E D I T O R I A L   P A G E

EDITORIALS

Rediscover SAARC spirit
As was widely expected, the SAARC summit at Kathmandu was overshadowed by the India-Pakistan spat. What happened at the sidelines hogged more attention than the main agenda. 

Blair, blah, blah
The Indian leadership should brace itself for a diplomatic onslaught from the global community because of the military build-up on the border with Pakistan. British Prime Minister Tony Blair had come calling on Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee earlier also as part of the US-led campaign for mobilising global support in favour of the action in Afghanistan. 

Signs of recovery
Doomsayers apart, there are unmistakable signs that the US economy is on the path to recovery. At least, the slide has been stemmed. The index of activity in US factories, monitored by the Institute of Supply Management (ISM), jumped from 44.5 to 48.2 last month. 

OPINION

Factors behind inflated Pak ego
Future of South Asia lies in cooperation
Instead of rushing Mr Tony Blair to the Indian subcontinent, President George W. Bush should consider that instability flows from the Cold War strategy of building up an inconsequential local player in order to deny the logic of geopolitics.

MIDDLE

Jokers all
Raj Chatterjee
Laughter is a part of the human survival kit, a sticking plaster on the wounds of existence. It will not ward off a bee-sting but it has helped people to endure wars, pestilence, persecution and — politicians.

REALPOLITIK

Poll without war and waves
P. Raman
The worst nightmare for the contemporary Indian politician is the prospect of having to fight a normal election. For long, they have abdicated their role as catalytic agents of progress and change. 

TRENDS & POINTERS

The tongue can reveal when you are lying
Researchers may have discovered a new technique for detecting untruths as they trip off the liar’s tongue. Blood flow, and, therefore, heat loss, increases around the eyes when a person tells a lie, lead investigator James A. Levine of Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, explained in an interview. 

• New study shows heart can repair itself

75 YEARS AGO

Cantonment employees

1970, Literature: ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN

SPIRITUAL NUGGETS

EDITORIALS

Rediscover SAARC spirit

As was widely expected, the SAARC summit at Kathmandu was overshadowed by the India-Pakistan spat. What happened at the sidelines hogged more attention than the main agenda. This despite the fact that the regional forum is not supposed to waste its time on bilateral issues. To India’s gratification, the summit did give a strong call for regional cooperation against terrorism, but even that was no substitute for lack of substantive progress on the central theme which is socio-economic development. There was extreme frustration among the member-nations over this unwanted development and this was amply articulated. President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom of the Maldives spoke for everyone when he said that it would take a “great deal of energy, persistence and commitment — indeed a Himalayan effort — to restart what has become a stalled process”. Mr Lyonpo Khanda Wangchuk, the Prime Minister of Bhutan, was even more candid. He said the countries should be ashamed that the bloc had been slow to act against the trafficking of women and children within the region. Bangladeshi Premier Khaleda Zia chided SAARC for failing to implement even a single regional project while Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee lamented that the ambitious poverty alleviation plan proposed 10 years ago in Bangladesh was never implemented in a region where more than 500 million people get only one meal a day. Why, even Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf pointed out that while SAARC limped along, organisations like the European Union and ASEAN had galloped ahead.

Blair, blah, blah

The Indian leadership should brace itself for a diplomatic onslaught from the global community because of the military build-up on the border with Pakistan. British Prime Minister Tony Blair had come calling on Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee earlier also as part of the US-led campaign for mobilising global support in favour of the action in Afghanistan. The Indian leadership did not bat an eyelid in extending unqualified support to the global war on terrorism spearheaded by the USA. Mr Blair chose an inconvenient time, in the context of the SAARC summit in Kathmandu, for making another trip to Delhi, this time via Bangalore. But what he said in the course of his meeting with Mr Vajpayee was more in the nature of the usual diplomatic blah, blah, rather an unqualified support to India’s case against Pakistan-engineered acts of terrorism on Indian soil. The global community is understandably worried about the fallout of an armed conflict between India and Pakistan at this critical juncture. Yet neither President George Bush nor another leader of stature is willing to extend to India, not even after December 13, the kind of unqualified support the American action in Afghanistan received from it. December 13 was as serious an incident as the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The America enunciated policy of “ my enemy is your enemy”, but “your enemy is not necessarily my enemy” is largely responsible for the exponential growth in acts of global terrorism. Otherwise, Mr Blair, who seems to be now doing more work for President Bush than his own country, would not have extended a virtually empty hand of friendship to India during his meeting with Mr Vajpayee.

