Official India’s attitude towards West Asia displays a curious tendency to be several steps behind time. This is a region of unending turmoil, today the epicentre of a confrontation that could engulf the entire world. This much has been evident since at least 2003, when the U.S. began gearing up for its invasion of Iraq, the final act in a saga of destruction that would reduce one of the Arab world’s most viable states to a pathetic state of internal meltdown. For weeks on end, the Indian government dawdled, rather than take a stand. It sat through two weeks and a few days of the invasion, before finally issuing a statement in Hindi that cleverly sought to obscure the distinction between “condemning” and “deploring” the thoroughly illegitimate war of destruction. And it urged the withdrawal of invading forces from Iraq on the precise day that U.S. forces were entering Baghdad.
It is necessary to recall this bit of recent history since the habitual tendency to delay taking a stand has not changed with the UPA government. On July 20, the Ministry of External Affairs issued a statement declaring Israel’s actions “unjustified”. This might have seemed a timely response to the Israeli military’s destructive rampage through Lebanon, which had wrecked most of that country’s civilian infrastructure and killed in excess of 300 civilians. But no, the Indian government’ statement it transpired, bore reference to the trail of destruction that Israeli marauders had left in Gaza. It was at least three weeks since Israel had bombed Gaza’s only power plant, abducted most elected representatives of the Palestinian people, and ground the administrative offices of the Palestinian National Authority to rubble. And while the Indian government agonised over the appropriate response to these crimes against humanity, the Israeli killing machine had moved on to open another front in Lebanon. It was not as if the slaughter in the Gaza had ceased. It was just that it had acquired a “business as usual” dimension and been knocked off the world headlines, since the massacre in Lebanon had momentarily acquired greater dimensions.
A few days later, the criminal U.S. administration of George Bush sent its principal diplomat, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, to West Asia to find a way to end the bloodshed in Lebanon. In what was intended to be a conciliatory gesture towards bruised Arab sensibilities, Rice visited the beleaguered Lebanese capital of Beirut first. She met with the Prime Minister, the speaker of parliament, and other significant participants in the coalition of sectarian groups that is the ruling arrangement in Lebanon. She did not receive, by any account, a single word of sustenance and was sent on her way with the unequivocal demand that Israel stop its aggression and a reconstruction effort be set underway before the terms of a final peace settlement could be discussed.
The Lebanese perception in this sense was congruent with the global commonsense, that for a durable peace to be negotiated, the immediate provocation of Israel’s wanton military brutality should be reined in. Uniquely however, the U.S. had a different perception. Obviously believing that the deafening sound of missiles and bombs wrecking the civilian infrastructure of a country would concentrate minds, the U.S. was insisting that a ceasefire would only be the final outcome of a comprehensive peace settlement. The Lebanese were under duress, being stampeded into signing a peace agreement with Israel – much like the shameful documents of surrender authored by Egypt in 1980 and Jordan in 1994 – that would take the country out of the Arab orbit and make it an accomplice in the cultural genocide of Palestine.
It was already clear by the time of the Rice visit though, that the U.S.-Israeli stratagem was faltering. Much store had been set by this axis of evil on the sectarian groups within Lebanon’s political mosaic rebelling against the Shi’a militant group, Hezbollah, that had sparked off the crisis by its cross-border raid into Israel to kill six Israeli soldiers and capture two prisoners of war. Initial rumbles of discontent from the Maronite Christian leadership within Lebanon seemed to indicate that the game-plan may bear fruit. But during Rice’s visit to Beirut, when she met the Sunni prime minister, the Shi’a speaker of parliament and leaders of other factions within Lebanon’s unique mosaic of confessional politics, she was unequivocally told that the Israeli aggression was perceived across all schisms, as a national rather than a sectarian problem.
The reasons are not far to seek. The religious factions in Lebanese politics are all too aware of the disastrous consequences that disunity can have at this juncture. Memories of the country’s 15 year-long civil war, punctuated by the brutal Israeli invasion of 1982 and the destruction of much of its capital city, are still raw.
Then, the bloodletting was only ended by the 1990 Taif accord sponsored by the Arab League. The conditions both implicit and explicit under which the truce came into effect have never been a secret. Syria would under-write the peace in Lebanon and honour the National Accord of 1943, which was the foundational document of the brittle peace between the country’s different confessional groupings. Lebanese Christians had lost their social, economic and above all, numerical preeminence since the 1943 compact assured them the presidency of the republic in perpetuity. Natural growth and the influx of Palestinian victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing in 1948 and subsequent years, had altered the demographic balances. But if the Taif accord committed itself to honouring the 1943 compact, it was only on the essential condition that the resistance would be kept alive.
There would in other words, be no peace treaty with Israel without a broader settlement of all issues of concern to the Arab world. Uniquely for a process of national reconciliation, the Lebanese state agreed in 1990 to an abridgment of its powers, granting Hezbollah the autonomy in southern Lebanon to sustain the resistance. This was in part a recognition of the stellar role the Shi’a militant group – which operates as a full-fledged parliamentary party in Lebanese politics – had played in sustaining a sense of civil society and nationality in the south of the country through the years of Israeli aggression and occupation. As Rafiq al-Hariri, then the Prime Minister of Lebanon, put it in 1996: “The resistance...is not made by the Lebanese government. It is made by the people. All we are saying is that the people have the right to fight the occupation”.
Today, both the U.S. and Israel seek to portray Hezbollah as the terrorist proxy of hostile governments in Syria and Iran. This self-serving narrative overlooks the close links that Hezbollah has managed to forge with all sections of Lebanese national life. It is for precisely this reason that the U.S. and Israel, after wheedling and coercing the U.N. Security Council into passing resolution 1559 demanding the disarming of Hezbollah and the extension of the Lebanese government’s writ over the entire country, have been unsure about the means available to enforce it. An effort to deploy the Lebanese national army in disarming the Hezbollah would, absent a broader settlement in the region, fail to muster up a political consensus. Even if the battle were to be joined, it would be an unequal fight since Hezbollah, as the most powerful military force in Lebanon, commanding the allegiance of its largest confessional grouping, would easily prevail.
Hezbollah fought the Lebanese general elections of 2005 with a slate of predominantly Shi’a candidates. But it draws the unswerving support of the Palestinian diaspora in the country. And the powerful Druze chieftain, Walid Junblatt, has also allied himself with Hezbollah in the ruling arrangement in Beirut. Further political sustenance has come from Michel Aoun, a former chief of staff of the Lebanese army and a Maronite Christian who has credibility and respect across all confessional groupings. Both Junblatt and Aoun have long opposed the influence exerted by Syria in Lebanese affairs and in allying themselves closely with Hezbollah, they have effectively rubbished the self-serving myth that the U.S. and Israel have sought to propagate.
Unfortunately, some of the more influential Arab states -- motivated both by loyalty to the U.S. aid-giver and apprehension over growing Iranian geopolitical influence – have chosen to buy the western myth. Foreign Ministers of the Arab League were called into session at Cairo on the fourth day of the offensive against Lebanon. In an obvious effort to set the tone for this meeting, King Abdullah of Jordan joined President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt in issuing a statement putting the onus of finding a peace on Hezbollah. Its brand of “adventurism” did not serve “Arab interests” according to the joint declaration, which explicitly warned Hezbollah to steer clear of any actions that could plunge the region into “uncalculated confrontations”. Concurrently, a spokesman for the Saudi Arabian ruling family, came out with a denunciation of Hezbollah’s “uncalculated adventures” which had ostensibly exposed “Arab nations... to grave dangers without these nations having a say in the matter.”
In compliance with a U.S. demarche, the Saudi foreign minister read out a statement at the Arab League session, demanding that Hezbollah cease its “unexpected, inappropriate and irresponsible acts” of aggression against Israel. Saudi Arabia was joined in this demand by Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, the Gulf states and the Palestinian authority, represented not by its elected parliament but by the increasingly isolated president, Abu Mazen. Ranged on the other side, were Syria, Algeria, Yemen and Libya, among others.
Two weeks on, with the Hezbollah resistance showing no signs of crumbling, the mood in the Arab camp was somewhat different. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia authored a personal communication to the U.S. president, delivered by his kinsman and foreign minister, reportedly “beseeching” him to end the Israeli aggression. The Jordanian foreign minister declared that his country would support a ceasefire and the deployment of an international force in southern Lebanon to “dislodge” the Hezbollah from the strategic positions it had occupied. And reverting to the brand of diplomacy that it is most comfortable with, Saudi Arabia committed itself to provide a sum of $ 1.5 billion for the reconstruction of Lebanon.
Israel was by this time reconciled to the strategic reality that its use of air and artillery power had failed to complete the job of decimating the Hezbollah. Leaflets were being profusely dropped in southern Lebanon, warning the civilian population to leave, since Israel intended to convert the entire region into a free-fire zone where nothing would be safe. Israel’s chief of defence staff, Lt-Gen Dan Halutz – who is effectively persona non grata in several countries because of the threat of prosecution for war crimes under universal jurisdiction laws – was urging his forces to destroy at least ten buildings in Lebanon for every rocket that Hezbollah fired. And evidence was emerging that Israel had, as during its wars of destruction against Lebanon in 1982, 1993 and 1996, again been using banned incendiary weapons on civilians in the south of the country.
In 1996, the international advocacy group, Human Rights Watch, had recorded powerful and persuasive eyewitness testimony about Israel’s use of white phosphorus weapons -- which when not fatal, cause intense burns and permanent scars – on Lebanese civilians including children. “The available circumstantial evidence of the illegal use of phosphorus, and/or other incendiaries, by Israel against Lebanese civilians during the 1993 events and afterwards is so compelling as to warrant serious investigation and a public response by the Israeli government”, it had observed: “Among other evidence, Human Rights Watch saw several civilians, including children, in southern Lebanon with burns that are likely to have been caused by phosphorus”.
Far from being forced to account for its crimes, Israel has only been given greater licence and leeway to kill and destroy. As Israel presses on with its ground offensive into Lebanon, it is reportedly prepared for a long stay, till the U.S. is able to cobble together an international force that will be empowered to take aggressive enforcement action against Hezbollah. Few countries have yet volunteered troops for this enterprise. And just when the U.S. administration was seeking to step up its mobilisational efforts, the news emerged of the deliberate targeting by Israel of a U.N. observer post in Lebanon. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has expressed deep anger and called for an investigation into the incident, which has claimed at least four lives. At the time of writing, it seems that some of the casualties could have been Indian personnel on peace-keeping duties with the U.N.
As with Iraq in 2003, India could soon be faced with a request from the U.S. to volunteer troops for the dirty work of policing Israel’s regime of coercion and aggression in West Asia. And unlike then, it is greatly to be hoped that India will respond this time, not with waffling and equivocation, but with a firm and decisive “no”. The more worthwhile and principled foreign policy pursuit would obviously be to rein in the racist outlaw regime of Israel in the cause of justice for Palestine and Lebanon.
Friday, July 28, 2006
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Israel in Lebanon: focusing minds through bombs and missiles
Over the third weekend of July, television studios in the U.S. were resonant with talk of an apocalyptic struggle of good against evil. Israel had just begun a destructive military rampage in Lebanon, gutting Beirut’s international airport, destroying the country’s electricity grid and throwing transportation networks out of gear. In obvious admiration, Newt Gingrich, the right-wing ideologue and prospective Republican candidate for the U.S. presidency, spoke of these actions as the first salvos of “World War Three”. Joining him in this ascent towards a variety of religious rapture, were news and talk-show hosts in virtually all channels with a tilt towards the right. If the “war on terror” has lost some of the spectral magic that earned the rabid right two significant electoral victories in the U.S., it evidently needs now to be supplanted by an ever more frightening vision.
But for a war that pitted such clearly defined moral categories as good and evil against each other, the line-up of geopolitical forces on either side of World War III remained indeterminate. With the exception of the U.S. and Israel, global public opinion remained firmly on the side of the supposed forces of darkness. And the dynastic regimes of the Arab world, none too firm in their adherence to democracy, stood uneasily on the side of the U.S. This arrangement of pieces on the international checkerboard had altered, though ever so subtly, in the days since the war began. But every minute shift conveyed grim suggestions of unending turmoil in the region.
Though no explicit words of approval were uttered in public, the U.S. was prepared to risk international isolation in resisting any multilateral involvement to curb Israel’s absolute freedom to terrorise its neighbourhood. At the same time, it was prepared with unseemly haste, to rush to unfavourable judgment in all matters involving Israel’s adversaries. Eleven days into the war, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice paid a visit to the region. In a gesture of conciliation towards bruised Arab sentiments, she chose Beirut as her first port of call, expressing sympathy for the Lebanese civilians caught up in a vicious war, but saying nothing that could be construed as disapproval of Israel’s military actions. Rather, she rehearsed yet again, her well-worn line that a ceasefire would be of little substantive value, if it were to be breached within a matter of months. To be of any enduring use, a ceasefire would have to be accompanied by a comprehensive peace that addressed all the fundamental problems of the region. And in identifying the problems that needed immediate attention, Rice proved disinclined to take a broad view. The one problem she had in mind was the pervasive presence and influence of the Hezbollah militia in southern Lebanon, where it had effectively become a “state within a state”, unamenable to central control from Beirut and able to threaten Israel’s northern settlements at will through lethal rocket fire.
The U.S. attitude in effect reverses the commonsense of international diplomacy, which had been articulated the preceding Thursday by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Addressing the U.N. Security Council, Annan paid due obeisance to the U.S. sensibilities, criticising Hezbollah for its “provocative” foray across the border a week before, when two Israeli soldiers were taken prisoner. This action, carried out without the authority of a duly constituted political authority, showed a “reckless disregard for the interests of the government of Lebanon”. But having said all this, Annan was firm in his belief that Israel's “excessive use of force” was completely unwarranted. It did “little or nothing to decrease popular support” for Hezbollah, and made the Lebanese government, whose authority Israel wanted extended to the entire country, a hapless hostage to the actions of a guerrilla force. Staying well within the bounds of diplomacy, Annan chided Israel for instigating a humanitarian crisis that was likely in little time, to engulf upto a million people.
Fundamental to the divergence between the U.S. and the rest of the world are rival perceptions about the conditions under which negotiations should best be conducted. While conceding that there is a large complex of issues to be resolved, Annan’s proposals suggested that negotiations should ideally proceed in a calm and settled atmosphere. With her own interventions, Rice in effect, was articulating the U.S. position that peace talks are most likely to achieve their objective if conducted with the deafening crescendo of bombs and missiles in the background.
From behind the scenes though, another story was emerging in unsubtle leaks: that even as Rice was setting off for her tour of the region, the U.S. had given Israel a clear deadline of a week to complete its military campaign. Beyond that, the U.S. was reportedly, not prepared to hold out the assurance that it would resist the international call for a ceasefire. Whether this conformed to the professional military assessment from the Israeli side was unclear. At a cabinet meeting the day before the Rice visit, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had reportedly assured his ministerial colleagues that “the diplomatic process” would not be pursued “at the expense of destroying infrastructures of terror”, which would “take a very long time”.
Evidently to ensure that maximal havoc was created in the available time, the U.S. was also, as the New York Times reported on July 22, hastening its deliveries of lethal munitions to Israel. “The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the Bush administration”, reported the newspaper: “Its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others because of the appearance that the United States is actively aiding the Israeli bombing campaign in a way that could be compared to Iran’s efforts to arm and resupply Hezbollah”.
Even without the additional element of rancour injected by this report, Arab states had begun by then to show deep signs of disquiet. Foreign Ministers of the Arab League were called into session at Cairo on the fourth day of the offensive against Lebanon. In an obvious effort to set the tone for this meeting, King Abdullah of Jordan joined President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt in issuing a statement putting the onus of finding a peace on Hezbollah. The predominantly Shi’a Muslim formation, which represents the largest of Lebanon’s many confessional groupings and is a significant presence in the national parliament, was accused of “adventurism that does not serve Arab interests” and explicitly told to steer clear of any actions that could plunge the region into “uncalculated confrontations.” As if on cue, a spokesman for the Saudi Arabian ruling family immediately afterwards, came out with a denunciation of Hezbollah’s “uncalculated adventures” which had ostensibly exposed “Arab nations... to grave dangers without these nations having a say in the matter.”
In compliance with a U.S. demarche, the Saudi foreign minister read out a statement at the Arab League session, demanding that Hezbollah cease its “unexpected, inappropriate and irresponsible acts” of aggression against Israel. Saudi Arabia was joined in this demand by Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, the Gulf states and the Palestinian authority, represented not by its elected parliament but by the increasingly isolated president, Abu Mazen. Ranged on the other side, were Syria, Algeria, Yemen and Libya.
Within a week, the Saudi foreign minister, accompanied by two other members of the ruling family, called on the U.S. President in Washington, to deliver a letter from Saudi King Abdullah. According to media reports, the King “beseeched” the U.S. President to intervene in Israel's military campaign in Lebanon. As he left the presidential premises, the Saudi minister said that he had “requested a cease-fire to allow for a cessation of hostilities”. The “bleeding in Lebanon” had to stop, and there had to be “an agreement to save Lebanese lives, Lebanese properties and what the Lebanese have built, and to save this country from the ordeal it is facing”.
Behind this shift in Saudi attitudes, lies a sense of alarm at the violence inflicted upon Lebanon. Israel had obviously calculated that the scale of mechanical and explosive force it was prepared to apply through air and artillery power, would unhinge the loose coalition of confessional groups that is the ruling arrangement in Lebanon. It had hoped that the Maronite Christian element, traditionally viewed as allies, would lead a revolt against the Hezbollah, if necessary ejecting the party from the ruling coalition and deploying the Lebanese national army to rein in its militia.
It did not take very long before this calculation came a cropper. The religious factions in Lebanese politics are all too aware of the disastrous consequences that disunity can have at this juncture. Memories of the country’s 15 year-long civil war, punctuated by the brutal Israeli invasion of 1982 and the destruction of much of its capital city, are still raw. The bloodletting was ended by the 1990 Taif accord sponsored by the Arab League and its conditions – both implicit and explicit – have never been a secret. Syria would under-write the peace in Lebanon and honour the National Accord of 1943, which was the foundational document of the brittle peace between the country’s different confessional groupings. The Christians had lost their social, economic and above all, numerical preeminence since the 1943 compact assured them the presidency of the republic in perpetuity. Natural growth and the influx of Palestinian victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing in 1948 and subsequent years, had altered the demographic balances. But if the Taif accord committed itself to honouring the 1943 compact, it was only on the essential condition that the resistance would be kept alive. There would in other words, be no peace treaty with Israel without a broader settlement of all issues of concern to the Arab world.
Shortly after the Israelis blasted a residential building of Beirut with 20 tonnes of explosives in an effort to kill him, Hezbollah’s leader Shaikh Hassan Nasrallah sat down for an interview with the Al Jazeera news channel. Asked about the impunity with which Hezbollah functioned in southern Lebanon, engaging in hostile actions that endangered the fragile peace with Israel, he was categorical that the Shi’a militia was operating within the terms of a broader agreement with the Lebanese government. “The government statement, on the basis of which we participated in the government, talks about the Lebanese Government's endorsement of resistance and its national right to liberate the land and the prisoners”, said Nasrallah. Uniquely for a process of national reconciliation, the Lebanese state agreed in 1990 to an abridgment of its powers, granting Hezbollah the autonomy in southern Lebanon to sustain the resistance. And the objectives of the resistance as laid out by Nasrallah, were manifold, though not all were of equal priority.
