burning natural gas”.

Since Pant’s book was published, a nuclear power plant nearing completion in Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu, has been temporarily abandoned after people living in the locality laid siege to it. Early tests of some of the systems at the plant led to waves of anxiety about the security of lives and livelihoods in the near neighbourhood. And in Jaitapur on the Konkan coast, plans to build the world’s largest nuclear electricity generation capacity in a single location have been set back by a revolt of the people who stand to lose farms and homes as the cordon sanitaire for the monstrously large 9,900 MW plant is imposed.

What possible benefit can the nuclear option bring that other energy sources cannot? The vision of the early planners was that the nuclear option was the surest guarantee of independence and autonomy. This vision had India overcoming the handicaps of a late start and making a rapid ascent of the learning curve by focusing its scientific efforts narrowly in the nuclear domain. A three stage nuclear energy programme was planned, beginning with natural uranium fuel, then moving to fast breeder reactors powered by plutonium and finally ending with the cornucopia of electricity generated from thorium.

Over a half-century since the blueprint was drawn up, the DAE revealed that domestic uranium availability was, contrary to the early promise, rather paltry. And this is after the primary area of uranium mining in the country -- Jaduguda in present-day Jharkhand state – had been stricken by an epidemic of ill-health and disease as an apparent consequence of the DAE’s activities.

The DAE figures only incidentally in Pant’s diligent effort to understand the various actors on the grand panorama of the nuclear dialogue. It is an omission that is not surprising, since the department remained discretely on the sidelines, except for a famous February 2006 outburst by the DAE head, Anil Kakodkar, about the U.S. “shifting the goalposts” in the nuclear dialogue. At key junctures, the main personalities involved in the dialogue, who have all been given due credit in Pant’s narrative, ensured they had the DAE onside. But the DAE role in the nuclear dialogue with the U.S. will be remembered basically for Kakodkar’s insistence that it would not under any circumstances, allow its fast-breeder test reactor (FBTR) at Kalpakkam to be designated as a civilian facility, subject to international safeguards.

As the cornerstone of the second phase of India’s nuclear energy programme, the FBTR should by any reckoning, have been classified as a civilian facility. But the DAE thought differently. The point that Kakodkar made in his intervention was simply that “long term energy security” and the sustenance of India’s “minimum credible deterrent”, required that the FBTR be kept out of the safeguards regime.

Clearly, the DAE’s discomfiture was primarily occasioned by the fact that it had for very long been used to working with few internal walls of separation between its activities. The civilian nuclear effort was known to feed into the weapons effort both in terms of material transactions and personnel transfers. The FBTR is in a manner of speaking the atomic age equivalent of the scientific fantasy of the “perpetual motion machine” – it produces plutonium fuel even as it burns it. Despite having other reactors dedicated exclusively to weapons grade fuel production, the DAE’s ardour in protecting the FBTR from international scrutiny spoke of some uncertainty over how “minimum” a nuclear deterrent could be for it to be “credible”. The Indian nuclear weapons doctrine in other words, was well advanced along the slippery slope that “deterrence” was always known to be.

Pant rightly observes that the DAE’s revolt may have been an inconvenience to the progress of the negotiations, though it was ultimately turned to advantage in securing better terms for India. His focus is on how the states party to the negotiations sought to manoeuvre and secure their best advantage in the context of the global configuration of forces. Their conduct followed certain idioms of political behaviour: realism and its variants. The U.S. was impelled by the need to find a strategic counterweight to growing Chinese influence in the Asian landmass. And India was moved by like motives, its sense of negotiating purpose strengthened by a gestalt shift in perceptions from third world romanticism to robust calculations of realpolitik. In seeking their partly congruent ends, both states negotiated the delicate terrain of domestic opinion with surefooted ease, ensuring that key constituencies were placated or neutralised.

This beguiling tale of negotiations moving towards a happy outcome, omits the two crucial factors of nationalist vanity and security anxiety. The bond between nuclear capability and national prestige still remains strong in the imagination of the Indian elite. Its dangerous consequence today is that the revolt of the silent majority against the dislocations of a massive expansion of nuclear capacity, is ascribed to external agents intent on sabotaging India’s rise to global preeminence. Security anxieties had their play when at key junctures, stories were featured in sections of the country’s media – bearing the obvious imprint of self-interested plants by the strategic establishment – suggesting that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal threatened to outstrip India’s and questioning China’s good faith.

Pant does not pause for long to consider the implications of the U.S.-India nuclear deal on the global disarmament dialogue, such as it is. His concern is limited to the impact on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and its perceived legitimacy. And this is a question that he passes over with an airy generalisation about “international regimes (being) merely reflections of global power realities”.

