Review Article
Nehru Centre, Witness to History, Transition and Transformation of India, 1947-1964, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2011, pp xiv + 162, Rs 445.
A basic existential question would virtually leap out at the reader, a few pages into this volume. Does India’s first prime minister deserve another celebratory volume? Jawaharlal Nehru is acknowledged as an epochal figure in the struggle against colonialism, with perhaps the most successful record among the leaders of national liberation, in building a polity that functions by basic norms of democracy. The high tide of the celebration of his life and times, was his centenary year over two decades back. It has since been recognised that the time for celebration – or for its opposite – has long passed.
Yet the mood of celebration stretches on, bearing testimony perhaps to the ample funding available for burnishing the image of a statesman who remains a source of legitimacy for the country’s dominant political dynasty. Further, there are signs that the political forces claiming most ardently to protect Nehru’s legacy are unsure of their footing and unclear about strategy. A powerful argument meanwhile builds up, which puts down the prevalent mood of turmoil and anxiety in the country entirely to Nehru’s legacy.
Veteran journalist Inder Malhotra expresses an anguish felt by all who retain the faith: “…there is a group of people that are full of hatred for Nehru and his philosophy and legacy. Ideologically driven, they are determined to dismantle his greatest achievements – the founding and nurturing of the modern, democratic and secular Indian society and Indian State, committed to protecting and preserving the country’s plurality and its inclusiveness”. The ideological offensive against the Nehruvian bequest of secular statecraft, he concludes, has failed. The mass hysteria over the Ayodhya issue, the rants about “minority appeasement” and the barbs freely hurled about the Congress party’s alleged “softness on jihadi terrorism”, have failed as political ploys. Indeed, says Malhotra, the “voters’ overwhelming verdict” in the country’s most recent parliamentary general elections must be regarded as an “endorsement of Nehru’s legacy”.
It may be of some interest to pursue this inquiry. How far can one electoral verdict be construed as an endorsement of secularism, when several reliable accounts – the most recent being the Sachar committee’s – have shown that the State remains in default on the broader promises inherent in the principle, such as equal treatment under the law and fair opportunity for all? Malhotra does not pause over this question, but rather, moves on to a defence of Nehru against the two critiques most often levelled against him: his policy on China and his indecisiveness on Kashmir.
The charge that he was no statesman but a trusting naïf in respect of China is brushed away with a few extracts from the diary of G. Parthasarathi, at the time India’s ambassador to that country. The Nehru that emerges in this narrative is a robust and realistic judge of geopolitical realities, clearly aware of the dangers of Chinese duplicity and the conflict potential inherent in its looming presence across the Himalayas. He is recorded even urging Parthasarathi to keep V.K. Krishna Menon, a trusted lieutenant whose judgment on China he had reason to doubt, out of key deliberations.
In terms of utility, this manner of anecdotal evidence could be seriously questioned, especially in the evaluation of a world statesman on the broad sweep of historical time. But that unfortunately is the status of Nehru scholarship today. As far as his legacy is concerned, the past is not quite dead. It is not even past. It lives on in contemporary political contests.
Unsurprisingly, Nehru’s record on Kashmir comes in for extensive attention. India’s first Prime Minister is often faulted for an inadequate military response to Pakistan’s provocative tribal raid into Kashmir during the cataclysmic partition of the sub-continent. Critics believe that he stopped military operations rather too early, without evicting the marauders from the entire territory of Kashmir (as it existed then). To have then taken the matter to the United Nations was to grievously compound the error.
Rehashing a fantasy that refuses to die, journalist M.V. Kamath says that Nehru should “have waited for the Indian Army to capture Lahore and then (asked) Pakistan to come to terms”. This version of history enjoys a certain vogue in circles committed to a muscular military posture in neighbourhood relations. Yet there is no escape from its utter naivete and wilful disregard of a point that K. Natwar Singh alludes to in his contribution: that the armies of both India and Pakistan functioned under British command and Governor-General Louis Mountbatten had managed to foist himself on both as Chairman of the Joint Defence Council.
Malhotra finds the critique of Nehru’s record on Kashmir seriously askew. But the reasons he advances offer an oblique and unflattering commentary on aspects that remain for the most part unexplored by Indian commentators. The complete eviction of Pakistan’s tribal raiders from Kashmir, even if feasible in a narrow military sense, would have been political folly, he argues. To a crucial degree, India depended for its legitimacy in Kashmir on Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, leader of Kashmir’s liberation movement against the Dogra monarchy in the state. And the Sheikh by Malhotra’s account, advised against a complete mopping up operation in the state, since his following was confined to the Kashmiri linguistic community in the valley. Pushing beyond the territory of the valley would have been a gamble on the loyalty of the Punjabi speakers in the region now called “Azad Kashmir”.
Rather carelessly, without great regard for the broader implications, Malhotra compares the possible outcome of an aggressive military strategy to the very palpable disaster that Israel’s occupation of all Palestine has become. By presumable analogy then, taking all of Kashmir in 1948 would have burdened India with a restive population and a long-term security headache.
It is an unintended irony here that the situation in Kashmir, without quite approaching the dimensions of the existential struggle in Palestine, has today plunged into a state of endemic unrest. If this has been the outcome of what is today read as Nehru’s strategic foresight in 1948, the reader could be forgiven for wondering how much worse things could be. P.C. Alexander, the long-serving bureaucrat whose career began in the years immediately following independence, reflects rather dolefully on the current situation: “Kashmir continues to be a problem even sixty years after Nehru chose this path”.
Alexander leaves the final judgment on Kashmir for a future generation, but unsurprisingly, virtually every other contributor to the volume has an opinion to vent. On the referral to the U.N., Malhotra argues that there was no real choice. If India had not, other interested parties, notably Britain and Pakistan, would have exercised that option. Alexander believes that Nehru’s decision was made under pressure from Governor-General Mountbatten and its legacy has been uncertain, in part because the U.N. as a collective body, was never inclined to give India a fair hearing.
For Natwar Singh, a former diplomat and member of the union cabinet, Nehru’s handling of Kashmir was among the least edifying aspects of his leadership. He was hustled into a reckless course by Mountbatten, whose record Natwar Singh judges to have been extremely dubious in this and various other respects. It took Nehru’s passing from the scene in 1964 for a more robust policy to emerge. And Natwar Singh identifies 1965 as a key moment, when India’s foreign minister led his delegation out of the U.N. Security Council in protest at his Pakistan counterpart Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s strident assertion of a claim on Kashmir. The U.N., Natwar Singh says, never took up the issue of Kashmir at any point after that.
Jagmohan, another bureaucrat who later found a successful niche in politics, thinks differently. Though the initial referral was an unequivocal mistake, Nehru showed a sure touch and deep conviction in every subsequent action. He knew that the U.N. was compromised and bitterly polarised by Cold War calculations and avoided these with practised assurance. And in doing all this, he never retreated from a deeply held conviction that Kashmir belonged with India.
Karan Singh from his unique perspective as a scion of Kashmir’s ruling dynasty, identifies Nehru’s misplaced belief in Sheikh Abdullah as a problem. While the Sheikh had a loyal following in the Kashmir valley, the region under dispute was larger and more complex. To have viewed the entire issue through the prism of Kashmir did little justice to the interests and aspirations of the distinct cultural units of Jammu and Ladakh. Karan Singh is unsure about matters of detail, such as the composition of the States Reorganisation Commission appointed in 1953, dismissing the matter with a regal “if I remember right”. But he is positive that the far-reaching recommendation made by the commission on the creation of linguistic states, was key to the consolidation of the Indian Union. For the commission to have stopped at the borders of Jammu and Kashmir, ostensibly “because it had a separate situation”, was a grievous error.
Approaching this issue from a rather different perspective, Balraj Puri, the veteran political activist and public intellectual from Jammu, suggests a gaping democracy deficit as the root of the problem. The dominant Indian historical narrative puts the problem down to the Dogra Maharaja’s indecisiveness and Pakistan’s effort to settle the issue by force of arms. Puri looks deeper and finds a more complex reality, in which the upsurge of communal violence in Jammu at the time of the Indian partition figures as a determinant influence. This aspect is generally left out of the official Indian narrative, but was at the time significant enough for Mahatma Gandhi to publicly question the legitimacy of the Dogra monarchy and demand that all power be yielded to the ultimate sovereigns: the people of Jammu and Kashmir.
Quite plainly, the tribal incursion from Pakistan, then a nation in process of formation and self-definition, did not occur in a political vacuum. Reasonable observers have inferred that a state without a clearly established chain of political or military authority could not have undertaken the agenda of snatching territory by force, even less of entrusting this project to tribal raiders unlikely to submit to any form of civilian control (as understood in the modern sense).
Any reader who exercises the limited privilege of stretching the valuable insights offered by Puri’s contribution, would see that the armed raid into Kashmir was part of a sequence of events in which the Dogra dynasty’s perceived atrocities against the Muslims in Jammu was an inescapable ingredient, quite possibly a trigger. Over the years that followed, Puri points out, Nehru allowed his robust democratic instincts to be trumped by the palpable sense of insecurity occasioned by the circumstances of Kashmir’s accession. In seeking to square the impossible circle of Sheikh Abdullah’s rebellion and the Dogra dynasty’s long discredited claims to pre-eminence, Nehru allowed the voice of the people of Kashmir to be drowned out.
There was evidently a calculation underpinning this sequence of questionable decisions by a sworn democrat, whose respect for parliamentary institutions and procedures is the subject of a celebratory contribution by Subhash Kashyap. What could that calculation possibly have been? There was a larger Nehruvian world-view within which all contingent decisions were justified with an abundance of hope, if not with complete democratic conviction. And the Nehruvian vision of India involved the evolution of a modern enlightened citizen with no greater loyalty than the civic bond with fellow citizens. Narrow identities of religion and language would be submerged in the march towards that end, in a shared pursuit of “progress” as defined in European enlightenment terms. To quote a rather telling Nehruvian locution from the 1930s: “the real thing to my mind is the
economic factor. If we lay stress on this and divert public attention
to it we will find automatically that religious differences recede to
the background and a common bond unites different groups”.
This book of rather loosely organised reminiscences has little space for the Nehruvian legacy on economic planning. In a rare moment when the critical instinct triumphs, Natwar Singh describes Nehru’s understanding of economics as “inadequate” and frets over his failure to inject this element into foreign policy calculations all through the seventeen years he held the portfolio. Striking a contrary note, Muchkund Dubey looks back on the philosophical underpinnings of Nehru’s foreign policy and celebrates its cardinal principles of fairness and equity, in which the economic dimension was integral. But as he scans the horizon of world affairs today, Dubey is assailed by a sense of alarm. The Cold War has ended, but military force continues to be the currency of global politics. “The nuclear arms race”, he warns, “has acquired ominous proportions” and “India itself has emerged as a de facto nuclear power”. Diplomacy itself leaves little room for the ethical element and is a slave of narrow calculations.
With all these despairing pronouncements behind him, Dubey affirms the need for a retrieval today of the Nehruvian vision. As with all other contributions to this volume, this is a statement made in faith, without any manner of engagement with the reasons why the optimism and idealism of a newly independent nation -- embodied in the personality of its first prime minister -- has through cycles of crisis and retrieval, ended up as a scarcely recognisable mutant.
This book of often contrary views is given an element of coherence only by the deep reverence towards its subject that all contributions share. The anecdotes and personal remembrances that it strings together might interest the serious student of the Nehru years, but need better sourcing and authentication to be of enduring value. This book will add bulk to the overflowing shelves of Nehruana without seriously raising the average quality of scholarship. Though all uniformly well-intentioned and devoted to a worthwhile political cause, few among the contributors has achieved the distance and dispassion that would that a possibility.
Friday, January 13, 2012
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Explaining the Mundane, Excluding Voices of Dissent
Review Article
Harsh V. Pant, The US-India Nuclear Pact: Policy, Process and Great Power Politics, Oxford University Press, Delhi, Delhi, 2011, pp xii + 150, Rs 450; ISBN 0-19-807396-8.
Early in this book, Harsh V. Pant, a lecturer at King’s College, London, does a subtle but fairly effective job of puncturing some of the more fanciful conceptions of nuclear nationalism. “Nuclear weapons do retain their relevance in international politics”, he writes, “but it is increasingly a very limited one”. If there is any reason why major world powers retain nuclear arsenals, it is for political purposes rather than with intent to use them. This being the case, “India’s nuclear doctrine of credible minimum deterrence serves its interests well in the near to medium term”. However, any “over investment either intellectual or financial, in this realm, might even be counterproductive”.
No further clarity is offered on the soundness of the Indian nuclear doctrine, perhaps because that is peripheral to the main focus of this book. Pant’s approach is to study the dialogue between the U.S. and India that began soon after the Indian nuclear tests in 1998, and gained traction after Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to the U.S. in July 2005. That visit opened up the first glimmer of a pathway out of the uneasy limbo that India had long inhabited in the global nuclear order. And among the first steps that India needed to take along that pathway, was to clearly distinguish between its military and civilian nuclear facilities.
The analysis in this volume considers the trajectory of India’s negotiations with the U.S., which culminated in what was then described as a “historic” agreement on nuclear technology and trade. Pant proceeds along three different levels at which he sees the deal being consummated: the international strategic context, the domestic political domain in the two countries, and finally, but very importantly, the commitments and concerns of specific individuals.
Mundane events and processes are often rendered profound by merely adding to them the prefix “nuclear”. The “nuclear” dialogue between India and the U.S. consumed much of the time and attention of the strategic establishment through Manmohan Singh’s first term as Indian Prime Minister. The media too caught the infection, transforming the public discourse into an echo chamber where dissent was given little space and the official dialogue, faithfully reproduced. And all this was about a weapons capability that virtually everybody recognised, would never be used and an energy source that contributed less than three percent to the country’s total electricity generation.
By what criterion then, could the public debate over the U.S.-India nuclear agreement be considered a worthwhile investment of time and intellectual effort? Pant is sceptical about the practical utility of nuclear weapons and does not venture into the patchy record of nuclear energy generation in India. Yet he sees the nuclear deal as important in symbolic terms, since after years of estrangement, it provided a point of convergence for the strategic interests of the U.S. and India.
Do the potential benefits emanating from this symbolism, justify the effort and political capital invested in bringing the deal to fruition? Pant recognises that the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan may cast a pall over the ambitious targets drawn up by India’s Department of Atomic Energy (DAE). But then in one of many passages where his own authorial judgment blends seamlessly into the claims made by the political leadership that negotiated the deal, he prounounces that “India cannot realistically hope to ignore nuclear power in the future and making electricity from nuclear power remains far less damaging to human health than making it from coal, oil, or even lean-burning natural gas”.
Since Pant’s book was published, a nuclear power plant nearing completion in Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu, has been temporarily abandoned after people living in the locality laid siege to it. Early tests of some of the systems at the plant led to waves of anxiety about the security of lives and livelihoods in the near neighbourhood. And in Jaitapur on the Konkan coast, plans to build the world’s largest nuclear electricity generation capacity in a single location have been set back by a revolt of the people who stand to lose farms and homes as the cordon sanitaire for the monstrously large 9,900 MW plant is imposed.
What possible benefit can the nuclear option bring that other energy sources cannot? The vision of the early planners was that the nuclear option was the surest guarantee of independence and autonomy. This vision had India overcoming the handicaps of a late start and making a rapid ascent of the learning curve by focusing its scientific efforts narrowly in the nuclear domain. A three stage nuclear energy programme was planned, beginning with natural uranium fuel, then moving to fast breeder reactors powered by plutonium and finally ending with the cornucopia of electricity generated from thorium.
Over a half-century since the blueprint was drawn up, the DAE revealed that domestic uranium availability was, contrary to the early promise, rather paltry. And this is after the primary area of uranium mining in the country -- Jaduguda in present-day Jharkhand state – had been stricken by an epidemic of ill-health and disease as an apparent consequence of the DAE’s activities.
The DAE figures only incidentally in Pant’s diligent effort to understand the various actors on the grand panorama of the nuclear dialogue. It is an omission that is not surprising, since the department remained discretely on the sidelines, except for a famous February 2006 outburst by the DAE head, Anil Kakodkar, about the U.S. “shifting the goalposts” in the nuclear dialogue. At key junctures, the main personalities involved in the dialogue, who have all been given due credit in Pant’s narrative, ensured they had the DAE onside. But the DAE role in the nuclear dialogue with the U.S. will be remembered basically for Kakodkar’s insistence that it would not under any circumstances, allow its fast-breeder test reactor (FBTR) at Kalpakkam to be designated as a civilian facility, subject to international safeguards.
As the cornerstone of the second phase of India’s nuclear energy programme, the FBTR should by any reckoning, have been classified as a civilian facility. But the DAE thought differently. The point that Kakodkar made in his intervention was simply that “long term energy security” and the sustenance of India’s “minimum credible deterrent”, required that the FBTR be kept out of the safeguards regime.
Clearly, the DAE’s discomfiture was primarily occasioned by the fact that it had for very long been used to working with few internal walls of separation between its activities. The civilian nuclear effort was known to feed into the weapons effort both in terms of material transactions and personnel transfers. The FBTR is in a manner of speaking the atomic age equivalent of the scientific fantasy of the “perpetual motion machine” – it produces plutonium fuel even as it burns it. Despite having other reactors dedicated exclusively to weapons grade fuel production, the DAE’s ardour in protecting the FBTR from international scrutiny spoke of some uncertainty over how “minimum” a nuclear deterrent could be for it to be “credible”. The Indian nuclear weapons doctrine in other words, was well advanced along the slippery slope that “deterrence” was always known to be.
Pant rightly observes that the DAE’s revolt may have been an inconvenience to the progress of the negotiations, though it was ultimately turned to advantage in securing better terms for India. His focus is on how the states party to the negotiations sought to manoeuvre and secure their best advantage in the context of the global configuration of forces. Their conduct followed certain idioms of political behaviour: realism and its variants. The U.S. was impelled by the need to find a strategic counterweight to growing Chinese influence in the Asian landmass. And India was moved by like motives, its sense of negotiating purpose strengthened by a gestalt shift in perceptions from third world romanticism to robust calculations of realpolitik. In seeking their partly congruent ends, both states negotiated the delicate terrain of domestic opinion with surefooted ease, ensuring that key constituencies were placated or neutralised.