Signs of recovery

Doomsayers apart, there are unmistakable signs that the US economy is on the path to recovery. At least, the slide has been stemmed. The index of activity in US factories, monitored by the Institute of Supply Management (ISM), jumped from 44.5 to 48.2 last month. Americans made enthusiastic purchases during the Christmas festival and year-end revelry. But that alone is not enough. The ISM index of the non-manufacturing has recorded its second successive increase after a plunge in October. The service sector has resumed growth. Aided by softer loans, car sales were up in 2001. Pessimists may point to a six-year-high of US unemployment rate, but that too has started declining as the November figures of the non-farm jobs reveal. The Americans have, it may be concluded based on the available evidence, escaped a long-term, widely feared Japanese style slump. Economists credit the recovery to the frequent, aggressive rate cuts by the Federal Reserve Bank which forced US fund managers and individual investors to pull their billions out of the money market and saving accounts and park it in the USA and emerging equity markets like India and China. An upward trend in Nasdaq has led to a recovery in the technology sector worldwide. US chip-makers have shown positive results. The American curbs on computer exports to India, Pakistan, China and Russia have been lifted. Orders have started resuming to Indian technology companies. It is, however, too early to expect a kind of tech bull run that was seen two years ago, specially with gathering war clouds.

OPINION

Factors behind inflated Pak ego
Future of South Asia lies in cooperation
Sunanda K. Datta-Ray

Instead of rushing Mr Tony Blair to the Indian subcontinent, President George W. Bush should consider that instability flows from the Cold War strategy of building up an inconsequential local player in order to deny the logic of geopolitics. What southern Asia needs is a replication of the equation between the USA and its neighbours which preserves continental peace, and would have done so even if the USA had not been the lone super power.

If the USA truly seeks a new relationship with India, it must go beyond asking President Pervez Musharraf to make a few arrests or freeze some bank accounts and abandon the illusion that India and Pakistan are unreconciled Siamese twins. For, an India that must constantly watch out for terrorist attacks cannot attend to the basic needs of its people. If it cannot fulfil that first task, it cannot create opportunities for US businessmen or guard the sealanes that are essential to America’s survival. Even less can it provide the democratic ballast that the Republicans seek as part of their strategy of coopting and containing China.

Mr Richard Haass, who combines the positions of Director of Policy Planning in the State Department with Coordinator for the Future of Afghanistan, once attributed all the tension in the subcontinent to Pakistan’s refusal to accept India’s primacy and India’s refusal to accept anything else. That sounded as if India was bent on gobbling up Pakistan but, in fact, a primacy that reflects size, population and resources and respects national interests and integrity as the cornerstone of stability in any concert of nations. Which is why in 1823 America’s fifth president, James Monroe, famously proclaimed the Monroe Doctrine to ban European intervention in the Americas, and John F. Kennedy risked nuclear war to put a quick end to Soviet attempts to create a beachhead in Cuba.

Insulation allowed the countries of North and South America to settle down to a natural equilibrium that no one questions. India’s objections to US-led military pacts, its rejection of the Brezhnev Doctrine and attempts to have the Indian Ocean declared a zone of peace were rooted in a similar understanding of independence that Rajiv Gandhi articulated most vigorously. But his initiatives were doomed to failure because of India’s economic dependence and powerful US and Chinese interests in subcontinental affairs.