This is all very well as far as it goes. But rather than candidly identify the impact that “global power realities” had on India’s own conduct, Pant chooses to gloss the issue over. Thus, the two votes that India cast to censure Iran in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board, for treaty violations that were if anything, borderline in nature, are mentioned in anodyne and offhand terms: “It is not clear what part U.S. pressure played in India’s decision …. but the Bush administration made it clear that if India voted against the U.S. motion, the U.S. Congress would likely not approve the U.S.-India nuclear agreement”.

Quite in contrast with the elite perception in India, the nuclear deal was seen internationally to be in serious ethical deficit. The Guardian in London, for instance, commented that the nuclear deal was about “about breaking rules and expecting others to abide by them”. More picturesquely put, it was about “preaching temperance from the barstool”.

In advance of the 2006 Bush visit to India, The New York Times similarly observed that despite all the accompanying froth, the presidential passage to India was “built around a bad nuclear deal”. With the deal consummated, the newspaper commented rather acidly, that Bush was turning out to be Iran’s best friend. His adventure in Iraq, launched on flimsy and fabricated evidence, had transformed that country into a satellite of the Islamic Republic next door. And his deal with India sent “exactly the wrong message”, since Iran’s hopes of thwarting a global consensus on its nuclear programme rested on “convincing the rest of the world that the West (was) guilty of a double standard on nuclear issues”.

Even if he chooses to ignore the wider context and the ethical dilemmas, Pant’s narrative would, to be of value, need to factor in changing power equations and their impact on the range of benefits accruing from the nuclear deal. He is concerned that since the Bush regime ended its tenure in something akin to global ignominy and was succeeded by one more mindful of the need for consistent standards in multilateral matters, the prospects inherent in the nuclear deal have seriously diminished. Pant sees some features of the Nuclear Liability Bill passed by the Indian parliament following the conclusion of the deal, as a potential disincentive to investors in nuclear energy. A key difficulty he identifies, is the provision of the law which in the event of an accident, would hold liable the operator of the nuclear plant as well as the vendor of equipment.

This was the inevitable consequence of the need for compromise within a democratic space. But there is abundant irony in the reticence of the major vendors to enter a market where they would have to bear legal liability for an accident, when the DAE and its spokespersons have ardently been seeking to foster the impression that modern nuclear power plants are absolutely fail-safe. As Suvrat Raju and M.V. Ramana, physicists and campaigners for nuclear disarmament, recently put it in the context of the agitation against the Kundankulam plant: “When nuclear companies are unwilling to stake their financial health on these claims of ‘100% safety’, how can the government ask local residents to risk their lives?” (“Why Kudankulam is untenable”, The Hindu, November 12, 2011, editorial page.)

The point needs serious reflection, at a time when the strategic establishment, counting on the reflexive nationalism of the elite, is seeking to identify a “foreign hand” behind the rising tide of protest over nuclear location decisions. And for analysts who focus exclusively on the currency of power, it is a long overdue lesson on the gulf that separates popular aspirations from the overblown claims of nuclear nationalism.

Redefining the Secular in Indian Society

It is a word that has been tossed around in political contests and minutely dissected in scholarly circles. But “secularism” still remains an elusive concept. And in practice, “secular” politics is besieged at a number of levels, unable at any time to rise above particular, sectional interests.

An event on December 7 organised by Sahmat was the occasion for a scholarly inquiry into the deeper meanings and definitions of the “secular” in Indian society. There are numerous -- and mostly irreconcilable -- definitions already in circulation. December 7 became for this reason, an exercise in redefinition and rediscovery, in retrieving a principle from depths of conceptual confusion.

The event was organised a few days after the eightieth birthday of Romila Thapar, one of India’s greatest historians. Though this aspect was downplayed in deference to the individual’s unease with the public observance of a personal milestone, all speakers opened their remarks with eloquent tributes to an institution builder, teacher and mentor for generations of scholars. Beyond the world of academia, Romila Thapar has illumined trails of history that have long remained obscure for the wider public, considerably enhancing the quality of public discourse.

The historian K.N. Panikkar recounted some part of the public debt owed this remarkable career as an academic and public intellectual. Romila Thapar combined “scholarly pursuit with social commitment” in a manner that lent “direction to many a public issue”. While exploring new frontiers in historical scholarship, she also had time to frontally combat the “political abuse of history” – which indeed was a term of her coinage from the dark days of the Ayodhya movement, when the forces of Hindutva had managed to recruit large numbers to the cause of effacing a medieval mosque. Aside from giving a rigorous scholarly orientation to the effort of defeating the spurious historiography of Hindutva, Panikkar remarked, Romila Thapar was at the forefront of the campaign for sanity and tolerance in public life.