This beguiling tale of negotiations moving towards a happy outcome, omits the two crucial factors of nationalist vanity and security anxiety. The bond between nuclear capability and national prestige still remains strong in the imagination of the Indian elite. Its dangerous consequence today is that the revolt of the silent majority against the dislocations of a massive expansion of nuclear capacity, is ascribed to external agents intent on sabotaging India’s rise to global preeminence. Security anxieties had their play when at key junctures, stories were featured in sections of the country’s media – bearing the obvious imprint of self-interested plants by the strategic establishment – suggesting that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal threatened to outstrip India’s and questioning China’s good faith.
Pant does not pause for long to consider the implications of the U.S.-India nuclear deal on the global disarmament dialogue, such as it is. His concern is limited to the impact on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and its perceived legitimacy. And this is a question that he passes over with an airy generalisation about “international regimes (being) merely reflections of global power realities”.
This is all very well as far as it goes. But rather than candidly identify the impact that “global power realities” had on India’s own conduct, Pant chooses to gloss the issue over. Thus, the two votes that India cast to censure Iran in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board, for treaty violations that were if anything, borderline in nature, are mentioned in anodyne and offhand terms: “It is not clear what part U.S. pressure played in India’s decision …. but the Bush administration made it clear that if India voted against the U.S. motion, the U.S. Congress would likely not approve the U.S.-India nuclear agreement”.
Quite in contrast with the elite perception in India, the nuclear deal was seen internationally to be in serious ethical deficit. The Guardian in London, for instance, commented that the nuclear deal was about “about breaking rules and expecting others to abide by them”. More picturesquely put, it was about “preaching temperance from the barstool”.
In advance of the 2006 Bush visit to India, The New York Times similarly observed that despite all the accompanying froth, the presidential passage to India was “built around a bad nuclear deal”. With the deal consummated, the newspaper commented rather acidly, that Bush was turning out to be Iran’s best friend. His adventure in Iraq, launched on flimsy and fabricated evidence, had transformed that country into a satellite of the Islamic Republic next door. And his deal with India sent “exactly the wrong message”, since Iran’s hopes of thwarting a global consensus on its nuclear programme rested on “convincing the rest of the world that the West (was) guilty of a double standard on nuclear issues”.
Even if he chooses to ignore the wider context and the ethical dilemmas, Pant’s narrative would, to be of value, need to factor in changing power equations and their impact on the range of benefits accruing from the nuclear deal. He is concerned that since the Bush regime ended its tenure in something akin to global ignominy and was succeeded by one more mindful of the need for consistent standards in multilateral matters, the prospects inherent in the nuclear deal have seriously diminished. Pant sees some features of the Nuclear Liability Bill passed by the Indian parliament following the conclusion of the deal, as a potential disincentive to investors in nuclear energy. A key difficulty he identifies, is the provision of the law which in the event of an accident, would hold liable the operator of the nuclear plant as well as the vendor of equipment.
This was the inevitable consequence of the need for compromise within a democratic space. But there is abundant irony in the reticence of the major vendors to enter a market where they would have to bear legal liability for an accident, when the DAE and its spokespersons have ardently been seeking to foster the impression that modern nuclear power plants are absolutely fail-safe. As Suvrat Raju and M.V. Ramana, physicists and campaigners for nuclear disarmament, recently put it in the context of the agitation against the Kundankulam plant: “When nuclear companies are unwilling to stake their financial health on these claims of ‘100% safety’, how can the government ask local residents to risk their lives?” (“Why Kudankulam is untenable”, The Hindu, November 12, 2011, editorial page.)
The point needs serious reflection, at a time when the strategic establishment, counting on the reflexive nationalism of the elite, is seeking to identify a “foreign hand” behind the rising tide of protest over nuclear location decisions. And for analysts who focus exclusively on the currency of power, it is a long overdue lesson on the gulf that separates popular aspirations from the overblown claims of nuclear nationalism.
Harsh V. Pant, The US-India Nuclear Pact: Policy, Process and Great Power Politics, Oxford University Press, Delhi, Delhi, 2011, pp xii + 150, Rs 450; ISBN 0-19-807396-8.
Early in this book, Harsh V. Pant, a lecturer at King’s College, London, does a subtle but fairly effective job of puncturing some of the more fanciful conceptions of nuclear nationalism. “Nuclear weapons do retain their relevance in international politics”, he writes, “but it is increasingly a very limited one”. If there is any reason why major world powers retain nuclear arsenals, it is for political purposes rather than with intent to use them. This being the case, “India’s nuclear doctrine of credible minimum deterrence serves its interests well in the near to medium term”. However, any “over investment either intellectual or financial, in this realm, might even be counterproductive”.
No further clarity is offered on the soundness of the Indian nuclear doctrine, perhaps because that is peripheral to the main focus of this book. Pant’s approach is to study the dialogue between the U.S. and India that began soon after the Indian nuclear tests in 1998, and gained traction after Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to the U.S. in July 2005. That visit opened up the first glimmer of a pathway out of the uneasy limbo that India had long inhabited in the global nuclear order. And among the first steps that India needed to take along that pathway, was to clearly distinguish between its military and civilian nuclear facilities.
The analysis in this volume considers the trajectory of India’s negotiations with the U.S., which culminated in what was then described as a “historic” agreement on nuclear technology and trade. Pant proceeds along three different levels at which he sees the deal being consummated: the international strategic context, the domestic political domain in the two countries, and finally, but very importantly, the commitments and concerns of specific individuals.
Mundane events and processes are often rendered profound by merely adding to them the prefix “nuclear”. The “nuclear” dialogue between India and the U.S. consumed much of the time and attention of the strategic establishment through Manmohan Singh’s first term as Indian Prime Minister. The media too caught the infection, transforming the public discourse into an echo chamber where dissent was given little space and the official dialogue, faithfully reproduced. And all this was about a weapons capability that virtually everybody recognised, would never be used and an energy source that contributed less than three percent to the country’s total electricity generation.
By what criterion then, could the public debate over the U.S.-India nuclear agreement be considered a worthwhile investment of time and intellectual effort? Pant is sceptical about the practical utility of nuclear weapons and does not venture into the patchy record of nuclear energy generation in India. Yet he sees the nuclear deal as important in symbolic terms, since after years of estrangement, it provided a point of convergence for the strategic interests of the U.S. and India.
Do the potential benefits emanating from this symbolism, justify the effort and political capital invested in bringing the deal to fruition? Pant recognises that the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan may cast a pall over the ambitious targets drawn up by India’s Department of Atomic Energy (DAE). But then in one of many passages where his own authorial judgment blends seamlessly into the claims made by the political leadership that negotiated the deal, he prounounces that “India cannot realistically hope to ignore nuclear power in the future and making electricity from nuclear power remains far less damaging to human health than making it from coal, oil, or even lean-burning natural gas”.
Since Pant’s book was published, a nuclear power plant nearing completion in Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu, has been temporarily abandoned after people living in the locality laid siege to it. Early tests of some of the systems at the plant led to waves of anxiety about the security of lives and livelihoods in the near neighbourhood. And in Jaitapur on the Konkan coast, plans to build the world’s largest nuclear electricity generation capacity in a single location have been set back by a revolt of the people who stand to lose farms and homes as the cordon sanitaire for the monstrously large 9,900 MW plant is imposed.
What possible benefit can the nuclear option bring that other energy sources cannot? The vision of the early planners was that the nuclear option was the surest guarantee of independence and autonomy. This vision had India overcoming the handicaps of a late start and making a rapid ascent of the learning curve by focusing its scientific efforts narrowly in the nuclear domain. A three stage nuclear energy programme was planned, beginning with natural uranium fuel, then moving to fast breeder reactors powered by plutonium and finally ending with the cornucopia of electricity generated from thorium.
Over a half-century since the blueprint was drawn up, the DAE revealed that domestic uranium availability was, contrary to the early promise, rather paltry. And this is after the primary area of uranium mining in the country -- Jaduguda in present-day Jharkhand state – had been stricken by an epidemic of ill-health and disease as an apparent consequence of the DAE’s activities.
The DAE figures only incidentally in Pant’s diligent effort to understand the various actors on the grand panorama of the nuclear dialogue. It is an omission that is not surprising, since the department remained discretely on the sidelines, except for a famous February 2006 outburst by the DAE head, Anil Kakodkar, about the U.S. “shifting the goalposts” in the nuclear dialogue. At key junctures, the main personalities involved in the dialogue, who have all been given due credit in Pant’s narrative, ensured they had the DAE onside. But the DAE role in the nuclear dialogue with the U.S. will be remembered basically for Kakodkar’s insistence that it would not under any circumstances, allow its fast-breeder test reactor (FBTR) at Kalpakkam to be designated as a civilian facility, subject to international safeguards.
As the cornerstone of the second phase of India’s nuclear energy programme, the FBTR should by any reckoning, have been classified as a civilian facility. But the DAE thought differently. The point that Kakodkar made in his intervention was simply that “long term energy security” and the sustenance of India’s “minimum credible deterrent”, required that the FBTR be kept out of the safeguards regime.
Clearly, the DAE’s discomfiture was primarily occasioned by the fact that it had for very long been used to working with few internal walls of separation between its activities. The civilian nuclear effort was known to feed into the weapons effort both in terms of material transactions and personnel transfers. The FBTR is in a manner of speaking the atomic age equivalent of the scientific fantasy of the “perpetual motion machine” – it produces plutonium fuel even as it burns it. Despite having other reactors dedicated exclusively to weapons grade fuel production, the DAE’s ardour in protecting the FBTR from international scrutiny spoke of some uncertainty over how “minimum” a nuclear deterrent could be for it to be “credible”. The Indian nuclear weapons doctrine in other words, was well advanced along the slippery slope that “deterrence” was always known to be.
Pant rightly observes that the DAE’s revolt may have been an inconvenience to the progress of the negotiations, though it was ultimately turned to advantage in securing better terms for India. His focus is on how the states party to the negotiations sought to manoeuvre and secure their best advantage in the context of the global configuration of forces. Their conduct followed certain idioms of political behaviour: realism and its variants. The U.S. was impelled by the need to find a strategic counterweight to growing Chinese influence in the Asian landmass. And India was moved by like motives, its sense of negotiating purpose strengthened by a gestalt shift in perceptions from third world romanticism to robust calculations of realpolitik. In seeking their partly congruent ends, both states negotiated the delicate terrain of domestic opinion with surefooted ease, ensuring that key constituencies were placated or neutralised.
This beguiling tale of negotiations moving towards a happy outcome, omits the two crucial factors of nationalist vanity and security anxiety. The bond between nuclear capability and national prestige still remains strong in the imagination of the Indian elite. Its dangerous consequence today is that the revolt of the silent majority against the dislocations of a massive expansion of nuclear capacity, is ascribed to external agents intent on sabotaging India’s rise to global preeminence. Security anxieties had their play when at key junctures, stories were featured in sections of the country’s media – bearing the obvious imprint of self-interested plants by the strategic establishment – suggesting that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal threatened to outstrip India’s and questioning China’s good faith.
Pant does not pause for long to consider the implications of the U.S.-India nuclear deal on the global disarmament dialogue, such as it is. His concern is limited to the impact on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and its perceived legitimacy. And this is a question that he passes over with an airy generalisation about “international regimes (being) merely reflections of global power realities”.
This is all very well as far as it goes. But rather than candidly identify the impact that “global power realities” had on India’s own conduct, Pant chooses to gloss the issue over. Thus, the two votes that India cast to censure Iran in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board, for treaty violations that were if anything, borderline in nature, are mentioned in anodyne and offhand terms: “It is not clear what part U.S. pressure played in India’s decision …. but the Bush administration made it clear that if India voted against the U.S. motion, the U.S. Congress would likely not approve the U.S.-India nuclear agreement”.
Quite in contrast with the elite perception in India, the nuclear deal was seen internationally to be in serious ethical deficit. The Guardian in London, for instance, commented that the nuclear deal was about “about breaking rules and expecting others to abide by them”. More picturesquely put, it was about “preaching temperance from the barstool”.
In advance of the 2006 Bush visit to India, The New York Times similarly observed that despite all the accompanying froth, the presidential passage to India was “built around a bad nuclear deal”. With the deal consummated, the newspaper commented rather acidly, that Bush was turning out to be Iran’s best friend. His adventure in Iraq, launched on flimsy and fabricated evidence, had transformed that country into a satellite of the Islamic Republic next door. And his deal with India sent “exactly the wrong message”, since Iran’s hopes of thwarting a global consensus on its nuclear programme rested on “convincing the rest of the world that the West (was) guilty of a double standard on nuclear issues”.
Even if he chooses to ignore the wider context and the ethical dilemmas, Pant’s narrative would, to be of value, need to factor in changing power equations and their impact on the range of benefits accruing from the nuclear deal. He is concerned that since the Bush regime ended its tenure in something akin to global ignominy and was succeeded by one more mindful of the need for consistent standards in multilateral matters, the prospects inherent in the nuclear deal have seriously diminished. Pant sees some features of the Nuclear Liability Bill passed by the Indian parliament following the conclusion of the deal, as a potential disincentive to investors in nuclear energy. A key difficulty he identifies, is the provision of the law which in the event of an accident, would hold liable the operator of the nuclear plant as well as the vendor of equipment.
This was the inevitable consequence of the need for compromise within a democratic space. But there is abundant irony in the reticence of the major vendors to enter a market where they would have to bear legal liability for an accident, when the DAE and its spokespersons have ardently been seeking to foster the impression that modern nuclear power plants are absolutely fail-safe. As Suvrat Raju and M.V. Ramana, physicists and campaigners for nuclear disarmament, recently put it in the context of the agitation against the Kundankulam plant: “When nuclear companies are unwilling to stake their financial health on these claims of ‘100% safety’, how can the government ask local residents to risk their lives?” (“Why Kudankulam is untenable”, The Hindu, November 12, 2011, editorial page.)
The point needs serious reflection, at a time when the strategic establishment, counting on the reflexive nationalism of the elite, is seeking to identify a “foreign hand” behind the rising tide of protest over nuclear location decisions. And for analysts who focus exclusively on the currency of power, it is a long overdue lesson on the gulf that separates popular aspirations from the overblown claims of nuclear nationalism.
Friday, January 06, 2012
Redefining the Secular in Indian Society
It is a word that has been tossed around in political contests and minutely dissected in scholarly circles. But “secularism” still remains an elusive concept. And in practice, “secular” politics is besieged at a number of levels, unable at any time to rise above particular, sectional interests.
An event on December 7 organised by Sahmat was the occasion for a scholarly inquiry into the deeper meanings and definitions of the “secular” in Indian society. There are numerous -- and mostly irreconcilable -- definitions already in circulation. December 7 became for this reason, an exercise in redefinition and rediscovery, in retrieving a principle from depths of conceptual confusion.
The event was organised a few days after the eightieth birthday of Romila Thapar, one of India’s greatest historians. Though this aspect was downplayed in deference to the individual’s unease with the public observance of a personal milestone, all speakers opened their remarks with eloquent tributes to an institution builder, teacher and mentor for generations of scholars. Beyond the world of academia, Romila Thapar has illumined trails of history that have long remained obscure for the wider public, considerably enhancing the quality of public discourse.
The historian K.N. Panikkar recounted some part of the public debt owed this remarkable career as an academic and public intellectual. Romila Thapar combined “scholarly pursuit with social commitment” in a manner that lent “direction to many a public issue”. While exploring new frontiers in historical scholarship, she also had time to frontally combat the “political abuse of history” – which indeed was a term of her coinage from the dark days of the Ayodhya movement, when the forces of Hindutva had managed to recruit large numbers to the cause of effacing a medieval mosque. Aside from giving a rigorous scholarly orientation to the effort of defeating the spurious historiography of Hindutva, Panikkar remarked, Romila Thapar was at the forefront of the campaign for sanity and tolerance in public life.
In remarks that opened the evening’s discussions, Romila Thapar spoke about the shifty and elusive character of “secularism” as a political principle. It is not difficult to identify events and actions that are antithetical to secularism. But as an affirmative principle, “secularism” is very difficult to pin down.
In this conceptual vacuum, parties of an overtly communal stripe have portrayed secularism as a denial of religion and the primordial identities that make the Indian nation what it is. Others have turned its supposed principle of religious tolerance into the sanction for the perpetuation of a clerical hegemony. Still others have recoiled from the futility of the entire project of building a secular order in a society of intense religiosity, ascribing the pathologies of modern sectarian politics entirely to the denial of identities held basic to social existence.
Romila Thapar warned against all these possible outcomes of muddled thinking. The definition popular in India, she said, “either equates secularism with atheism .. or else more commonly, (refers) to the co-existence of all religions”. Neither has great validity, since “personal belief is not central to the secular” so much as the “control of society by religious institutions”. And religious coexistence or tolerance is a meaning that has evolved specifically in the Indian historical context, as an antidote to the communal politics of both the Hindu and Muslim stripe. Yet it is a definition that has not accounted for either the “fact of religions being of unequal status”, or for the “underlying hierarchy in concepts such as the majority and the minority communities”.
Coexistence or religious tolerance cannot in this sense, be a primary criterion. The secular ideal originates in the western milieu where the issue of coexistence was of relatively little consequence, since subjects of the Sovereign were normally enjoined to follow the faith he patronised. What was germane rather, was the subordination of the religious authority to the worldly power. In Romila Thapar’s words: “The secular implies the primacy of civil laws. .. Identities of religion, race, caste, language and so on would be subordinated to the identity of citizenship, based on equal rights, duties and obligations of all citizens on the state”.
The focus then shifts from secularism as a principle supposedly embedded in the institutions of governance, towards secularisation as a process accompanying the consolidation of the nation-state. Religion loses its primary claim to citizen allegiance and is confined to a private sphere, while the civic compact takes over the public domain. People live together in “civil society” not because they resemble each other in terms of religion or any other marker of identity, but because they share a common set of values, embodied in a system of civil law.