During the Cold War, the USA armed and strengthened China to obstruct the Soviet Union. In turn, China armed and strengthened Pakistan to pin India down in the subcontinent. This second phase was never explicit US policy. But it is impossible to believe that it was unwelcome to Mr George Bush or Mr Bill Clinton, given the extraordinary lengths to which both went to conceal the evidence of China’s military collusion with Pakistan that their own intelligence services turned up. The USA benefited from Chinese stratagems in its diplomatic dealings with India.

Washington must rethink all this if it wants a peaceful southern Asia to be a force for stability. It must end the farce of genuflecting at the altar of democracy while contriving to cut the world’s biggest democracy down to size. The promise no longer to “hyphenate” relations could be even more ominous. The hyphen was always implied in gestures symbolic and substantial like lavishing hospitality on Liaquat Ali Khan immediately after Jawaharlal Nehru visited the USA or building up Pakistan’s air power. A de-hyphenated policy would entitle the Americans to shower money, sophisticated arms and technology on Pakistan without a thought for the consequences.

Pakistan’s gross domestic product is one-eighth India’s; it has one-seventh the population and one-fifth the area. The idee fixe of Kashmir is probably the strongest national glue today in a country that has fewer Muslims than its non-Muslim neighbour. The flow of American aid and arms (direct and through China) was designed to compensate for these disparities and contradictions and enable Pakistan to pretend that it was more than Afghanistan or Uzbekistan in spite of its bankrupt exchequer, disintegrating political institutions and demographic discord.

The parity gamble was extended to feed the illusion that if India’s neighbours were not its equal in every way (despite their combined area and population being a fraction of India’s), size invested India with a special responsibility to shrink to their level in all regional transactions. China’s Foreign Minister, Mr Tang Jiaxuan, recently repeated this message when he advised Mr Jaswant Singh that “as a big country” India should “play a more positive role” in the subcontinent. Mr Tang should be asked what concession big China made to smaller Vietnam in the Paracel islands or to the Philippines, also small and vulnerable, in the Spratlys.

When the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) was launched in 1985, Sri Lanka’s J.R. Jayewardene cannily placed the onus for success on India by saying that being “the largest in every way, larger than all the rest ... combined,” India alone could “by deeds and words create the confidence ... so necessary to make a beginning.” P.N. Haksar correctly interpreted him to mean that “India, as a big brother, must be at all times accommodating and tolerant towards the propensity for mischief-making of the younger brothers.”

That was the crux of the Gujral Doctrine. Mr Inder Kumar Gujral put into words what every Indian Prime Minister has tried to practise. It is an admirable philosophy in theory, but unsuited to the cynicism of international discourse where each country is out to grab what it can, and weakness is an instrument of leverage.

The spectre of nuclear war is now also invoked to deny India rights that are inherent in geopolitics. If the bomb were the ultimate currency of power, Mr Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union — “Upper Volta with missiles” as someone sneered — would not have collapsed so easily. Nor would President Vladimir Putin have gone cap in hand to Mr Bush’s court. The oil boom, not the bomb, maintained the illusion of Soviet might; when the boom vanished, so did the myth of a second super power.

Similar realism has not descended on southern Asia because Pakistan has successfully substituted one service for another to retain its illusory eminence. It helped to “contain” the Soviet Union, kept watch in the Islamic crescent of danger and collaborated in destroying the Taliban monster that it had created. A second factor is America’s conviction — reflected in a number of State Department, Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency position papers going back to 1948 — that the moment it withdraws its patronage, India would destroy its smaller neighbour, a fear that is no more plausible than saying that the USA wants to annex Canada or Mexico.

Washington seems keen now to engage a strong, secure and confident India that also promises to develop the world’s biggest market, and could thus provide Americans with both strategic and commercial support. Though India responded by being one of the few countries to welcome Mr Bush’s nuclear missile defence proposal and, later, offered undisclosed but probably unlimited facilities for the Afghan war, talk of partnership is still just that — only talk.