In remarks that opened the evening’s discussions, Romila Thapar spoke about the shifty and elusive character of “secularism” as a political principle. It is not difficult to identify events and actions that are antithetical to secularism. But as an affirmative principle, “secularism” is very difficult to pin down.

In this conceptual vacuum, parties of an overtly communal stripe have portrayed secularism as a denial of religion and the primordial identities that make the Indian nation what it is. Others have turned its supposed principle of religious tolerance into the sanction for the perpetuation of a clerical hegemony. Still others have recoiled from the futility of the entire project of building a secular order in a society of intense religiosity, ascribing the pathologies of modern sectarian politics entirely to the denial of identities held basic to social existence.

Romila Thapar warned against all these possible outcomes of muddled thinking. The definition popular in India, she said, “either equates secularism with atheism .. or else more commonly, (refers) to the co-existence of all religions”. Neither has great validity, since “personal belief is not central to the secular” so much as the “control of society by religious institutions”. And religious coexistence or tolerance is a meaning that has evolved specifically in the Indian historical context, as an antidote to the communal politics of both the Hindu and Muslim stripe. Yet it is a definition that has not accounted for either the “fact of religions being of unequal status”, or for the “underlying hierarchy in concepts such as the majority and the minority communities”.

Coexistence or religious tolerance cannot in this sense, be a primary criterion. The secular ideal originates in the western milieu where the issue of coexistence was of relatively little consequence, since subjects of the Sovereign were normally enjoined to follow the faith he patronised. What was germane rather, was the subordination of the religious authority to the worldly power. In Romila Thapar’s words: “The secular implies the primacy of civil laws. .. Identities of religion, race, caste, language and so on would be subordinated to the identity of citizenship, based on equal rights, duties and obligations of all citizens on the state”.

The focus then shifts from secularism as a principle supposedly embedded in the institutions of governance, towards secularisation as a process accompanying the consolidation of the nation-state. Religion loses its primary claim to citizen allegiance and is confined to a private sphere, while the civic compact takes over the public domain. People live together in “civil society” not because they resemble each other in terms of religion or any other marker of identity, but because they share a common set of values, embodied in a system of civil law.

But is this separation of the private and public spheres always feasible? And can religion be all that easily confined to the private sphere or demoted as a primary criterion of identity fixation? Religion is of course a medium for the socialisation of the individual and a private religion would be in some senses, a contradiction in terms. A more credible approach would be to view secularisation in terms of the balance of power between social institutions, as a process by which the civic compact as embodied in a secular constitution supersedes the decrees of religious authority.

Historically, secularisation has also corresponded to the diminution of the political power of the ecclesiastical orders, typified for instance, by the loss of their tithes and titles to land. That understanding though, is of limited relevance in India, where an ecclesiastical order on the lines of the Catholic Church never really existed.

Instances when sovereigns have specifically enjoined tolerance for various faiths as a political commitment are not lacking from Indian history. So too are there numerous instances of the sovereign power patronising a variety of religious institutions and orders. But these cannot be used to buttress the argument for secularism, since their focus was “the furtherance of religion as a social force”.

A more credible source for secular doctrines in Romila Thapar’s assessment, could be found in the various nastika sects which existed from the earliest times in India and despite all their internal disagreements, were almost all “opposed to divine sanction as necessary for civil laws”.

The nastika view was that “the universe is self-created” and life itself constituted by a combination of elements. Human consciousness and knowledge are finite and derived from perception, rather than revelation. In Romila Thapar’s words again, the nastika sects held that “laws being man-made, can be changed”. These were arguments that the Buddhists and Jainas found extremely congenial to their mission of propagating “social ethics as the mainspring of human behaviour, where the laws and values of society should ensure the equality and dignity of its members”.

Moving rapidly forward to contemporary times, these aspects of Indian tradition are of obvious relevance to the modern debate on secularism. From being a rather pale assurance of religious tolerance, secularism becomes a more robust principle of ensuring that constitutional guarantees of liberty and equality are fulfilled. Key assurances of the Indian constitution, such as equality before the law and fair opportunity, have obviously been breached repeatedly and without any gesture of redress from the State. Words and deeds are being increasingly subject to control and manipulation in accordance with “invented laws of what are described as religious and cultural tradition”. The rich multiplicities of history are being effaced in “monolithic structures” that answer the seeming need for a nation-state to define itself by primordial identities rather than the civic compact.

For Romila Thapar, these circumstances made the task of “redefining the secular in Indian society” an absolute imperative. Opportunities were available, since as a nation, India still has “the freedom to choose the values that should govern our society”. The retrieval of the secular could begin by shifting the focus “from a passive co-existence of religions, to the more dynamic co-existence of citizens with .. equal rights and obligations, guarded by the vigilance of a free and just society”.