But is this separation of the private and public spheres always feasible? And can religion be all that easily confined to the private sphere or demoted as a primary criterion of identity fixation? Religion is of course a medium for the socialisation of the individual and a private religion would be in some senses, a contradiction in terms. A more credible approach would be to view secularisation in terms of the balance of power between social institutions, as a process by which the civic compact as embodied in a secular constitution supersedes the decrees of religious authority.
Historically, secularisation has also corresponded to the diminution of the political power of the ecclesiastical orders, typified for instance, by the loss of their tithes and titles to land. That understanding though, is of limited relevance in India, where an ecclesiastical order on the lines of the Catholic Church never really existed.
Instances when sovereigns have specifically enjoined tolerance for various faiths as a political commitment are not lacking from Indian history. So too are there numerous instances of the sovereign power patronising a variety of religious institutions and orders. But these cannot be used to buttress the argument for secularism, since their focus was “the furtherance of religion as a social force”.
A more credible source for secular doctrines in Romila Thapar’s assessment, could be found in the various nastika sects which existed from the earliest times in India and despite all their internal disagreements, were almost all “opposed to divine sanction as necessary for civil laws”.
The nastika view was that “the universe is self-created” and life itself constituted by a combination of elements. Human consciousness and knowledge are finite and derived from perception, rather than revelation. In Romila Thapar’s words again, the nastika sects held that “laws being man-made, can be changed”. These were arguments that the Buddhists and Jainas found extremely congenial to their mission of propagating “social ethics as the mainspring of human behaviour, where the laws and values of society should ensure the equality and dignity of its members”.
Moving rapidly forward to contemporary times, these aspects of Indian tradition are of obvious relevance to the modern debate on secularism. From being a rather pale assurance of religious tolerance, secularism becomes a more robust principle of ensuring that constitutional guarantees of liberty and equality are fulfilled. Key assurances of the Indian constitution, such as equality before the law and fair opportunity, have obviously been breached repeatedly and without any gesture of redress from the State. Words and deeds are being increasingly subject to control and manipulation in accordance with “invented laws of what are described as religious and cultural tradition”. The rich multiplicities of history are being effaced in “monolithic structures” that answer the seeming need for a nation-state to define itself by primordial identities rather than the civic compact.
For Romila Thapar, these circumstances made the task of “redefining the secular in Indian society” an absolute imperative. Opportunities were available, since as a nation, India still has “the freedom to choose the values that should govern our society”. The retrieval of the secular could begin by shifting the focus “from a passive co-existence of religions, to the more dynamic co-existence of citizens with .. equal rights and obligations, guarded by the vigilance of a free and just society”.
Picking up on some of these themes, K.N. Panikkar drew attention to the need for understanding secularism in the context of “community formation” in modern times and the newly minted forms of religious identity that emerged within the colonial milieu. Small and diverse communities that existed on the basis of their economic and social functions, were under the influence of colonial modernity, incorporated into one or the other religious group. Religion had been a “perceived and experienced reality” in pre-colonial times, without generating a consciousness that transcended the local milieu. These identities became entrenched as civil society was incorporated into the colonial system. Moreover, in early early nationalist propaganda, these newly minted identities were seen as congruent with “national” identities.
To view secularism as an outcome of religious harmony is to invert the perspective, since tolerance only emerges when secularism is in place. Secularism as a principle however, began its journey in India burdened with the deadweight of religion, which in turn was perceived as a monolithic doctrine in which the multiple cultural diversities of the real world were effaced. Religious harmony fails to achieve the secular ideal because every religion has within it, various kinds of cultural and social hierarchies. Coexistence thus becomes a formula for the sustenance of difference and for the perpetuation of these inequalities within each religious order.
It was “logical” to have accorded a degree of priority to religious harmony, given the reality of Indian society, where multiple religious traditions had at various times sprouted and flourished. But the notion was not sufficient to achieve a truly inclusive social order. “For realizing inclusiveness, cultural plurality is not sufficient”, said Panikkar: “what is essential
is cultural equality”.
In its practice in India, secularism in both its state and society centred versions, was enclosed within the discourse of “religious consciousness”. It failed to reconcile between the “religious and material conditions of existence”. Redefining the secular requires that areas of human existence other than the religious, such as culture and economy, be incorporated into its praxis. It requires that “the values of democracy and social justice and cultural equality” be introduced as integral elements of the secular compact.
Secularism accorded priority to the political values of liberty and equality, over the codes of duty and obedience ordained by religion. Concluding the discussion, Prabhat Patnaik argued that what is often taken to be the purely ethical impulse towards freedom has a basis in reason. Every individual has a rational cause to struggle for freedom as part of a human collective, since nobody can call himself free while there are many who are unfree.
This collective endeavour for freedom fosters the domain of the “secular”. It creates the community that strives for a transcendence of narrower values imposed by religion. But it is threatened by the forces of reaction which seek to impose an order based on religious values. More subtly, the bourgeois order which retains a formal commitment to secularism, may seek to engineer schisms in the collective struggle for freedom, reducing each individual to an atomised existence, impelling him in turn to seek an anchorage in an older, familiar network of religious community.
The denial of human freedom then is the logical course of a bourgeois political order which exalts an individual’s seeming gain at the expense of society, as the ultimate benchmark of achievement. With the untold riches foretold on that pathway now proving illusory and the world order built on the unfettered and unaccountable rampage of finance capital in palpable crisis, the forces of reaction seem poised to resume their push towards absolute political power. A redefinition of the secular in Indian society is clearly a political programme of surpassing urgency.
December 28 2011
An event on December 7 organised by Sahmat was the occasion for a scholarly inquiry into the deeper meanings and definitions of the “secular” in Indian society. There are numerous -- and mostly irreconcilable -- definitions already in circulation. December 7 became for this reason, an exercise in redefinition and rediscovery, in retrieving a principle from depths of conceptual confusion.
The event was organised a few days after the eightieth birthday of Romila Thapar, one of India’s greatest historians. Though this aspect was downplayed in deference to the individual’s unease with the public observance of a personal milestone, all speakers opened their remarks with eloquent tributes to an institution builder, teacher and mentor for generations of scholars. Beyond the world of academia, Romila Thapar has illumined trails of history that have long remained obscure for the wider public, considerably enhancing the quality of public discourse.
The historian K.N. Panikkar recounted some part of the public debt owed this remarkable career as an academic and public intellectual. Romila Thapar combined “scholarly pursuit with social commitment” in a manner that lent “direction to many a public issue”. While exploring new frontiers in historical scholarship, she also had time to frontally combat the “political abuse of history” – which indeed was a term of her coinage from the dark days of the Ayodhya movement, when the forces of Hindutva had managed to recruit large numbers to the cause of effacing a medieval mosque. Aside from giving a rigorous scholarly orientation to the effort of defeating the spurious historiography of Hindutva, Panikkar remarked, Romila Thapar was at the forefront of the campaign for sanity and tolerance in public life.
In remarks that opened the evening’s discussions, Romila Thapar spoke about the shifty and elusive character of “secularism” as a political principle. It is not difficult to identify events and actions that are antithetical to secularism. But as an affirmative principle, “secularism” is very difficult to pin down.
In this conceptual vacuum, parties of an overtly communal stripe have portrayed secularism as a denial of religion and the primordial identities that make the Indian nation what it is. Others have turned its supposed principle of religious tolerance into the sanction for the perpetuation of a clerical hegemony. Still others have recoiled from the futility of the entire project of building a secular order in a society of intense religiosity, ascribing the pathologies of modern sectarian politics entirely to the denial of identities held basic to social existence.
Romila Thapar warned against all these possible outcomes of muddled thinking. The definition popular in India, she said, “either equates secularism with atheism .. or else more commonly, (refers) to the co-existence of all religions”. Neither has great validity, since “personal belief is not central to the secular” so much as the “control of society by religious institutions”. And religious coexistence or tolerance is a meaning that has evolved specifically in the Indian historical context, as an antidote to the communal politics of both the Hindu and Muslim stripe. Yet it is a definition that has not accounted for either the “fact of religions being of unequal status”, or for the “underlying hierarchy in concepts such as the majority and the minority communities”.
Coexistence or religious tolerance cannot in this sense, be a primary criterion. The secular ideal originates in the western milieu where the issue of coexistence was of relatively little consequence, since subjects of the Sovereign were normally enjoined to follow the faith he patronised. What was germane rather, was the subordination of the religious authority to the worldly power. In Romila Thapar’s words: “The secular implies the primacy of civil laws. .. Identities of religion, race, caste, language and so on would be subordinated to the identity of citizenship, based on equal rights, duties and obligations of all citizens on the state”.
The focus then shifts from secularism as a principle supposedly embedded in the institutions of governance, towards secularisation as a process accompanying the consolidation of the nation-state. Religion loses its primary claim to citizen allegiance and is confined to a private sphere, while the civic compact takes over the public domain. People live together in “civil society” not because they resemble each other in terms of religion or any other marker of identity, but because they share a common set of values, embodied in a system of civil law.
But is this separation of the private and public spheres always feasible? And can religion be all that easily confined to the private sphere or demoted as a primary criterion of identity fixation? Religion is of course a medium for the socialisation of the individual and a private religion would be in some senses, a contradiction in terms. A more credible approach would be to view secularisation in terms of the balance of power between social institutions, as a process by which the civic compact as embodied in a secular constitution supersedes the decrees of religious authority.
Historically, secularisation has also corresponded to the diminution of the political power of the ecclesiastical orders, typified for instance, by the loss of their tithes and titles to land. That understanding though, is of limited relevance in India, where an ecclesiastical order on the lines of the Catholic Church never really existed.
Instances when sovereigns have specifically enjoined tolerance for various faiths as a political commitment are not lacking from Indian history. So too are there numerous instances of the sovereign power patronising a variety of religious institutions and orders. But these cannot be used to buttress the argument for secularism, since their focus was “the furtherance of religion as a social force”.
A more credible source for secular doctrines in Romila Thapar’s assessment, could be found in the various nastika sects which existed from the earliest times in India and despite all their internal disagreements, were almost all “opposed to divine sanction as necessary for civil laws”.
The nastika view was that “the universe is self-created” and life itself constituted by a combination of elements. Human consciousness and knowledge are finite and derived from perception, rather than revelation. In Romila Thapar’s words again, the nastika sects held that “laws being man-made, can be changed”. These were arguments that the Buddhists and Jainas found extremely congenial to their mission of propagating “social ethics as the mainspring of human behaviour, where the laws and values of society should ensure the equality and dignity of its members”.
Moving rapidly forward to contemporary times, these aspects of Indian tradition are of obvious relevance to the modern debate on secularism. From being a rather pale assurance of religious tolerance, secularism becomes a more robust principle of ensuring that constitutional guarantees of liberty and equality are fulfilled. Key assurances of the Indian constitution, such as equality before the law and fair opportunity, have obviously been breached repeatedly and without any gesture of redress from the State. Words and deeds are being increasingly subject to control and manipulation in accordance with “invented laws of what are described as religious and cultural tradition”. The rich multiplicities of history are being effaced in “monolithic structures” that answer the seeming need for a nation-state to define itself by primordial identities rather than the civic compact.
For Romila Thapar, these circumstances made the task of “redefining the secular in Indian society” an absolute imperative. Opportunities were available, since as a nation, India still has “the freedom to choose the values that should govern our society”. The retrieval of the secular could begin by shifting the focus “from a passive co-existence of religions, to the more dynamic co-existence of citizens with .. equal rights and obligations, guarded by the vigilance of a free and just society”.
Picking up on some of these themes, K.N. Panikkar drew attention to the need for understanding secularism in the context of “community formation” in modern times and the newly minted forms of religious identity that emerged within the colonial milieu. Small and diverse communities that existed on the basis of their economic and social functions, were under the influence of colonial modernity, incorporated into one or the other religious group. Religion had been a “perceived and experienced reality” in pre-colonial times, without generating a consciousness that transcended the local milieu. These identities became entrenched as civil society was incorporated into the colonial system. Moreover, in early early nationalist propaganda, these newly minted identities were seen as congruent with “national” identities.
To view secularism as an outcome of religious harmony is to invert the perspective, since tolerance only emerges when secularism is in place. Secularism as a principle however, began its journey in India burdened with the deadweight of religion, which in turn was perceived as a monolithic doctrine in which the multiple cultural diversities of the real world were effaced. Religious harmony fails to achieve the secular ideal because every religion has within it, various kinds of cultural and social hierarchies. Coexistence thus becomes a formula for the sustenance of difference and for the perpetuation of these inequalities within each religious order.
It was “logical” to have accorded a degree of priority to religious harmony, given the reality of Indian society, where multiple religious traditions had at various times sprouted and flourished. But the notion was not sufficient to achieve a truly inclusive social order. “For realizing inclusiveness, cultural plurality is not sufficient”, said Panikkar: “what is essential
is cultural equality”.
In its practice in India, secularism in both its state and society centred versions, was enclosed within the discourse of “religious consciousness”. It failed to reconcile between the “religious and material conditions of existence”. Redefining the secular requires that areas of human existence other than the religious, such as culture and economy, be incorporated into its praxis. It requires that “the values of democracy and social justice and cultural equality” be introduced as integral elements of the secular compact.
Secularism accorded priority to the political values of liberty and equality, over the codes of duty and obedience ordained by religion. Concluding the discussion, Prabhat Patnaik argued that what is often taken to be the purely ethical impulse towards freedom has a basis in reason. Every individual has a rational cause to struggle for freedom as part of a human collective, since nobody can call himself free while there are many who are unfree.
This collective endeavour for freedom fosters the domain of the “secular”. It creates the community that strives for a transcendence of narrower values imposed by religion. But it is threatened by the forces of reaction which seek to impose an order based on religious values. More subtly, the bourgeois order which retains a formal commitment to secularism, may seek to engineer schisms in the collective struggle for freedom, reducing each individual to an atomised existence, impelling him in turn to seek an anchorage in an older, familiar network of religious community.
The denial of human freedom then is the logical course of a bourgeois political order which exalts an individual’s seeming gain at the expense of society, as the ultimate benchmark of achievement. With the untold riches foretold on that pathway now proving illusory and the world order built on the unfettered and unaccountable rampage of finance capital in palpable crisis, the forces of reaction seem poised to resume their push towards absolute political power. A redefinition of the secular in Indian society is clearly a political programme of surpassing urgency.
December 28 2011
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Dear Readers' Editor
Dear Readers’ Editor,
Maybe you do not have jurisdiction over material published in Frontline magazine. And if nobody before me has made this point to you, let me be the first: your columns as Readers’ Editor in The Hindu are seriously off-key.
We expect a serious effort to address matters that the readership brings before you, but you seem intent on lecturing them on what is right and what is not.
However, that is a different matter and I will not detain you on that issue here.
My really serious difficulty with your editorial policy relates to the magazine Frontline, which is unique among Indian periodicals in having significant space devoted to international affairs. This is an important gesture of commitment, but I wish you would use some qualitative measures and some consistent political standards in allowing material through in this section.
International affairs should not be about equal opportunity junkets. Such as: I find in the most recent issue of Frontline that you have an article on the situation within Syria, which is very committed and serious. Even when it is defending a dynastic regime that represents nobody but itself and has been responsible for crushing the secular Palestinian movement for liberation in 1976, there is a certain seriousness there.
Unfortunately, it does not take great intelligence to find out that this article is written by somebody who is either totally foolish or completely paid off. If the author of that article had real conviction in writing what he did, he should have written equally critically about the next government that gave him an all-expenses paid junket.
I find though, that he is generous in his praise for the Emirs of Oil in the United Arab Emirates. Far be it from me to attribute motives, but for any informed reader, this rather bizarre conjunction of opinionated articles would be rather difficult to digest. And you should really not blame the reader for concluding that this is just about who pays the bills.
In other words, this is another variant of “paid news”.
Surely, we expect better from your esteemed publication.
With best regards,
Sincerely,
Maybe you do not have jurisdiction over material published in Frontline magazine. And if nobody before me has made this point to you, let me be the first: your columns as Readers’ Editor in The Hindu are seriously off-key.
We expect a serious effort to address matters that the readership brings before you, but you seem intent on lecturing them on what is right and what is not.
However, that is a different matter and I will not detain you on that issue here.
My really serious difficulty with your editorial policy relates to the magazine Frontline, which is unique among Indian periodicals in having significant space devoted to international affairs. This is an important gesture of commitment, but I wish you would use some qualitative measures and some consistent political standards in allowing material through in this section.
International affairs should not be about equal opportunity junkets. Such as: I find in the most recent issue of Frontline that you have an article on the situation within Syria, which is very committed and serious. Even when it is defending a dynastic regime that represents nobody but itself and has been responsible for crushing the secular Palestinian movement for liberation in 1976, there is a certain seriousness there.
Unfortunately, it does not take great intelligence to find out that this article is written by somebody who is either totally foolish or completely paid off. If the author of that article had real conviction in writing what he did, he should have written equally critically about the next government that gave him an all-expenses paid junket.
I find though, that he is generous in his praise for the Emirs of Oil in the United Arab Emirates. Far be it from me to attribute motives, but for any informed reader, this rather bizarre conjunction of opinionated articles would be rather difficult to digest. And you should really not blame the reader for concluding that this is just about who pays the bills.
In other words, this is another variant of “paid news”.
Surely, we expect better from your esteemed publication.
With best regards,
Sincerely,
Monday, November 28, 2011
The Untold Story of the West and the Rest: Terrorism, War, and Unrequited Guilt
Review Article
Jason Burke, The 9/11 Wars, Allen Lane, London, 2011, pp xxii + 709, ISBN 978-1-84614-517-9.
The attacks on mainland USA on September 11, 2001, have like no other single event, moulded world politics through this first decade of what is called a millennium. 9/11 is how that event has come to be known in contemporary accounts, and the imagery has been so powerful that every subsequent act of terrorism has sought a rhyming description.
That imitative pattern is expressed in the desperate urge governments have had in signing up for the global cause led by a military superpower that has unleashed its awesome capacity for destruction, and shown little interest in what follows. 9/11 generated a discourse that has dominated virtually every international gathering over the last decade. Global conclaves only managed to shift their attention towards other subjects when slapped in the face by the economic meltdown beginning late-2008. The whole strategic equation has since changed, though few today seem willing to recognise the reality of a world where a single superpower’s writ no longer runs. Governments stricken by a fear of freedom are groping for a means of coping, in a world where older certainties seem suddenly to have dissipated.