True, the USA owes a debt to Pakistan for years of dutiful service. Mr Bush’s best way of discharging that obligation would be to withdraw the artificial props that dangerously inflate Pakistan’s importance, encourage General Musharraf to come to terms with geography, and advise him that Pakistan’s security lies in cooperation, not confrontation, with India in an economic union that allows southern Asia to tap its huge potential. Pakistan resists reduction to its natural level only because the USA found it expedient during the Cold War to create and sustain delusions of grandeur. Mr Blair’s mission will serve a purpose only if he explodes that myth.

MIDDLE

Jokers all
Raj Chatterjee

Laughter is a part of the human survival kit, a sticking plaster on the wounds of existence. It will not ward off a bee-sting but it has helped people to endure wars, pestilence, persecution and — politicians.

If you think that I am the originator of that piece of profundity you would be paying me an undeserved compliment. I stole it from a book entitled “The Laughter-Makers” written by a man called David Nathan whose name suggests that he belongs to the race of Solomon the Wise.

King Solomon, I am sure, would have wholeheartedly agreed with Nathan, save that there were no politicians at the time. They came much later, in the form of a pestilence, to destroy such peace as had existed in the world.

I also feel certain that Solomon possessed a strong sense of humour which helped him to preserve his sanity amidst so many women. The Book of Kings in the Bible tells us that he had 700 wives and 300 concubines and that his wives “turned away his heart”.

To be fair, our politicians, or some of them, do have a sense of humour. The trouble is that lately they have been so busy shouting and abusing each other across the floor of the House that they have forgotten how to laugh, or make others laugh.

In the old days, when parliamentary debates were conducted in a more dignified manner we had MPs who could send both sides of the House into peals of laughter by some innocent remark. There was, for example, the late Piloo Mody who, apart from his witty utterances, caused amusement by occupying two seats in the House when he was entitled to only one.

There was the late Raj Narain who made history by defeating Indira Gandhi at the polls. He even served for a while as a Union Minister and generated much merriment by his outlandish attire.

And there was the late Babu Jagjivan Ram who blandly declared that he had forgotten to file his income-tax returns for 10 years. People laughed, but not those who were income-tax payers and whose ITOs would not have appreciated such a joke had they emulated Babuji.

Dr Subramaniam Swamy, when he was a minister, said something funny almost every day without realising that he had done so, but it made newspaper readers laugh.

Mr Narasimha Rao, his stern visage notwithstanding, has a wry sense of humour. Once, when the Opposition was going for him hammer and tong, for having sold the country to foreigners, he quipped: ‘Who is going to buy this country’?

What I found incredibly funny was the Congress (I) under the “pouting P.M.” promised to “roll back” prices within a 100 days. I am still laughing though it hurts my purse as well as my sides.

REALPOLITIK

Poll without war and waves
P. Raman

The worst nightmare for the contemporary Indian politician is the prospect of having to fight a normal election. For long, they have abdicated their role as catalytic agents of progress and change. Neither do they have any credible record on which they could seek votes. This leaves the politician with the only option of helplessly waiting for an election ‘wave’ activated by jingoism, caste and religious hatred.

When the wave god fails them, the parties strive hard to invent them. Look at some of the headlines in the past few weeks: ‘BJP to bank on terror law mantra’, ‘SP to gain from charges against UP ministers’, ‘BJP to use war gains to win poll’, ‘Rajnath’s MBC plank to break SP, BSP vote banks’, ‘Terrorist attack gives new poll plank to BJP’. Come elections, efforts to whip up emotional issues that would submerge all other drawbacks of the adversaries would turn more frantic.