Despite vacating much of southern Lebanon in 2000, Israel continues to be in occupation of a small patch of land called the Shab’a farms. Furthermore, violations of the sovereign space of Lebanon through land, air and sea are almost a daily occurrence. But neither of these, in Nasrallah’s account, merited great attention on the part of the resistance. Though the border violations in particular, were a grievous provocation, Lebanon he declared, could live with them. Where it would not compromise though, was in respect of the Lebanese nationals and Palestinians who were being held without trial in Israeli prisons, and the civilians who were subject to the daily military atrocities of the Israeli armed forces. Strategically and tactically, in the aggravated situation that prevailed mid-July, with Israeli military action against civilians scaling new heights of random and disproportionate violence, the Hezbollah had no option but to conduct its raid across the border and take two soldiers prisoner.
The subsequent reaction by the Arab states had disappointed Lebanon, but there were in Nasrallah’s strategic estimation, no grounds for anxiety in the internal situation. “We do not fear the internal front”, said Nasrallah: “They are trying to play on the sectarian divisions. They know that playing on the sectarian divisions is dangerous. …. If they want to play on the differences between Sunni and Shi’a, Muslim and Christian, or Druze and Shi’a, it will be dangerous to the country”.
These locutions have multiple layers of significance. On the one hand, an effort to deploy the Lebanese national army in disarming the Hezbollah would, absent a broader settlement in the region, fail to muster up a political consensus. It would moreover, be an unequal battle, since Hezbollah, as the most powerful military force in Lebanon, commanding the allegiance of its largest confessional grouping, would easily overwhelm the Lebanese army. If external powers were to intervene, the outcome would be a descent into civil war, which in conjunction with the daily bloodshed in Iraq, could plunge the entire region into anarchy.
Within Lebanon itself, Hezbollah fought the general elections of 2005 with a slate of predominantly Shi’a candidates. But it draws the unswerving support of the Palestinian diaspora in the country. And the powerful Druze chieftain Walid Junblatt, has also allied himself with Hezbollah in the ruling arrangement in Beirut. Further political sustenance has come from Michel Aoun, a former chief of staff of the Lebanese army and a Maronite Christian who has credibility and respect across all confessional groupings.
Both Junblatt and Aoun have been long-time opponents of the overweening influence exerted by Syria in Lebanese affairs. In allying themselves so closely with Hezbollah, they have effectively rubbished the notion, so pronounced in the Israeli and U.S. narration, that Hezbollah is little else than a terrorist proxy for Syria, determined to work contrary to Lebanon’s national interests. At another level, Nasrallah’s statements reflect a certain confidence that the Israeli assault would heal, rather than deepen sectarian fissures within Lebanon. Since the Israeli strategy has been quite explicitly to inflict pain on all of Lebanon rather than only the offending elements, it seemed to have precisely this effect after the first two weeks. Further, in standing up and signaling that Israel would be called to account for its atrocities on the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, Hezbollah has the potential to transcend the sectarian split between Shi’a and Sunni Muslim, and appeal to a broad mass of the Arab people.
Since the farce of its withdrawal from Gaza, Israel has, with the acquiescence of all Arab regimes, considerably stepped up its daily attacks on the very fabric of civic life in occupied Palestine. These attacks have ascended several notches in virulence since Palestinian national elections in February brought the Islamic resistance group Hamas to power. Western governments have been mobilised to stop all aid flows to the beleaguered people, tax revenues rightfully belonging to the Palestinian administration have been withheld, and access routes through both land and sea have been blocked. In what would be recognised under international rules of war as a legitimate act of self-defence, Hamas militants in June carried out a raid on an Israeli military picket enforcing the illegal siege of Gaza. Two soldiers were killed and one taken prisoner. Since then, Israel has been engaged in the kind of destructive rampage through Gaza that it is now visiting on Lebanon.
That no Arab state managed to summon up the political will to condemn Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people, has been a blot on their already besmirched reputations. That a non-state actor like Hezbollah should have taken up the onus of demanding accountability from Israel, is a further challenge to the Arab state system. Early reactions to the atrocities in Lebanon were conditioned by the aversion most Arab regimes have towards any accretion to the regional strategic influence of Iran, which is still considered, with obvious inattention to truth, the external prop without which Hezbollah would be a negligible political force. The later mood within the Arab leadership, which seemed almost to verge on panic, could well suggest the beginnings of a rearguard to safeguard their rapidly shrinking political legitimacy.
July 25, 2006
But for a war that pitted such clearly defined moral categories as good and evil against each other, the line-up of geopolitical forces on either side of World War III remained indeterminate. With the exception of the U.S. and Israel, global public opinion remained firmly on the side of the supposed forces of darkness. And the dynastic regimes of the Arab world, none too firm in their adherence to democracy, stood uneasily on the side of the U.S. This arrangement of pieces on the international checkerboard had altered, though ever so subtly, in the days since the war began. But every minute shift conveyed grim suggestions of unending turmoil in the region.
Though no explicit words of approval were uttered in public, the U.S. was prepared to risk international isolation in resisting any multilateral involvement to curb Israel’s absolute freedom to terrorise its neighbourhood. At the same time, it was prepared with unseemly haste, to rush to unfavourable judgment in all matters involving Israel’s adversaries. Eleven days into the war, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice paid a visit to the region. In a gesture of conciliation towards bruised Arab sentiments, she chose Beirut as her first port of call, expressing sympathy for the Lebanese civilians caught up in a vicious war, but saying nothing that could be construed as disapproval of Israel’s military actions. Rather, she rehearsed yet again, her well-worn line that a ceasefire would be of little substantive value, if it were to be breached within a matter of months. To be of any enduring use, a ceasefire would have to be accompanied by a comprehensive peace that addressed all the fundamental problems of the region. And in identifying the problems that needed immediate attention, Rice proved disinclined to take a broad view. The one problem she had in mind was the pervasive presence and influence of the Hezbollah militia in southern Lebanon, where it had effectively become a “state within a state”, unamenable to central control from Beirut and able to threaten Israel’s northern settlements at will through lethal rocket fire.
The U.S. attitude in effect reverses the commonsense of international diplomacy, which had been articulated the preceding Thursday by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Addressing the U.N. Security Council, Annan paid due obeisance to the U.S. sensibilities, criticising Hezbollah for its “provocative” foray across the border a week before, when two Israeli soldiers were taken prisoner. This action, carried out without the authority of a duly constituted political authority, showed a “reckless disregard for the interests of the government of Lebanon”. But having said all this, Annan was firm in his belief that Israel's “excessive use of force” was completely unwarranted. It did “little or nothing to decrease popular support” for Hezbollah, and made the Lebanese government, whose authority Israel wanted extended to the entire country, a hapless hostage to the actions of a guerrilla force. Staying well within the bounds of diplomacy, Annan chided Israel for instigating a humanitarian crisis that was likely in little time, to engulf upto a million people.
Fundamental to the divergence between the U.S. and the rest of the world are rival perceptions about the conditions under which negotiations should best be conducted. While conceding that there is a large complex of issues to be resolved, Annan’s proposals suggested that negotiations should ideally proceed in a calm and settled atmosphere. With her own interventions, Rice in effect, was articulating the U.S. position that peace talks are most likely to achieve their objective if conducted with the deafening crescendo of bombs and missiles in the background.
From behind the scenes though, another story was emerging in unsubtle leaks: that even as Rice was setting off for her tour of the region, the U.S. had given Israel a clear deadline of a week to complete its military campaign. Beyond that, the U.S. was reportedly, not prepared to hold out the assurance that it would resist the international call for a ceasefire. Whether this conformed to the professional military assessment from the Israeli side was unclear. At a cabinet meeting the day before the Rice visit, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had reportedly assured his ministerial colleagues that “the diplomatic process” would not be pursued “at the expense of destroying infrastructures of terror”, which would “take a very long time”.
Evidently to ensure that maximal havoc was created in the available time, the U.S. was also, as the New York Times reported on July 22, hastening its deliveries of lethal munitions to Israel. “The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the Bush administration”, reported the newspaper: “Its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others because of the appearance that the United States is actively aiding the Israeli bombing campaign in a way that could be compared to Iran’s efforts to arm and resupply Hezbollah”.
Even without the additional element of rancour injected by this report, Arab states had begun by then to show deep signs of disquiet. Foreign Ministers of the Arab League were called into session at Cairo on the fourth day of the offensive against Lebanon. In an obvious effort to set the tone for this meeting, King Abdullah of Jordan joined President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt in issuing a statement putting the onus of finding a peace on Hezbollah. The predominantly Shi’a Muslim formation, which represents the largest of Lebanon’s many confessional groupings and is a significant presence in the national parliament, was accused of “adventurism that does not serve Arab interests” and explicitly told to steer clear of any actions that could plunge the region into “uncalculated confrontations.” As if on cue, a spokesman for the Saudi Arabian ruling family immediately afterwards, came out with a denunciation of Hezbollah’s “uncalculated adventures” which had ostensibly exposed “Arab nations... to grave dangers without these nations having a say in the matter.”
In compliance with a U.S. demarche, the Saudi foreign minister read out a statement at the Arab League session, demanding that Hezbollah cease its “unexpected, inappropriate and irresponsible acts” of aggression against Israel. Saudi Arabia was joined in this demand by Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, the Gulf states and the Palestinian authority, represented not by its elected parliament but by the increasingly isolated president, Abu Mazen. Ranged on the other side, were Syria, Algeria, Yemen and Libya.
Within a week, the Saudi foreign minister, accompanied by two other members of the ruling family, called on the U.S. President in Washington, to deliver a letter from Saudi King Abdullah. According to media reports, the King “beseeched” the U.S. President to intervene in Israel's military campaign in Lebanon. As he left the presidential premises, the Saudi minister said that he had “requested a cease-fire to allow for a cessation of hostilities”. The “bleeding in Lebanon” had to stop, and there had to be “an agreement to save Lebanese lives, Lebanese properties and what the Lebanese have built, and to save this country from the ordeal it is facing”.
Behind this shift in Saudi attitudes, lies a sense of alarm at the violence inflicted upon Lebanon. Israel had obviously calculated that the scale of mechanical and explosive force it was prepared to apply through air and artillery power, would unhinge the loose coalition of confessional groups that is the ruling arrangement in Lebanon. It had hoped that the Maronite Christian element, traditionally viewed as allies, would lead a revolt against the Hezbollah, if necessary ejecting the party from the ruling coalition and deploying the Lebanese national army to rein in its militia.
It did not take very long before this calculation came a cropper. The religious factions in Lebanese politics are all too aware of the disastrous consequences that disunity can have at this juncture. Memories of the country’s 15 year-long civil war, punctuated by the brutal Israeli invasion of 1982 and the destruction of much of its capital city, are still raw. The bloodletting was ended by the 1990 Taif accord sponsored by the Arab League and its conditions – both implicit and explicit – have never been a secret. Syria would under-write the peace in Lebanon and honour the National Accord of 1943, which was the foundational document of the brittle peace between the country’s different confessional groupings. The Christians had lost their social, economic and above all, numerical preeminence since the 1943 compact assured them the presidency of the republic in perpetuity. Natural growth and the influx of Palestinian victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing in 1948 and subsequent years, had altered the demographic balances. But if the Taif accord committed itself to honouring the 1943 compact, it was only on the essential condition that the resistance would be kept alive. There would in other words, be no peace treaty with Israel without a broader settlement of all issues of concern to the Arab world.
Shortly after the Israelis blasted a residential building of Beirut with 20 tonnes of explosives in an effort to kill him, Hezbollah’s leader Shaikh Hassan Nasrallah sat down for an interview with the Al Jazeera news channel. Asked about the impunity with which Hezbollah functioned in southern Lebanon, engaging in hostile actions that endangered the fragile peace with Israel, he was categorical that the Shi’a militia was operating within the terms of a broader agreement with the Lebanese government. “The government statement, on the basis of which we participated in the government, talks about the Lebanese Government's endorsement of resistance and its national right to liberate the land and the prisoners”, said Nasrallah. Uniquely for a process of national reconciliation, the Lebanese state agreed in 1990 to an abridgment of its powers, granting Hezbollah the autonomy in southern Lebanon to sustain the resistance. And the objectives of the resistance as laid out by Nasrallah, were manifold, though not all were of equal priority.
Despite vacating much of southern Lebanon in 2000, Israel continues to be in occupation of a small patch of land called the Shab’a farms. Furthermore, violations of the sovereign space of Lebanon through land, air and sea are almost a daily occurrence. But neither of these, in Nasrallah’s account, merited great attention on the part of the resistance. Though the border violations in particular, were a grievous provocation, Lebanon he declared, could live with them. Where it would not compromise though, was in respect of the Lebanese nationals and Palestinians who were being held without trial in Israeli prisons, and the civilians who were subject to the daily military atrocities of the Israeli armed forces. Strategically and tactically, in the aggravated situation that prevailed mid-July, with Israeli military action against civilians scaling new heights of random and disproportionate violence, the Hezbollah had no option but to conduct its raid across the border and take two soldiers prisoner.
The subsequent reaction by the Arab states had disappointed Lebanon, but there were in Nasrallah’s strategic estimation, no grounds for anxiety in the internal situation. “We do not fear the internal front”, said Nasrallah: “They are trying to play on the sectarian divisions. They know that playing on the sectarian divisions is dangerous. …. If they want to play on the differences between Sunni and Shi’a, Muslim and Christian, or Druze and Shi’a, it will be dangerous to the country”.
These locutions have multiple layers of significance. On the one hand, an effort to deploy the Lebanese national army in disarming the Hezbollah would, absent a broader settlement in the region, fail to muster up a political consensus. It would moreover, be an unequal battle, since Hezbollah, as the most powerful military force in Lebanon, commanding the allegiance of its largest confessional grouping, would easily overwhelm the Lebanese army. If external powers were to intervene, the outcome would be a descent into civil war, which in conjunction with the daily bloodshed in Iraq, could plunge the entire region into anarchy.
Within Lebanon itself, Hezbollah fought the general elections of 2005 with a slate of predominantly Shi’a candidates. But it draws the unswerving support of the Palestinian diaspora in the country. And the powerful Druze chieftain Walid Junblatt, has also allied himself with Hezbollah in the ruling arrangement in Beirut. Further political sustenance has come from Michel Aoun, a former chief of staff of the Lebanese army and a Maronite Christian who has credibility and respect across all confessional groupings.
Both Junblatt and Aoun have been long-time opponents of the overweening influence exerted by Syria in Lebanese affairs. In allying themselves so closely with Hezbollah, they have effectively rubbished the notion, so pronounced in the Israeli and U.S. narration, that Hezbollah is little else than a terrorist proxy for Syria, determined to work contrary to Lebanon’s national interests. At another level, Nasrallah’s statements reflect a certain confidence that the Israeli assault would heal, rather than deepen sectarian fissures within Lebanon. Since the Israeli strategy has been quite explicitly to inflict pain on all of Lebanon rather than only the offending elements, it seemed to have precisely this effect after the first two weeks. Further, in standing up and signaling that Israel would be called to account for its atrocities on the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, Hezbollah has the potential to transcend the sectarian split between Shi’a and Sunni Muslim, and appeal to a broad mass of the Arab people.
Since the farce of its withdrawal from Gaza, Israel has, with the acquiescence of all Arab regimes, considerably stepped up its daily attacks on the very fabric of civic life in occupied Palestine. These attacks have ascended several notches in virulence since Palestinian national elections in February brought the Islamic resistance group Hamas to power. Western governments have been mobilised to stop all aid flows to the beleaguered people, tax revenues rightfully belonging to the Palestinian administration have been withheld, and access routes through both land and sea have been blocked. In what would be recognised under international rules of war as a legitimate act of self-defence, Hamas militants in June carried out a raid on an Israeli military picket enforcing the illegal siege of Gaza. Two soldiers were killed and one taken prisoner. Since then, Israel has been engaged in the kind of destructive rampage through Gaza that it is now visiting on Lebanon.
That no Arab state managed to summon up the political will to condemn Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people, has been a blot on their already besmirched reputations. That a non-state actor like Hezbollah should have taken up the onus of demanding accountability from Israel, is a further challenge to the Arab state system. Early reactions to the atrocities in Lebanon were conditioned by the aversion most Arab regimes have towards any accretion to the regional strategic influence of Iran, which is still considered, with obvious inattention to truth, the external prop without which Hezbollah would be a negligible political force. The later mood within the Arab leadership, which seemed almost to verge on panic, could well suggest the beginnings of a rearguard to safeguard their rapidly shrinking political legitimacy.
July 25, 2006
Monday, July 24, 2006
Mumbai and the question of terror
Mumbai is a generous city, a city that for all its signs of decay, still manages to accommodate any needy person in search of a livelihood. And as Mumbaikars showed the very day after the serial bombing of their city’s lifeline, it is a courageous city. Both by compulsion and by unswerving commitment to the basic credo of getting on with life, while likewise allowing all others, Mumbai is a city whose rhythms can never be silenced.
Following the July 11 attacks on Mumbai’s suburban transportation system, there was much lament in public forums, that India’s struggle against terrorism had gone seriously adrift. The proposition was advanced, not unheard of before, that force can only be combated by an equal, opposite -- perhaps even a disproportionate -- application of the same principle. And there was some bemoaning of the fact that India’s campaign against terrorism, after its brief victory in the early-1990s in the Punjab theatre, had lost sight of the basics in subsequent challenges: in Kashmir and in the proliferation of affronts that the Indian state has had to face in diverse corners of the country.
The closest perhaps that Mumbai has come to having its spirit broken, was for two weeks in January 1993, when its streets were taken over by rampaging mobs intent on inflicting maximum violence on a vulnerable minority. And just two months later, it was paralysed into silence and submission when a retaliatory sequence of bombings devastated crucial nodes of its daily life.
Since that horrendous outrage, there have been several attacks on civic life in the city that have challenged the common citizen’s loyalty. And yet, with all the provocation, there has been no occasion since when civic peace has been disturbed, when the fabric of inter-community understanding has been in danger of being shredded.
If there is a lesson underlying all this, it is simply that a citizenry committed to peace and determined to preserve the civic responsibilities that make life in a big city possible, is the principal resource that a state can count upon in its struggle against terrorism. It is a curiosity then, that in all the policy deliberations that followed Mumbai’s tragedy, not to mention the advisory opinions that the media so generously proffered, this issue never featured in any significant manner.
As a term, “terrorism” may remain slippery and evasive, though there is little that is vague about the real world manifestations of the threat. India in particular, has suffered enormously from successive, and intimate, encounters with the random and insensate violence of terrorism, designed with deliberate intent, to disrupt the rhythms of daily life for a civilian population and sap public loyalty to the political order. The motives of terrorism could be various: a sense of grievance at real or imagined injustices, a quest for vengeance against palpably real atrocities. But in terms of its long-term calculus, terrorism invariably targets the will of an entire people, to sap their stated and unstated consent in the perpetuation of a political order.