In the years ahead, two political trajectories – the superpower led war on terrorism and the global upsurge against an iniquitous economic order – will intersect, though in ways that cannot be forecast. Global political and strategic equations have been in a state of flux over the decade since 9/11. Economics could soon become a determinant influence in an already complex process.
Jason Burke’s compendious and valuable volume, released at the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, bears witness to events that still remain in flux. A point of closure, if at all one can be found for events quite so complex, is impossible to foretell. “The wars that make up this most recent conflict span the globe geographically”, writes Burke in his introduction: “With no obvious starting point and no obvious end, with no sense of what might constitute victory or defeat, their chronological span is impossible to determine”.
As this book was released, the U.S. was determining how to end its military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan -- two of the main theatres of the wars that followed 9/11. As 2011 winds to a close, the U.S. will be out of Iraq, by the commitment its government has made. Military compulsion has dictated this decision, compounded by the acute economic distress that an unsustainable debt burden has occasioned. A declaration of victory – and withdrawal - would also play well within the election cycle in the U.S., just as it enters an active phase early in 2012.
As the troops come home from Iraq, they will be joined by a small number – perhaps about 10,000 -- of U.S. servicemen deployed in Afghanistan. That would still leave a massive U.S. military deployment in Afghanistan, of which a third would pull out by the autumn of 2012, prior to a complete exit by the end of 2014.
Nothing is certain in the world bequeathed by 9/11. But this winding down of military action in countries far and distant, is in a longer historical view, an ironic postscript to the rhetoric with which the “global crusade” – in U.S. President George W. Bush’s characterisation – was kicked off in 2001. Three days after the trauma of 9/11, Bush invoked a divine right that he believed, was invested in the country he had by a judicial whim and an enormous fluke, been chosen to lead. That investiture from a transcendant source of authority left no room for mundane disputation. “Americans do not yet have the distance of history”, he said, but they were clear about their “responsibility to history”, which was to destroy “evil”. The U.S. had been forced into a conflict “on the timing and terms of others”. But once roused to war, the U.S. would ensure that the war would “end in a way and at an hour of (its) choosing”.
Bush’s successor today prepares his retreat from the main theatres of action in the 9/11 Wars without the slightest assurance that the civilisational mission is any closer to fulfilmment. And it is a spectacle on which Burke offers a verdict with an eloquent economy of words: “The West has certainly … avoided defeat”. But if the ten years since 9/11 have brought victory, “then America (sic, the U.S.) and the West more generally cannot afford very many more victories like it”.
It is in Burke’s account, an index of this ambiguous outcome, that the U.S. has managed to sustain its vast levels of military spending despite enormous economic strains. Those who engineered 9/11 may have worked in part with the aim of draining the U.S. economically and crippling its capacity to enforce its will. And yet the U.S., Burke concludes, has “been able (despite the debt issues it currently confronts) to pay for the grotesque strategic error of the war in Iraq … and a ten-year conflict in Afghanistan, all while financing a huge security industry at home in the midst of one of the gravest economic crises for decades”.
This assessment would be incomplete without specific note being made of the many perversities of U.S. economic policy through the decade of global warfare. War-time presidents are known to exhort their people towards greater sacrifices. Citizens of nations ostensibly engaged in a struggle over existential values, are known to bear any economic burden to fulfil their mandate. In a reversal of this commonsense, the Bush doctrine has summoned the U.S. to war against “evil”, but also to liberation from taxes, so that the bills for the global crusade are met through borrowing furiously from the rest of the world.
Just over a month before the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. Treasury formally notified Congress that the government had reached the limits of borrowing allowed under the law and was in danger of default on debt. The U.S. government, then hot and feverish for war, needed to borrow to merely service its national debt. Bush not merely went to war, but two months later decreed a sweeping set of tax concessions that plunged the U.S. deeper into hock.
Burke does not directly address this mystery, nor does he seek to probe too deeply into the “why” of the war against Iraq. He introduces his chapter on the headlong rush to invade a country that had no clear connection to 9/11, with a telling title: “Threats, Falsehoods and Dead Men”. But he sidesteps any serious engagement with the reasons why falsehoods were manufactured on a mass scale by the U.S. administration and its eager acolytes in the U.K. – and amplified by an acquiescent media – in the rush to war.
What Burke finally offers is a rather anodyne reading: that in the U.S. and “virtually every Western nation”, the
intelligence agencies were uneasily “aware of the importance of avoiding another grotesque failure such as that which had resulted in 9/11”. This induced a play-safe attitude and a disinclination to engage in a potentially “damaging row with political masters”. Without serious thought of longer term consequences, the intelligence agencies began on this account “to issue much more alarming analyses (than warranted) of the potential threat that (Iraq) posed”.
All these stratagems of the political leadership, which were taking the West down the road to disaster, may have been exposed, Burke says, except that the counter-narrative hardly gained a fair hearing. This could have been on account of a tendency to shut out facts that create a “cognitive dissonance” or perhaps, “deliberate mendacity”. Burke does not indicate exactly which of these would seem the more plausible on the balance of probabilities. He does provide some evidence to suggest that U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, in making his case for war before the U.N. Security Council in February 2003, may not have been absolutely mendacious in suggesting that top functionaries of the global Islamic network had visited Iraq.
A few other circumstances are cited which seem to absolve the U.S. from the accusation of waging war on outright falsehoods. But Burke chooses to overlook the truly persuasive facts which establish that a deep political calculation lay behind the decision to go to war in Iraq. And since this was a political calculation that did not dare to speak its name, “mendacity” is the only accurate description for the stratagem that was in play.
Burke surely errs in suggesting that western intelligence agencies in general proved compliant to the political directive to concoct a rationale for war. The CIA in the U.S. had entered several reservations about departures from established procedure in the run-up to war. Likewise, the head of the British intelligence services had put on record, in what became famously known as the Downing Street Memo of July 2002, his discussions in Washington DC in the weeks preceding, which spoke of “intelligence being fixed” around the Bush administration’s determination to remove the Saddam Hussein regime, using the conjunction of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) as the rationale. The clumsy confection won few converts to the cause of war and was indeed called out for what it was by U.N. arms inspectors in Iraq. With the evidence building up, the British government’s principal legal officer rendered an explicit opinion that there was little chance of obtaining a legal mandate for war. And among major western nations, France and Germany made no secret of the fact that they were at serious odds with the U.S. intent.
History’s losers sometimes have a story to tell, often more compelling than the version rendered by the victors. As he worked to avert war, acceding to every one of the escalating demands placed on his country, Tariq Aziz, then Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister, had on various occasions allowed his sense of fatalism to prevail. In October 2002 – soon after Bush had issued his famous challenge to the U.N. to either authorise war or face irrelevance -- Aziz went on record with the bleak forecast that nothing that Iraq did would prevent an invasion. The U.S., simply put, was intent on war, “for oil and Israel”.
Despite ranging widely over the globe – from south-east Asia to the western hemisphere and continental America – Burke says very little in his voluminous work, about the conflict in Palestine. Israel occurs rather sporadically through his book, almost everywhere as an incidental mention. Indeed, at one point, he describes a failed 2003 attempt to bomb a Tel Aviv nightclub as a rare instance “of the 9/11 Wars suddenly surging into the otherwise largely autonomous conflict in Israel/Palestine”.
The Palestinian intifada for freedom had been underway for almost a year when 9/11 occurred. In remarks to the far-right columnist George F. Will immediately afterwards, Binyamin Netanyahu – now the Israeli Prime Minister but then an opposition politician trying hard to regain the perch he was pushed off by a collusive deal between two former generals, Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon – put it with little ambiguity: “The soldiers of militant Islam and Pan-Arabism do not hate the West because of Israel; they hate Israel because of the West”. Zionism was a target, because it is “an expression and representation of Western civilization”. And, the warriors of the Islamic holy war or jihad hate America because “it is the purest expression of modernity -- individualism, pluralism, freedom, secularism”.
Israel found a matchless opportunity in 9/11 to portray the Palestinian struggle as an element within the lethal mix of the global Islamic jihad. It was just the right formula to silence global outrage at the brutal military reoccupation of Palestinian territories granted a limited measure of autonomy under the Oslo agreements. When failure became an undeniable reality of the U.S. project in Iraq, it was almost foretold that attention would turn towards Iran and Syria. As Syria was forced to yield the hegemonic grip it had established over Lebanon as reward for acquiescence in the U.S.’s Iraq project, Israel showed a greater willingness to step out of the shadows and show its hand. The Israeli military assault on Lebanon that followed in 2006, was part of the grand design of rearranging the political geography of the Arab world. And provisionally, the final chapter of Zionist involvement in the 9/11 wars has been the sham withdrawal from the Gaza which converted that territory into the world’s largest open-air prison, and the offensive that began there late in 2008 to cripple the civic amenities that had been disingenuously labelled “terrorist infrastructure”.
With a sharp eye for detail, Burke identifies the suicide bomb as the “characteristic tactic” of the 9/11 Wars and the “blast walls” erected as a defence against such strikes as their “iconic image”. By the end of 2002, “inverted Ts of concrete” placed “in long lines to form instant walls of astonishing ugliness” had become a feature of the landscape in most theatres of the 9/11 Wars. The construction of these “blast walls” had become a significant business opportunity for local enterprises in Afghanistan by the end of 2002.
Burke omits a significant detail here: Israel was a pioneer even in the enterprise of erecting walls to separate “the West and the rest”. The Israeli government’s decision making on the “apartheid wall” – as it is fairly acurately called -- has always been a closely guarded, highly secretive process. The first phase of the wall which extends for a distance of 150 kilometres, was declared completed on July 31, 2003. Though Israel in a submission before the International Court of Justice – made informally since it chose to boycott the formal hearings on the legality of the wall -- indicated that the “separation fence” is not a permanent structure and can be modified or even dismantled, there is a very real prospect that its contours lay out the final territorial boundaries of the Zionist state.
The future course of the 9/11 Wars will be deeply influenced by the upsurge for democracy that much of the Arab world is currently witnessing. Here again, perceptions of “the West and the rest” have induced deep duplicities: the uprisings in Libya and Syria are cast unequivocally in a positive light, while similar yearnings in Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain are seen as deeply troubling.
Burke’s narrative reaches right upto this point though without offering much by way of serious prognoses. His sensitivities as a reporter are evident in the acute and vivid descriptions of the many theatres of the 9/11 Wars. Among the many actors that he provides arresting pictures of, are immigrant Muslim communities in western Europe, not known for their religious piety, but suffering the deep anxieties of a rapidly changing social milieu. And then there are the clan and tribal networks of Pakistan’s Pashtun areas, which have seen their identities effaced in the hegemonic narrative of Islamic jihad and are fighting to retrieve these and their eroding territorial autonomy.
Globe-girdling wars invariably tend to have several fronts and multiple actors who engage in combat with diverse motivations. The global conflagrations of the twentieth century, today known as the two “world wars”, both involved the clash of big imperial powers, which afforded the larger narrative. But in the interstices left by the consuming avarice of the imperial powers, who have since managed to dictate the tone of history writing, there were epic struggles waged for the liberation of large masses of humanity from the yoke of colonialism. These intersected in various ways with the broader inter-imperialist tensions between 1914 and 1945, since it is reasonable to say that despite the official categorisation of this period of global strife into two distinct conflicts, the fighting never really stopped between 1914 and 1945.
It could credibly be argued that the fighting has not stopped since either. This book is about the wars that have followed 9/11, but it establishes clear continuities with the conflicts that preceded, arising from the latent tensions and iniquities of the global order bequeathed by World War II. Where the events that it narrates will end, cannot of course be foreseen. It can safely be averred, though, the world which emerges out of this phase of global conflict and upheaval will be very different from the one that the post-World War II generations have got accustomed to.
Jason Burke, The 9/11 Wars, Allen Lane, London, 2011, pp xxii + 709, ISBN 978-1-84614-517-9.
The attacks on mainland USA on September 11, 2001, have like no other single event, moulded world politics through this first decade of what is called a millennium. 9/11 is how that event has come to be known in contemporary accounts, and the imagery has been so powerful that every subsequent act of terrorism has sought a rhyming description.
That imitative pattern is expressed in the desperate urge governments have had in signing up for the global cause led by a military superpower that has unleashed its awesome capacity for destruction, and shown little interest in what follows. 9/11 generated a discourse that has dominated virtually every international gathering over the last decade. Global conclaves only managed to shift their attention towards other subjects when slapped in the face by the economic meltdown beginning late-2008. The whole strategic equation has since changed, though few today seem willing to recognise the reality of a world where a single superpower’s writ no longer runs. Governments stricken by a fear of freedom are groping for a means of coping, in a world where older certainties seem suddenly to have dissipated.
In the years ahead, two political trajectories – the superpower led war on terrorism and the global upsurge against an iniquitous economic order – will intersect, though in ways that cannot be forecast. Global political and strategic equations have been in a state of flux over the decade since 9/11. Economics could soon become a determinant influence in an already complex process.
Jason Burke’s compendious and valuable volume, released at the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, bears witness to events that still remain in flux. A point of closure, if at all one can be found for events quite so complex, is impossible to foretell. “The wars that make up this most recent conflict span the globe geographically”, writes Burke in his introduction: “With no obvious starting point and no obvious end, with no sense of what might constitute victory or defeat, their chronological span is impossible to determine”.
As this book was released, the U.S. was determining how to end its military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan -- two of the main theatres of the wars that followed 9/11. As 2011 winds to a close, the U.S. will be out of Iraq, by the commitment its government has made. Military compulsion has dictated this decision, compounded by the acute economic distress that an unsustainable debt burden has occasioned. A declaration of victory – and withdrawal - would also play well within the election cycle in the U.S., just as it enters an active phase early in 2012.
As the troops come home from Iraq, they will be joined by a small number – perhaps about 10,000 -- of U.S. servicemen deployed in Afghanistan. That would still leave a massive U.S. military deployment in Afghanistan, of which a third would pull out by the autumn of 2012, prior to a complete exit by the end of 2014.
Nothing is certain in the world bequeathed by 9/11. But this winding down of military action in countries far and distant, is in a longer historical view, an ironic postscript to the rhetoric with which the “global crusade” – in U.S. President George W. Bush’s characterisation – was kicked off in 2001. Three days after the trauma of 9/11, Bush invoked a divine right that he believed, was invested in the country he had by a judicial whim and an enormous fluke, been chosen to lead. That investiture from a transcendant source of authority left no room for mundane disputation. “Americans do not yet have the distance of history”, he said, but they were clear about their “responsibility to history”, which was to destroy “evil”. The U.S. had been forced into a conflict “on the timing and terms of others”. But once roused to war, the U.S. would ensure that the war would “end in a way and at an hour of (its) choosing”.
Bush’s successor today prepares his retreat from the main theatres of action in the 9/11 Wars without the slightest assurance that the civilisational mission is any closer to fulfilmment. And it is a spectacle on which Burke offers a verdict with an eloquent economy of words: “The West has certainly … avoided defeat”. But if the ten years since 9/11 have brought victory, “then America (sic, the U.S.) and the West more generally cannot afford very many more victories like it”.
It is in Burke’s account, an index of this ambiguous outcome, that the U.S. has managed to sustain its vast levels of military spending despite enormous economic strains. Those who engineered 9/11 may have worked in part with the aim of draining the U.S. economically and crippling its capacity to enforce its will. And yet the U.S., Burke concludes, has “been able (despite the debt issues it currently confronts) to pay for the grotesque strategic error of the war in Iraq … and a ten-year conflict in Afghanistan, all while financing a huge security industry at home in the midst of one of the gravest economic crises for decades”.
This assessment would be incomplete without specific note being made of the many perversities of U.S. economic policy through the decade of global warfare. War-time presidents are known to exhort their people towards greater sacrifices. Citizens of nations ostensibly engaged in a struggle over existential values, are known to bear any economic burden to fulfil their mandate. In a reversal of this commonsense, the Bush doctrine has summoned the U.S. to war against “evil”, but also to liberation from taxes, so that the bills for the global crusade are met through borrowing furiously from the rest of the world.
Just over a month before the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. Treasury formally notified Congress that the government had reached the limits of borrowing allowed under the law and was in danger of default on debt. The U.S. government, then hot and feverish for war, needed to borrow to merely service its national debt. Bush not merely went to war, but two months later decreed a sweeping set of tax concessions that plunged the U.S. deeper into hock.
Burke does not directly address this mystery, nor does he seek to probe too deeply into the “why” of the war against Iraq. He introduces his chapter on the headlong rush to invade a country that had no clear connection to 9/11, with a telling title: “Threats, Falsehoods and Dead Men”. But he sidesteps any serious engagement with the reasons why falsehoods were manufactured on a mass scale by the U.S. administration and its eager acolytes in the U.K. – and amplified by an acquiescent media – in the rush to war.
What Burke finally offers is a rather anodyne reading: that in the U.S. and “virtually every Western nation”, the
intelligence agencies were uneasily “aware of the importance of avoiding another grotesque failure such as that which had resulted in 9/11”. This induced a play-safe attitude and a disinclination to engage in a potentially “damaging row with political masters”. Without serious thought of longer term consequences, the intelligence agencies began on this account “to issue much more alarming analyses (than warranted) of the potential threat that (Iraq) posed”.
All these stratagems of the political leadership, which were taking the West down the road to disaster, may have been exposed, Burke says, except that the counter-narrative hardly gained a fair hearing. This could have been on account of a tendency to shut out facts that create a “cognitive dissonance” or perhaps, “deliberate mendacity”. Burke does not indicate exactly which of these would seem the more plausible on the balance of probabilities. He does provide some evidence to suggest that U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, in making his case for war before the U.N. Security Council in February 2003, may not have been absolutely mendacious in suggesting that top functionaries of the global Islamic network had visited Iraq.
A few other circumstances are cited which seem to absolve the U.S. from the accusation of waging war on outright falsehoods. But Burke chooses to overlook the truly persuasive facts which establish that a deep political calculation lay behind the decision to go to war in Iraq. And since this was a political calculation that did not dare to speak its name, “mendacity” is the only accurate description for the stratagem that was in play.