Apparently, this is a reflection of the politicians’ lack of confidence in their own performance. Ruling parties have nothing credible to show to the voters as their achievement. The opposition fails to set forth any viable alternatives except routinely assailing the governments for their non-performance, mismanagement and failures. Compulsive globalisation has made ideological or policy debates irrelevant. Any such intellectual exercise is dismissed as global blasphemy and those who venture it are condemned as ‘dinosaurs’.

The new world fora like WTO have not only robbed the nations of their sovereign right to decide their own taxation and investment decisions but has enforced a regime of readymade micro economic agenda. The rigid framework does not provide any room for improvements and innovation. Thus, even the election manifestos of mainstream parties can only emphasise ‘more efficient’ or ‘quick’ implementation.

Since globalisation has been accompanied by the emergence of a single super power order, our foreign policy has also lost its flexibility and diverse options. All this invariably restricts the ability of the contending political parties to offer alternative programmes to the voters. They try to make up for the loss of real issues by introducing trivial ones. Simultaneously, the consumerism-induced new lifestyle has led to a series of attitudinal and behavioural changes among the dominant upper and middle classes. They have given new definitions to the concept of an ideal politician.

Three decades back, old Gandhians and Sarvodayites had become ‘nice misfits’. Now the plight of the honest politician who refuses to resort to quick-fix solutions is still worse. Madan Lal Khurana, with all his crucial role in building the BJP in Delhi, has been left high and dry just for his plain speaking. Instead, smart operators with right connections are taking over. Political parties no more find it profitable to nominate those with personal stature built on years of sacrifice and simple life style.

The changing popular mindset, aided by mindless glorification of those like the ‘page-three’ celebrities, has turned the decent politician into a ‘nice misfit’ in this fast moving technological era. All admiration is reserved for the individual achievers and go-getters. Such candidates are expected to provide similar quick material rewards to their electors. Thus, political parties prefer Pappu Yadavs, who could use their network to mop up the necessary additional votes to win elections, to a clean leader with a high reputation.

This is how the new theory of ‘winnability criterion’ has gained ground in the present day political parlance. Political parties give overriding priority to winnability in preference to other qualities like loyalty, commitment and service to the party. Earlier, gangsters’ services were accepted to herd voters around. Then they themselves were made legislators and ministers - as in the BJP government in UP. The undue stress on winnability may lead to post-poll defections when parties fail to maintain a trouble-free majority - as in UP and now in Chhattisgarh.

Next month’s assembly elections epitomise this sad predicament of the political parties in an issueless election. With a pathetic record of performance, the ruling parties have been trying to create local ‘waves’. In UP, the most crucial electoral war theatre, this ding-dong battle between the BJP and the opposition has been in sharper focus. When one is prevented from taking up the real problems of the state’s lower classes due to the new economic dogmatism, the best way is to embarrass the rival sides with relatively trivial issues.

The opposition seems to have redrawn its strategy with regard to such war of nerves. Barring issues like Ayodhya, they have begun carefully avoiding confrontation with the government. In UP, the first case was Rajnath Singh’s move to announce a sectoral reservation for the most backwards among the OBCs and the Scheduled Castes. Yadavas and Jatavas, mainstay of the support base of Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayawati respectively, have been the chief beneficiaries of reservation. Singh’s special quota for the MBCs aimed at precipitating a vertical split within the ranks of the two rival parties.

But neither Mulayam nor Mayawati fell into the trap. Instead they hailed the decision as their ‘victory’ because the BJP, which had opposed the Mandal report as it amounted to dividing the Hindu society, has now finally endorsed the principle of reservation. The terrorist attack on Parliament has been another issue which the BJP wanted to turn into a major election plank. Its leaders, anticipating an adverse response from the opposition, linked it with the latter’s allergy for POTO.