That Mumbai has defied this calculus despite repeated provocation, is a tribute to the resilience of the city and to the vital stakes that all of India has in its well-being. At the very least it would seem, the citizens of Mumbai need recognition for their fortitude -- an example for the whole country – and this can only come through pursuing the perpetrators of July 11 with all the determination and fairness that the law mandates.
Initial signals have not been the most propitious. The principal opposition party, the BJP, has with its allies, made known its determination to put the government on the mat in the monsoon session of Parliament over its alleged softness on terrorism. Reprising a favoured theme – which it has never tired of harping upon since the Terrorism and Disruptive Activities Prevention Act (TADA) was repealed in the mid-1990s and the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) in 2004 – it has demanded the enactment of a special category of law in addition to all existing statutes, to deal the modern-day scourge of terrorism.
The Government for its part has responded with a disavowal of any such intent, but in a meeting with chief secretaries from all the states on July 20, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh effectively acknowledged that prevalent practices and procedures had proven woefully inadequate. “It is the primary responsibility of the state to maintain public order and ensure the safety of its people”, said the Prime Minister: “You will have to empower your police forces to discharge their functions at higher levels of efficiency”.
It is not clear that the additional powers sought for the police and security agencies would be achieved through legislation. Some part of the challenge in the Prime Minister’s perception evidently involves the enhancement of operational efficiencies within these forces. But a little consideration would show that there is a strategic challenge beyond these relatively more mundane matters, that still remains to be grappled with.
Media reports of July 14, obviously primed by well-planned leaks, suggested that the union cabinet at its first meeting since the Mumbai atrocities, had been told by top security officials, that Pakistan was directly responsible. The consensus though, was vitiated by two senior ministers. One of the dissenters, according to the media leaks, pointed to the finding by an independent initiative, that the alleged terrorist plot on the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) headquarters in Nagpur, and the June 1 police encounter in which all its intending authors were killed, had in fact been staged. Another senior minister, harked back to a lethal bomb blast in the district headquarters town of Nanded in Mahrashtra, in which two people had been killed, both of them associated with Hindu extremist organisations. The timing of the Nanded blasts, he pointed out, suggested a deep political intent, since it came around the time that BJP leader L.K. Advani was to transit through Maharashtra as part of his cross-country odyssey focusing attention on terrorism.
Since neither of the ministers identified as the dissenters within the union cabinet could have wanted to be associated with an unpopular viewpoint in an especially fraught moment, it is safe to assume that the media leak about their interventions came from other sources. But since dissent has reached the level of the union cabinet on the issue of terrorism – where the unspoken national consensus so far has been to lay all the blame on Pakistan – it is perhaps important to assess how credible the underlying information is.
The inquiry into the Nagpur incident was led by B.G. Kolse Patil, a former judge of the Bombay High Court, and involved twelve other individuals representing five distinct civil liberties and legal advocacy bodies. Its report, completed mid-June and covered rather indifferently by the media, is brief but convincing. It points to numerous lacunae and discrepancies in the official narration of the encounter in which three “jehadi” terrorists were killed, and refers to the unwillingness or inability of the Nagpur police commissioner to meet with the inquiry team and answer certain very basic doubts. It concludes in the light of all the information available, that the encounter was “fake” and requires a “fair probe” in the national interest.
Similar ambiguities and concerns surround the Nanded bomb blasts, which did not receive any of the nation-wide coverage that the Nagpur incident did. The few media reports that did emerge, quoted authoritative police sources identifying the deceased as active members of a Hindu extremist organisation, who had been engaged in the fabrication of an explosive device. But interest soon died out and the police, for reasons yet unclear, sought to dissuade any further media coverage on the grounds that it would damage the investigative process.
When public scepticism over the Nagpur incident was acknowledged in the media, it was only to deflect awkward questions. The argument was deployed that the intelligence and security services had acted on credible information that an attack was imminent. Rather than arrest the militant elements and pursue the tedious legal process of prosecution, the agencies decided that a more effective recourse would be to eliminate them. Recent incidents, such as the hijacking of Indian Airlines IC 814 in 1999, when the Indian government was compelled to release three terrorists held for operations in the Kashmir theatre, had shown that detaining jehadi elements and pursuing the process of the law was a high-risk enterprise.
It cannot be a very reassuring thought for most common people, that summary justice will be the norm when the security agencies deal with the risk of terrorism. The policy of shooting first and then suppressing, or when that is impossible, evading the awkward questions, may play well in an environment of overwrought nationalism and hyper-insecurity. But it feeds into a climate of official impunity, makes for very poor long-term efficacy and involves numerous risks to ordinary citizens.
December 13, 2001 was a defining moment in India in this sense. The attack on India’s parliament premises by two car-loads of gun-wielding desperados, marked a transition from a holding operation by the Indian State, to an offensive doctrine of prevention and even pre-emption of terrorism. It enabled a coordination on the terrain of principle and practice between India and other self-proclaimed leaders of the struggle against terrorism, notably the U.S. and Israel. And in the domestic arena, it was to be the test case of the efficacy of a newly crafted anti-terrorism law, POTA.
Nearly five years years after that pivotal event in India’s history, the long-term consequences remain ambivalent at best. Of the four individuals who were arrested shortly afterwards and charged with waging war against the Indian state, three were swiftly convicted and sentenced to death under POTA. One other accused person, a woman, was sentenced to an extended term in prison, the sentence partly moderated by the fact that she had a child of tender years.
In appeal before the Delhi High Court, two of the convictions were quashed. But the prosecution, led by the Special Task Force (STF) of the Delhi Police would have none of it. Choosing its occasion well, it went in appeal to India’s Supreme Court on December 13, 2003. On August 4, 2005, the Supreme Court confirmed the acquittals handed down by the Delhi High Court. It also absolved another of the accused of the charge of conspiracy, instead holding him guilty of the lesser crime of concealing knowledge about the conspiracy. Yet, even as it mitigated the sentence of this individual, effectively knocking out several of the props of the prosecution case, the Supreme Court contrived, in a surviving curiosity of judicial reasoning, to uphold the death sentence on the fourth defendant.
Multiple suspicions arise once it is noted that the only person against whom the charge of involvement in the December 13 conspiracy has stuck, was a surrendered militant, obliged by the terms of his capitulation, to keep regular contact with the anti-insurgency wing of the Jammu and Kashmir Police. It was an invidious position that he found himself in, subsequent to his 1993 surrender. While having to go the extra distance to prove his fealty to the terms of his surrender, he was also under constant threat of liquidation by his erstwhile confederates in the Kashmir militancy. For a while, the way out of the conundrum was, seemingly, to pay up a sum – determined at the momentary discretion of his handler in the security apparatus – as protection money. The alternative was to enlist as a “special police officer”, or in plain language, a police informer.
When the December 13 case was in appeal in the Delhi High Court, some of India’s most eminent jurists appeared on behalf of the accused. Ram Jethmalani argued that “the evidence discloses total non-application of mind and an unforgivable frivolity of attitude”. He also charged that the police case was “riddled with illegality”, and the evidence disclosed “concoction and fabrication”. In similar vein, senior advocate Shanti Bhushan, contended that his client had “been falsely implicated in the conspiracy case by the investigating agency”, which had “gone out of its way in concocting evidence”.
If this record of manifest ineptitude is the legacy of the December 13 attacks, which had international ramifications and almost brought India and Pakistan to war, then the state-of-play in the prosecution of the worst terrorist atrocity ever on Indian soil, the 1993 Mumbai blasts, does not inspire very much confidence either. In October 2000, the designated judge in Mumbai declared that the hearing of the case had concluded. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) was given a limited period of time to present concluding evidence regarding the nature of the explosives used in the attacks, following which the defence lawyers were expected to submit their final pleas. Six years on, the case is effectively frozen in the limbo it was then cast into. Meanwhile, of the 124 accused, ten have died, while over 30 remain still in custody. The rest have obtained bail and by all accounts, are not under any serious encumbrance, since their ranks include some of the affluent and influential. Whether from the viewpoint of the victims or the alleged perpetrators of the 1993 atrocities, the ends of justice clearly, are a long way from being met.
Can it do any good for public confidence that the police and intelligence agencies have come a cropper in two of India’s most significant terrorism trials, despite being empowered with extraordinary statutes? Can it be taken for granted then, that the resolve of the common citizen, an unacknowledged though invaluable resource in the battle against terrorism, will remain as firm as it is now? These questions need to be posed now with a fresh vigour by the public, since to this record of conspicuous failure must be added a story of the deliberate abdication of responsibility in pursuing the guilty of the 1993 communal carnage in Mumbai. In most reasonable assessments, January 1993 was a macabre turning point in that city’s career of cosmopolitanism and civic concord. Mumbai’s people deserve nothing less than full accountability for all the crimes they have suffered, starting from then.
(ENDS)
Following the July 11 attacks on Mumbai’s suburban transportation system, there was much lament in public forums, that India’s struggle against terrorism had gone seriously adrift. The proposition was advanced, not unheard of before, that force can only be combated by an equal, opposite -- perhaps even a disproportionate -- application of the same principle. And there was some bemoaning of the fact that India’s campaign against terrorism, after its brief victory in the early-1990s in the Punjab theatre, had lost sight of the basics in subsequent challenges: in Kashmir and in the proliferation of affronts that the Indian state has had to face in diverse corners of the country.
The closest perhaps that Mumbai has come to having its spirit broken, was for two weeks in January 1993, when its streets were taken over by rampaging mobs intent on inflicting maximum violence on a vulnerable minority. And just two months later, it was paralysed into silence and submission when a retaliatory sequence of bombings devastated crucial nodes of its daily life.
Since that horrendous outrage, there have been several attacks on civic life in the city that have challenged the common citizen’s loyalty. And yet, with all the provocation, there has been no occasion since when civic peace has been disturbed, when the fabric of inter-community understanding has been in danger of being shredded.
If there is a lesson underlying all this, it is simply that a citizenry committed to peace and determined to preserve the civic responsibilities that make life in a big city possible, is the principal resource that a state can count upon in its struggle against terrorism. It is a curiosity then, that in all the policy deliberations that followed Mumbai’s tragedy, not to mention the advisory opinions that the media so generously proffered, this issue never featured in any significant manner.
As a term, “terrorism” may remain slippery and evasive, though there is little that is vague about the real world manifestations of the threat. India in particular, has suffered enormously from successive, and intimate, encounters with the random and insensate violence of terrorism, designed with deliberate intent, to disrupt the rhythms of daily life for a civilian population and sap public loyalty to the political order. The motives of terrorism could be various: a sense of grievance at real or imagined injustices, a quest for vengeance against palpably real atrocities. But in terms of its long-term calculus, terrorism invariably targets the will of an entire people, to sap their stated and unstated consent in the perpetuation of a political order.
That Mumbai has defied this calculus despite repeated provocation, is a tribute to the resilience of the city and to the vital stakes that all of India has in its well-being. At the very least it would seem, the citizens of Mumbai need recognition for their fortitude -- an example for the whole country – and this can only come through pursuing the perpetrators of July 11 with all the determination and fairness that the law mandates.
Initial signals have not been the most propitious. The principal opposition party, the BJP, has with its allies, made known its determination to put the government on the mat in the monsoon session of Parliament over its alleged softness on terrorism. Reprising a favoured theme – which it has never tired of harping upon since the Terrorism and Disruptive Activities Prevention Act (TADA) was repealed in the mid-1990s and the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) in 2004 – it has demanded the enactment of a special category of law in addition to all existing statutes, to deal the modern-day scourge of terrorism.
The Government for its part has responded with a disavowal of any such intent, but in a meeting with chief secretaries from all the states on July 20, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh effectively acknowledged that prevalent practices and procedures had proven woefully inadequate. “It is the primary responsibility of the state to maintain public order and ensure the safety of its people”, said the Prime Minister: “You will have to empower your police forces to discharge their functions at higher levels of efficiency”.
It is not clear that the additional powers sought for the police and security agencies would be achieved through legislation. Some part of the challenge in the Prime Minister’s perception evidently involves the enhancement of operational efficiencies within these forces. But a little consideration would show that there is a strategic challenge beyond these relatively more mundane matters, that still remains to be grappled with.
Media reports of July 14, obviously primed by well-planned leaks, suggested that the union cabinet at its first meeting since the Mumbai atrocities, had been told by top security officials, that Pakistan was directly responsible. The consensus though, was vitiated by two senior ministers. One of the dissenters, according to the media leaks, pointed to the finding by an independent initiative, that the alleged terrorist plot on the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) headquarters in Nagpur, and the June 1 police encounter in which all its intending authors were killed, had in fact been staged. Another senior minister, harked back to a lethal bomb blast in the district headquarters town of Nanded in Mahrashtra, in which two people had been killed, both of them associated with Hindu extremist organisations. The timing of the Nanded blasts, he pointed out, suggested a deep political intent, since it came around the time that BJP leader L.K. Advani was to transit through Maharashtra as part of his cross-country odyssey focusing attention on terrorism.
Since neither of the ministers identified as the dissenters within the union cabinet could have wanted to be associated with an unpopular viewpoint in an especially fraught moment, it is safe to assume that the media leak about their interventions came from other sources. But since dissent has reached the level of the union cabinet on the issue of terrorism – where the unspoken national consensus so far has been to lay all the blame on Pakistan – it is perhaps important to assess how credible the underlying information is.
The inquiry into the Nagpur incident was led by B.G. Kolse Patil, a former judge of the Bombay High Court, and involved twelve other individuals representing five distinct civil liberties and legal advocacy bodies. Its report, completed mid-June and covered rather indifferently by the media, is brief but convincing. It points to numerous lacunae and discrepancies in the official narration of the encounter in which three “jehadi” terrorists were killed, and refers to the unwillingness or inability of the Nagpur police commissioner to meet with the inquiry team and answer certain very basic doubts. It concludes in the light of all the information available, that the encounter was “fake” and requires a “fair probe” in the national interest.
Similar ambiguities and concerns surround the Nanded bomb blasts, which did not receive any of the nation-wide coverage that the Nagpur incident did. The few media reports that did emerge, quoted authoritative police sources identifying the deceased as active members of a Hindu extremist organisation, who had been engaged in the fabrication of an explosive device. But interest soon died out and the police, for reasons yet unclear, sought to dissuade any further media coverage on the grounds that it would damage the investigative process.
When public scepticism over the Nagpur incident was acknowledged in the media, it was only to deflect awkward questions. The argument was deployed that the intelligence and security services had acted on credible information that an attack was imminent. Rather than arrest the militant elements and pursue the tedious legal process of prosecution, the agencies decided that a more effective recourse would be to eliminate them. Recent incidents, such as the hijacking of Indian Airlines IC 814 in 1999, when the Indian government was compelled to release three terrorists held for operations in the Kashmir theatre, had shown that detaining jehadi elements and pursuing the process of the law was a high-risk enterprise.
It cannot be a very reassuring thought for most common people, that summary justice will be the norm when the security agencies deal with the risk of terrorism. The policy of shooting first and then suppressing, or when that is impossible, evading the awkward questions, may play well in an environment of overwrought nationalism and hyper-insecurity. But it feeds into a climate of official impunity, makes for very poor long-term efficacy and involves numerous risks to ordinary citizens.
December 13, 2001 was a defining moment in India in this sense. The attack on India’s parliament premises by two car-loads of gun-wielding desperados, marked a transition from a holding operation by the Indian State, to an offensive doctrine of prevention and even pre-emption of terrorism. It enabled a coordination on the terrain of principle and practice between India and other self-proclaimed leaders of the struggle against terrorism, notably the U.S. and Israel. And in the domestic arena, it was to be the test case of the efficacy of a newly crafted anti-terrorism law, POTA.
Nearly five years years after that pivotal event in India’s history, the long-term consequences remain ambivalent at best. Of the four individuals who were arrested shortly afterwards and charged with waging war against the Indian state, three were swiftly convicted and sentenced to death under POTA. One other accused person, a woman, was sentenced to an extended term in prison, the sentence partly moderated by the fact that she had a child of tender years.
In appeal before the Delhi High Court, two of the convictions were quashed. But the prosecution, led by the Special Task Force (STF) of the Delhi Police would have none of it. Choosing its occasion well, it went in appeal to India’s Supreme Court on December 13, 2003. On August 4, 2005, the Supreme Court confirmed the acquittals handed down by the Delhi High Court. It also absolved another of the accused of the charge of conspiracy, instead holding him guilty of the lesser crime of concealing knowledge about the conspiracy. Yet, even as it mitigated the sentence of this individual, effectively knocking out several of the props of the prosecution case, the Supreme Court contrived, in a surviving curiosity of judicial reasoning, to uphold the death sentence on the fourth defendant.
Multiple suspicions arise once it is noted that the only person against whom the charge of involvement in the December 13 conspiracy has stuck, was a surrendered militant, obliged by the terms of his capitulation, to keep regular contact with the anti-insurgency wing of the Jammu and Kashmir Police. It was an invidious position that he found himself in, subsequent to his 1993 surrender. While having to go the extra distance to prove his fealty to the terms of his surrender, he was also under constant threat of liquidation by his erstwhile confederates in the Kashmir militancy. For a while, the way out of the conundrum was, seemingly, to pay up a sum – determined at the momentary discretion of his handler in the security apparatus – as protection money. The alternative was to enlist as a “special police officer”, or in plain language, a police informer.
When the December 13 case was in appeal in the Delhi High Court, some of India’s most eminent jurists appeared on behalf of the accused. Ram Jethmalani argued that “the evidence discloses total non-application of mind and an unforgivable frivolity of attitude”. He also charged that the police case was “riddled with illegality”, and the evidence disclosed “concoction and fabrication”. In similar vein, senior advocate Shanti Bhushan, contended that his client had “been falsely implicated in the conspiracy case by the investigating agency”, which had “gone out of its way in concocting evidence”.
If this record of manifest ineptitude is the legacy of the December 13 attacks, which had international ramifications and almost brought India and Pakistan to war, then the state-of-play in the prosecution of the worst terrorist atrocity ever on Indian soil, the 1993 Mumbai blasts, does not inspire very much confidence either. In October 2000, the designated judge in Mumbai declared that the hearing of the case had concluded. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) was given a limited period of time to present concluding evidence regarding the nature of the explosives used in the attacks, following which the defence lawyers were expected to submit their final pleas. Six years on, the case is effectively frozen in the limbo it was then cast into. Meanwhile, of the 124 accused, ten have died, while over 30 remain still in custody. The rest have obtained bail and by all accounts, are not under any serious encumbrance, since their ranks include some of the affluent and influential. Whether from the viewpoint of the victims or the alleged perpetrators of the 1993 atrocities, the ends of justice clearly, are a long way from being met.