Burke surely errs in suggesting that western intelligence agencies in general proved compliant to the political directive to concoct a rationale for war. The CIA in the U.S. had entered several reservations about departures from established procedure in the run-up to war. Likewise, the head of the British intelligence services had put on record, in what became famously known as the Downing Street Memo of July 2002, his discussions in Washington DC in the weeks preceding, which spoke of “intelligence being fixed” around the Bush administration’s determination to remove the Saddam Hussein regime, using the conjunction of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) as the rationale. The clumsy confection won few converts to the cause of war and was indeed called out for what it was by U.N. arms inspectors in Iraq. With the evidence building up, the British government’s principal legal officer rendered an explicit opinion that there was little chance of obtaining a legal mandate for war. And among major western nations, France and Germany made no secret of the fact that they were at serious odds with the U.S. intent.
History’s losers sometimes have a story to tell, often more compelling than the version rendered by the victors. As he worked to avert war, acceding to every one of the escalating demands placed on his country, Tariq Aziz, then Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister, had on various occasions allowed his sense of fatalism to prevail. In October 2002 – soon after Bush had issued his famous challenge to the U.N. to either authorise war or face irrelevance -- Aziz went on record with the bleak forecast that nothing that Iraq did would prevent an invasion. The U.S., simply put, was intent on war, “for oil and Israel”.
Despite ranging widely over the globe – from south-east Asia to the western hemisphere and continental America – Burke says very little in his voluminous work, about the conflict in Palestine. Israel occurs rather sporadically through his book, almost everywhere as an incidental mention. Indeed, at one point, he describes a failed 2003 attempt to bomb a Tel Aviv nightclub as a rare instance “of the 9/11 Wars suddenly surging into the otherwise largely autonomous conflict in Israel/Palestine”.
The Palestinian intifada for freedom had been underway for almost a year when 9/11 occurred. In remarks to the far-right columnist George F. Will immediately afterwards, Binyamin Netanyahu – now the Israeli Prime Minister but then an opposition politician trying hard to regain the perch he was pushed off by a collusive deal between two former generals, Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon – put it with little ambiguity: “The soldiers of militant Islam and Pan-Arabism do not hate the West because of Israel; they hate Israel because of the West”. Zionism was a target, because it is “an expression and representation of Western civilization”. And, the warriors of the Islamic holy war or jihad hate America because “it is the purest expression of modernity -- individualism, pluralism, freedom, secularism”.
Israel found a matchless opportunity in 9/11 to portray the Palestinian struggle as an element within the lethal mix of the global Islamic jihad. It was just the right formula to silence global outrage at the brutal military reoccupation of Palestinian territories granted a limited measure of autonomy under the Oslo agreements. When failure became an undeniable reality of the U.S. project in Iraq, it was almost foretold that attention would turn towards Iran and Syria. As Syria was forced to yield the hegemonic grip it had established over Lebanon as reward for acquiescence in the U.S.’s Iraq project, Israel showed a greater willingness to step out of the shadows and show its hand. The Israeli military assault on Lebanon that followed in 2006, was part of the grand design of rearranging the political geography of the Arab world. And provisionally, the final chapter of Zionist involvement in the 9/11 wars has been the sham withdrawal from the Gaza which converted that territory into the world’s largest open-air prison, and the offensive that began there late in 2008 to cripple the civic amenities that had been disingenuously labelled “terrorist infrastructure”.
With a sharp eye for detail, Burke identifies the suicide bomb as the “characteristic tactic” of the 9/11 Wars and the “blast walls” erected as a defence against such strikes as their “iconic image”. By the end of 2002, “inverted Ts of concrete” placed “in long lines to form instant walls of astonishing ugliness” had become a feature of the landscape in most theatres of the 9/11 Wars. The construction of these “blast walls” had become a significant business opportunity for local enterprises in Afghanistan by the end of 2002.
Burke omits a significant detail here: Israel was a pioneer even in the enterprise of erecting walls to separate “the West and the rest”. The Israeli government’s decision making on the “apartheid wall” – as it is fairly acurately called -- has always been a closely guarded, highly secretive process. The first phase of the wall which extends for a distance of 150 kilometres, was declared completed on July 31, 2003. Though Israel in a submission before the International Court of Justice – made informally since it chose to boycott the formal hearings on the legality of the wall -- indicated that the “separation fence” is not a permanent structure and can be modified or even dismantled, there is a very real prospect that its contours lay out the final territorial boundaries of the Zionist state.
The future course of the 9/11 Wars will be deeply influenced by the upsurge for democracy that much of the Arab world is currently witnessing. Here again, perceptions of “the West and the rest” have induced deep duplicities: the uprisings in Libya and Syria are cast unequivocally in a positive light, while similar yearnings in Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain are seen as deeply troubling.
Burke’s narrative reaches right upto this point though without offering much by way of serious prognoses. His sensitivities as a reporter are evident in the acute and vivid descriptions of the many theatres of the 9/11 Wars. Among the many actors that he provides arresting pictures of, are immigrant Muslim communities in western Europe, not known for their religious piety, but suffering the deep anxieties of a rapidly changing social milieu. And then there are the clan and tribal networks of Pakistan’s Pashtun areas, which have seen their identities effaced in the hegemonic narrative of Islamic jihad and are fighting to retrieve these and their eroding territorial autonomy.
Globe-girdling wars invariably tend to have several fronts and multiple actors who engage in combat with diverse motivations. The global conflagrations of the twentieth century, today known as the two “world wars”, both involved the clash of big imperial powers, which afforded the larger narrative. But in the interstices left by the consuming avarice of the imperial powers, who have since managed to dictate the tone of history writing, there were epic struggles waged for the liberation of large masses of humanity from the yoke of colonialism. These intersected in various ways with the broader inter-imperialist tensions between 1914 and 1945, since it is reasonable to say that despite the official categorisation of this period of global strife into two distinct conflicts, the fighting never really stopped between 1914 and 1945.
It could credibly be argued that the fighting has not stopped since either. This book is about the wars that have followed 9/11, but it establishes clear continuities with the conflicts that preceded, arising from the latent tensions and iniquities of the global order bequeathed by World War II. Where the events that it narrates will end, cannot of course be foreseen. It can safely be averred, though, the world which emerges out of this phase of global conflict and upheaval will be very different from the one that the post-World War II generations have got accustomed to.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Zionism, Racism and Culture
After blustery threats failed to banish the item from the agenda, the U.S. and Israel retaliated in their own ways when the U.N. cultural body UNESCO, voted overwhelmingly to admit Palestine as a full member.
The U.S. cut off all financial support and Israel announced plans to build a few thousand more dwelling units in occupied Palestinian land.
As the public discourse plays out about a world body that does not repay U.S. generosity with any manner of gratitude, a more realistic assessment, which nobody yet dares speak out loud, is gaining traction in the higher levels of the U.S. administration. Robert Gates, a legacy of the Bush administration and till recently U.S. Defence Secretary, in one of his final internal meetings before leaving office, reportedly said that the U.S. had done much and taken great risks for Israel, though Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was proving an “ungrateful ally”.
A few days after the UNESCO vote, U.S. President Barack Obama met his French counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy at the G20 summit and spoke informally about his disappointment at the French support for Palestinian membership. Unaware that their conversation, conducted through interpreters, was being heard by media personnel assembled in anticipation of a joint press conference, Sarkozy said quite simply that he found Netanyahu an impossible liar. Obama did not demur, only suggesting that Sarkozy’s frustration was nothing near the aggravations he faced in his daily dealings with the cocky and obstreperous Israeli.
Netanyahu’s disdain for all who would stand in the way of Israel’s infinite aggrandisement was evident in his address to the U.N. General Assembly in September, not long after Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had submitted a claim on behalf of his people for full membership of the world body. The General Assembly he said, was “the theatre of the absurd”, which a religious mentor had, as he began his political career as envoy to the U.N., described as a “house of many lies”.
The Israeli Prime Minister spoke with unconcealed racist contempt, as when describing Israel’s challenge of security in terms of its proximity to hostile territory, comparable to the distance between certain boroughs of New York city. And the people within these boroughs he reminded his audience, “are considerably nicer than some of Israel's neighbours”.
Netanyahu accused the U.N. of having sanctified the “lie” that “the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Judaism's holiest place” was “occupied Palestinian territory”. And with this airy denial of centuries of Palestinian settlement in the area, he quickly moved onto another tall tale to establish the antiquity of the Jewish claim to the land. Archaeologists, he said, had found in close proximity to the Western Wall, an ancient seal, close to 3,000 years old, imprinted with his surname. And his first name dated even further back. People who bore that name wandered in the area since distant millennia and there had been “a continuous Jewish presence in the land ever since”.
Current scholarship, as exemplified in the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand’s acclaimed book The Invention of the Jewish People – now into a second edition -- has exploded this mythology in large part. But the facts of Netanyahu’s own life, which he has managed to artfully embellish, speak for themselves. Netanyahu’s father Ben-Zion Milikovski was a Polish settler in Palestine who adopted a surname of Hebraic provenance as a gesture of commitment to the Zionist myth. It was effrontery of a high order for the Israeli Prime Minister to strut his name before the General Assembly as an identity dating back millennia. But then, perhaps he was true to his ancestry in one respect: his espousal of a particularly rabid form of colonial ideology was much in the mould of his father, regarded as an incendiary element by even that most extreme Zionist, Menachem Begin.
The denial of the Palestinians’ right to exist acquires several forms: most of them overt, physical and brutal. Palestine has been a battle about culture and antiquity since the first expropriations of the native population by Zionist settlers in the 1920s. And it is no coincidence that among the first major projects that Israel undertook in East Jerusalem after it was seized in 1967, was an archaeological excavation to establish the area’s unbroken Jewish heritage.
These excavations have been controversial, their most observable feature being the use of bulldozers to cut through layers of antiquity to arrive at a distant Judaic past. Archaeology has been a profoundly political discipline everywhere, but nowhere more explosively so than in Palestine. In 2010, Israel entered into a public spat with UNESCO when the historic site in Hebron – scene of a grisly 1994 massacre of Palestinian worshippers by the extremist Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein – was designated as a mosque on the basis of its dominant features. In 1996, riots broke out all over the occupied territories when Netanyahu, in an earlier tenure as Prime Minister, ordered the opening of an archaeological tunnel that Palestinians believe, was deliberately laid under the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem to weaken its foundations. And in 1992, Albert Glock, an American archaeologist who had documented the principal features of Palestinian villages and heritage sites effaced in the creation of Israel, was shot dead in Birzeit on the West Bank, in a crime that was never solved.
Netanyahu’s locutions are increasingly an insult to basic rationality. His government is almost certainly going to disregard the consequences of Palestine’s newly acquired membership of UNESCO, much as it has every inconvenient U.N. resolution in the past. The Palestinian people though have gained a toehold within the institutional framework of multilateralism. They could use this limited opening to work towards salvaging their culture and heritage – as embodied in numerous sites of historic importance in the entire territory of historical Palestine – from the devouring myths of Zionism.
It is a largely symbolic victory, but significant nonetheless and one that needs to be consolidated.
The U.S. cut off all financial support and Israel announced plans to build a few thousand more dwelling units in occupied Palestinian land.
As the public discourse plays out about a world body that does not repay U.S. generosity with any manner of gratitude, a more realistic assessment, which nobody yet dares speak out loud, is gaining traction in the higher levels of the U.S. administration. Robert Gates, a legacy of the Bush administration and till recently U.S. Defence Secretary, in one of his final internal meetings before leaving office, reportedly said that the U.S. had done much and taken great risks for Israel, though Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was proving an “ungrateful ally”.
A few days after the UNESCO vote, U.S. President Barack Obama met his French counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy at the G20 summit and spoke informally about his disappointment at the French support for Palestinian membership. Unaware that their conversation, conducted through interpreters, was being heard by media personnel assembled in anticipation of a joint press conference, Sarkozy said quite simply that he found Netanyahu an impossible liar. Obama did not demur, only suggesting that Sarkozy’s frustration was nothing near the aggravations he faced in his daily dealings with the cocky and obstreperous Israeli.
Netanyahu’s disdain for all who would stand in the way of Israel’s infinite aggrandisement was evident in his address to the U.N. General Assembly in September, not long after Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had submitted a claim on behalf of his people for full membership of the world body. The General Assembly he said, was “the theatre of the absurd”, which a religious mentor had, as he began his political career as envoy to the U.N., described as a “house of many lies”.
The Israeli Prime Minister spoke with unconcealed racist contempt, as when describing Israel’s challenge of security in terms of its proximity to hostile territory, comparable to the distance between certain boroughs of New York city. And the people within these boroughs he reminded his audience, “are considerably nicer than some of Israel's neighbours”.
Netanyahu accused the U.N. of having sanctified the “lie” that “the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Judaism's holiest place” was “occupied Palestinian territory”. And with this airy denial of centuries of Palestinian settlement in the area, he quickly moved onto another tall tale to establish the antiquity of the Jewish claim to the land. Archaeologists, he said, had found in close proximity to the Western Wall, an ancient seal, close to 3,000 years old, imprinted with his surname. And his first name dated even further back. People who bore that name wandered in the area since distant millennia and there had been “a continuous Jewish presence in the land ever since”.
Current scholarship, as exemplified in the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand’s acclaimed book The Invention of the Jewish People – now into a second edition -- has exploded this mythology in large part. But the facts of Netanyahu’s own life, which he has managed to artfully embellish, speak for themselves. Netanyahu’s father Ben-Zion Milikovski was a Polish settler in Palestine who adopted a surname of Hebraic provenance as a gesture of commitment to the Zionist myth. It was effrontery of a high order for the Israeli Prime Minister to strut his name before the General Assembly as an identity dating back millennia. But then, perhaps he was true to his ancestry in one respect: his espousal of a particularly rabid form of colonial ideology was much in the mould of his father, regarded as an incendiary element by even that most extreme Zionist, Menachem Begin.
The denial of the Palestinians’ right to exist acquires several forms: most of them overt, physical and brutal. Palestine has been a battle about culture and antiquity since the first expropriations of the native population by Zionist settlers in the 1920s. And it is no coincidence that among the first major projects that Israel undertook in East Jerusalem after it was seized in 1967, was an archaeological excavation to establish the area’s unbroken Jewish heritage.
These excavations have been controversial, their most observable feature being the use of bulldozers to cut through layers of antiquity to arrive at a distant Judaic past. Archaeology has been a profoundly political discipline everywhere, but nowhere more explosively so than in Palestine. In 2010, Israel entered into a public spat with UNESCO when the historic site in Hebron – scene of a grisly 1994 massacre of Palestinian worshippers by the extremist Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein – was designated as a mosque on the basis of its dominant features. In 1996, riots broke out all over the occupied territories when Netanyahu, in an earlier tenure as Prime Minister, ordered the opening of an archaeological tunnel that Palestinians believe, was deliberately laid under the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem to weaken its foundations. And in 1992, Albert Glock, an American archaeologist who had documented the principal features of Palestinian villages and heritage sites effaced in the creation of Israel, was shot dead in Birzeit on the West Bank, in a crime that was never solved.
Netanyahu’s locutions are increasingly an insult to basic rationality. His government is almost certainly going to disregard the consequences of Palestine’s newly acquired membership of UNESCO, much as it has every inconvenient U.N. resolution in the past. The Palestinian people though have gained a toehold within the institutional framework of multilateralism. They could use this limited opening to work towards salvaging their culture and heritage – as embodied in numerous sites of historic importance in the entire territory of historical Palestine – from the devouring myths of Zionism.
It is a largely symbolic victory, but significant nonetheless and one that needs to be consolidated.
Press Council as Bully Pulpit: A debate on media regulation that could go nowhere
November 7, 2011
Markandey Katju was appointed chairman of the Press Council of India (PCI) within days of retiring as a Judge of the Supreme Court. Purely by coincidence, there was some talk hanging in the air as he took office, of the need for new regulatory norms in the electronic media. Though not within his formal jurisdiction, he was quick to ask that the new guidelines be held in abeyance. He then plunged into a sequence of abrasive comments about the realm he had just been appointed to oversee and regulate, which if substantively little different from observations made by his predecessors, has raised hackles with its added embellishment of intellectual disdain. Where the debate will proceed from here is anybody’s guess. But the tone has dropped several notches and the media industry is unlikely to let another opportunity pass, to push back against a potentially constructive public debate on transparency and accountability.
The media in its broadest definition, touches several lives. Even if it is a small player on most aggregate economic measures – revenue, value addition or profit – it is an industry on which everybody has an opinion and an urge to be heard. Media persons, who are generous with moral judgments and grudging in admitting the most egregious errors, cannot really complain when the compliment is occasionally returned. The final bulwark that the public often finds difficult to breach, is the ability of the media to control the message.
For long, the only recourse an ordinary reader (or “media consumer” in current terminology) had for being heard, was a letter to the editor, which would, in most cases, end up in the trash bin if it did not pamper newspaper egos. Today, even as she suffers the constant mortification of being talked down to by hectoring news anchors and leader writers, the media consumer has discovered the blogosphere, or the virtual media, which offers itself as a new platform for conducting the social dialogue. The ability of the media industry to control the public discourse is rapidly eroding and there has yet been no credible strategy devised from within its business model, to counter this reality.
Legal coercion though, is an option that still works. A sturdy platform of media criticism in the “virtual world” recently found itself the target of unwelcome attention from a real world entity whose enormous clout could be denied only at great peril. On October 14, the media watchdog website, The Hoot (www.thehoot.org), received a legal notice from the Times Global Broadcasting Company Ltd, which owns the Times Now news channel and is a subsidiary of Bennett Coleman and Co Ltd (BCCL), publishers of the Times of India. The media giant had been irked by an article published the day before, which raised a number of troubling questions about the coverage of a brutal attack on the lawyer and civil rights campaigner Prashant Bhushan, by right-wing thugs on October 12.(1)
Media under scrutiny
Under particular scrutiny was the conduct of the Times Now channel, since it had a news crew on the spot at the time of the attack. The article, written by a journalist with years of experience in print and television, wondered if the presence of the news crew may not have brought on the attacks. The thought was not outlandish, since the vigilante group behind the attack, the Sri Ram Sene, had a long record – from places as far afield as Mangalore, Bangalore and Delhi – of prearranging media coverage before foraying forth to dispense summary justice. Once the attack on Bhushan began, the news crew on the site showed less than humane instincts when it continued recording the brutality with a steady and unswerving camera. No member of the team even stepped into the camera frame while Bhushan was punched, kicked and dragged along the floor.