However, a vote-conscious opposition refused to bite the BJP bait. Instead, Mulayam Singh Yadav tried to wrest the initiative by suggesting some kind of a hot pursuit. Then came the war threat to Pakistan through massive troop movement. The BJP calculated that such a move will create the right kind of political atmosphere in UP and other three states. The initial adverse reaction from the opposition had further encouraged the BJP to make it another Kargil triumph at hustings. But here too, the opposition outsmarted the ruling party. Such poll-eve strategic emotional battles in which no one wants to concede any special advantage to others, mark an interesting turn in election politics.

No analysis of the ensuing poll scene will be complete without mentioning the widely held misconception about its larger political implications. If the NDA parties suffer a major defeat, it is bound to affect the Vajpayee government’s credibility. However, it is absurd to presume that such a rout would mark the fall of the government. It will not because the present establishment at the centre is working on entirely different dynamics.

TRENDS & POINTERS

The tongue can reveal when you are lying

Researchers may have discovered a new technique for detecting untruths as they trip off the liar’s tongue.

People’s faces could be scanned with the camera, without their knowledge, while they were asked questions like “Are you carrying a weapon?” or “Did you pack your own luggage?” Reuters

New study shows heart can repair itself

In a study that turns on its head the traditional view that the heart cannot help heal itself, scientists have found evidence that the organ may indeed harbour stem-cell reserves capable of regenerating damaged tissue.

Their study of men who received heart transplants from female donors revealed that primitive cells from the recipients migrated into the donor hearts, after which new muscle cells and small blood vessels formed.

The researchers were able to pin down the phenomenon by finding a considerable number of cells in the donor heart that bore the Y chromosome (the male sex chromosome), which could only have come from the transplant recipients themselves.

Piero Anversa of New York Medical College said his team believes primitive cells moved to the donor hearts from the remaining portions of the transplant recipients’ own hearts, although the study does not prove this.

Anversa explained that his team could not rule out the possibility that the cells travelled to the heart from the bone marrow, which contains the stem cells that give rise to blood.

Still, he said, the study “indicates that the heart possesses a population of cardiac stem cells...implying that the heart has the capacity to regenerate itself.”

And that idea, Anversa noted, is at odds with the cardiology “dogma” that there is no such thing as cardiac stem cells — populations of immature cells within the heart that have the potential to divide, proliferate and replace mature cells killed off by heart attack and disease. Reuters

75 YEARS AGO

Cantonment employees

SPIRITUAL NUGGETS

The highest form of freedom carries with it the greatest measure of discipline and humility. Freedom that comes from discipline and humility cannot be denied. Unbridled licence is a sign of vulgarity alike to self and one's neighbours.

There will have to be rigid and iron discipline before we achieve anything great and enduring and that discipline will not come by mere academic argument and appeal to reason and logic. Discipline is learnt in the school of adversity.

— Mahatma Gandhi, Young India, June 3, 1926, June 24, 1926

***

If knowledge does not liberate the self from the self, Then ignorance is better than such knowledge. Love is here like the blood in my veins and skin, He has annihilated me and filled me only with Him. His fire has penetrated all the atoms or my body, Of 'me' only my name remains, the rest is Him.

— Jalaludin Rumi

***

When the mystery of realising that the mystic is one with the Divine - is revealed to you, you will understand that you are no other than God.... Then you will, see all your actions to be His actions and your essence to be His essence.... There is nothing except His face, wheresoever you turn, there is the face of God.

— Ibn' Arabi

***

A bird I am: this body was my cage, But I have flown leaving it as a token.

— Al Ghanali - From British Museum MS Or 7561, F.86

***

O worthless and ignorant mortal, Fix thy heart for ever and ever on God; Remember, O Nanak, the Lord who made Thee; Then, in the end, He will abide with thee.

— Guru Arjan Dev, Sukmani Sahib, Ashtpadi 4, shloka I

***

The more I dashed my hands and feet against the waves, The more woefully perplexed did I feel, But when I ceased to struggle and lay motionless, The waves of their free will drifted me across to the shore.

— Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Tarjuman al-Quran