Picking up on some of these themes, K.N. Panikkar drew attention to the need for understanding secularism in the context of “community formation” in modern times and the newly minted forms of religious identity that emerged within the colonial milieu. Small and diverse communities that existed on the basis of their economic and social functions, were under the influence of colonial modernity, incorporated into one or the other religious group. Religion had been a “perceived and experienced reality” in pre-colonial times, without generating a consciousness that transcended the local milieu. These identities became entrenched as civil society was incorporated into the colonial system. Moreover, in early early nationalist propaganda, these newly minted identities were seen as congruent with “national” identities.

To view secularism as an outcome of religious harmony is to invert the perspective, since tolerance only emerges when secularism is in place. Secularism as a principle however, began its journey in India burdened with the deadweight of religion, which in turn was perceived as a monolithic doctrine in which the multiple cultural diversities of the real world were effaced. Religious harmony fails to achieve the secular ideal because every religion has within it, various kinds of cultural and social hierarchies. Coexistence thus becomes a formula for the sustenance of difference and for the perpetuation of these inequalities within each religious order.

It was “logical” to have accorded a degree of priority to religious harmony, given the reality of Indian society, where multiple religious traditions had at various times sprouted and flourished. But the notion was not sufficient to achieve a truly inclusive social order. “For realizing inclusiveness, cultural plurality is not sufficient”, said Panikkar: “what is essential
is cultural equality”.

In its practice in India, secularism in both its state and society centred versions, was enclosed within the discourse of “religious consciousness”. It failed to reconcile between the “religious and material conditions of existence”. Redefining the secular requires that areas of human existence other than the religious, such as culture and economy, be incorporated into its praxis. It requires that “the values of democracy and social justice and cultural equality” be introduced as integral elements of the secular compact.

Secularism accorded priority to the political values of liberty and equality, over the codes of duty and obedience ordained by religion. Concluding the discussion, Prabhat Patnaik argued that what is often taken to be the purely ethical impulse towards freedom has a basis in reason. Every individual has a rational cause to struggle for freedom as part of a human collective, since nobody can call himself free while there are many who are unfree.

This collective endeavour for freedom fosters the domain of the “secular”. It creates the community that strives for a transcendence of narrower values imposed by religion. But it is threatened by the forces of reaction which seek to impose an order based on religious values. More subtly, the bourgeois order which retains a formal commitment to secularism, may seek to engineer schisms in the collective struggle for freedom, reducing each individual to an atomised existence, impelling him in turn to seek an anchorage in an older, familiar network of religious community.

The denial of human freedom then is the logical course of a bourgeois political order which exalts an individual’s seeming gain at the expense of society, as the ultimate benchmark of achievement. With the untold riches foretold on that pathway now proving illusory and the world order built on the unfettered and unaccountable rampage of finance capital in palpable crisis, the forces of reaction seem poised to resume their push towards absolute political power. A redefinition of the secular in Indian society is clearly a political programme of surpassing urgency.

December 28 2011

Dear Readers' Editor

Dear Readers’ Editor,
Maybe you do not have jurisdiction over material published in Frontline magazine. And if nobody before me has made this point to you, let me be the first: your columns as Readers’ Editor in The Hindu are seriously off-key.
We expect a serious effort to address matters that the readership brings before you, but you seem intent on lecturing them on what is right and what is not.
However, that is a different matter and I will not detain you on that issue here.
My really serious difficulty with your editorial policy relates to the magazine Frontline, which is unique among Indian periodicals in having significant space devoted to international affairs. This is an important gesture of commitment, but I wish you would use some qualitative measures and some consistent political standards in allowing material through in this section.
International affairs should not be about equal opportunity junkets. Such as: I find in the most recent issue of Frontline that you have an article on the situation within Syria, which is very committed and serious. Even when it is defending a dynastic regime that represents nobody but itself and has been responsible for crushing the secular Palestinian movement for liberation in 1976, there is a certain seriousness there.
Unfortunately, it does not take great intelligence to find out that this article is written by somebody who is either totally foolish or completely paid off. If the author of that article had real conviction in writing what he did, he should have written equally critically about the next government that gave him an all-expenses paid junket.
I find though, that he is generous in his praise for the Emirs of Oil in the United Arab Emirates. Far be it from me to attribute motives, but for any informed reader, this rather bizarre conjunction of opinionated articles would be rather difficult to digest. And you should really not blame the reader for concluding that this is just about who pays the bills.
In other words, this is another variant of “paid news”.
Surely, we expect better from your esteemed publication.
With best regards,
Sincerely,