Perhaps, the article said, the climate of intolerance that brought on the attack had been nurtured by the unique style of the electronic media. It was a regular feature of prime-time news broadcasts to pit adversarial viewpoints against each other in the most abrasive and uncivil manner. A special mention was reserved for the Times Now’s prime-time news anchor, who regularly sets the blogosphere buzzing with his preachy morality and self-righteousness.
There were points made in the article which could have been fruitfully debated, had The Hoot not taken it down in haste under threat of legal action.(2) While protesting that the article had nothing by way of defamatory content and was merely an honest effort to advance the debate on free speech and its attendant obligations, The Hoot took the abundant precaution of apologising for any offence it may have caused. The whole episode passed without seriously disturbing the stately passage of the mighty media.
A desultory debate had meanwhile begun on the sidelines, occasioned by the expressed intent of the Ministry for Information and Broadcasting (MIB) to revise eligibility norms for the broadcasting industry. The stated rationale was that the norms currently in place are notoriously lax, which few can really question. But the antidote devised by the MIB bureaucracy seemed worse than the disease.
Regulatory vacuum
The norms for cable and satellite broadcasting were put in place rather late, close to a decade after the medium became pervasive at least in urban India. And in that one decade, as the government dithered, big global players had already acquired a major presence in India, forcing open several doors by making creative use of policy ambiguities and the marked official proclivity for ad hoc procedures.
The initial policy response was to doggedly hang on to the government’s monopoly over the airwaves – at least in the limited sense of uplinking signals from Indian territory. In a defensive measure against proliferating signals from satellites high above, which could only be restrained through the extraordinary exercise of police powers, the principle of intermediary liability was imposed. The cable operator would be responsible for ensuring conformity of all broadcast content with applicable norms.
It was another matter that there was little consultation or agreement across relevant sections of government, industry and civil society, on best regulatory practices. Neither was there any concern in the two decades of the satellite broadcasting boom, for enforcing the basic principles of media governance: such as the separation of content and carriage; and the prevention of cross-media ownership concentration.
A landmark judgment by the Indian Supreme Court in 1995, holding the broadcast spectrum as a public resource, entered the judicial annals as a finely crafted statement of principle. But its practical relevance has been negligible, as corporate entities, political parties and even religious bodies have rapidly colonised the airwaves.
The MIB’s recent awakening clearly occurred under duress. Following widespread public concern over media coverage of the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, there was one attempt at enforcing a code on the electronic media, especially in situations designated as “emergencies”. The news channels, sensing a threat to their autonomy, preemptively enacted their own code, to be enforced by a News Broadcasting Standards Authority (NBSA) under the chairmanship of J.S. Verma, a former Chief Justice of India. The other main industry body, the Indian Broadcasting Federation followed after a few months with its own complaints council, under a former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court, A.P. Shah.
The NBSA has had a mixed record of success. Its first major ruling imposing a fine led to angry recriminations between the offending channel and its competitors, and an unabashed refusal to comply. Following a truce and the return of the delinquent element into the fold, a more settled course has been in evidence. Strictures that the NBSA issued early this year against a channel that had telecast a news item held grossly derogatory of the gay community, were complied with in full. Close observers of the broadcast industry believe that despite this chastening, the channel concerned soon went back to its old ways, secure in the knowledge that it could always move faster than the watchdog’s capabilities of oversight and sanction.
Government anxieties aroused
Meanwhile, the news channels’ coverage of the Anna Hazare agitation, first in April this year and then in August, had reawakened the deepest anxieties of the government. Yet again, the debate on regulation was resurrected in terms of the old and discredited principles of oversight and sanction, with little regard for how feasible such a strategy would be in a domain where an estimated 727 channels function, of which no fewer than 359 are categorised as news broadcasters by the MIB. The entry threshold is derisorily low: principal requirements being that a company uplinking to a broadcast satellite would need to be registered in India, have no more than 40 percent foreign shareholding and a minimum net-worth ranging from as low as Rs 1 crore to a high of Rs 3 crore, depending on the category of licence applied for.
As Katju assumed charge at the PCI, a debate was underway on the need to revise these norms. The principal measures under consideration included raising the threshold of net-worth to a figure in the range of Rs 10 crore and stipulating that news channels should be headed by individuals with a certain minimum years of editorial experience. There were also suggestions of a “five strikes and out” rule: that news channels held guilty of a certain number of violations of an agreed programme code, would be stripped of their licence.
Katju’s interventions in this context seemed less an affirmation of principle and more a power-grab. At his first public engagement, which was a meeting with senior editors, Katju called for “introspection” and also questioned some of the priorities that the media seemed to be pursuing at the cost of what he considered the really important issues. Soon afterwards, he appeared on a widely watched interview programme on an English news channel. If there was an element of discretion earlier, the tone now was all aggression and disparagement. Indian journalists he said, were for the most part, “of a very poor intellectual level”. Media personnel in general, he said, have no idea of “economic theory or political science, philosophy, literature”.(3) Katju also called for investing the PCI with statutory powers – extending to the broadcast media -- to punish organisations that step out of line of an accepted code of conduct. “One of the reasons” that self-regulation has not worked, he said, is that its procedures have failed to instil “fear in the media.”
In Katju’s own words, the means of achieving optimal regulatory ends are clear: “I want powers to stop government advertisements, I want powers to suspend the licence of that media for a certain period if it behaves in a very obnoxious manner. I want powers to impose fines, all this in extreme situations.”
Novelty lacking
The scorn and disdain aside, these are possible options that have been raised by Katju’s three immediate predecessors and perhaps several more. So it is not yet evident that Katju has in any manner advanced a debate that has been underway for at least as long as the PCI has existed.(4)
Evidence of a constructive role going forward, if any, could be found from examining the other points the PCI chairman makes about the three modes in which the media is failing the people of India. The substance of the former judge’s accusations are that: the media often focuses on trivialities at the cost of the really major issues the country faces; it frequently divides communities by leaping to unwarranted inferences about the identity of those responsible for crimes such as terrorism; and finally, rather than propagate rational and scientific thinking, which is the need of the delicate social and economic transition India is undergoing, the media seemingly has time for only the most obscurantist fetishes, such as astrology and the supernatural.
None of what Katju says would come as breaking news to an observer of the Indian media. At various recent junctures when its conduct has been seen as questionable, the media’s role has come in for incisive and frequently, scathing analysis. But the logic of the media as an industry geared towards the motive of private profit, determines that it will follow a trajectory that remains indifferent to these public concerns. Media growth in the last two decades – but more so since the turn of the century -- is a sub-theme of the larger story of the revolution of rising aspirations of the great Indian middle class. It has been fuelled by the advertising boom that has accompanied this dizzying expansion of horizons. Needless to say, the growth of advertising – from the automobile sector, communications, real estate, financial services and other so-called success stories of the two decades of liberalisation -- has reflected emerging patterns of consumption of the middle and upper strata.
The other side of the growth story, of rising economic inequality and stagnant or deteriorating living standards at the lower end of the scale of wealth, has been rudely excised from the media narrative, simply because it is of no interest to the advertiser.
Public utility or industry?
These aspects of media functioning have been in the spotlight since the early years of independence and notably since 1952, when the Press Commission was appointed as India’s first expert attempt to evolve a doctrine on the media and society. Political circles and journalism unions were then suffused with the sense of imminent betrayal, that the press was forgetting its mission and treading the perilous pathway towards profit at all costs. The Press Commission put forward the doctrine that the newspaper was a “public utility”, which by definition, was essential to the sustenance of the civic community. Needless to say, the newspaper industry had little patience with what it regarded as a particularly woolly-headed type of idealism.(5) And it has since managed to beat back every regulatory effort.
As the media environment became more complex, independent media commentators and journalism unions did their bit to advance the debate, and there were also significant developments, such as the “airwaves” judgment of 1995, that could potentially have had a bearing. Yet, with all the cumulative force that genuinely committed individuals and organisations could exert, the media industry just would not be deflected off its chosen trajectory.
Set up in 1966, abolished in 1975 and then revived three years later, the PCI has not had a great record in stamping its authority on media functioning. Its credibility has not been helped in any measure by a discrete tendency towards silence at junctures when the press has come under attack in India’s more troubled regions. In November 2008 for instance, the government of Jammu and Kashmir sent out a letter warning the media against publishing any “objectionable material”. Failure to comply, it warned, would lead to action under the applicable laws, including the withdrawal of government advertising. In June 2009, as civil disturbances swept the Kashmir valley, the state government, almost reflexively, blamed the media for fomenting the strife and banned all news broadcasts on local channels. The harsh measures continued right through to the following year and were considerably enhanced through the four months of mass demonstrations in 2010, when physical attacks on journalists became commonplace, newspapers were seized at the point of publication, and messaging services over the cellular network were completely banned.(6)
Areas of default
Except for announcing an inquiry in 2010 that did not get very far, the PCI remained indifferent through these events. So the question really must be asked if a body that fails to raise its voice when summary measures are used to muzzle the press, can be trusted to use such powers fairly. Katju thinks that he has the judicial wisdom and experience to ensure the fair application of such powers, but he has not convinced very many. Professional bodies such as the Editors’ Guild and industry lobbies from the print and broadcast sectors have already dismissed his proposals out of hand. And for former Chief Justice J.S. Verma, his locutions seem to suggest an “authoritarian” tendency.
Little progress is likely if the debate remains confined within a paradigm of controls and sanctions, to the neglect of possible modes of allowing more voices the opportunity to be heard. Access to the blogosphere is still reserved for those of relative privilege and the alternative message that has begun to spread through this medium, though valuable, is limited in its diffusion. An official discourse that emphasises control and conformity, has effectively banished the 1995 “airwaves judgment” from the central position it deserves in the debate. Public service broadcasting has languished and the ridiculous prohibition of news content over FM radio continues to be in force.
A PCI that endlessly rehearses old themes about an augmentation of its powers, serves little purpose today. A more constructive engagement would look at true measures of public empowerment, rather than the aggrandisement of a highly diminished body.
Footnotes
(1) The Hoot’s letter of apology and retraction can be found at the following link: http://www.thehoot.org/web/home/story.php?storyid=5549&mod=1&pg=1§ionId=5&valid=true.
(2) The ethical issues involved were in fact not dealt with in any manner at all by the media, aside from a report in The Hindu on October 13, which raised some of the questions and sought at least preliminary clarifications from the Times Now management. See “Attack on Prashant Bhushan captured on camera”, The Hindu, Delhi, October 13, p 10; available at: http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/article2532909.ece.
(3)See the transcript of the interview at the website of the channel concerned: http://ibnlive.in.com/news/media-deliberately-dividing-people-pci-chief/197593-3.html.
(4) See A.G. Noorani, “The Press Council: An Expensive Irrelevance”, Economic and Political Weekly, January 3, 2009, pp 13-5, for the substance of what has been said earlier on these issues.
(5) This is a story that is adequately told by G.S. Bhargava, The Press in India: An Overview, National Book Trust, Delhi, 2005.
(6) The International Federation of Journalists has come out with situation reports on the media in Kashmir through these three years. These are available currently at: http://asiapacific.ifj.org/assets/docs/118/188/54dea76-41a4dbc.pdf; http://asiapacific.ifj.org/assets/docs/126/113/2fe407e-23c0e71.pdf; http://asiapacific.ifj.org/en/articles/blaming-the-messenger-media-under-pressure-in-jammu-and-kashmir.
Markandey Katju was appointed chairman of the Press Council of India (PCI) within days of retiring as a Judge of the Supreme Court. Purely by coincidence, there was some talk hanging in the air as he took office, of the need for new regulatory norms in the electronic media. Though not within his formal jurisdiction, he was quick to ask that the new guidelines be held in abeyance. He then plunged into a sequence of abrasive comments about the realm he had just been appointed to oversee and regulate, which if substantively little different from observations made by his predecessors, has raised hackles with its added embellishment of intellectual disdain. Where the debate will proceed from here is anybody’s guess. But the tone has dropped several notches and the media industry is unlikely to let another opportunity pass, to push back against a potentially constructive public debate on transparency and accountability.
The media in its broadest definition, touches several lives. Even if it is a small player on most aggregate economic measures – revenue, value addition or profit – it is an industry on which everybody has an opinion and an urge to be heard. Media persons, who are generous with moral judgments and grudging in admitting the most egregious errors, cannot really complain when the compliment is occasionally returned. The final bulwark that the public often finds difficult to breach, is the ability of the media to control the message.
For long, the only recourse an ordinary reader (or “media consumer” in current terminology) had for being heard, was a letter to the editor, which would, in most cases, end up in the trash bin if it did not pamper newspaper egos. Today, even as she suffers the constant mortification of being talked down to by hectoring news anchors and leader writers, the media consumer has discovered the blogosphere, or the virtual media, which offers itself as a new platform for conducting the social dialogue. The ability of the media industry to control the public discourse is rapidly eroding and there has yet been no credible strategy devised from within its business model, to counter this reality.
Legal coercion though, is an option that still works. A sturdy platform of media criticism in the “virtual world” recently found itself the target of unwelcome attention from a real world entity whose enormous clout could be denied only at great peril. On October 14, the media watchdog website, The Hoot (www.thehoot.org), received a legal notice from the Times Global Broadcasting Company Ltd, which owns the Times Now news channel and is a subsidiary of Bennett Coleman and Co Ltd (BCCL), publishers of the Times of India. The media giant had been irked by an article published the day before, which raised a number of troubling questions about the coverage of a brutal attack on the lawyer and civil rights campaigner Prashant Bhushan, by right-wing thugs on October 12.(1)
Media under scrutiny
Under particular scrutiny was the conduct of the Times Now channel, since it had a news crew on the spot at the time of the attack. The article, written by a journalist with years of experience in print and television, wondered if the presence of the news crew may not have brought on the attacks. The thought was not outlandish, since the vigilante group behind the attack, the Sri Ram Sene, had a long record – from places as far afield as Mangalore, Bangalore and Delhi – of prearranging media coverage before foraying forth to dispense summary justice. Once the attack on Bhushan began, the news crew on the site showed less than humane instincts when it continued recording the brutality with a steady and unswerving camera. No member of the team even stepped into the camera frame while Bhushan was punched, kicked and dragged along the floor.
Perhaps, the article said, the climate of intolerance that brought on the attack had been nurtured by the unique style of the electronic media. It was a regular feature of prime-time news broadcasts to pit adversarial viewpoints against each other in the most abrasive and uncivil manner. A special mention was reserved for the Times Now’s prime-time news anchor, who regularly sets the blogosphere buzzing with his preachy morality and self-righteousness.
There were points made in the article which could have been fruitfully debated, had The Hoot not taken it down in haste under threat of legal action.(2) While protesting that the article had nothing by way of defamatory content and was merely an honest effort to advance the debate on free speech and its attendant obligations, The Hoot took the abundant precaution of apologising for any offence it may have caused. The whole episode passed without seriously disturbing the stately passage of the mighty media.
A desultory debate had meanwhile begun on the sidelines, occasioned by the expressed intent of the Ministry for Information and Broadcasting (MIB) to revise eligibility norms for the broadcasting industry. The stated rationale was that the norms currently in place are notoriously lax, which few can really question. But the antidote devised by the MIB bureaucracy seemed worse than the disease.
Regulatory vacuum
The norms for cable and satellite broadcasting were put in place rather late, close to a decade after the medium became pervasive at least in urban India. And in that one decade, as the government dithered, big global players had already acquired a major presence in India, forcing open several doors by making creative use of policy ambiguities and the marked official proclivity for ad hoc procedures.
The initial policy response was to doggedly hang on to the government’s monopoly over the airwaves – at least in the limited sense of uplinking signals from Indian territory. In a defensive measure against proliferating signals from satellites high above, which could only be restrained through the extraordinary exercise of police powers, the principle of intermediary liability was imposed. The cable operator would be responsible for ensuring conformity of all broadcast content with applicable norms.
It was another matter that there was little consultation or agreement across relevant sections of government, industry and civil society, on best regulatory practices. Neither was there any concern in the two decades of the satellite broadcasting boom, for enforcing the basic principles of media governance: such as the separation of content and carriage; and the prevention of cross-media ownership concentration.
A landmark judgment by the Indian Supreme Court in 1995, holding the broadcast spectrum as a public resource, entered the judicial annals as a finely crafted statement of principle. But its practical relevance has been negligible, as corporate entities, political parties and even religious bodies have rapidly colonised the airwaves.
The MIB’s recent awakening clearly occurred under duress. Following widespread public concern over media coverage of the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, there was one attempt at enforcing a code on the electronic media, especially in situations designated as “emergencies”. The news channels, sensing a threat to their autonomy, preemptively enacted their own code, to be enforced by a News Broadcasting Standards Authority (NBSA) under the chairmanship of J.S. Verma, a former Chief Justice of India. The other main industry body, the Indian Broadcasting Federation followed after a few months with its own complaints council, under a former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court, A.P. Shah.
The NBSA has had a mixed record of success. Its first major ruling imposing a fine led to angry recriminations between the offending channel and its competitors, and an unabashed refusal to comply. Following a truce and the return of the delinquent element into the fold, a more settled course has been in evidence. Strictures that the NBSA issued early this year against a channel that had telecast a news item held grossly derogatory of the gay community, were complied with in full. Close observers of the broadcast industry believe that despite this chastening, the channel concerned soon went back to its old ways, secure in the knowledge that it could always move faster than the watchdog’s capabilities of oversight and sanction.
Government anxieties aroused
Meanwhile, the news channels’ coverage of the Anna Hazare agitation, first in April this year and then in August, had reawakened the deepest anxieties of the government. Yet again, the debate on regulation was resurrected in terms of the old and discredited principles of oversight and sanction, with little regard for how feasible such a strategy would be in a domain where an estimated 727 channels function, of which no fewer than 359 are categorised as news broadcasters by the MIB. The entry threshold is derisorily low: principal requirements being that a company uplinking to a broadcast satellite would need to be registered in India, have no more than 40 percent foreign shareholding and a minimum net-worth ranging from as low as Rs 1 crore to a high of Rs 3 crore, depending on the category of licence applied for.
