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On
Record Ideological roadblocks
on the road to peace |
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Profile Reflections Diversities
— Delhi Letter Kashmir
Diary
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On Record
He had left the Congress at the peak of anti-Congressism but today rues the day he did so for he believes it is the third front which helped the BJP to grow from a two-member party to its present status. In an interview to The Tribune, he explains the party’s future plans for the coming Lok Sabha polls. Q: Now that the Congress has got down to the serious business of building an alternate coalition, how easy or difficult is the task? A: It is neither easy nor difficult. A concerted attempt is being made to forge an alternate secular front. The potential for a multi-level alliance is huge and we are trying our level-best to tap it. We need allies in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra. We have a choice to make in all the four states. In Bihar, we are already in alliance with the Rashtriya Janata Dal. In Maharashtra, too, we are in alliance with the Nationalist Congress Party. We are thinking of a tie-up with the DMK in Tamil Nadu and we are yet to make a final choice in UP. Q: But don’t you think that UP is the key to any alternate alliance or front that you are envisaging? A: I agree, but in UP, we are yet to take a clear and unambiguous decision. The Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party are both secular. But there is a huge political conflict between them. Ideally, it will be better to have adjustments with both. But we are yet to decide. Q: Will it be possible to have both on board since they have stated that you have to make your choice clear? A: I admit there’s a big problem there. We are already in some kind of an alliance with SP leader Mulayam Singh Yadav...the Congress is lending outside support to his government. However, we need to decide in the context of the Lok Sabha polls. Q: What about the view in your party that the BSP might be a better choice since it has a transferable vote and greater presence? A: No comment. Q: How easy will it be to forge an alliance in Maharashtra? How reliable is Sharad Pawar as there is talk that the BJP is also wooing him? A: Alliance building is never an easy process. But I cannot react to rumours. Q: How do you plan to iron out your differences with the DMK? A: Today the task before the country is to protect the secular fabric. Q: How will this alliance shape up? A: We have a positive view of the potential alliance with the DMK. But the proposed broad secular alliance will be multi-pronged. We can have an understanding with the Left parties at the national level but not a formal alliance before the polls. With the others, it is possible for a pre-poll alliance. Q: Is the issue of the proposed coalition’s leadership settled or wide open? A: We are clear about the leadership of our party. But how can we settle the leadership of the alliance even before it is formed? This can be settled only through talks with the allies. Q: At Shimla last July, the Congress clearly spoke of a Sonia Gandhi-led alliance. Is there no dilution in your stand? A: In Shimla there were no pre-conditions just as now. Q: If your alliance does not project a leader and the other side projects Atal Bihari Vajpayee, will it not put you at a disadvantage? A: Look what happened in the Chhattisgarh assembly election. We had a chief ministerial candidate, the BJP did not. Yet, the BJP won the election. You offer an alternate in terms of an alliance of parties and ideology and not necessarily in terms of prime ministerial candidate. Q: But what about the perception that the BJP is more adept at building a coalition and dealing with allies? A: Where is the NDA in Uttar Pradesh? The BJP is a poor third in Tamil Nadu and has no allies in that state as yet. In Kerala, it is a poor third force and the same is true of West Bengal. In fact, after the announcement of an early Lok Sabha poll, the BJP has lost the DMK and the MDMK. We believe the mood in the country is very much against the NDA government and there is a strong anti-incumbency sentiment against it...it is for the Congress and the allies to tap it. Q: The Pranab Mukherjee report has revealed that there were a host of inhouse problems which could have been avoided. Any comment? A: The basic fact remains that it is anti-incumbency which did us in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Q: But is the Congress really prepared to face an early Lok Sabha poll? It is besieged with internal problems... look at Punjab and Kerala. A: These things are part of any political process. Look at the BJP...why did BJP change Keshubhai Patel and why did Kalyan Singh leave the party? But we are confident of settling these problems. They have arisen in the past and will continue to rise in the future as well. In democracies, you cannot wish away factionalism. As for Punjab, we admit there is a huge problem there and we are trying to settle it. So many formulae have been discussed but we cannot disclose them as no single formula has found acceptance with both the groups. We are trying to attend to this problem and are confident of settling it early. In Kerala, Karunakaran and Antony have been leaders of two factions for 30 years and yet they have co-existed in the same party. Q: But is it not a fact that infighting in Punjab is only helping the Akalis? A:
When the Akali Dal was the ruling party, Badal and Tohra were
perpetually fighting, they made up only after their defeat. |
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Ideological roadblocks
on the road to peace THE Hot Peace among different communities of the world, in the beginning of the 21st century, marked by its advent by the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre towers in New York, is, in a sense, more explosive than the earlier Cold War between nation-states in the 20th century. Ethno-national and religious ideologies characterise the Hot Peace era today whereas the Cold War era was ostensibly dominated by clash of secular ideologies — liberal democracy versus communism. As observed by Professor Hans Kung in his book “Global Responsibility”, there can be “no peace among the nations without peace among the religions”. The pathways to peace among ethnic, ethno-religious and religious communities are dotted by ideological roadblocks some of which are homogenisation and assimilation, evangelism (religious, political and economic), the clash of civilisations theory, and globalisation both as an economic dispensation and an ideology. Class contradictions that characterised social reality in the 20th century, down to the collapse of the Soviet Union, has given way to ethnic, ethno-religious and religious contradictions which, depending upon the variables of time and space, often take on fundamentalist colours and contours. Different communities and groups are becoming more and more conscious of their respective self-defined identities based on religion, ethnicity, language, etc. These identities are perceived to be endangered by the above-mentioned ideological forces and trends. Western civilisation, now on the way out, based on the dichotomy of church and state, of the spiritual and the material, has been, for that very reason, incapacitated to resolve the ethnic, ethno-religious, and religious contradictions. Nationalism held out the hope that all other identities would be subsumed under the overarching ‘national’ identity. Marxism postulated that ethnic, ethno-religious and religious tensions would get transformed into economic categories and get resolved as such. But the converse has happened in the past few decades — class contradictions are now getting mediated through ethnic, ethno-religious and religious contradictions. Homogenisation and assimilation are perceived by ethnic, ethno-religious and religious communities the world over as twin threats to their self-defined identities. In the Indian context, to quote just one instance, the continual refrain of the protagonists of Hindutva, as against the liberal Vajpayee line, that ‘Sikhs are Hindus’ sends shock waves among the Sikhs, providing political adrenalin to Sikh fundamentalists, apart from causing strains in the Akali-BJP alliance in Punjab, though the Akali leadership for reasons of political expediency prefers to keep mum. Evangelism in its various incarnations — religious, political, economic — has also been impinging upon inter-religious and inter-community relations. If religious evangelism has exhibited, in violent forms, its agenda of conversion from one faith to another, political evangelism attempted conversion to communism on the one side, and to Western-type social democracy on the other side. And then, there is economic evangelism in its latest form of globalisation, striving hard to subordinate economies of the developing and underdeveloped countries to the economies of the developed countries, following the dictates of IMF and the World Bank. Writes Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist of the World Bank in his eye-opening book “Globalisation and its Discontents” (2002): “If, in too many instances, the benefits of globalisation have been less than its advocates claim, the price paid has been greater, as the environment has been destroyed, as political processes have been corrupted, and as the rapid pace of change has not allowed countries time for cultural adaptation. The crises that have brought in their wake massive unemployment have, in turn, been followed by longer-term problems of social dissolution — from urban violence in Latin America to ethnic conflicts in other parts of the world, such as Indonesia”. There is an inherent tendency in evangelism to posit the We/They polarity in different forms, most of which — through not all — then lead to divinising We and demonising They. We, then, presume to be divinely ordained and historically destined to eliminate the Other. This is how earlier the Jews were treated, though both Judaism and Christianity seem to have realised that for them, now, it is time to meet, in the words of Revd. Marcus Braybrooke, President of the World Congress of Faiths (UK). So, now the target has shifted to Islam in the post-9/11 era. The West’s renewed focus on Islam as its primary target is rationalised as the inevitable clash of civilisations (Christian versus Islamic) by Samuel P. Huntington and other ideologists of Western civilisation. On the other side are far-sighted thinkers for whom the fading out of Western civilisation is essential for evolving multi-civilisational global dispensation of the third millennium, free from ethnic, ethno-religious and religious contradictions which Euro-centric evangelising Western civilisation failed to resolve. Globalisation as an ideology