Can it do any good for public confidence that the police and intelligence agencies have come a cropper in two of India’s most significant terrorism trials, despite being empowered with extraordinary statutes? Can it be taken for granted then, that the resolve of the common citizen, an unacknowledged though invaluable resource in the battle against terrorism, will remain as firm as it is now? These questions need to be posed now with a fresh vigour by the public, since to this record of conspicuous failure must be added a story of the deliberate abdication of responsibility in pursuing the guilty of the 1993 communal carnage in Mumbai. In most reasonable assessments, January 1993 was a macabre turning point in that city’s career of cosmopolitanism and civic concord. Mumbai’s people deserve nothing less than full accountability for all the crimes they have suffered, starting from then.
(ENDS)
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Israel’s war in Gaza: a case for international intervention
Sukumar Muralidharan
Early in July, with Israeli forces rampaging through Gaza, killing, maiming and destroying with gay abandon, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman had a moment of revelation. A sightseeing trip through the rain forests of Peru was just the stimulus needed to see distant events with a new and blinding clarity. And as he reflected on the violence in West Asia from the vantage point of Peru’s tropical splendour, what occurred most strikingly was the sheer lack of purpose of it all. Violence was inherent in nature, but it was always underlined by a grand purpose of species preservation. The subtle equations of nature are preserved in the struggle between species for living space and the nourishment that the elements provide. A delicate balance between predator species and their prey is often sustained by the dynamics of evolutionary biology. But this balance requires that species behave rationally and respect their inherent instincts for self-preservation.
What was on display in Palestine however, was completely contrary to rationality. Israel had evacuated the Gaza strip, wrote Friedman, but the Palestinian Islamic resistance, Hamas, chose not to use the opportunity to build “a nest for its young there -- a decent state and society, with jobs”. Instead, it decided on the path of obduracy and violence, launching “hundreds of rockets into Israel”. The Palestinians could instantly “have a state on the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem”, said Friedman, “if they and the Arab League clearly recognised Israel, normalised relations and renounced violence”. But they were intent, regrettably, on little else than the destruction of Israel, even if it also meant self-obliteration. “Species that behave that way in the rain forest”, Friedman concluded ominously, inevitably “become extinct”.
Wish-fulfilment is often a powerful, though unconscious, motivation for writers. Friedman’s unquestioning Zionist loyalty has never been a secret and his column written in Peru seemed rather eagerly to anticipate a moment in history, that for Israel has been the only possible solution to the conflict in Palestine: the extinction of the Palestinians as a national community and their dispersal into distant corners of the Arab world as a people devoid of a specific historical identity. The Zionist construction of history first denied the existence of the Palestinians and then grudgingly came around to recognising them as an irritant, a people whose claims to the land they had lived in for centuries did not have any of the sanctity of divine investiture that the Jews enjoyed. The annals of Zionism are replete with statements by its champions – David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir, Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon, Yitzhak Rabin, right down to Ehud Olmert – advocating the “transfer” of the Palestinian people as the only viable solution to what was called the “demographic problem” of Israel. And just to ensure that the conditions were appropriate for the departure of the Palestinians – always prefixed with the proviso that it would be “voluntary” -- Zionism was prepared to make their lives under occupation a veritable hell.
Israel’s newest war on Gaza began on June 28, just over nine months after an evacuation of the territory was accomplished to much internal discord and a torrent of global praise for what were deemed the Zionist state’s peaceful intentions. The immediate provocation for the invasion was a Palestinian attack on a military picket in which two Israeli soldiers were killed and one captured. It is important to note that the target of the Palestinian attack was a military post, instrumental in enforcing the illegal Israeli blockade of Gaza. Since the Palestinian national elections of February, the blockade has in its ruthlessness, managed to wed the lethal efficiency of U.S.-made weaponry to the savagery of medieval siege warfare. Effectively, the 1.5 million residents of Gaza have been deprived of the basic necessities of life since February, while being targeted with random and indiscriminate military strikes. The bombing of the Gaza beachfront on June 9, which killed seven innocent civilians and left the traumatised ten year-old, Huda Ghalia, as the sole survivor in a family of eight, may have shocked the world because of the media coverage it garnered. But Huda Ghalia’s trauma and tragedy have been played out repeatedly in the Palestinian lands since at least the last six years of the second intifada, which by the Palestinian’s avowal, will be their final uprising against colonialism.
By any applicable criterion of international law, the Israeli military outpost, engaged in illegal siege warfare against the population of Gaza, was a legitimate target. And the Israeli soldier captured on the occasion, Corporal Gilad Shalit, would be a prisoner of war, entitled to all the rights the status entailed. That indeed has been the burden of the Palestinian militants’ argument: that the release of the captured Israeli soldier is a matter to be negotiated by the Israeli government.
Israel has instead embarked upon a military rampage that has shocked the world. Gaza’s only electricity generating station was destroyed on the first day of the offensive. Roads and bridges essential to the movement of the civilian population and the sustenance of their livelihoods, soon followed, victims of high-technology ordnance manufactured in the U.S. On July 2, the London-based human rights group, Amnesty International observed after careful consideration, that the “deliberate attacks by Israeli forces against civilian property and infrastructure in the Gaza Strip violate international humanitarian law and constitute war crimes”. Israel was obliged under international law, to “take urgent measures to remedy the long-term damage it has caused and immediately restore the supply -- at its own cost -- of electricity and water to the Palestinian population in the affected areas”.
Effectively demolishing the argument that Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza was a demonstration of its peaceful intent, Amnesty observed: “High numbers of Palestinian bystanders, including women and children, have been killed and injured by Israeli artillery shelling and air strikes in recent weeks and months”. And with greater subtlety, the human rights group laid to rest the myth that Israeli military actions have been a legitimate response to Palestinian provocations. The situation, said Amnesty, “looks set to worsen in light of the end of the unilateral cease-fire which the armed wing of Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups had been observing since last year”.
If the situation that prevailed was one of a “unilateral ceasefire by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups”, what then could Friedman and others of his ilk mean by their constant harping on the “hundreds of rockets that are fired into Israel”? The answer is not far to seek. The rockets that are fired are essentially home-made weapons – no more sophisticated than firecrackers – that have had minimal military impact. Their significance indeed, has been little more than symbolic. Even as the organised political forces in Palestine declared a ceasefire in the expectation that Israel would reciprocate, individuals outside the control of these groups have kept up their symbolic gestures of defiance. Their argument is very simple: Israel has never been in the business of reciprocity and it would be foolish to expect the Zionist establishment to reverse course now.
The Israeli response, as always, has been disproportionate and indiscriminate. According to an assessment of the situation by the U.N. Office of the Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs, between November and December 2005, the Palestinians launched an estimated 283 home-made rockets into Israel. None of these caused any casualties. In supposed retaliation – though the more credible argument would be that theirs was the original provocation – the Israel Defence Force (IDF) conducted 124 air-strikes and fired 544 artillery shells into Gaza. And all these actions had seriously lethal implications. The number of Palestinians killed in Gaza since the so-called Israeli withdrawal, has been, in proportionate terms, considerably more than in the worst days of the occupation.
In December 2005, belying all claims of a withdrawal, Israel declared parts of northern Gaza a “no-go” area, where its forces would feel free to fire and kill without warning. Palestinian fishermen setting out to sea are routinely fired upon by the IDF in incidents involving loss of life. And routes of entry and exit from Gaza are under the ironhanded control of the IDF. The consequence of withdrawal in other words, has been little else than to convert Gaza from a site of brutal military occupation into the world’s largest unsupervised prison.
This was exactly how things were meant to be. Friedman and others of his stripe who argue that the Gaza withdrawal was a gesture of peace, are guilty of the worst form of disingenuousness. Indeed, the moment it was announced, the Israeli gameplan was denounced as a dilatory tactic to deny the Palestinians true sovereignty and retain indefinite control over the strategically more important West Bank. Such indeed was plainly stated by the then Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon’s principal political aide, Dov Weisglass. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz on October 8, 2004, Weisglass effectively laid out the hidden agenda of the Gaza withdrawal. By late-2003, as he recounted matters, Israel was deep in a quagmire. The bloody confrontation with the Palestinians had dragged on three years at considerable damage to Israel’s international image. The US was still firmly committed, but time was not on Israel’s side. The economy was stagnant and domestic dissent was growing. It was just a matter of time before international opinion, already considerably alienated, crossed the crucial threshold and began to think of sanctions against Israel as a distinct possibility.
In the circumstances, the Gaza withdrawal was a tactical master-stroke, which presented a semblance of real concessions to the Palestinians, while preserving Israel’s core strategic interests in the West Bank. The peace negotiations, Weisglass chortled, had been cast away, into an indefinite limbo. Referring to an exchange of letters between Sharon and U.S. President George Bush early in 2004, Weisglass described how the US had with little demur, endorsed Israel’s essential interests in the West Bank.
Though intended as an overture towards the restive constituency of settlers that saw the Gaza withdrawal as a treasonous ceding of Israel’s divine patrimony, Weisglass’s long and candid exposition of Israel’s agenda for Palestinian statehood attracted considerable international attention. Rather than offering the Palestinians the possibility of an honourable peace, the purpose as plainly stated, was to put the “peace process into formalin”, i.e., to preserve a dead organism as a laboratory specimen to be displayed whenever it suited Israel’s interests.
With its occupation forces having pulled out, Israel has felt at liberty to wildly escalate its retribution for real and imagined acts of defiance. The only difference is that, at least until the June 28 invasion, the violence was administered by fighter aircraft and helicopters from the safety of the skies. If the Palestinians have refused to be cowed down, that is only a tribute to the undying character of their struggle, which a morally anaesthetised world would happily bury in oblivion, if it were not for the visible brutality that Israel continues to visit on innocent civilians.
If the criteria for “humanitarian intervention” employed when the western powers launched successive wars of dismemberment against Yugoslavia in the 1990s were to be applied today, Israel would long since have been placed under international guardianship and its political leaders indicted for war crimes. On June 6, the U.N. Human Rights Council adopted a resolution condemning Israel's military operations in Palestine as a clear breach of international humanitarian law. The newly established body of the U.N. resolved by a margin of 29 against 11, with five abstentions, that it would send a fact-finding mission to Gaza.
From an Indian viewpoint, what is perhaps most significant about this resolution is simply the fact that India voted in its favour. After years of shameless kowtowing before the U.S.-Israeli agenda of depriving the Palestinians of their basic political rights and identity, India has awoken now to the responsibilities it owes to people elsewhere, struggling for their freedom from colonialism. This is a major gain, but it has been vitiated by commentary in the bourgeois media – reminiscent of the BJP Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh’s infamous statement after a visit to Israel – that India’s support for Palestinian national rights is a concession to “vote bank politics” at home. This variety of political idiocy clearly needs to be combated and defeated, if the commonsense and morality of India’s foreign policy is to be retrieved from the slough that it has been plunged into, by the recent ardour for courting the U.S.-Israel neo-imperial axis.
July 11, 2006
Early in July, with Israeli forces rampaging through Gaza, killing, maiming and destroying with gay abandon, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman had a moment of revelation. A sightseeing trip through the rain forests of Peru was just the stimulus needed to see distant events with a new and blinding clarity. And as he reflected on the violence in West Asia from the vantage point of Peru’s tropical splendour, what occurred most strikingly was the sheer lack of purpose of it all. Violence was inherent in nature, but it was always underlined by a grand purpose of species preservation. The subtle equations of nature are preserved in the struggle between species for living space and the nourishment that the elements provide. A delicate balance between predator species and their prey is often sustained by the dynamics of evolutionary biology. But this balance requires that species behave rationally and respect their inherent instincts for self-preservation.
What was on display in Palestine however, was completely contrary to rationality. Israel had evacuated the Gaza strip, wrote Friedman, but the Palestinian Islamic resistance, Hamas, chose not to use the opportunity to build “a nest for its young there -- a decent state and society, with jobs”. Instead, it decided on the path of obduracy and violence, launching “hundreds of rockets into Israel”. The Palestinians could instantly “have a state on the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem”, said Friedman, “if they and the Arab League clearly recognised Israel, normalised relations and renounced violence”. But they were intent, regrettably, on little else than the destruction of Israel, even if it also meant self-obliteration. “Species that behave that way in the rain forest”, Friedman concluded ominously, inevitably “become extinct”.
Wish-fulfilment is often a powerful, though unconscious, motivation for writers. Friedman’s unquestioning Zionist loyalty has never been a secret and his column written in Peru seemed rather eagerly to anticipate a moment in history, that for Israel has been the only possible solution to the conflict in Palestine: the extinction of the Palestinians as a national community and their dispersal into distant corners of the Arab world as a people devoid of a specific historical identity. The Zionist construction of history first denied the existence of the Palestinians and then grudgingly came around to recognising them as an irritant, a people whose claims to the land they had lived in for centuries did not have any of the sanctity of divine investiture that the Jews enjoyed. The annals of Zionism are replete with statements by its champions – David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir, Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon, Yitzhak Rabin, right down to Ehud Olmert – advocating the “transfer” of the Palestinian people as the only viable solution to what was called the “demographic problem” of Israel. And just to ensure that the conditions were appropriate for the departure of the Palestinians – always prefixed with the proviso that it would be “voluntary” -- Zionism was prepared to make their lives under occupation a veritable hell.
Israel’s newest war on Gaza began on June 28, just over nine months after an evacuation of the territory was accomplished to much internal discord and a torrent of global praise for what were deemed the Zionist state’s peaceful intentions. The immediate provocation for the invasion was a Palestinian attack on a military picket in which two Israeli soldiers were killed and one captured. It is important to note that the target of the Palestinian attack was a military post, instrumental in enforcing the illegal Israeli blockade of Gaza. Since the Palestinian national elections of February, the blockade has in its ruthlessness, managed to wed the lethal efficiency of U.S.-made weaponry to the savagery of medieval siege warfare. Effectively, the 1.5 million residents of Gaza have been deprived of the basic necessities of life since February, while being targeted with random and indiscriminate military strikes. The bombing of the Gaza beachfront on June 9, which killed seven innocent civilians and left the traumatised ten year-old, Huda Ghalia, as the sole survivor in a family of eight, may have shocked the world because of the media coverage it garnered. But Huda Ghalia’s trauma and tragedy have been played out repeatedly in the Palestinian lands since at least the last six years of the second intifada, which by the Palestinian’s avowal, will be their final uprising against colonialism.
By any applicable criterion of international law, the Israeli military outpost, engaged in illegal siege warfare against the population of Gaza, was a legitimate target. And the Israeli soldier captured on the occasion, Corporal Gilad Shalit, would be a prisoner of war, entitled to all the rights the status entailed. That indeed has been the burden of the Palestinian militants’ argument: that the release of the captured Israeli soldier is a matter to be negotiated by the Israeli government.
Israel has instead embarked upon a military rampage that has shocked the world. Gaza’s only electricity generating station was destroyed on the first day of the offensive. Roads and bridges essential to the movement of the civilian population and the sustenance of their livelihoods, soon followed, victims of high-technology ordnance manufactured in the U.S. On July 2, the London-based human rights group, Amnesty International observed after careful consideration, that the “deliberate attacks by Israeli forces against civilian property and infrastructure in the Gaza Strip violate international humanitarian law and constitute war crimes”. Israel was obliged under international law, to “take urgent measures to remedy the long-term damage it has caused and immediately restore the supply -- at its own cost -- of electricity and water to the Palestinian population in the affected areas”.
Effectively demolishing the argument that Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza was a demonstration of its peaceful intent, Amnesty observed: “High numbers of Palestinian bystanders, including women and children, have been killed and injured by Israeli artillery shelling and air strikes in recent weeks and months”. And with greater subtlety, the human rights group laid to rest the myth that Israeli military actions have been a legitimate response to Palestinian provocations. The situation, said Amnesty, “looks set to worsen in light of the end of the unilateral cease-fire which the armed wing of Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups had been observing since last year”.
If the situation that prevailed was one of a “unilateral ceasefire by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups”, what then could Friedman and others of his ilk mean by their constant harping on the “hundreds of rockets that are fired into Israel”? The answer is not far to seek. The rockets that are fired are essentially home-made weapons – no more sophisticated than firecrackers – that have had minimal military impact. Their significance indeed, has been little more than symbolic. Even as the organised political forces in Palestine declared a ceasefire in the expectation that Israel would reciprocate, individuals outside the control of these groups have kept up their symbolic gestures of defiance. Their argument is very simple: Israel has never been in the business of reciprocity and it would be foolish to expect the Zionist establishment to reverse course now.
The Israeli response, as always, has been disproportionate and indiscriminate. According to an assessment of the situation by the U.N. Office of the Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs, between November and December 2005, the Palestinians launched an estimated 283 home-made rockets into Israel. None of these caused any casualties. In supposed retaliation – though the more credible argument would be that theirs was the original provocation – the Israel Defence Force (IDF) conducted 124 air-strikes and fired 544 artillery shells into Gaza. And all these actions had seriously lethal implications. The number of Palestinians killed in Gaza since the so-called Israeli withdrawal, has been, in proportionate terms, considerably more than in the worst days of the occupation.
In December 2005, belying all claims of a withdrawal, Israel declared parts of northern Gaza a “no-go” area, where its forces would feel free to fire and kill without warning. Palestinian fishermen setting out to sea are routinely fired upon by the IDF in incidents involving loss of life. And routes of entry and exit from Gaza are under the ironhanded control of the IDF. The consequence of withdrawal in other words, has been little else than to convert Gaza from a site of brutal military occupation into the world’s largest unsupervised prison.
This was exactly how things were meant to be. Friedman and others of his stripe who argue that the Gaza withdrawal was a gesture of peace, are guilty of the worst form of disingenuousness. Indeed, the moment it was announced, the Israeli gameplan was denounced as a dilatory tactic to deny the Palestinians true sovereignty and retain indefinite control over the strategically more important West Bank. Such indeed was plainly stated by the then Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon’s principal political aide, Dov Weisglass. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz on October 8, 2004, Weisglass effectively laid out the hidden agenda of the Gaza withdrawal. By late-2003, as he recounted matters, Israel was deep in a quagmire. The bloody confrontation with the Palestinians had dragged on three years at considerable damage to Israel’s international image. The US was still firmly committed, but time was not on Israel’s side. The economy was stagnant and domestic dissent was growing. It was just a matter of time before international opinion, already considerably alienated, crossed the crucial threshold and began to think of sanctions against Israel as a distinct possibility.
In the circumstances, the Gaza withdrawal was a tactical master-stroke, which presented a semblance of real concessions to the Palestinians, while preserving Israel’s core strategic interests in the West Bank. The peace negotiations, Weisglass chortled, had been cast away, into an indefinite limbo. Referring to an exchange of letters between Sharon and U.S. President George Bush early in 2004, Weisglass described how the US had with little demur, endorsed Israel’s essential interests in the West Bank.
Though intended as an overture towards the restive constituency of settlers that saw the Gaza withdrawal as a treasonous ceding of Israel’s divine patrimony, Weisglass’s long and candid exposition of Israel’s agenda for Palestinian statehood attracted considerable international attention. Rather than offering the Palestinians the possibility of an honourable peace, the purpose as plainly stated, was to put the “peace process into formalin”, i.e., to preserve a dead organism as a laboratory specimen to be displayed whenever it suited Israel’s interests.