As Katju assumed charge at the PCI, a debate was underway on the need to revise these norms. The principal measures under consideration included raising the threshold of net-worth to a figure in the range of Rs 10 crore and stipulating that news channels should be headed by individuals with a certain minimum years of editorial experience. There were also suggestions of a “five strikes and out” rule: that news channels held guilty of a certain number of violations of an agreed programme code, would be stripped of their licence.
Katju’s interventions in this context seemed less an affirmation of principle and more a power-grab. At his first public engagement, which was a meeting with senior editors, Katju called for “introspection” and also questioned some of the priorities that the media seemed to be pursuing at the cost of what he considered the really important issues. Soon afterwards, he appeared on a widely watched interview programme on an English news channel. If there was an element of discretion earlier, the tone now was all aggression and disparagement. Indian journalists he said, were for the most part, “of a very poor intellectual level”. Media personnel in general, he said, have no idea of “economic theory or political science, philosophy, literature”.(3) Katju also called for investing the PCI with statutory powers – extending to the broadcast media -- to punish organisations that step out of line of an accepted code of conduct. “One of the reasons” that self-regulation has not worked, he said, is that its procedures have failed to instil “fear in the media.”
In Katju’s own words, the means of achieving optimal regulatory ends are clear: “I want powers to stop government advertisements, I want powers to suspend the licence of that media for a certain period if it behaves in a very obnoxious manner. I want powers to impose fines, all this in extreme situations.”
Novelty lacking
The scorn and disdain aside, these are possible options that have been raised by Katju’s three immediate predecessors and perhaps several more. So it is not yet evident that Katju has in any manner advanced a debate that has been underway for at least as long as the PCI has existed.(4)
Evidence of a constructive role going forward, if any, could be found from examining the other points the PCI chairman makes about the three modes in which the media is failing the people of India. The substance of the former judge’s accusations are that: the media often focuses on trivialities at the cost of the really major issues the country faces; it frequently divides communities by leaping to unwarranted inferences about the identity of those responsible for crimes such as terrorism; and finally, rather than propagate rational and scientific thinking, which is the need of the delicate social and economic transition India is undergoing, the media seemingly has time for only the most obscurantist fetishes, such as astrology and the supernatural.
None of what Katju says would come as breaking news to an observer of the Indian media. At various recent junctures when its conduct has been seen as questionable, the media’s role has come in for incisive and frequently, scathing analysis. But the logic of the media as an industry geared towards the motive of private profit, determines that it will follow a trajectory that remains indifferent to these public concerns. Media growth in the last two decades – but more so since the turn of the century -- is a sub-theme of the larger story of the revolution of rising aspirations of the great Indian middle class. It has been fuelled by the advertising boom that has accompanied this dizzying expansion of horizons. Needless to say, the growth of advertising – from the automobile sector, communications, real estate, financial services and other so-called success stories of the two decades of liberalisation -- has reflected emerging patterns of consumption of the middle and upper strata.
The other side of the growth story, of rising economic inequality and stagnant or deteriorating living standards at the lower end of the scale of wealth, has been rudely excised from the media narrative, simply because it is of no interest to the advertiser.
Public utility or industry?
These aspects of media functioning have been in the spotlight since the early years of independence and notably since 1952, when the Press Commission was appointed as India’s first expert attempt to evolve a doctrine on the media and society. Political circles and journalism unions were then suffused with the sense of imminent betrayal, that the press was forgetting its mission and treading the perilous pathway towards profit at all costs. The Press Commission put forward the doctrine that the newspaper was a “public utility”, which by definition, was essential to the sustenance of the civic community. Needless to say, the newspaper industry had little patience with what it regarded as a particularly woolly-headed type of idealism.(5) And it has since managed to beat back every regulatory effort.
As the media environment became more complex, independent media commentators and journalism unions did their bit to advance the debate, and there were also significant developments, such as the “airwaves” judgment of 1995, that could potentially have had a bearing. Yet, with all the cumulative force that genuinely committed individuals and organisations could exert, the media industry just would not be deflected off its chosen trajectory.
Set up in 1966, abolished in 1975 and then revived three years later, the PCI has not had a great record in stamping its authority on media functioning. Its credibility has not been helped in any measure by a discrete tendency towards silence at junctures when the press has come under attack in India’s more troubled regions. In November 2008 for instance, the government of Jammu and Kashmir sent out a letter warning the media against publishing any “objectionable material”. Failure to comply, it warned, would lead to action under the applicable laws, including the withdrawal of government advertising. In June 2009, as civil disturbances swept the Kashmir valley, the state government, almost reflexively, blamed the media for fomenting the strife and banned all news broadcasts on local channels. The harsh measures continued right through to the following year and were considerably enhanced through the four months of mass demonstrations in 2010, when physical attacks on journalists became commonplace, newspapers were seized at the point of publication, and messaging services over the cellular network were completely banned.(6)
Areas of default
Except for announcing an inquiry in 2010 that did not get very far, the PCI remained indifferent through these events. So the question really must be asked if a body that fails to raise its voice when summary measures are used to muzzle the press, can be trusted to use such powers fairly. Katju thinks that he has the judicial wisdom and experience to ensure the fair application of such powers, but he has not convinced very many. Professional bodies such as the Editors’ Guild and industry lobbies from the print and broadcast sectors have already dismissed his proposals out of hand. And for former Chief Justice J.S. Verma, his locutions seem to suggest an “authoritarian” tendency.
Little progress is likely if the debate remains confined within a paradigm of controls and sanctions, to the neglect of possible modes of allowing more voices the opportunity to be heard. Access to the blogosphere is still reserved for those of relative privilege and the alternative message that has begun to spread through this medium, though valuable, is limited in its diffusion. An official discourse that emphasises control and conformity, has effectively banished the 1995 “airwaves judgment” from the central position it deserves in the debate. Public service broadcasting has languished and the ridiculous prohibition of news content over FM radio continues to be in force.
A PCI that endlessly rehearses old themes about an augmentation of its powers, serves little purpose today. A more constructive engagement would look at true measures of public empowerment, rather than the aggrandisement of a highly diminished body.
Footnotes
(1) The Hoot’s letter of apology and retraction can be found at the following link: http://www.thehoot.org/web/home/story.php?storyid=5549&mod=1&pg=1§ionId=5&valid=true.
(2) The ethical issues involved were in fact not dealt with in any manner at all by the media, aside from a report in The Hindu on October 13, which raised some of the questions and sought at least preliminary clarifications from the Times Now management. See “Attack on Prashant Bhushan captured on camera”, The Hindu, Delhi, October 13, p 10; available at: http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/article2532909.ece.
(3)See the transcript of the interview at the website of the channel concerned: http://ibnlive.in.com/news/media-deliberately-dividing-people-pci-chief/197593-3.html.
(4) See A.G. Noorani, “The Press Council: An Expensive Irrelevance”, Economic and Political Weekly, January 3, 2009, pp 13-5, for the substance of what has been said earlier on these issues.
(5) This is a story that is adequately told by G.S. Bhargava, The Press in India: An Overview, National Book Trust, Delhi, 2005.
(6) The International Federation of Journalists has come out with situation reports on the media in Kashmir through these three years. These are available currently at: http://asiapacific.ifj.org/assets/docs/118/188/54dea76-41a4dbc.pdf; http://asiapacific.ifj.org/assets/docs/126/113/2fe407e-23c0e71.pdf; http://asiapacific.ifj.org/en/articles/blaming-the-messenger-media-under-pressure-in-jammu-and-kashmir.
Monday, September 26, 2011
Palestine Statehood: New Hope Amid Threats
The new spirit of assertion by a hitherto supine leadership and the degree of support from governments across the world, speak of a dawn of hope for the Palestinian people. The bid for a unilateral declaration of independence from Israeli occupation, which the Palestinians hope will be recognised by the United Nations, emerges from the wider ferment in the Arab world. But because it involves Israel, it will be judged by a different set of standards. It embodies the spirit of hope and resistance. Yet, it could just as well, be the first stage in a new phase of confrontation, more bitter than anything in the past.
The dangers are embodied in the figure of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who basks in the glow of adulation from the U.S. Congress and self-righteously demands the unquestioning loyalty of what he, with surpassing arrogance, calls the “civilised world”. Unqualified endorsement of the creeping annexation of all Palestine – save the Gaza which would continue being the world’s largest open-air prison – is the minimum he demands, as blood price for past atrocities the Jewish people have suffered in the bastions of civilisation.
Netanyahu has ever since assuming office as Prime Minister of Israel, sought assiduously to change the subject: from the need for justice in Palestine to the putative nuclear threat from Iran; from the legitimate demand of those made refugees several times over by Zionist ethnic cleansing, to the imperative that the world recognise the eternally Jewish character of Israel (and thus Palestine). Netanyahu’s recalcitrance would be a sufficient threat to world peace were there not greater hazards lurking in the cabinet of right-wing extremists he has assembled.
Avigdor Lieberman, foreign minister of Israel under the power-sharing deal that keeps Netanyahu in office, is the other face of this hazard. A person who does not hesitate to use metaphors from the animal world in referring to the Palestinians, Lieberman sees no irony in saying in the very next breath that “Israel is now on the frontline of a battle involving not just the Jewish people but all Western civilisation”. His warning to the Palestinians is an unabashed assertion of imperial mastery: the relative stability of the last two years, with high rates of growth and relatively unimpeded movement, would be a thing of the past if the Palestinians were to persist with the intent to declare statehood.
What Israel demands, the U.S. soon fulfils. In his speech before the U.N. General Assembly on September 21, just hours after mass rallies were held all over occupied Palestine to celebrate the push towards independence, U.S. President Barack Obama warned against the entire enterprise. It was in part, a disavowal of much he had said at the same forum exactly a year before. Acknowledging as much, he reaffirmed his belief in a Palestinian state, but underlined that this was a moral imperative that could only be realised “between Israelis and Palestinians themselves”.
The meaning is clear: the final contours of a settlement should set in stone for eternity, the asymmetric power relations between the Israelis and the Palestinians. A Palestinian “state”, simply because it involves a relationship of equality, is an unthinkable for Israel. What the world sees as a moral imperative is for Israel an existential threat. In addressing this dilemma, Obama has to make frequent concessions to the demands of justice and just as frequently recant.
Obama’s inner councils are restive at the indignity of the situation but uneasily aware that there is no way out, given the conflict between the configurations of domestic politics and the compulsions of maintaining a pretence of global leadership. Top cabinet officials in the U.S. may denounce Netanyahu in private as an ungrateful and mendacious ally. But any such statement in public would unleash a firestorm of rage from the far-right, unrepentant despite Iraq and energised by recent economic woes.
The far-right extremist John Bolton, who even a Republican Congress found inappropriate for the post of ambassador to the U.N., has resurrected the imperial fantasies the world hoped had died with the Bush administration: extinguish the Iranian threat through the use of force, pull out of the U.N. and cut all funding if it goes ahead with recognising a Palestinian state. His advocacy of a muscular U.S. military posture around the world – fanciful in the context of current economic realities, but still anchored in a semblance of rationality – blends with the messianic visions of those who are today the leading contenders for leadership of the Republican party. Israel is no mere ally in this perception, but a divinely ordained cause, nothing less than a fundamental act of commitment to good over evil.
The mood is mirrored in uncanny and disturbing ways in Israel, where economic difficulties – typified by growing inequality and rampant inflation – have exacerbated already sharp social divisions. Resentment is rising at the political influence of the extremist settlers, but so is the sense of siege, as popular attitudes darken in Turkey, Egypt and Jordan, till now considered Israel’s more dependable friends. It is a context in which political forces that successfully evade hard questions and tap the most deep-seated resentments – i.e., the most fanatical elements -- have a natural advantage. If the U.S.-Israel axis was for years an impediment to justice in Palestine, the prospective alignment of the extremist factions in these countries could soon become an active threat to world peace.
The dangers are embodied in the figure of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who basks in the glow of adulation from the U.S. Congress and self-righteously demands the unquestioning loyalty of what he, with surpassing arrogance, calls the “civilised world”. Unqualified endorsement of the creeping annexation of all Palestine – save the Gaza which would continue being the world’s largest open-air prison – is the minimum he demands, as blood price for past atrocities the Jewish people have suffered in the bastions of civilisation.
Netanyahu has ever since assuming office as Prime Minister of Israel, sought assiduously to change the subject: from the need for justice in Palestine to the putative nuclear threat from Iran; from the legitimate demand of those made refugees several times over by Zionist ethnic cleansing, to the imperative that the world recognise the eternally Jewish character of Israel (and thus Palestine). Netanyahu’s recalcitrance would be a sufficient threat to world peace were there not greater hazards lurking in the cabinet of right-wing extremists he has assembled.
Avigdor Lieberman, foreign minister of Israel under the power-sharing deal that keeps Netanyahu in office, is the other face of this hazard. A person who does not hesitate to use metaphors from the animal world in referring to the Palestinians, Lieberman sees no irony in saying in the very next breath that “Israel is now on the frontline of a battle involving not just the Jewish people but all Western civilisation”. His warning to the Palestinians is an unabashed assertion of imperial mastery: the relative stability of the last two years, with high rates of growth and relatively unimpeded movement, would be a thing of the past if the Palestinians were to persist with the intent to declare statehood.
What Israel demands, the U.S. soon fulfils. In his speech before the U.N. General Assembly on September 21, just hours after mass rallies were held all over occupied Palestine to celebrate the push towards independence, U.S. President Barack Obama warned against the entire enterprise. It was in part, a disavowal of much he had said at the same forum exactly a year before. Acknowledging as much, he reaffirmed his belief in a Palestinian state, but underlined that this was a moral imperative that could only be realised “between Israelis and Palestinians themselves”.
The meaning is clear: the final contours of a settlement should set in stone for eternity, the asymmetric power relations between the Israelis and the Palestinians. A Palestinian “state”, simply because it involves a relationship of equality, is an unthinkable for Israel. What the world sees as a moral imperative is for Israel an existential threat. In addressing this dilemma, Obama has to make frequent concessions to the demands of justice and just as frequently recant.
Obama’s inner councils are restive at the indignity of the situation but uneasily aware that there is no way out, given the conflict between the configurations of domestic politics and the compulsions of maintaining a pretence of global leadership. Top cabinet officials in the U.S. may denounce Netanyahu in private as an ungrateful and mendacious ally. But any such statement in public would unleash a firestorm of rage from the far-right, unrepentant despite Iraq and energised by recent economic woes.
The far-right extremist John Bolton, who even a Republican Congress found inappropriate for the post of ambassador to the U.N., has resurrected the imperial fantasies the world hoped had died with the Bush administration: extinguish the Iranian threat through the use of force, pull out of the U.N. and cut all funding if it goes ahead with recognising a Palestinian state. His advocacy of a muscular U.S. military posture around the world – fanciful in the context of current economic realities, but still anchored in a semblance of rationality – blends with the messianic visions of those who are today the leading contenders for leadership of the Republican party. Israel is no mere ally in this perception, but a divinely ordained cause, nothing less than a fundamental act of commitment to good over evil.
The mood is mirrored in uncanny and disturbing ways in Israel, where economic difficulties – typified by growing inequality and rampant inflation – have exacerbated already sharp social divisions. Resentment is rising at the political influence of the extremist settlers, but so is the sense of siege, as popular attitudes darken in Turkey, Egypt and Jordan, till now considered Israel’s more dependable friends. It is a context in which political forces that successfully evade hard questions and tap the most deep-seated resentments – i.e., the most fanatical elements -- have a natural advantage. If the U.S.-Israel axis was for years an impediment to justice in Palestine, the prospective alignment of the extremist factions in these countries could soon become an active threat to world peace.
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Trouble in The Hindu: Fourth generation of a newspaper dynasty founders in search of a new business paradigm
It is a family that has always taken pride in its unity, discretion and commitment to public causes -- a family that has for four generations from its home base in Chennai (formerly Madras) published The Hindu, one of India’s most widely-recognised and respected newspapers. The Hindu has itself been in print since 1878 – longer than all other Indian newspapers, except The Times of India of Mumbai (Bombay) and The Statesman of Kolkata (Calcutta).
Yet The Hindu stands out even in this company in having been under the control of a single family – beginning with Kasturi Ranga Iyengar and now continuing with his great grand-children – since 1905. It is a family that has another unique claim among newspaper dynasties – through four generations, it has not ventured into lines of business that may conflict with core commitments. Individual members may have gone into their own lines of business, but never with a conspicuous impact on the principles of editorial detachment and fairness that the newspaper was loudly committed to.
The façade of family unity had been breached on occasion, notably during junctures when consensus decisions on editorial and management control have been called for. These eruptions, most notably in 1990 and then again in 2003, pointed to stresses within the family owned newspaper as the number of stakeholders multiplied with each succeeding generation. But each eruption was contained and a new way found to continue with business as usual. It was expedient as tactics, but given the play of bristling egos within, not assured of enduring success as strategy. The intense discord that emerged to public view in March 2010 was perhaps, long foretold.
Events have since played out towards a bitter parting of ways between two factions within the family. A decisive moment came in April 2011, with the board of directors of the proprietary company of The Hindu, Kasturi and Sons Ltd (KSL), deciding by a majority of seven to five, to hand over the editor’s post to a person from outside the family.
The minority directors made no secret of their ire and obtained a stay on implementation of the decision from the Company Law Board (CLB), a statutory body dealing with matters of corporate governance. Relief for the minority proved short-lived, with the majority group successfully intervening first in the High Court based in Chennai to get the stay vacated and then having an appeal in the Supreme Court summarily dismissed without prejudice to the CLB’s final determination.
In July, Siddharth Varadarajan, a well-respected professional who was at the time bureau chief in Delhi, was formally appointed editor by the board, triggering off angry recriminations and the collective resignation (retirement in one case) of the minority faction in the KSL board from all executive positions. The minority five have with obvious intent, underlined their intention to continue as directors, pointing towards more turbulence in the boardroom in years ahead.