has bigger potential than its economic form for sudden violent eruptions, often in ethnic and religious forms. Globalisation is fast fostering a consumerist culture, propped up by credit card borrowings, the illusory prosperity of which is benumbing the voices of discontent, dissent and protest against the exploitative system and is de-sensitising the marginalised, the deprived and the other have-nots to the earlier redemptive concepts of revolt and revolution leading to their collective mobilisation which, now thanks to globalisation as an ideology, is suffering diffusion, dispersal and dissipation, but nevertheless getting repressed in subconscious mind. Like Freudian repressions, the repressed discontents have the potential of sudden volcanic eruptions — with religion, ethnicity, language and regional factors as the new rallying points — in unpredictable places, times and manners. The system, without coping with the casual factors, in their specificities, retaliates by artificially fitting such violent eruptions into generalised stereotypes of religious fundamentalism, cross-border terrorism, internal mafiadom, etc. That wouldn’t
help. The writer, a former Vice-Chancellor of Punjabi University, Patiala, is President, Guru Gobind Singh Foundation, Chandigarh |
Profile The BJP unit of UP is in tatters and needs a backward class leader to boost its poll prospects. In the event of Kalyan Singh returning to the BJP, it is certain to gain in the Lok Sabha elections. He has already been acknowledged as an unquestioned leader of “Lodhis”, comprising about 3 per cent of the electorate in UP. His supporters say, as the BJP’s support base is confined only to “BBT” ( Brahmin, Baniya and Thakur), it needs the backing of OBCs at the hustings. Kalyan Singh had two terms as Chief Minister lasting for two years each and both were marked by controversies. His first term began in 1991 after the BJP secured a massive majority in the assembly elections but his government was dismissed following the demolition of Babri Masjid. Had the BJP-RSS-VHP combine desisted from the disastrous course, he would have ruled for full five years. It was generally believed that he was against the suicidal step but was helpless in the face of mounting pressure from the leaders of the three organisations. Kalyan proved during his short-lived rule that he was an able administrator. He established the rule of law in the chaotic state and there were no communal riots. He also firmly stopped mass copying in the examinations. Kalyan Singh's second term began amidst controversy after he split both the BSP and the Congress and formed a coalition with the breakaway MLAs of both the parties. Earlier, according to a rotational arrangement with Kanshi Ram, the BSP and BJP nominees were to hold office for six months by turn. Mayawati became the Chief Minister for first six months but after completion of the period, she refused to accept Kalyan Singh as her successor. The BSP-BJP rotational understanding was on the verge of collapse when the twin splits were engineered enabling Kalyan Singh to acquire a majority and head the state government. Kalyan Singh's second term was also marked by dissidence in the state BJP unit. His bias against upper caste reflected in his clash with his cabinet colleagues, Kalraj Mishra, Lalji Tandon and party president, Rajnath Singh. Also he picked up cudgels against the Prime Minister. From the sleepy town of Atrauli in Aligarh district to UP assembly has been a long and arduous journey for Kalyan Singh, now in his seventies. This backward caste leader joined the high-caste, Hindu-dominated RSS on the eve of independence while in school and rose from the ranks under the tutelage of disciplinarians like Deendayal Upadhayaya and Nanaji Deshmukh. He says he had to struggle at every step to make his way in politics in the RSS-dominated Jana Sangh and later the BJP. “I was born in a kisan’s house in a village. Trodding the zigzag path, I have travelled a long way to attain an important stature in the state”. Kalyan Singh emerged as an important OBC leader and has the potential to make a dent in Mayawati’s Dalit vote bank. Evidently, the BJP needs him more than ever before as Dalit votes hold the key to electoral success in the state. Kalyan was first elected to the UP assembly in 1967. Since then, except 1980, he has been representing Atrauli. He is widely noted for his polemics and debating skills but shot into fame towards the fag end of the eighties as the Leader of the Opposition. It is said that the opportunity to excel in that role was often provided to him by Mulayam Singh Yadav. |
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Reflections And now, who has already survived away from her own establishment and her support base for nearly a year. I have declined to fall in with love with Manhattan and its shopping malls! For me, it is a case of contractual-time-bound- live-in-relationship of convenience-and- circumstances, with of course noble intentions and firm professional commitments. In United Nations, I came to the post as Civilian Police Adviser in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations. Truly an assignment of international policing: Totally opposite to my Delhi-centric focussed work. The current spreadsheet of the work ranges from East Timor in East Asia to Kosovo in the Balkans. To Liberia, Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of Congo in Africa. And