With its occupation forces having pulled out, Israel has felt at liberty to wildly escalate its retribution for real and imagined acts of defiance. The only difference is that, at least until the June 28 invasion, the violence was administered by fighter aircraft and helicopters from the safety of the skies. If the Palestinians have refused to be cowed down, that is only a tribute to the undying character of their struggle, which a morally anaesthetised world would happily bury in oblivion, if it were not for the visible brutality that Israel continues to visit on innocent civilians.
If the criteria for “humanitarian intervention” employed when the western powers launched successive wars of dismemberment against Yugoslavia in the 1990s were to be applied today, Israel would long since have been placed under international guardianship and its political leaders indicted for war crimes. On June 6, the U.N. Human Rights Council adopted a resolution condemning Israel's military operations in Palestine as a clear breach of international humanitarian law. The newly established body of the U.N. resolved by a margin of 29 against 11, with five abstentions, that it would send a fact-finding mission to Gaza.
From an Indian viewpoint, what is perhaps most significant about this resolution is simply the fact that India voted in its favour. After years of shameless kowtowing before the U.S.-Israeli agenda of depriving the Palestinians of their basic political rights and identity, India has awoken now to the responsibilities it owes to people elsewhere, struggling for their freedom from colonialism. This is a major gain, but it has been vitiated by commentary in the bourgeois media – reminiscent of the BJP Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh’s infamous statement after a visit to Israel – that India’s support for Palestinian national rights is a concession to “vote bank politics” at home. This variety of political idiocy clearly needs to be combated and defeated, if the commonsense and morality of India’s foreign policy is to be retrieved from the slough that it has been plunged into, by the recent ardour for courting the U.S.-Israel neo-imperial axis.
July 11, 2006
Mandal II and the Media
Sukumar Muralidharan
A recently concluded survey of the British media found that of the senior journalists with decisive influence over news priorities and editorial policy, a significant majority is drawn from a narrow, privately-schooled, Oxbridge-educated elite. Indeed, as British society becomes more diverse and the political system grapples with the challenge of inclusion, the media – if a comparison were to be made with similar data from the mid-1980s – has tended to become an enclave of class privilege. In the words of a report in the Guardian, the dominance of the upper crust is strong enough to ensure that it is “difficult for those from other backgrounds to get a foothold”.
These findings from distant shores were published at roughly the same time that a decision by the Indian government to set aside a fixed proportion of seats in the higher education system for classes of citizens disadvantaged by history, had ignited a debate on the quality of representation afforded by the institutions of Indian democracy. Among the institutions that came in for an examination – even if rather hesitantly and fleetingly – was the media. A survey prompted by the controversy, found that in a sample of 315 journalists in the national capital with the authority to determine media agendas, not one belonged to either a Scheduled Caste or Tribe. No fewer than 49 per cent of the sample was drawn from the Brahminical strata. And if all caste Hindu groups were to be considered in addition to the so-called dwija or twice-born, their share in the total is no less 88 per cent.
Where Scheduled Castes and Tribes are concerned, the argument over affirmative action was settled as part of the nationalist compact which brought India its independence. That the media should remain innocent of any participation from these classes, well into India’s sixth decade as a sovereign, self-governing nation, should surely be occasion for introspection by a social institution that has pretensions to objectivity and fairness in its self-assigned role of determining national priorities. Curiously though, the main English-language newspapers in the country had little space or time for this particular survey on the social origin of journalists.
It is a far from settled point that where one comes from determines what one is. That notion of determinacy is completely antithetical to all conceptions of individual liberty. It could be a valid proposition though, that a psychology of conformity could operate within large aggregates of individuals. Particular individuals could well transcend the limitations imposed by the circumstances of their origin and their accumulation of lived experience. In large groups though, personal commitments and convictions may well get submerged in the overriding pressure to do what is accepted.
To talk about the media today is to deal with complexity and multiple meanings. Variously perceived and described, the media is today a source of information and entertainment, as also the midwife of a union between the two. For a growing number, it increasingly serves as a forum of self-expression. In most studies of the modern media as a social reality, a self-serving myth, continues to hold sway. The media in this portrayal is the institutional bearer of the social right to free speech. This is a happy scenario, except for a minor quibble: the media derives its profits not from delivering information of value to an audience or from serving as a forum for a democratic exchange of views, but from delivering an audience of value to the corporate advertiser. The media arena is not a competitive marketplace where information and ideas are allowed a free run so that the best among them rise to the surface. Rather, it is a carefully controlled environment to ensure the most favourable circumstances for advertisers to sell their wares to carefully screened and selected audiences.
Evidently, perceptions of media neutrality and integrity often lie in the eyes (and ears) of the beholder. The notion that the mass media as an entity merits a distinct field of study originates with the proliferation of the print industry in the early 20th century, followed by the pervasive spread of broadcasting in the years after World War II. The early approach focused on media content and the impact this would have on public perceptions. The role of the media would also invariably come in for scrutiny when certain alarming or disintegrative tendencies, such as an upsurge in violent crime, became manifest in society. These would typically be accompanied by suggestions that the media should play a constructive and ameliorative role, though it has never been clear how best this function is discharged: through reporting things as they are, taking a moral position, or simply avoiding the subject altogether.
Similar is the dilemma that arises when dealing with the functioning of the media in a context of social conflict. Is the function of accurate reporting uppermost, even if it is disconnected from moral judgments? Or is an ethical posture inherent even in the most dispassionate account of any event or sequence of events? Does a well-considered effort at ascribing responsibility for a state of inequality, which does not hesitate to name winners and losers, aggravate an already inflamed situation? Or does it, by focusing attention on the sources of injustice, impel society at large to grapple with the viruses within its fold and root them out?
If any convincing answers have been devised to these questions, they are yet to be elucidated. Neither are they evident in the existing practice of the media. Publishing media content that is in conformity with a placid and uncontested paradigm of social evolution would be acceptable conduct, because it serves elite interests and safeguards their social preeminence. Anything that departs from this idiom would be behaviour warranting stricture and quite possibly, sanction.
This brings up the issue of the relationship between the media as a commercial institution and the public that it caters to. In turn, this requires that at least two other models of media behaviour be considered. The first of these could be called, taking Dennis McQuail’s widely cited formulation, the “ritualist” model, which emphasises not “the transmission of information across space” but the “maintenance of society in time” and the “representation of shared beliefs”. And then there is the “publicity” model which approaches the media less as a source of information than as a device of drawing and retaining visual (or aural) attention. This in turn, serves the direct economic objective of increasing revenue earned from an audience. This model emphasises that “mass communication is liable not to be communication at all, in the sense of an ordered transfer of meaning”. Rather, it is more about “spectatorship” in which the “fact of attention often matters more than the quality of attention”.
In 1990, when the Indian media faced its first significant challenge on the question of affirmative action for the “socially and educationally backward classes” (SEBC’s), it responded by invoking the sacred trope of a seamless Indian national identity and denouncing the divisiveness of caste. “Class” is the term used in the clause of the Indian constitution that enables the State to undertake schemes of protective discrimination, as also in the 1980 report of the Mandal Commission which coined the term “other backward classes” to distinguish its target group from existing beneficiaries of affirmative action. But “class” has invariably translated in official pronouncements into “caste”, raising fears that the ghosts of a primitive, ascriptive social order were rising again to haunt India’s halting but brave efforts at modernisation.
In its tone, editorial comment in the English language press – which exerts an influence far exceeding its reach in India – then tended to the view that all was going well until the government of the day gave into an opportunistic whim. Editorially, the Indian Express (August 9, 1990) condemned the decision as “ruinous” and gloomily forecast a “further deterioration of the state apparatus and heightened social tensions” as the first consequence of a “crassly opportunistic” move. The Times of India (TOI) similarly, commented (August 9, 1990) that the Mandal recommendations on job reservations in the central government, threatened to undo “at one stroke” all that had been achieved over four decades of independence, in building a “modern, egalitarian order”. Reservations, the TOI continued, would “enshrine casteism, undermine meritocracy and excellence, and work against the creation of a pan-Indian identity”.
Notions of progress, it has been said, are remarkably congenial to those ascending the scale of income and wealth. But no matter, the TOI was willing to concede that the backward classes could be helped to improve their “competitiveness” – again, that favoured term of the upwardly mobile – through the provision of “abundant educational, health, nutritional and other social welfare benefits”.
Having identified the augmentation of “competitiveness” within the backward classes as a national priority, the media then lapsed into a phase of inattention. When “structural adjustment” kicked in as official economic policy in 1991, the Indian media joined in eagerly with the chorus of acclaim. The withdrawal of the State from domains where its interventions were not essential, the media confidently forecast, would enable it to more effectively meet the basic needs of a wider mass of the population. In its turn, the easing of the onerous burden of taxes that the more affluent had to bear, would reignite the spark of entrepreneurship, since individual self-aggrandisement was the most effective incentive available for productive economic activity. As the size of the national product increased, the diminution in rates of taxation would more than pay for itself in buoyant tax revenues, empowering the State with ample means to address its basic welfare commitments.
As the decade of the 1990s wore on, it became increasingly evident that these initial prognoses were disastrously askew. The limitless self-aggrandisement of individuals was very much a reality and the media found considerable satisfaction recently in reporting that in a world where the celebration of wealth had become the reigning cult, India had perhaps the fastest growing number of billionaires. But few have concerned themselves with the inconvenient facts that India has also had a rapid growth in economic inequality, perhaps next only to the U.S. and China. The correlation with the rapid fading out of the social sectors from governmental attention is yet to be drawn. But future scholars will probably make the effort to draw the necessary links between growing inequality in India – as both cause and consequence – and the precipitate drop in governmental welfare expenditure.
A 1996-97 report by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) documented how educational infrastructure in the country was in an advanced state of decay. It was allowed to sink into oblivion with scarcely an acknowledgment from the media. In 2002, the Supreme Court directed in response to a set of very energetic petitions from concerned citizens, that the right to food was a basic entitlement the State had to protect. As a first step, it directed all state governments to introduce midday meal programmes in schools. Financial stringency would not be permitted to stand as an alibi for failure. The state governments had to “cut the flab” and the central government was obliged to help meet shortfalls in resource availability. Since then, there have been patchy and sporadic efforts to comply with the judicial directive, intended to serve the dual purposes of enhancing both nutritional standards and school enrollment levels. These have been far from adequate and periodic social audits, have put together a valuable documentation of governmental failure in meeting basic social obligations. These again have failed to excite the media very much.
The reasons are not far to seek. Beginning from around the mid-1990s, the global media began to acknowledge the undeniable fact that the cult of individual affluence also meant that celebrity narcissism would be the wave of the future. The interests and aspirations of the socially disadvantaged were of little consequence, since editorial content had to be moulded in accordance with the perceptions of the rich and the powerful. Editorial distinction may lie in the inclusion of diverse sections of the population in the priorities of the media. But commercial success lay in adapting editorial content to advertiser needs, in shifting content towards fashion, lifestyle and entertainment.
It took the resurrection of Mandal, this time in the shape of reservations for backward classes in institutions of higher education funded by the Central Government, to reawaken media interest in the gigantic defaults of social welfare policy through the 1990s. Initial editorial comment tended to be fairly uniform in its emphases. By providing preferential access to higher education, the government had effectively reversed priorities, said the media. Defending against the perpetuation of inherited disabilities was undoubtedly a national priority, but these needed to start with the basics of the learning process. Higher learning should be reserved as a domain where merit alone prevailed, where selection processes were entirely free of extraneous concerns. This national priority would not conflict with others, such as the redressal of the iniquities of history, if opportunities for all sections were to be equalised through a universal and non-discriminatory system of school education.
The patronising flavour in these editorial recommendations was not missed, their inherent suggestion that the backward classes were yet to prove themselves worthy of the professions, since they were yet to pass the threshold of school education. Rather than hammer home this theme and risk a further alienation of public sentiments, the media then chose a line of retreat. In an early editorial, the TOI argued (May 31, 2006), that the available data base for public policy on affirmative action was seriously flawed. This made a “caste census” in India a “necessary evil”. Later, the same newspaper (June 14, 2006) deprecated the fact that ad hoc decisions had for long held the field when “the need of the hour” was a “coherent justification” and a “clear roadmap for future policy on reservations”. Since several of the classes that had reservation benefits through earlier generations had graduated out of backwardness, there was a case for a continuing process of review of the list of beneficiaries. And the quantum of reservations itself needed to be revisited, since a “blind application of the maximum permitted reservation .. speaks very poorly of government policy”.
The Indian Express though remained fundamentally unreconciled to the notion, arguing that reservations threatened to fatally erode India’s potential to contribute to the global knowledge economy, where its competitive advantages were well established. In a June 5 editorial, it poured scorn on the political opportunism of ambitious individuals that had ostensibly triggered off the furore. It warned that the “space for liberal policymaking (had) been won after a long political fight”. In the course of this struggle, the more “intelligent leaders” of Indian politics, had realised that “quality and efficiency, in most fields, cannot simply be mandated by fiat”. This hard fought gain, the IE bemoaned, was at risk of being squandered in the pursuit of political advantage by ambitious individuals.
The Economic Times which clearly would have preferred not to address the issue, belatedly awoke to the merits of an alternative to the reservations process that has for long been established practice in Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Editorially, it urged the Central Government to “universalise” the JNU admissions model, “which awards booster points for various kinds of backwardness..”. “Scarcity accentuates social fissures”, it warned, and any a priori segregation of seats for particular classes would deepen the sense of grievance among those who did not have the privilege to call themselves “backward”.
Editorially, The Hindu (May 25) urged that three imperatives be borne in mind in implementing reservations. The commitment that discrimination in favour of the backward classes would not diminish opportunities for others, needed to be operationalised. This meant that the central government, “must get serious about strengthening (the) physical and academic infrastructure” of the institutions that it was directly responsible for. “Funds”, the newspaper commented in defiance of the parlous arithmetic of the central budget, “should not be hard to come by, given the buoyancy in revenues”. Second, the newspaper urged that in “the larger interests of the nation”, certain institutions “need to be retained as islands of excellence, their entrance standards uncompromised even by socially desirable goals”. And finally, the central government should steer clear of the political trap that several states had fallen into, of viewing affirmative action as merely the institution of quotas. A far more serious approach towards basic education was essential if the ultimate purposes of protective discrimination were to be met.
The concern for basic education of course, was awakened within the national media only when the disadvantaged staked a claim to a place in the bastions of higher academic excellence, which were ostensibly the arena that would prepare the best of India’s youth to take on the challenges of globalisation. Editorially, the media tended in relation to its reaction to Mandal I, to adopt a more restrained tone of comment with the second visitation. But editorial comment is perhaps the lesser role that the media plays in moments of deep social turmoil. By far the more decisive influence is exerted by the tone and content of its news coverage. And in this respect, some of the biases that were blatantly in evidence during Mandal I have resurfaced, though with noticeably greater restraint. Perhaps nothing illustrates this better than the life and death of an individual who came to be seen in many ways, as a symbol of the agitation against Mandal I.
Rajeev Goswami died on February 24, 2004 aged 33, his passing marked by a few cursory mentions in the media. The image conveyed to the world on his death was drawn not from recent times, but from that moment in 1990 when he set himself afire in spectacular and violent rage at Mandal I. That fateful moment lived with Rajeev Goswami till the end. The cause of his death was internal organ failure arising from burn injuries suffered in 1990.
His injuries lived with him, but the message that Rajeev Goswami sought to convey proved transient. Parties across the board, after a period of connivance with the anti-Mandal demonstrations, began an anxious project of accommodation with the backward class assertion that Mandal epitomised. The Supreme Court put its own imprimatur of constitutional validity on the Mandal recommendations in November 1992. And by then, the media itself had turned its back on the incendiary rhetoric of the agitation.
The Rajeev Goswami tragedy had many dimensions, some of which were encapsulated in official statistics. Since he made his emblematic political statement, employment in the central government has fallen from 3.4 million to 3.3 million. New recruitment has taken place, only to replace retiring employees or others voluntarily leaving government service. Assuming rather generously, that there is an annual attrition rate of 5 per cent in central government employment, the jobs at stake in a regime of 27 per cent reservations for backward classes would number around 40,000. This is literally a drop in the ocean in relation to the tens of millions who enter the work force every year, most of whom fall back on some form of unorganised sector work.
Was Rajeev Goswami's sacrifice only about safeguarding the claims of “merit” to an infinitesimally small enclave of secure employment? Or was it about a larger cause? If the quantitative parameters alone are considered, the sacrifice was obviously not worth it. And that is not a retrospective judgment, since there were any number of voices counselling moderation on precisely these grounds, at the time the anti-Mandal agitation was most virulent. Whatever else, all those who participated in the violent disturbances in 1990 cannot plead lack of knowledge as an alibi -- least of all the media which instigated the agitators with unbridled rhetoric.
From the first stirrings of unrest on the street in August 1990 till Rajeev Goswami's paroxysm of rage on September 19, official spokesmen sought at several junctures to calm the student disturbances. The number of job opportunities that Mandal I would directly impinge upon, they said, was limited. The purpose of the recommendations was not to underline caste exclusions in Indian society, but to dissolve these by empowering sections that had drawn an unlucky number in life's lottery.
The message failed to win a receptive audience in sections that were rampaging through the streets of various north Indian towns. For this, the media bears a large part of the responsibility. The Indian Express, edited then by an individual who was later a member of the Union Cabinet, delivered its judgment mid-August, pronouncing the anti-Mandal agitation a clear “defence of the national interest”. Far from counselling restraint and a measure of sobriety in assessing reservations as official policy, it exhorted the agitationists to “spread and intensify” the disturbances.
Late-August, the same newspaper was denouncing the official effort to mitigate the sense of grievance within the student community. Central Government jobs may be just a small fraction of total employment in the country, but that was not the issue, said an analyst in its columns. What was of concern was the huge preponderance of central government jobs within “organised sector” employment.
The burden of the official rationalisation was that “organised sector” employment was not the only area of interest. There was a whole “unorganised” world outside, that needed to be accommodated in the formal structures of bureaucratic power. But with the media unequivocally behind it by this time, the anti-Mandal agitation was conspicuously displaying its contempt for the unorganised sector. Students from Delhi's elite colleges were trooping to the dhobi-ghats on the Yamuna riverfront to exercise their laundry skills in full view of the national media; others chose strategic street corners to sit with shoe-shine kits to offer their services to any passer-by.
An elitist contempt for all the livelihood recourses of the “unorganised sector” was evident in this pattern of public demonstration. By this time it was evident that “Mandal” had tapped into the populist vein essential for the sustenance of any mass movement. “Anti-Mandal” meanwhile had lost its moral compass, making too explicit a statement of disdain for the vast majority of the country's population. Inevitably, the momentum of the agitation was beginning to die out within a month of the policy announcement by the central government. Rajeev Goswami's suicidal violence on September 19, 1990, brought it back to life.
Rajeev Goswami survived that attempt, though not its long-term effects. He was the first to tempt death in the anti-Mandal cause. But the first to actually die was Surinder Singh Chauhan. This self-immolation happened a week after Rajeev Goswami's abortive attempt. Chauhan's death throes were recorded on film by a mysterious photographer who happened to be on the spot just at that time, equipped with a camera. This photograph was prominently displayed by most national newspapers, in violation of the well-accepted media convention, that photographs of the act of suicide are not to be published for fear that they could set off copycat attempts.