At the centre of the swirling controversy is N. Ram, editor-in-chief of the newspaper group and the most senior among the fourth generation of Kasturi Ranga Iyengar’s descendants to be actively associated with the business. With two younger brothers, N. Murali and N. Ravi, being respectively managing director of KSL and editor of The Hindu, Ram’s branch of the Kasturi family was dominant among the four that have shareholder interests in the newspaper. Murali has been his ally through earlier arguments over editorial control, though Ravi had in both 1990 and 2003, taken the other side.
As recorded in his letter of retirement and in recent statements made to the press -- in seeming contradiction to his public image of quiet efficiency and discretion -- Murali claims to have initiated in September 2009, a move to put in place norms on corporate governance and management succession on both the business and editorial side. The objective was to ensure that all shareholders got a fair share of responsibility and rewards. The basic premise was that all family members would retire from editorial and management positions at the age of 65.
Ram was under this plan, designated to retire in May 2010, to be succeeded as editor-in-chief by Ravi. In terms of the various publications under the group, Malini Parthasarathy -- a second cousin of Ram’s -- was to be editor of The Hindu and other top editorial positions, in the business daily, the sports weekly and fortnightly newsmagazine, were to be assigned within the four family branches, Positions on the business side were to be reserved for branches without sufficient representation on the editorial side.
Ravi and Parthasarathy had run The Hindu since 1991 and were as of 2003, designated as editor and executive editor. They then lost effective control, though not their formal designations, with Ram’s appointment, by a majority of eight to four in the board of directors, as editor-in-chief. The newspaper has since then moved on, though not with its accustomed placidity, since Ram’s very distinct editorial postures -- on India’s left-wing politics, China, Sri Lanka, not to mention one among the two parties that presides over the politics of his home state of Tamil Nadu – have been widely dissected and, for the most part, commented upon unfavourably.
The 2009 pact within the four branches of the KSL family, if at all there was one, proved rather ephemeral. In January 2010, Ram appointed three members of the fifth-generation, including his own daughter, to key positions in overseas bureaus of the newspaper group. The decision he later claimed, was approved without a “murmur of dissent” by the board of directors. Three shareholders though, including the children of Murali and Ravi, put on record their reservations in a strongly worded letter to the board: “It is essential that the board considers issues of corporate governance and the appointment of family members seriously .. The inequitable and arbitrary system that currently exists is not only unfair to non-family employees but to shareholders as a class as well. If there is ever any intention of instituting sound and modern corporate governance practices and discontinuing the feudal system that exists, then issues such as the ones we have raised need to be addressed squarely, honestly and without fear or favour”.
Concord was obviously not the prevalent mood when the KSL board assembled on March 20 last year, with editorial succession being among the principal items on the agenda. Ram assembled a bare majority in the twelve-member board to strike down Murali’s proposal that family members retire at 65 from active editorial and management roles. The board then appointed K. Balaji, a first cousin of Ram’s and Murali’s, as Managing Director, designating Murali as Senior Managing Director – a rather implausible title that barely camouflaged the very real effort to strip him of all substantive authority.
The story emerged in public view at this point, with the Indian Express – a newspaper which competes with The Hindu in a few markets, though not very effectively – on March 25 carrying a story headlined “Battle for control breaks out in The Hindu very divided family”.
Within hours of the Indian Express edition for the day hitting the stands, Ram responded with a news story on The Hindu website, assuring the author of the story, and the editor and publisher of the Indian Express, with civil and criminal defamation action.
It was a curiously petulant and undignified response by a journalist and public figure who has long been demanding that criminal law should not under any circumstances be applicable to the supposed offence of defamation. Rather quickly, Ravi responded with a posting on his twitter-page, asking how The Hindu, which “has taken a strong stand against criminal defamation”, could use it as a “threat to silence journalists”. Parthasarathy likewise, tweeted that journalists should never be “afraid of public scrutiny”.
In a later posting, Parthasarathy – one among three sisters who were the first women in the four-generation long history of the company to assume active management positions – spoke of rampant misogyny to which she would never again fall victim.
A blog-site had meanwhile come up, titled “Save the Hindu Newspaper”, promoted by persons with an overt posture against Ram. For the venerable old newspaper, which had with its sedate and somnolent style, earned a sobriquet likening it to Mahavishnu, the most remote, inscrutable and unattainable deity within the Hindu pantheon, the harsh glare of the public limelight must have been altogether unwelcome.
Murali secured a ruling from the CLB which set aside the changes on the management side. But Ram continued to have a majority in the board, which he used in April 2011 to push through Varadarajan’s appointment as editor.
Ravi responded by addressing a letter to the staff of The Hindu, seeking their understanding as the institution entered “a second, and what might turn out to be a prolonged, phase of conflict and turbulence”. Ram’s refusal to honour the agreed age of retirement, he said, had become untenable with the CLB ruling. His response it seemed, was to take “all the editorial directors – most (of whom) are in their 50s – into retirement with him with a scorched earth policy to ensure that no one in the family succeeds him”.
Ravi contrasted the image and performance of the newspaper in the years between 1991 and 2003 – when he actually exercised the authority of the editor – with what he described as a decline in public esteem since. The “distortions” that had crept into the “editorial framework”, he warned, would be “entrenched” with the decision of the board. “In the recent past, editorial integrity, he said, had "been severely compromised and news coverage linked directly to advertising”. The frequent public engagements of the editor-in-chief had also gained coverage in the newspaper “with a regularity that would put corporate house journals to shame”.
Ravi’s letter of resignation in July was even angrier in its tone, with references to the “deceit, lack of probity and bad faith” that had crept into “dealings among family members on the board with a clique being formed through exchange of unmerited favours”.
Murali in a letter written at the same time, spoke of his “anger, anguish and sadness at the horrible happenings” in the company and the “crude display of factionalism, vindictiveness, vote-bank and opportunistic politics and personal agendas by various board members”. These had seriously damaged the credibility of the “family run newspaper” and also “severely impaired the competitive ability and profitability of the whole enterprise”. If the “faction of the board” that had won the last rounds of battle were to persist “in its unsavoury ways”, then the “iconic 132-year old newspaper would have a very bleak future indeed”.
Parthasarathy the same day sent in her resignation, condemning the “strong family jealousies and prejudice” that had “intervened to pull away” all her “editorial responsibilities”. She had since, in her narration, subsequently endured “daily humiliations” in the belief that the board would finally do what was fair and just. But with her “legitimate professional aspirations” being “belittled and rudely rebuffed”, she had no alternative but resignation.
Nirmala Lakshman, sister of Malini Parthasarathy, wrote of her “deep sense of disappointment and sadness” at the attempt to reorganise the company “with little foresight, complete insensitivity, and a lack of grace and decency”. “With competitors making alarming inroads into our territory, functioning in this cavalier manner and playing the numbers game does not bode well for the future of The Hindu”, she warned.
Though the finances of The Hindu remain an area of opacity, there are sufficient indications that the newspaper group is under pressure now like never before in its history. The ongoing economic recession has cut deeply into bottomline figures across the industry, and advertisement revenue for The Hindu group is believed to have shrunk 40 percent in the course of the 2008 downturn. There has been a recovery since then, but the profit after tax is now estimated at less than a third of what it was in 2003.
All through its hundred year history at the helm of The Hindu, the Kasturi Ranga Iyengar family has stayed close to the knitting, identifying the newspaper as its core commitment, which would not be diluted by loyalty to any other business interest. The family has been seriously involved in sports and culture, though without implicating the newspaper as a whole in individual commitments. There was a project to develop a golf-course on the coastal sands between Chennai and the historic city of Mahabalipuram to the south, which absorbed much of the resources of the business group and was identified with one among the four branches of the family. The project collapsed without leaving a trace and there have been murmurs within the family branches that were not involved, about the serious lack of accountability for this colossal business misadventure.
In recent years, The Hindu has begun rather hesitantly, to get engaged in the TV news channel business, though with characteristic caution and conservatism. As competition built up – with the entry of the Deccan Chronicle into Chennai and especially with the Times of India launching an edition from the city – there were credible reports that KSL had begun exploring external sources of finance and had perhaps reconciled itself to selling a minority stake to a foreign investor.
The fragmentation of the family makes a decision arrived at with serious strategic forethought less likely than one made in pique. What this would mean for the future of one of India’s most respected newspapers, still remains a matter of speculation.
Yet The Hindu stands out even in this company in having been under the control of a single family – beginning with Kasturi Ranga Iyengar and now continuing with his great grand-children – since 1905. It is a family that has another unique claim among newspaper dynasties – through four generations, it has not ventured into lines of business that may conflict with core commitments. Individual members may have gone into their own lines of business, but never with a conspicuous impact on the principles of editorial detachment and fairness that the newspaper was loudly committed to.
The façade of family unity had been breached on occasion, notably during junctures when consensus decisions on editorial and management control have been called for. These eruptions, most notably in 1990 and then again in 2003, pointed to stresses within the family owned newspaper as the number of stakeholders multiplied with each succeeding generation. But each eruption was contained and a new way found to continue with business as usual. It was expedient as tactics, but given the play of bristling egos within, not assured of enduring success as strategy. The intense discord that emerged to public view in March 2010 was perhaps, long foretold.
Events have since played out towards a bitter parting of ways between two factions within the family. A decisive moment came in April 2011, with the board of directors of the proprietary company of The Hindu, Kasturi and Sons Ltd (KSL), deciding by a majority of seven to five, to hand over the editor’s post to a person from outside the family.
The minority directors made no secret of their ire and obtained a stay on implementation of the decision from the Company Law Board (CLB), a statutory body dealing with matters of corporate governance. Relief for the minority proved short-lived, with the majority group successfully intervening first in the High Court based in Chennai to get the stay vacated and then having an appeal in the Supreme Court summarily dismissed without prejudice to the CLB’s final determination.
In July, Siddharth Varadarajan, a well-respected professional who was at the time bureau chief in Delhi, was formally appointed editor by the board, triggering off angry recriminations and the collective resignation (retirement in one case) of the minority faction in the KSL board from all executive positions. The minority five have with obvious intent, underlined their intention to continue as directors, pointing towards more turbulence in the boardroom in years ahead.
At the centre of the swirling controversy is N. Ram, editor-in-chief of the newspaper group and the most senior among the fourth generation of Kasturi Ranga Iyengar’s descendants to be actively associated with the business. With two younger brothers, N. Murali and N. Ravi, being respectively managing director of KSL and editor of The Hindu, Ram’s branch of the Kasturi family was dominant among the four that have shareholder interests in the newspaper. Murali has been his ally through earlier arguments over editorial control, though Ravi had in both 1990 and 2003, taken the other side.
As recorded in his letter of retirement and in recent statements made to the press -- in seeming contradiction to his public image of quiet efficiency and discretion -- Murali claims to have initiated in September 2009, a move to put in place norms on corporate governance and management succession on both the business and editorial side. The objective was to ensure that all shareholders got a fair share of responsibility and rewards. The basic premise was that all family members would retire from editorial and management positions at the age of 65.
Ram was under this plan, designated to retire in May 2010, to be succeeded as editor-in-chief by Ravi. In terms of the various publications under the group, Malini Parthasarathy -- a second cousin of Ram’s -- was to be editor of The Hindu and other top editorial positions, in the business daily, the sports weekly and fortnightly newsmagazine, were to be assigned within the four family branches, Positions on the business side were to be reserved for branches without sufficient representation on the editorial side.
Ravi and Parthasarathy had run The Hindu since 1991 and were as of 2003, designated as editor and executive editor. They then lost effective control, though not their formal designations, with Ram’s appointment, by a majority of eight to four in the board of directors, as editor-in-chief. The newspaper has since then moved on, though not with its accustomed placidity, since Ram’s very distinct editorial postures -- on India’s left-wing politics, China, Sri Lanka, not to mention one among the two parties that presides over the politics of his home state of Tamil Nadu – have been widely dissected and, for the most part, commented upon unfavourably.
The 2009 pact within the four branches of the KSL family, if at all there was one, proved rather ephemeral. In January 2010, Ram appointed three members of the fifth-generation, including his own daughter, to key positions in overseas bureaus of the newspaper group. The decision he later claimed, was approved without a “murmur of dissent” by the board of directors. Three shareholders though, including the children of Murali and Ravi, put on record their reservations in a strongly worded letter to the board: “It is essential that the board considers issues of corporate governance and the appointment of family members seriously .. The inequitable and arbitrary system that currently exists is not only unfair to non-family employees but to shareholders as a class as well. If there is ever any intention of instituting sound and modern corporate governance practices and discontinuing the feudal system that exists, then issues such as the ones we have raised need to be addressed squarely, honestly and without fear or favour”.
Concord was obviously not the prevalent mood when the KSL board assembled on March 20 last year, with editorial succession being among the principal items on the agenda. Ram assembled a bare majority in the twelve-member board to strike down Murali’s proposal that family members retire at 65 from active editorial and management roles. The board then appointed K. Balaji, a first cousin of Ram’s and Murali’s, as Managing Director, designating Murali as Senior Managing Director – a rather implausible title that barely camouflaged the very real effort to strip him of all substantive authority.
The story emerged in public view at this point, with the Indian Express – a newspaper which competes with The Hindu in a few markets, though not very effectively – on March 25 carrying a story headlined “Battle for control breaks out in The Hindu very divided family”.
Within hours of the Indian Express edition for the day hitting the stands, Ram responded with a news story on The Hindu website, assuring the author of the story, and the editor and publisher of the Indian Express, with civil and criminal defamation action.
It was a curiously petulant and undignified response by a journalist and public figure who has long been demanding that criminal law should not under any circumstances be applicable to the supposed offence of defamation. Rather quickly, Ravi responded with a posting on his twitter-page, asking how The Hindu, which “has taken a strong stand against criminal defamation”, could use it as a “threat to silence journalists”. Parthasarathy likewise, tweeted that journalists should never be “afraid of public scrutiny”.
In a later posting, Parthasarathy – one among three sisters who were the first women in the four-generation long history of the company to assume active management positions – spoke of rampant misogyny to which she would never again fall victim.
A blog-site had meanwhile come up, titled “Save the Hindu Newspaper”, promoted by persons with an overt posture against Ram. For the venerable old newspaper, which had with its sedate and somnolent style, earned a sobriquet likening it to Mahavishnu, the most remote, inscrutable and unattainable deity within the Hindu pantheon, the harsh glare of the public limelight must have been altogether unwelcome.
Murali secured a ruling from the CLB which set aside the changes on the management side. But Ram continued to have a majority in the board, which he used in April 2011 to push through Varadarajan’s appointment as editor.
Ravi responded by addressing a letter to the staff of The Hindu, seeking their understanding as the institution entered “a second, and what might turn out to be a prolonged, phase of conflict and turbulence”. Ram’s refusal to honour the agreed age of retirement, he said, had become untenable with the CLB ruling. His response it seemed, was to take “all the editorial directors – most (of whom) are in their 50s – into retirement with him with a scorched earth policy to ensure that no one in the family succeeds him”.
Ravi contrasted the image and performance of the newspaper in the years between 1991 and 2003 – when he actually exercised the authority of the editor – with what he described as a decline in public esteem since. The “distortions” that had crept into the “editorial framework”, he warned, would be “entrenched” with the decision of the board. “In the recent past, editorial integrity, he said, had "been severely compromised and news coverage linked directly to advertising”. The frequent public engagements of the editor-in-chief had also gained coverage in the newspaper “with a regularity that would put corporate house journals to shame”.
Ravi’s letter of resignation in July was even angrier in its tone, with references to the “deceit, lack of probity and bad faith” that had crept into “dealings among family members on the board with a clique being formed through exchange of unmerited favours”.
Murali in a letter written at the same time, spoke of his “anger, anguish and sadness at the horrible happenings” in the company and the “crude display of factionalism, vindictiveness, vote-bank and opportunistic politics and personal agendas by various board members”. These had seriously damaged the credibility of the “family run newspaper” and also “severely impaired the competitive ability and profitability of the whole enterprise”. If the “faction of the board” that had won the last rounds of battle were to persist “in its unsavoury ways”, then the “iconic 132-year old newspaper would have a very bleak future indeed”.
Parthasarathy the same day sent in her resignation, condemning the “strong family jealousies and prejudice” that had “intervened to pull away” all her “editorial responsibilities”. She had since, in her narration, subsequently endured “daily humiliations” in the belief that the board would finally do what was fair and just. But with her “legitimate professional aspirations” being “belittled and rudely rebuffed”, she had no alternative but resignation.
Nirmala Lakshman, sister of Malini Parthasarathy, wrote of her “deep sense of disappointment and sadness” at the attempt to reorganise the company “with little foresight, complete insensitivity, and a lack of grace and decency”. “With competitors making alarming inroads into our territory, functioning in this cavalier manner and playing the numbers game does not bode well for the future of The Hindu”, she warned.
Though the finances of The Hindu remain an area of opacity, there are sufficient indications that the newspaper group is under pressure now like never before in its history. The ongoing economic recession has cut deeply into bottomline figures across the industry, and advertisement revenue for The Hindu group is believed to have shrunk 40 percent in the course of the 2008 downturn. There has been a recovery since then, but the profit after tax is now estimated at less than a third of what it was in 2003.
All through its hundred year history at the helm of The Hindu, the Kasturi Ranga Iyengar family has stayed close to the knitting, identifying the newspaper as its core commitment, which would not be diluted by loyalty to any other business interest. The family has been seriously involved in sports and culture, though without implicating the newspaper as a whole in individual commitments. There was a project to develop a golf-course on the coastal sands between Chennai and the historic city of Mahabalipuram to the south, which absorbed much of the resources of the business group and was identified with one among the four branches of the family. The project collapsed without leaving a trace and there have been murmurs within the family branches that were not involved, about the serious lack of accountability for this colossal business misadventure.
In recent years, The Hindu has begun rather hesitantly, to get engaged in the TV news channel business, though with characteristic caution and conservatism. As competition built up – with the entry of the Deccan Chronicle into Chennai and especially with the Times of India launching an edition from the city – there were credible reports that KSL had begun exploring external sources of finance and had perhaps reconciled itself to selling a minority stake to a foreign investor.
The fragmentation of the family makes a decision arrived at with serious strategic forethought less likely than one made in pique. What this would mean for the future of one of India’s most respected newspapers, still remains a matter of speculation.
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