The image of Chauhan's self-immolation was conveyed to the newspapers by a confederate of Rajeev Goswami. On September 19, 1990, when Rajeev Goswami brought the anti-Mandal agitation out of its stasis, he was accompanied in his project by a colleague called Laxman Singh Tomar, who ostensibly suffered serious injuries, but survived. Tomar was the source for all the photographs published in the national English-language media of Chauhan's suicide by fire. The media was aware of this curious twist in the anti-Mandal agitation, as is evident from the fine print reporting of the event. But the media chose to wilfully disregard all the conventions about responsible reporting in that charged conjuncture.
In the retrospective judgment of the Indian Express, Rajeev Goswami was initially the symbol of the anti-Mandal agitation, but finally its fall guy. He failed to see that the older artifacts of merit and excellence were thin disguises for inherited privilege; that the inclusion of diverse sections of a plural society in all spheres of national endeavour was a desirable end in itself, one that contributed significantly to boosting achievement. Yet, this moment of revelation came to the media without any of the attendant inconveniences of accountability. It took little wisdom though, to conclude that Rajeev Goswami was finally, the victim of conniving politics and media irresponsibility. That the sordid drama of 1990 has not been reenacted in the context of Mandal II is testimony to a growing sense of social responsibility within the media. But the fact that some of the troublesome old tendencies persist, is evidence that the awakening is yet incomplete and perhaps, far too slow.
July 5, 2006
A recently concluded survey of the British media found that of the senior journalists with decisive influence over news priorities and editorial policy, a significant majority is drawn from a narrow, privately-schooled, Oxbridge-educated elite. Indeed, as British society becomes more diverse and the political system grapples with the challenge of inclusion, the media – if a comparison were to be made with similar data from the mid-1980s – has tended to become an enclave of class privilege. In the words of a report in the Guardian, the dominance of the upper crust is strong enough to ensure that it is “difficult for those from other backgrounds to get a foothold”.
These findings from distant shores were published at roughly the same time that a decision by the Indian government to set aside a fixed proportion of seats in the higher education system for classes of citizens disadvantaged by history, had ignited a debate on the quality of representation afforded by the institutions of Indian democracy. Among the institutions that came in for an examination – even if rather hesitantly and fleetingly – was the media. A survey prompted by the controversy, found that in a sample of 315 journalists in the national capital with the authority to determine media agendas, not one belonged to either a Scheduled Caste or Tribe. No fewer than 49 per cent of the sample was drawn from the Brahminical strata. And if all caste Hindu groups were to be considered in addition to the so-called dwija or twice-born, their share in the total is no less 88 per cent.
Where Scheduled Castes and Tribes are concerned, the argument over affirmative action was settled as part of the nationalist compact which brought India its independence. That the media should remain innocent of any participation from these classes, well into India’s sixth decade as a sovereign, self-governing nation, should surely be occasion for introspection by a social institution that has pretensions to objectivity and fairness in its self-assigned role of determining national priorities. Curiously though, the main English-language newspapers in the country had little space or time for this particular survey on the social origin of journalists.
It is a far from settled point that where one comes from determines what one is. That notion of determinacy is completely antithetical to all conceptions of individual liberty. It could be a valid proposition though, that a psychology of conformity could operate within large aggregates of individuals. Particular individuals could well transcend the limitations imposed by the circumstances of their origin and their accumulation of lived experience. In large groups though, personal commitments and convictions may well get submerged in the overriding pressure to do what is accepted.
To talk about the media today is to deal with complexity and multiple meanings. Variously perceived and described, the media is today a source of information and entertainment, as also the midwife of a union between the two. For a growing number, it increasingly serves as a forum of self-expression. In most studies of the modern media as a social reality, a self-serving myth, continues to hold sway. The media in this portrayal is the institutional bearer of the social right to free speech. This is a happy scenario, except for a minor quibble: the media derives its profits not from delivering information of value to an audience or from serving as a forum for a democratic exchange of views, but from delivering an audience of value to the corporate advertiser. The media arena is not a competitive marketplace where information and ideas are allowed a free run so that the best among them rise to the surface. Rather, it is a carefully controlled environment to ensure the most favourable circumstances for advertisers to sell their wares to carefully screened and selected audiences.
Evidently, perceptions of media neutrality and integrity often lie in the eyes (and ears) of the beholder. The notion that the mass media as an entity merits a distinct field of study originates with the proliferation of the print industry in the early 20th century, followed by the pervasive spread of broadcasting in the years after World War II. The early approach focused on media content and the impact this would have on public perceptions. The role of the media would also invariably come in for scrutiny when certain alarming or disintegrative tendencies, such as an upsurge in violent crime, became manifest in society. These would typically be accompanied by suggestions that the media should play a constructive and ameliorative role, though it has never been clear how best this function is discharged: through reporting things as they are, taking a moral position, or simply avoiding the subject altogether.
Similar is the dilemma that arises when dealing with the functioning of the media in a context of social conflict. Is the function of accurate reporting uppermost, even if it is disconnected from moral judgments? Or is an ethical posture inherent even in the most dispassionate account of any event or sequence of events? Does a well-considered effort at ascribing responsibility for a state of inequality, which does not hesitate to name winners and losers, aggravate an already inflamed situation? Or does it, by focusing attention on the sources of injustice, impel society at large to grapple with the viruses within its fold and root them out?
If any convincing answers have been devised to these questions, they are yet to be elucidated. Neither are they evident in the existing practice of the media. Publishing media content that is in conformity with a placid and uncontested paradigm of social evolution would be acceptable conduct, because it serves elite interests and safeguards their social preeminence. Anything that departs from this idiom would be behaviour warranting stricture and quite possibly, sanction.
This brings up the issue of the relationship between the media as a commercial institution and the public that it caters to. In turn, this requires that at least two other models of media behaviour be considered. The first of these could be called, taking Dennis McQuail’s widely cited formulation, the “ritualist” model, which emphasises not “the transmission of information across space” but the “maintenance of society in time” and the “representation of shared beliefs”. And then there is the “publicity” model which approaches the media less as a source of information than as a device of drawing and retaining visual (or aural) attention. This in turn, serves the direct economic objective of increasing revenue earned from an audience. This model emphasises that “mass communication is liable not to be communication at all, in the sense of an ordered transfer of meaning”. Rather, it is more about “spectatorship” in which the “fact of attention often matters more than the quality of attention”.
In 1990, when the Indian media faced its first significant challenge on the question of affirmative action for the “socially and educationally backward classes” (SEBC’s), it responded by invoking the sacred trope of a seamless Indian national identity and denouncing the divisiveness of caste. “Class” is the term used in the clause of the Indian constitution that enables the State to undertake schemes of protective discrimination, as also in the 1980 report of the Mandal Commission which coined the term “other backward classes” to distinguish its target group from existing beneficiaries of affirmative action. But “class” has invariably translated in official pronouncements into “caste”, raising fears that the ghosts of a primitive, ascriptive social order were rising again to haunt India’s halting but brave efforts at modernisation.
In its tone, editorial comment in the English language press – which exerts an influence far exceeding its reach in India – then tended to the view that all was going well until the government of the day gave into an opportunistic whim. Editorially, the Indian Express (August 9, 1990) condemned the decision as “ruinous” and gloomily forecast a “further deterioration of the state apparatus and heightened social tensions” as the first consequence of a “crassly opportunistic” move. The Times of India (TOI) similarly, commented (August 9, 1990) that the Mandal recommendations on job reservations in the central government, threatened to undo “at one stroke” all that had been achieved over four decades of independence, in building a “modern, egalitarian order”. Reservations, the TOI continued, would “enshrine casteism, undermine meritocracy and excellence, and work against the creation of a pan-Indian identity”.
Notions of progress, it has been said, are remarkably congenial to those ascending the scale of income and wealth. But no matter, the TOI was willing to concede that the backward classes could be helped to improve their “competitiveness” – again, that favoured term of the upwardly mobile – through the provision of “abundant educational, health, nutritional and other social welfare benefits”.
Having identified the augmentation of “competitiveness” within the backward classes as a national priority, the media then lapsed into a phase of inattention. When “structural adjustment” kicked in as official economic policy in 1991, the Indian media joined in eagerly with the chorus of acclaim. The withdrawal of the State from domains where its interventions were not essential, the media confidently forecast, would enable it to more effectively meet the basic needs of a wider mass of the population. In its turn, the easing of the onerous burden of taxes that the more affluent had to bear, would reignite the spark of entrepreneurship, since individual self-aggrandisement was the most effective incentive available for productive economic activity. As the size of the national product increased, the diminution in rates of taxation would more than pay for itself in buoyant tax revenues, empowering the State with ample means to address its basic welfare commitments.
As the decade of the 1990s wore on, it became increasingly evident that these initial prognoses were disastrously askew. The limitless self-aggrandisement of individuals was very much a reality and the media found considerable satisfaction recently in reporting that in a world where the celebration of wealth had become the reigning cult, India had perhaps the fastest growing number of billionaires. But few have concerned themselves with the inconvenient facts that India has also had a rapid growth in economic inequality, perhaps next only to the U.S. and China. The correlation with the rapid fading out of the social sectors from governmental attention is yet to be drawn. But future scholars will probably make the effort to draw the necessary links between growing inequality in India – as both cause and consequence – and the precipitate drop in governmental welfare expenditure.
A 1996-97 report by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) documented how educational infrastructure in the country was in an advanced state of decay. It was allowed to sink into oblivion with scarcely an acknowledgment from the media. In 2002, the Supreme Court directed in response to a set of very energetic petitions from concerned citizens, that the right to food was a basic entitlement the State had to protect. As a first step, it directed all state governments to introduce midday meal programmes in schools. Financial stringency would not be permitted to stand as an alibi for failure. The state governments had to “cut the flab” and the central government was obliged to help meet shortfalls in resource availability. Since then, there have been patchy and sporadic efforts to comply with the judicial directive, intended to serve the dual purposes of enhancing both nutritional standards and school enrollment levels. These have been far from adequate and periodic social audits, have put together a valuable documentation of governmental failure in meeting basic social obligations. These again have failed to excite the media very much.
The reasons are not far to seek. Beginning from around the mid-1990s, the global media began to acknowledge the undeniable fact that the cult of individual affluence also meant that celebrity narcissism would be the wave of the future. The interests and aspirations of the socially disadvantaged were of little consequence, since editorial content had to be moulded in accordance with the perceptions of the rich and the powerful. Editorial distinction may lie in the inclusion of diverse sections of the population in the priorities of the media. But commercial success lay in adapting editorial content to advertiser needs, in shifting content towards fashion, lifestyle and entertainment.
It took the resurrection of Mandal, this time in the shape of reservations for backward classes in institutions of higher education funded by the Central Government, to reawaken media interest in the gigantic defaults of social welfare policy through the 1990s. Initial editorial comment tended to be fairly uniform in its emphases. By providing preferential access to higher education, the government had effectively reversed priorities, said the media. Defending against the perpetuation of inherited disabilities was undoubtedly a national priority, but these needed to start with the basics of the learning process. Higher learning should be reserved as a domain where merit alone prevailed, where selection processes were entirely free of extraneous concerns. This national priority would not conflict with others, such as the redressal of the iniquities of history, if opportunities for all sections were to be equalised through a universal and non-discriminatory system of school education.
The patronising flavour in these editorial recommendations was not missed, their inherent suggestion that the backward classes were yet to prove themselves worthy of the professions, since they were yet to pass the threshold of school education. Rather than hammer home this theme and risk a further alienation of public sentiments, the media then chose a line of retreat. In an early editorial, the TOI argued (May 31, 2006), that the available data base for public policy on affirmative action was seriously flawed. This made a “caste census” in India a “necessary evil”. Later, the same newspaper (June 14, 2006) deprecated the fact that ad hoc decisions had for long held the field when “the need of the hour” was a “coherent justification” and a “clear roadmap for future policy on reservations”. Since several of the classes that had reservation benefits through earlier generations had graduated out of backwardness, there was a case for a continuing process of review of the list of beneficiaries. And the quantum of reservations itself needed to be revisited, since a “blind application of the maximum permitted reservation .. speaks very poorly of government policy”.
The Indian Express though remained fundamentally unreconciled to the notion, arguing that reservations threatened to fatally erode India’s potential to contribute to the global knowledge economy, where its competitive advantages were well established. In a June 5 editorial, it poured scorn on the political opportunism of ambitious individuals that had ostensibly triggered off the furore. It warned that the “space for liberal policymaking (had) been won after a long political fight”. In the course of this struggle, the more “intelligent leaders” of Indian politics, had realised that “quality and efficiency, in most fields, cannot simply be mandated by fiat”. This hard fought gain, the IE bemoaned, was at risk of being squandered in the pursuit of political advantage by ambitious individuals.
The Economic Times which clearly would have preferred not to address the issue, belatedly awoke to the merits of an alternative to the reservations process that has for long been established practice in Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Editorially, it urged the Central Government to “universalise” the JNU admissions model, “which awards booster points for various kinds of backwardness..”. “Scarcity accentuates social fissures”, it warned, and any a priori segregation of seats for particular classes would deepen the sense of grievance among those who did not have the privilege to call themselves “backward”.
Editorially, The Hindu (May 25) urged that three imperatives be borne in mind in implementing reservations. The commitment that discrimination in favour of the backward classes would not diminish opportunities for others, needed to be operationalised. This meant that the central government, “must get serious about strengthening (the) physical and academic infrastructure” of the institutions that it was directly responsible for. “Funds”, the newspaper commented in defiance of the parlous arithmetic of the central budget, “should not be hard to come by, given the buoyancy in revenues”. Second, the newspaper urged that in “the larger interests of the nation”, certain institutions “need to be retained as islands of excellence, their entrance standards uncompromised even by socially desirable goals”. And finally, the central government should steer clear of the political trap that several states had fallen into, of viewing affirmative action as merely the institution of quotas. A far more serious approach towards basic education was essential if the ultimate purposes of protective discrimination were to be met.
The concern for basic education of course, was awakened within the national media only when the disadvantaged staked a claim to a place in the bastions of higher academic excellence, which were ostensibly the arena that would prepare the best of India’s youth to take on the challenges of globalisation. Editorially, the media tended in relation to its reaction to Mandal I, to adopt a more restrained tone of comment with the second visitation. But editorial comment is perhaps the lesser role that the media plays in moments of deep social turmoil. By far the more decisive influence is exerted by the tone and content of its news coverage. And in this respect, some of the biases that were blatantly in evidence during Mandal I have resurfaced, though with noticeably greater restraint. Perhaps nothing illustrates this better than the life and death of an individual who came to be seen in many ways, as a symbol of the agitation against Mandal I.
Rajeev Goswami died on February 24, 2004 aged 33, his passing marked by a few cursory mentions in the media. The image conveyed to the world on his death was drawn not from recent times, but from that moment in 1990 when he set himself afire in spectacular and violent rage at Mandal I. That fateful moment lived with Rajeev Goswami till the end. The cause of his death was internal organ failure arising from burn injuries suffered in 1990.
His injuries lived with him, but the message that Rajeev Goswami sought to convey proved transient. Parties across the board, after a period of connivance with the anti-Mandal demonstrations, began an anxious project of accommodation with the backward class assertion that Mandal epitomised. The Supreme Court put its own imprimatur of constitutional validity on the Mandal recommendations in November 1992. And by then, the media itself had turned its back on the incendiary rhetoric of the agitation.
The Rajeev Goswami tragedy had many dimensions, some of which were encapsulated in official statistics. Since he made his emblematic political statement, employment in the central government has fallen from 3.4 million to 3.3 million. New recruitment has taken place, only to replace retiring employees or others voluntarily leaving government service. Assuming rather generously, that there is an annual attrition rate of 5 per cent in central government employment, the jobs at stake in a regime of 27 per cent reservations for backward classes would number around 40,000. This is literally a drop in the ocean in relation to the tens of millions who enter the work force every year, most of whom fall back on some form of unorganised sector work.
Was Rajeev Goswami's sacrifice only about safeguarding the claims of “merit” to an infinitesimally small enclave of secure employment? Or was it about a larger cause? If the quantitative parameters alone are considered, the sacrifice was obviously not worth it. And that is not a retrospective judgment, since there were any number of voices counselling moderation on precisely these grounds, at the time the anti-Mandal agitation was most virulent. Whatever else, all those who participated in the violent disturbances in 1990 cannot plead lack of knowledge as an alibi -- least of all the media which instigated the agitators with unbridled rhetoric.
From the first stirrings of unrest on the street in August 1990 till Rajeev Goswami's paroxysm of rage on September 19, official spokesmen sought at several junctures to calm the student disturbances. The number of job opportunities that Mandal I would directly impinge upon, they said, was limited. The purpose of the recommendations was not to underline caste exclusions in Indian society, but to dissolve these by empowering sections that had drawn an unlucky number in life's lottery.
The message failed to win a receptive audience in sections that were rampaging through the streets of various north Indian towns. For this, the media bears a large part of the responsibility. The Indian Express, edited then by an individual who was later a member of the Union Cabinet, delivered its judgment mid-August, pronouncing the anti-Mandal agitation a clear “defence of the national interest”. Far from counselling restraint and a measure of sobriety in assessing reservations as official policy, it exhorted the agitationists to “spread and intensify” the disturbances.
Late-August, the same newspaper was denouncing the official effort to mitigate the sense of grievance within the student community. Central Government jobs may be just a small fraction of total employment in the country, but that was not the issue, said an analyst in its columns. What was of concern was the huge preponderance of central government jobs within “organised sector” employment.
The burden of the official rationalisation was that “organised sector” employment was not the only area of interest. There was a whole “unorganised” world outside, that needed to be accommodated in the formal structures of bureaucratic power. But with the media unequivocally behind it by this time, the anti-Mandal agitation was conspicuously displaying its contempt for the unorganised sector. Students from Delhi's elite colleges were trooping to the dhobi-ghats on the Yamuna riverfront to exercise their laundry skills in full view of the national media; others chose strategic street corners to sit with shoe-shine kits to offer their services to any passer-by.
An elitist contempt for all the livelihood recourses of the “unorganised sector” was evident in this pattern of public demonstration. By this time it was evident that “Mandal” had tapped into the populist vein essential for the sustenance of any mass movement. “Anti-Mandal” meanwhile had lost its moral compass, making too explicit a statement of disdain for the vast majority of the country's population. Inevitably, the momentum of the agitation was beginning to die out within a month of the policy announcement by the central government. Rajeev Goswami's suicidal violence on September 19, 1990, brought it back to life.
Rajeev Goswami survived that attempt, though not its long-term effects. He was the first to tempt death in the anti-Mandal cause. But the first to actually die was Surinder Singh Chauhan. This self-immolation happened a week after Rajeev Goswami's abortive attempt. Chauhan's death throes were recorded on film by a mysterious photographer who happened to be on the spot just at that time, equipped with a camera. This photograph was prominently displayed by most national newspapers, in violation of the well-accepted media convention, that photographs of the act of suicide are not to be published for fear that they could set off copycat attempts.
The image of Chauhan's self-immolation was conveyed to the newspapers by a confederate of Rajeev Goswami. On September 19, 1990, when Rajeev Goswami brought the anti-Mandal agitation out of its stasis, he was accompanied in his project by a colleague called Laxman Singh Tomar, who ostensibly suffered serious injuries, but survived. Tomar was the source for all the photographs published in the national English-language media of Chauhan's suicide by fire. The media was aware of this curious twist in the anti-Mandal agitation, as is evident from the fine print reporting of the event. But the media chose to wilfully disregard all the conventions about responsible reporting in that charged conjuncture.
In the retrospective judgment of the Indian Express, Rajeev Goswami was initially the symbol of the anti-Mandal agitation, but finally its fall guy. He failed to see that the older artifacts of merit and excellence were thin disguises for inherited privilege; that the inclusion of diverse sections of a plural society in all spheres of national endeavour was a desirable end in itself, one that contributed significantly to boosting achievement. Yet, this moment of revelation came to the media without any of the attendant inconveniences of accountability. It took little wisdom though, to conclude that Rajeev Goswami was finally, the victim of conniving politics and media irresponsibility. That the sordid drama of 1990 has not been reenacted in the context of Mandal II is testimony to a growing sense of social responsibility within the media. But the fact that some of the troublesome old tendencies persist, is evidence that the awakening is yet incomplete and perhaps, far too slow.
July 5, 2006
Sunday, July 09, 2006
Israel: A Genocidal State by Origin and Intent (An Article from June 19, 2006)
ISRAEL: A GENOCIDAL STATE BY INTENT AND ORIGIN
It would be a gross error to condone as an accident, Israel’s June 9 shelling of a beach in Gaza city, which killed seven innocent civilians and left the traumatised ten year-old, Huda Ghalia, as the sole survivor in a family of eight. Just as it has proven a costly mistake for the world to accept Israel’s explanation and self-exculpation in the case of the 1996 Qana massacre, when hundreds of women and children in a U.N. refugee camp in southern Lebanon were killed in a sustained and indiscriminate barrage of artillery and aerial bombing.
Yet the record of global insensitivity to Israel’s atrocities on the Palestinian people, with literally hundreds of similar crimes in the past being overlooked, leaves no room for optimism. Conniving western governments and supine third world elites have shown altogether too great an eagerness to accept Israel’s claim that the thousands of Palestinians killed for the crime of resisting the unending occupation of their land, can all be tarred with the same brush, of being either terrorists or their accomplices.
The successive Israeli massacres carried out over many decades of occupation, have not been random or unconnected events, since they are all joined in the original intent with which the Jewish state was created, which was nothing less than the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The world community has for long stood mute witness to all the overt expressions of this genocidal intent. The global conspiracy of silence after the Gaza beach massacre is further testament to the complicity of world governments in an unending sequence of crimes against humanity.
Unapologetic as ever, Israel commissioned a military inquiry into the Gaza incident, and came up with the perfectly ridiculous claim that the killing of Palestinian civilians was a a self-inflicted tragedy, caused by a mine that the Islamic resistance movement Hamas had, with evil intent, concealed under the sands of the beach. It was a fact, said the official inquiry, that the Israeli army had been shelling parts of Gaza city just before the massacre on the beach. True also, that the Israeli navy had been patrolling the Gaza waters and unleashing random volleys of high explosives in the direction of the seafront. But the shrapnel that had been recovered from the site of the atrocity, the Israeli government claimed, did not match with the ammunition used in these operations. The only conclusion that seemed warranted in the circumstances, was that Hamas had conspired to kill its own, for the transient pleasure of embarrassing Israel.
The entire charade of accountability by the criminal Zionist state was exposed within a matter of hours by respected international observers. And the Hamas government of Palestine responded to the Jewish state’s crime with a swift condemnation and a vow to resume military operations after an 18-month long suspension. A military response that would “shake the earth” was promised. The unbridled rhetoric would have come as no surprise to the world community, which has been immersed in Israeli propaganda about Hamas as an embodiment of theological evil. There was of course, a more inconvenient fact that the Hamas response brought back to public attention: that far from being the agents of bestial cruelty on innocent civilians, the Palestinian resistance had been observing a ceasefire for all of 18 months. Despite several provocations from the Israeli side, including the charade of its withdrawal from Gaza and its loudly proclaimed intent to redraw the map of Palestine to ensure that Israel remained a state with a “stable Jewish majority”, the ceasefire was maintained. But these inconvenient facts were soon submerged in the theological discourse that Israel has so successfully deployed to wipe the Palestinian people out of existence.
Visiting his patrons in Washington DC in May, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert addressed the U.S. Congress and to a standing ovation, and reiterated the mythology that stands at the foundation of the Zionist enterprise: that the Jewish people have a divinely ordained right to the entire land of Palestine. He refused to countenance any situation in which he, as the leader of the Jewish nation, would cede any part of the “land of our forefathers”. “I believed, and to this day still believe, in our people's eternal and historic right to this entire land”, said Olmert.
The clear and undeniable purpose of these locutions is the delegitimisation of the Palestinian people’s right to the land they have lived in for a virtual eternity, and the raising of a dispersed Jewish community’s claims to the status of divine writ. But if the matter had been determined in a divine court of law, it would not be out of place to wonder, why Olmert was still intent on making a pretence of interest in mundane earthly processes of negotiation.
This was the other major motif of Olmert’s speech to the U.S. Congress: that Israel would be compelled by earthly circumstances, to draw its borders unilaterally, thereby committing an unpardonable offence against the divine will. It was Israel’s fervent desire to achieve this abridgment of divine purpose “hand in hand with a Palestinian partner”. But it had been the unfortunate experience of all the supposedly good faith negotiations that Israel had entered into, that a credible partner for peace on the Palestinian side has failed to emerge.
Israel does not, unfortunately, have a partner who will share the burden of breaching the divine writ that the Jewish people should eternally hold all of Palestine. But there is little that is divine about the fate that the Jewish state has chosen to visit upon the people of Palestine. Five months after Hamas won a landslide victory in parliamentary elections -- which were strongly advocated by Israel and the U.S. and certified as free and fair by all credible international observers -- Israel’s brutal policy of “closure”, which is little else than a variant of medieval siege warfare, continues to exact a heavy toll of civilian life in occupied Palestine. Taxes collected by the Israeli occupying forces have been withheld from the legitimate government. International aid has dried up, driven by the Israeli propaganda that Hamas as a terrorist organisation does not merit the patronage of the civilised world.
A consequence of this international programme of ostracism coordinated by Israel, has been that the Palestinian Authority, built up through the years when the late Yasser Arafat was led into one dead-end after another in a futile quest for peace with Israel, was starved of funds, plunging civic life in the occupied territories into an unprecedented crisis.
The demonisation of Hamas is all too reminiscent of the manner in which Israel first engaged, then neutralised, and finally finished off Yasser Arafat as a leader of the Palestinian national struggle. Ever since the Oslo peace accord was concluded in 1993, Israel made a pretence of engaging Arafat in negotiations, finally abandoning the charade with the Camp David summit hosted by U.S. President Bill Clinton in 2000. It then successfully floated the fiction that the rejection of its supposedly generous offer was an indication of bad faith on the Palestinian part, which justified the recourse to the harshest military means to quell the resistance to its occupation.
Arafat had to be isolated and finally done away with, because he would not yield on the fundamental demands of the Palestinian national struggle: Israel’s withdrawal to the 1967 borders, the restoration of Arab sovereignty over all of East Jerusalem, and the recognition, at least in principle, of the right of all the refugees created by successive waves of Israeli ethnic cleansing, to return to their homes. These are precisely the points that Hamas today insists on as irreducible demands, which cannot be bartered away by any representative body of the Palestinian people. Contrary to the fiction assiduously propagated by Israel, Hamas has long since recognised Israel’s right to exist, but within the international borders that prevailed prior to the six-day war of 1967. The success that Israel has had in tarnishing Hamas’ record, strongly recalls the effrontery with which it misrepresented the historic change effected by Arafat in the Palestinian national charter in 1988, committing the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) he led to a two-state solution which would explicitly recognise Israel’s right to exist within the 1967 boundaries.
While Arafat was alive, he served as an effective buffer against the Israeli game-plan to instigate a split within Palestinian ranks and quite possibly, foment a fratricidal battle for supremacy between the PLO and Hamas. Mahmoud Abbas, alias Abu Mazen, his successor as leader of Al Fatah, the dominant faction within the PLO, has not been quite so scrupulous about respecting the need for unity within the Palestinian struggle. In October 1995, Abu Mazen was responsible for sealing a plan for a final settlement with Israel. Negotiated with Yossi Beilin, then a member of the Israeli cabinet, the plan has been described by people in the know, as a “shameful document” which effectively left all illegal Israeli settlements on occupied territories intact, and in place of restoring Arab sovereignty over East Jerusalem, designated a village quite remote from the city as the future Palestinian capital. The Beilin-Abu Mazen plan was, perhaps, accepted by Arafat. But when he found that Israel intended to stick to the terms of that blueprint, and if anything, only alter it further to Palestinian disadvantage, he chose the honourable course of walking away from the charade of the peace negotiations.
Obviously chafing since Hamas’ landslide victory in January, Abu Mazen has now hit upon the tactical ploy of calling a referendum which would seek to determine the majority opinion among the Palestinian people on the future of their national struggle. Drafted by highly respected freedom fighters, currently languishing in Israeli jails, the so-called “prisoners’ plan” calls for recognising Israel’s right to exist within 1967 boundaries. Though not averse to the principle, Hamas has opposed the referendum plan, which it views as an unnecessary concession to a racist outlaw state that is yet to recognise the Palestinian people’s right to exist. Moreover, Hamas has rightly judged that the referendum embodies a disingenuous design by Abu Mazen and his backers in the west, to overturn the results of the January parliamentary elections and establish an entirely new principle of political legitimacy in occupied Palestine.
Israel and its cronies in the west, meanwhile, are doing their utmost to skew the political balance in favour of Abu Mazen. Affecting a deep sense of concern over the humanitarian crisis the closure policy has engendered, western governments have begun seeking a channel of aid disbursement that would push the legitimately elected Hamas government to the sidelines and lend more strength to Abu Mazen. And Israel has quite brazenly announced that it intends to ship significant quantities of arms and ammunition to forces loyal to Abu Mazen, ostensibly to meet the threat posed by Hamas terrorism. Till his dying days, Arafat successfully resisted the pressure from Israel to undertake the dirty work of policing its occupation and repressing his own people. Abu Mazen may not prove quite so steadfast. The closure policy has ensured that life for the Palestinian people today is a grim struggle for survival. As the fabric of civic life frays, tensions within Palestinian society are boiling over, threatening the entire West Asian region with unpredictable consequences. Never before has the need been quite so acute for freedom-loving people all around the world to intervene, bypassing the conniving governments of the west and the submissive and spineless governments of the third world.
June 19, 2006
It would be a gross error to condone as an accident, Israel’s June 9 shelling of a beach in Gaza city, which killed seven innocent civilians and left the traumatised ten year-old, Huda Ghalia, as the sole survivor in a family of eight. Just as it has proven a costly mistake for the world to accept Israel’s explanation and self-exculpation in the case of the 1996 Qana massacre, when hundreds of women and children in a U.N. refugee camp in southern Lebanon were killed in a sustained and indiscriminate barrage of artillery and aerial bombing.
Yet the record of global insensitivity to Israel’s atrocities on the Palestinian people, with literally hundreds of similar crimes in the past being overlooked, leaves no room for optimism. Conniving western governments and supine third world elites have shown altogether too great an eagerness to accept Israel’s claim that the thousands of Palestinians killed for the crime of resisting the unending occupation of their land, can all be tarred with the same brush, of being either terrorists or their accomplices.
The successive Israeli massacres carried out over many decades of occupation, have not been random or unconnected events, since they are all joined in the original intent with which the Jewish state was created, which was nothing less than the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The world community has for long stood mute witness to all the overt expressions of this genocidal intent. The global conspiracy of silence after the Gaza beach massacre is further testament to the complicity of world governments in an unending sequence of crimes against humanity.
Unapologetic as ever, Israel commissioned a military inquiry into the Gaza incident, and came up with the perfectly ridiculous claim that the killing of Palestinian civilians was a a self-inflicted tragedy, caused by a mine that the Islamic resistance movement Hamas had, with evil intent, concealed under the sands of the beach. It was a fact, said the official inquiry, that the Israeli army had been shelling parts of Gaza city just before the massacre on the beach. True also, that the Israeli navy had been patrolling the Gaza waters and unleashing random volleys of high explosives in the direction of the seafront. But the shrapnel that had been recovered from the site of the atrocity, the Israeli government claimed, did not match with the ammunition used in these operations. The only conclusion that seemed warranted in the circumstances, was that Hamas had conspired to kill its own, for the transient pleasure of embarrassing Israel.
The entire charade of accountability by the criminal Zionist state was exposed within a matter of hours by respected international observers. And the Hamas government of Palestine responded to the Jewish state’s crime with a swift condemnation and a vow to resume military operations after an 18-month long suspension. A military response that would “shake the earth” was promised. The unbridled rhetoric would have come as no surprise to the world community, which has been immersed in Israeli propaganda about Hamas as an embodiment of theological evil. There was of course, a more inconvenient fact that the Hamas response brought back to public attention: that far from being the agents of bestial cruelty on innocent civilians, the Palestinian resistance had been observing a ceasefire for all of 18 months. Despite several provocations from the Israeli side, including the charade of its withdrawal from Gaza and its loudly proclaimed intent to redraw the map of Palestine to ensure that Israel remained a state with a “stable Jewish majority”, the ceasefire was maintained. But these inconvenient facts were soon submerged in the theological discourse that Israel has so successfully deployed to wipe the Palestinian people out of existence.
Visiting his patrons in Washington DC in May, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert addressed the U.S. Congress and to a standing ovation, and reiterated the mythology that stands at the foundation of the Zionist enterprise: that the Jewish people have a divinely ordained right to the entire land of Palestine. He refused to countenance any situation in which he, as the leader of the Jewish nation, would cede any part of the “land of our forefathers”. “I believed, and to this day still believe, in our people's eternal and historic right to this entire land”, said Olmert.
The clear and undeniable purpose of these locutions is the delegitimisation of the Palestinian people’s right to the land they have lived in for a virtual eternity, and the raising of a dispersed Jewish community’s claims to the status of divine writ. But if the matter had been determined in a divine court of law, it would not be out of place to wonder, why Olmert was still intent on making a pretence of interest in mundane earthly processes of negotiation.
This was the other major motif of Olmert’s speech to the U.S. Congress: that Israel would be compelled by earthly circumstances, to draw its borders unilaterally, thereby committing an unpardonable offence against the divine will. It was Israel’s fervent desire to achieve this abridgment of divine purpose “hand in hand with a Palestinian partner”. But it had been the unfortunate experience of all the supposedly good faith negotiations that Israel had entered into, that a credible partner for peace on the Palestinian side has failed to emerge.
Israel does not, unfortunately, have a partner who will share the burden of breaching the divine writ that the Jewish people should eternally hold all of Palestine. But there is little that is divine about the fate that the Jewish state has chosen to visit upon the people of Palestine. Five months after Hamas won a landslide victory in parliamentary elections -- which were strongly advocated by Israel and the U.S. and certified as free and fair by all credible international observers -- Israel’s brutal policy of “closure”, which is little else than a variant of medieval siege warfare, continues to exact a heavy toll of civilian life in occupied Palestine. Taxes collected by the Israeli occupying forces have been withheld from the legitimate government. International aid has dried up, driven by the Israeli propaganda that Hamas as a terrorist organisation does not merit the patronage of the civilised world.
A consequence of this international programme of ostracism coordinated by Israel, has been that the Palestinian Authority, built up through the years when the late Yasser Arafat was led into one dead-end after another in a futile quest for peace with Israel, was starved of funds, plunging civic life in the occupied territories into an unprecedented crisis.
The demonisation of Hamas is all too reminiscent of the manner in which Israel first engaged, then neutralised, and finally finished off Yasser Arafat as a leader of the Palestinian national struggle. Ever since the Oslo peace accord was concluded in 1993, Israel made a pretence of engaging Arafat in negotiations, finally abandoning the charade with the Camp David summit hosted by U.S. President Bill Clinton in 2000. It then successfully floated the fiction that the rejection of its supposedly generous offer was an indication of bad faith on the Palestinian part, which justified the recourse to the harshest military means to quell the resistance to its occupation.
Arafat had to be isolated and finally done away with, because he would not yield on the fundamental demands of the Palestinian national struggle: Israel’s withdrawal to the 1967 borders, the restoration of Arab sovereignty over all of East Jerusalem, and the recognition, at least in principle, of the right of all the refugees created by successive waves of Israeli ethnic cleansing, to return to their homes. These are precisely the points that Hamas today insists on as irreducible demands, which cannot be bartered away by any representative body of the Palestinian people. Contrary to the fiction assiduously propagated by Israel, Hamas has long since recognised Israel’s right to exist, but within the international borders that prevailed prior to the six-day war of 1967. The success that Israel has had in tarnishing Hamas’ record, strongly recalls the effrontery with which it misrepresented the historic change effected by Arafat in the Palestinian national charter in 1988, committing the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) he led to a two-state solution which would explicitly recognise Israel’s right to exist within the 1967 boundaries.
While Arafat was alive, he served as an effective buffer against the Israeli game-plan to instigate a split within Palestinian ranks and quite possibly, foment a fratricidal battle for supremacy between the PLO and Hamas. Mahmoud Abbas, alias Abu Mazen, his successor as leader of Al Fatah, the dominant faction within the PLO, has not been quite so scrupulous about respecting the need for unity within the Palestinian struggle. In October 1995, Abu Mazen was responsible for sealing a plan for a final settlement with Israel. Negotiated with Yossi Beilin, then a member of the Israeli cabinet, the plan has been described by people in the know, as a “shameful document” which effectively left all illegal Israeli settlements on occupied territories intact, and in place of restoring Arab sovereignty over East Jerusalem, designated a village quite remote from the city as the future Palestinian capital. The Beilin-Abu Mazen plan was, perhaps, accepted by Arafat. But when he found that Israel intended to stick to the terms of that blueprint, and if anything, only alter it further to Palestinian disadvantage, he chose the honourable course of walking away from the charade of the peace negotiations.
Obviously chafing since Hamas’ landslide victory in January, Abu Mazen has now hit upon the tactical ploy of calling a referendum which would seek to determine the majority opinion among the Palestinian people on the future of their national struggle. Drafted by highly respected freedom fighters, currently languishing in Israeli jails, the so-called “prisoners’ plan” calls for recognising Israel’s right to exist within 1967 boundaries. Though not averse to the principle, Hamas has opposed the referendum plan, which it views as an unnecessary concession to a racist outlaw state that is yet to recognise the Palestinian people’s right to exist. Moreover, Hamas has rightly judged that the referendum embodies a disingenuous design by Abu Mazen and his backers in the west, to overturn the results of the January parliamentary elections and establish an entirely new principle of political legitimacy in occupied Palestine.
Israel and its cronies in the west, meanwhile, are doing their utmost to skew the political balance in favour of Abu Mazen. Affecting a deep sense of concern over the humanitarian crisis the closure policy has engendered, western governments have begun seeking a channel of aid disbursement that would push the legitimately elected Hamas government to the sidelines and lend more strength to Abu Mazen. And Israel has quite brazenly announced that it intends to ship significant quantities of arms and ammunition to forces loyal to Abu Mazen, ostensibly to meet the threat posed by Hamas terrorism. Till his dying days, Arafat successfully resisted the pressure from Israel to undertake the dirty work of policing its occupation and repressing his own people. Abu Mazen may not prove quite so steadfast. The closure policy has ensured that life for the Palestinian people today is a grim struggle for survival. As the fabric of civic life frays, tensions within Palestinian society are boiling over, threatening the entire West Asian region with unpredictable consequences. Never before has the need been quite so acute for freedom-loving people all around the world to intervene, bypassing the conniving governments of the west and the submissive and spineless governments of the third world.
June 19, 2006
Friday, May 05, 2006
Indian Agriculture and its Unending Crisis
INDIAN AGRICULTURE AND ITS UNENDING CRISIS
Sukumar Muralidharan
April 23, 2006
As a decade in the life of a nation, the 1990s could attract a variety of descriptions. For one thing, it was the decade of liberalisation, when India, after a seeming eternity of hesitation, finally decided to engage with the global economy. For another, it was when the Indian middle class, thwarted in its ambitions for generations, carried through its revolution of rising aspirations. And it was also a period of the unabashed celebration of the good life, when older notions of austerity and social responsibility, nurtured in the Gandhian strain of the Indian freedom struggle, were thrown overboard.
With all this, the 1990s could also be remembered as the decade when agriculture fell off the radar screen. Two points in time when the Indian economy was severely buffeted by weather adversities, capture the essence of this transition. In 1987, when the monsoon failed to an unprecedented degree, the economy as a whole went into recession. Agricultural output fell by over 2 percent and with industry and services also feeling the impact, the overall growth rate slumped. The next time around when the monsoon turned in a performance quite so disastrous was 2002. And yet, even as agricultural output shrank by as much as 7 percent, industry and services maintained their brisk rates of growth. The overall impact of the drought on the economy, at least in terms of growth rates, was relatively subdued.
Prior to the decade of globalisation, the financial press through the month of April seemingly had its priorities clear. With the winter crop of grain being harvested, attention would be focused on market arrivals in the mandis of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, for pointers about the security of essential supplies over the year ahead.
Today, though, the concerns of the financial press are confined, as at any other time of the year, to the level of the stock market. Indeed, April 2006 was a historic month for the Indian stock markets, with the sensitive share price index on the Bombay Stock Exchange, the Sensex, touching 12,000, after a steep climb from the landmark level of 11,000 it had touched just days before. The new record meant that market capitalisation in Indian stocks was, for the first time, of the same magnitude as GDP. This was, in the estimation of the financial press, occasion for joyous celebration. It was state of the art economics, they pointed out, that market capitalisation should be at the same level as the country’s GDP. This was the story in the advanced capitalist economies and it would be the story in India too. Globalisation and the Indian middle class’s revolution of rising aspirations, had transformed the stock market, with its 40 million investors, into a higher national priority than agriculture, with its 600 million people. That was fair going if inherent values, as denominated in monetary terms, were to be considered. Even as the stock markets touched their unprecedented heights, agriculture, the sole source of livelihood for over 55 percent of the country, was plunging towards the 20 percent mark in terms of its contribution to India’s GDP.
As the rabi harvest for the current year gets underway, there is little reason to believe that the wheat crop will be any less than anticipated. Yet, even before procurement began, the Union Government had announced plans to import wheat from Australia for supplying the country’s southern markets. These markets could be more cheaply supplied with imported wheat, says the government. Farmers, needless to say, are unimpressed, and see in the import decision and especially its timing, an effort to cut back wheat procurement operations. The price at which imports have been contracted is much higher than the procurement price for Indian wheat. And if the background to this decision is kept in mind, which is the export of almost 20 million tonnes of wheat from the country’s overflowing granaries since 2002 – at a price below that reserved for the population below the poverty line – then the numerous anomalies in policy approaches to agriculture would become still clearer.
Matters would have been murky enough if they had ceased there. But a mere three weeks into the procurement season, the Government announced a decision to import an additional 3 million tonnes of wheat. When concluded, this would be the biggest food import contract since the Green Revolution, as it is called, supposedly established India as a country that had no cause to worry about food security any longer.
The rapid decline in agricultural fortunes would in most circumstances, except in cases of policy-induced myopia, be serious cause for worry. Through the decade of globalisation, the per capita availability of foodgrain showed a persistent decline for the first time since the 1960s. And this recent phase of agricultural decline has been more alarming since the earlier episode had identifiable climatic adversities that could be held responsible. And despite all the climatic fluctuations through the 1990s, it is nobody’s case that the erosion of Indian agricultural output has had anything to do with natural phenomena, or with unavoidable causes.
Indeed, manmade causes have more to do with the adversities that agriculture today faces. Since structural reforms began in the Indian economy, there has been a steep decline in the proportion of the central government’s budgetary outlays that go into agriculture. This has also been the case with industry, energy, and other sectors. But in certain sectors like industry – though uncertainly so in energy -- budgetary cutbacks could be made good by private initiatives. This in any case is a decided impossibility when it comes to agriculture. Indeed, gross capital formation in agriculture after a gradual decline over the years, began to fall rapidly in the 1990s. And most expert analysis is agreed on the fact that this decline is primarily on account of the fall in public investment in agriculture.
Through the 1990s, the reigning mantra of economic policy was that public investment in sectors where there was no alternative to the energetic economic leadership of the State, would not suffer. The burden of adjustment rather, would fall on unproductive public expenditures, like unmerited subsidies and the establishment costs of the vast government bureaucracy. But this political program for obvious reasons, has been impossible to carry through. Agricultural subsidies have if anything, only increased in the period of structural adjustment, to the extent that the reigning slogan now within official circles is that the priority should shift from unproductive subsidies to productive investments. But there are obviously politically influential farm lobbies that benefit from the subsidies paid out and any effort to ensure a transition to productive investments that benefit a larger cross-section of the agricultural population, would have to run the gauntlet of their resistance.
To take the component parts of food subsidies, there is first, the difference to reckon with, between the price at which the Food Corporation of India procures grain from the farmer during the harvest and the price at which it issues grain to the public distribution system. Then there is the cost of operations, stockholding and transportation that the FCI bears. For much of the 1990s, stock levels were far in excess of prescribed norms. Figures compiled in a recent study commissioned by the Ministry of Finance of the government of India, tell a compelling story. As of January 1, 2002, stocks of wheat and rice with the government and its agencies were over three times the prescribed level – in the case of wheat, almost four times. The volume has been drawn down in subsequent years, until now the seeming embarrassment of riches has been transformed into a deficit. But this has been achieved only by exporting grain at a price below that reserved for “below poverty line” (BPL) families in India. A part of the food subsidy, in other words, is going towards subsidising the consumption of Indian grain abroad.
The report on subsidies makes note of the phenomenon of rising food stocks coexisting with endemic hunger and “reported starvation deaths” in the country. It notes that the price reserved for BPL families, of both wheat and rice, has risen cumulatively by over 60 per cent since 1997-98, against an increase in the consumer price index of only 26 per cent. And despite this rapid increase in the issue price of foodgrain, the aggregate food subsidy burden has increased tenfold since 1990-91 – from a figure of Rs 2,450 crore to over Rs 25,000 crore.
The reasons are twofold: firstly, the costs of stockholding have increased enormously; and secondly, the procurement price paid to the farmer has multiplied several-fold. Increasingly, the food subsidy has lost its function of safeguarding food security and become a system of underwriting an unnecessary and wholly irrational accumulation of food stocks with official procurement agencies, and of keeping the politically voluble farm lobby quiescent, especially in the grain surplus areas.
The rapid increase in procurement prices has been partly justified as a necessary compensation for the sharp curtailment of the fertiliser subsidy, which has contributed to a steep escalation in the price paid by the farmer for this essential input. But the situation here still remains anomalous. According to a recent calculation, if import parity prices were to be used as the benchmark, only an average of about 56 per cent of the total fertiliser subsidy borne by the government is the farmers’ share. The rest is a subsidy for the fertiliser industry.
Official policy, in its reach towards the agricultural sector, is becoming increasingly limited. And the 1990s have also been a period when farmers were once again subject to a gradual but inexorable process of marginalisation. After the robust period of integration with the institutions of the mainstream economy, beginning with the nationalization of the country’s main banks in 1969, this was a serious setback for the millions dependent on agriculture for their livelihood.
Figures tabulated by the National Sample Survey Organisation, show that cultivator households till as late as 1971, were drawing at least 68 percent of their credit requirements from the non-institutional sector – in other words, the local mahajans and moneylenders who would charge extortionate rates and not hesitate to seize their land and other assets in case of a default on repayment, even one induced by severe climatic stress. The picture began to change from the time that the banks nationalization occurred, to the extent that by 1981, the share of the non-institutional sources in total agrarian credit had fallen to 36.8 percent. Over the next decade, the figure fell still more, to 30.6 percent. But once the philosophy of liberalization kicked in, the farm sector became a relatively low priority for profit-oriented financial institutions. In consequence, the share of the non-institutional sources of credit in total agricultural lending, had increased to 39 percent by 2002.
It is possible to make the case that the more accurate measure to use for assessing the adequacy of credit flows to agriculture would be to take these in proportion to GDP. With the share of agriculture in GDP having fallen progressively over the years, it should occasion no surprise that the flow of institutional credit to the sector too, should diminish. But this does not take into account the fact that 60 percent of the country still depends on agriculture for its livelihood. With the shrinking of its access to institutional sources of support – whether budgetary or through the credit system – the agrarian sector becomes more vulnerable to transient parameters, such as weather fluctuations, pest infestation, or natural disasters. The consequence has been a huge increase in agricultural indebtedness, which the most recent survey of the NSSO testifies to in an abstract sense, and the spate of suicides by debt-ridden farmers bears witness to in a rather more intimate and alarming way.
Sukumar Muralidharan
April 23, 2006
As a decade in the life of a nation, the 1990s could attract a variety of descriptions. For one thing, it was the decade of liberalisation, when India, after a seeming eternity of hesitation, finally decided to engage with the global economy. For another, it was when the Indian middle class, thwarted in its ambitions for generations, carried through its revolution of rising aspirations. And it was also a period of the unabashed celebration of the good life, when older notions of austerity and social responsibility, nurtured in the Gandhian strain of the Indian freedom struggle, were thrown overboard.
With all this, the 1990s could also be remembered as the decade when agriculture fell off the radar screen. Two points in time when the Indian economy was severely buffeted by weather adversities, capture the essence of this transition. In 1987, when the monsoon failed to an unprecedented degree, the economy as a whole went into recession. Agricultural output fell by over 2 percent and with industry and services also feeling the impact, the overall growth rate slumped. The next time around when the monsoon turned in a performance quite so disastrous was 2002. And yet, even as agricultural output shrank by as much as 7 percent, industry and services maintained their brisk rates of growth. The overall impact of the drought on the economy, at least in terms of growth rates, was relatively subdued.
Prior to the decade of globalisation, the financial press through the month of April seemingly had its priorities clear. With the winter crop of grain being harvested, attention would be focused on market arrivals in the mandis of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, for pointers about the security of essential supplies over the year ahead.
Today, though, the concerns of the financial press are confined, as at any other time of the year, to the level of the stock market. Indeed, April 2006 was a historic month for the Indian stock markets, with the sensitive share price index on the Bombay Stock Exchange, the Sensex, touching 12,000, after a steep climb from the landmark level of 11,000 it had touched just days before. The new record meant that market capitalisation in Indian stocks was, for the first time, of the same magnitude as GDP. This was, in the estimation of the financial press, occasion for joyous celebration. It was state of the art economics, they pointed out, that market capitalisation should be at the same level as the country’s GDP. This was the story in the advanced capitalist economies and it would be the story in India too. Globalisation and the Indian middle class’s revolution of rising aspirations, had transformed the stock market, with its 40 million investors, into a higher national priority than agriculture, with its 600 million people. That was fair going if inherent values, as denominated in monetary terms, were to be considered. Even as the stock markets touched their unprecedented heights, agriculture, the sole source of livelihood for over 55 percent of the country, was plunging towards the 20 percent mark in terms of its contribution to India’s GDP.
As the rabi harvest for the current year gets underway, there is little reason to believe that the wheat crop will be any less than anticipated. Yet, even before procurement began, the Union Government had announced plans to import wheat from Australia for supplying the country’s southern markets. These markets could be more cheaply supplied with imported wheat, says the government. Farmers, needless to say, are unimpressed, and see in the import decision and especially its timing, an effort to cut back wheat procurement operations. The price at which imports have been contracted is much higher than the procurement price for Indian wheat. And if the background to this decision is kept in mind, which is the export of almost 20 million tonnes of wheat from the country’s overflowing granaries since 2002 – at a price below that reserved for the population below the poverty line – then the numerous anomalies in policy approaches to agriculture would become still clearer.
Matters would have been murky enough if they had ceased there. But a mere three weeks into the procurement season, the Government announced a decision to import an additional 3 million tonnes of wheat. When concluded, this would be the biggest food import contract since the Green Revolution, as it is called, supposedly established India as a country that had no cause to worry about food security any longer.
The rapid decline in agricultural fortunes would in most circumstances, except in cases of policy-induced myopia, be serious cause for worry. Through the decade of globalisation, the per capita availability of foodgrain showed a persistent decline for the first time since the 1960s. And this recent phase of agricultural decline has been more alarming since the earlier episode had identifiable climatic adversities that could be held responsible. And despite all the climatic fluctuations through the 1990s, it is nobody’s case that the erosion of Indian agricultural output has had anything to do with natural phenomena, or with unavoidable causes.
Indeed, manmade causes have more to do with the adversities that agriculture today faces. Since structural reforms began in the Indian economy, there has been a steep decline in the proportion of the central government’s budgetary outlays that go into agriculture. This has also been the case with industry, energy, and other sectors. But in certain sectors like industry – though uncertainly so in energy -- budgetary cutbacks could be made good by private initiatives. This in any case is a decided impossibility when it comes to agriculture. Indeed, gross capital formation in agriculture after a gradual decline over the years, began to fall rapidly in the 1990s. And most expert analysis is agreed on the fact that this decline is primarily on account of the fall in public investment in agriculture.
Through the 1990s, the reigning mantra of economic policy was that public investment in sectors where there was no alternative to the energetic economic leadership of the State, would not suffer. The burden of adjustment rather, would fall on unproductive public expenditures, like unmerited subsidies and the establishment costs of the vast government bureaucracy. But this political program for obvious reasons, has been impossible to carry through. Agricultural subsidies have if anything, only increased in the period of structural adjustment, to the extent that the reigning slogan now within official circles is that the priority should shift from unproductive subsidies to productive investments. But there are obviously politically influential farm lobbies that benefit from the subsidies paid out and any effort to ensure a transition to productive investments that benefit a larger cross-section of the agricultural population, would have to run the gauntlet of their resistance.
To take the component parts of food subsidies, there is first, the difference to reckon with, between the price at which the Food Corporation of India procures grain from the farmer during the harvest and the price at which it issues grain to the public distribution system. Then there is the cost of operations, stockholding and transportation that the FCI bears. For much of the 1990s, stock levels were far in excess of prescribed norms. Figures compiled in a recent study commissioned by the Ministry of Finance of the government of India, tell a compelling story. As of January 1, 2002, stocks of wheat and rice with the government and its agencies were over three times the prescribed level – in the case of wheat, almost four times. The volume has been drawn down in subsequent years, until now the seeming embarrassment of riches has been transformed into a deficit. But this has been achieved only by exporting grain at a price below that reserved for “below poverty line” (BPL) families in India. A part of the food subsidy, in other words, is going towards subsidising the consumption of Indian grain abroad.
The report on subsidies makes note of the phenomenon of rising food stocks coexisting with endemic hunger and “reported starvation deaths” in the country. It notes that the price reserved for BPL families, of both wheat and rice, has risen cumulatively by over 60 per cent since 1997-98, against an increase in the consumer price index of only 26 per cent. And despite this rapid increase in the issue price of foodgrain, the aggregate food subsidy burden has increased tenfold since 1990-91 – from a figure of Rs 2,450 crore to over Rs 25,000 crore.
The reasons are twofold: firstly, the costs of stockholding have increased enormously; and secondly, the procurement price paid to the farmer has multiplied several-fold. Increasingly, the food subsidy has lost its function of safeguarding food security and become a system of underwriting an unnecessary and wholly irrational accumulation of food stocks with official procurement agencies, and of keeping the politically voluble farm lobby quiescent, especially in the grain surplus areas.
The rapid increase in procurement prices has been partly justified as a necessary compensation for the sharp curtailment of the fertiliser subsidy, which has contributed to a steep escalation in the price paid by the farmer for this essential input. But the situation here still remains anomalous. According to a recent calculation, if import parity prices were to be used as the benchmark, only an average of about 56 per cent of the total fertiliser subsidy borne by the government is the farmers’ share. The rest is a subsidy for the fertiliser industry.
Official policy, in its reach towards the agricultural sector, is becoming increasingly limited. And the 1990s have also been a period when farmers were once again subject to a gradual but inexorable process of marginalisation. After the robust period of integration with the institutions of the mainstream economy, beginning with the nationalization of the country’s main banks in 1969, this was a serious setback for the millions dependent on agriculture for their livelihood.
Figures tabulated by the National Sample Survey Organisation, show that cultivator households till as late as 1971, were drawing at least 68 percent of their credit requirements from the non-institutional sector – in other words, the local mahajans and moneylenders who would charge extortionate rates and not hesitate to seize their land and other assets in case of a default on repayment, even one induced by severe climatic stress. The picture began to change from the time that the banks nationalization occurred, to the extent that by 1981, the share of the non-institutional sources in total agrarian credit had fallen to 36.8 percent. Over the next decade, the figure fell still more, to 30.6 percent. But once the philosophy of liberalization kicked in, the farm sector became a relatively low priority for profit-oriented financial institutions. In consequence, the share of the non-institutional sources of credit in total agricultural lending, had increased to 39 percent by 2002.
It is possible to make the case that the more accurate measure to use for assessing the adequacy of credit flows to agriculture would be to take these in proportion to GDP. With the share of agriculture in GDP having fallen progressively over the years, it should occasion no surprise that the flow of institutional credit to the sector too, should diminish. But this does not take into account the fact that 60 percent of the country still depends on agriculture for its livelihood. With the shrinking of its access to institutional sources of support – whether budgetary or through the credit system – the agrarian sector becomes more vulnerable to transient parameters, such as weather fluctuations, pest infestation, or natural disasters. The consequence has been a huge increase in agricultural indebtedness, which the most recent survey of the NSSO testifies to in an abstract sense, and the spate of suicides by debt-ridden farmers bears witness to in a rather more intimate and alarming way.
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