further on to Cyprus, Afghanistan, and Georgia, and with a few more already under assessment such as Sudan, former Ivory Coast and Burundi. To be exact, as of date, my Police Division has deployed a total of 4,476 senior police officers, from 63 countries, in these Peacekeeping Missions. They are performing executive, advisory, planning, training, mentoring, monitoring, reform and restructuring roles, depending on the mandates given by the Security Council in each individual case with a budget of over $ 2 billion per annum. All this entails revival of communities/countries ravaged by decades of internecine wars, violence of the most gruesome kind, corruption to the stage of not a dollar left in the national exchequer, exploitation of anything and any one possible — men, women and, children. Natural resources raped to its intestines to keep the conflicts and the warfare alive. Just for those few individuals who are desperate to stay in power. The police in these territories fends for itself. In tattered uniforms it robs and extorts. It violates human life with impunity. They are a necessary evil. Life with or without them is at risk. They were recruited, whenever, as a patronage. Never trained in the formal sense. The militia at times comprising kidnapped child soldiers are on the streets with guns terrorising hungry people. There are hundreds of refugee camps where the humanitarian agencies are at work providing food, clothing, shelter, medical care and security. The current generations are less schooled than the older ones. There are no industries worth the mention except those of exploitation of natural resources varying from minerals and oil to human trafficking. The prison systems are all forced labour. In fact these are places, excuses to find forced slaves. They work on the lands and farms of the rich and powerful. And if any of them show signs of escape or defiance, are shackled for life. At some place it was seen where a safe building did not exist a 6-foot hole was dug and the person put in with his head uncovered. And dependent on the circumstances it could just be capped. The women prisons predominantly comprise women accused of adultery. If they pay the cost of 13 cows to the men, (whose property they were) their imprisonment periods could be reduced. These women often come in with their adolescent girls due to their vulnerability. The court system is either non-existent or it is itself a place of finance generation, which pays for them, the militia or the government (sic) than which delivers justice. Hence it is source to extort. The women and children are the biggest victims of these circumstances. They are gang raped with impunity. The spread of AIDS is well known. The children, whether AIDS affected or otherwise, are needed for the internal wars. So what human rights are we talking of in this new century? And at the bottom of it all is, power, territorial control and resource exploitation. It’s all about ‘self-protection’ and ‘self-survival’ and ‘self-promotion’. How is the human being different today from those in the Stone Age? And unless we the international community makes this the year (and years of) ’Valuing Values’ and incorporating newer systems of evaluation on a par with the kinds of GDPs., i.e. Gross National Product...or the HDEs.. i.e. the Human Development Indexes, in terms of Gross-National-Happiness i.e. a new GNPs or still one of Gross National Values, i.e. GNVs, we will not be able to bring many countries and territories out of what has been narrated. But how about India showing the way to the world in this? Before we attempt to do so, we should be extra vigilant in not producing or nurturing, any more Telgis. Instead we can strive to bring forth a surge of moral spirit of the kind which existed in the past. In the spirit of Gandhi, Lajpat Rai, Sardar Patel, Maulana Azad, Kasturba Bhai, Rani Luxmi Bhai with the missionary spirit of Mother Teresa...Jai Hind. |
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Diversities — Delhi Letter Brushing aside temptations of the varied kind, I repeated the vow — no nights out for me, even on the new year eve and huddled and cuddled myself to bed just as the clock struck 12. And next morning when I asked the circuit people how deadly was their partying, you have to believe me that a majority of them sheepishly admitted staying indoors, many even adding that they had to double up with their pillows! Sisters Uma and Aruna had hosted the new year party at their Defence Colony home. Uma threw an invite but with one condition in tow — come along with a dish — man-made or otherwise (see, things have reached unromantic levels in this capital city). With me doubling as the cook I’d thought of opting for the singletons’ party — many are actually opting for the singleton marital status, stating rather loud and clear that double stories are tumbling and crashing overnight — where towing along was absolutely prohibited. Mix and match right there, on the hot spot, so to say. But as soon as I cried aloud that there’s this fog all along the way, my hosts shooed me off the guest list, mumbling that I was at my boring best! “You’re like my sister Radha who hates late night parties and the circuit dos...” was Kuchipudi dancer Kaushalya’s verdict, who'd partied along with Raja Reddy and chicken (no, he didn’t chicken out — how can he with his two wives, Radha and Kaushalya. It was the chicken-leg-breast -dish that she’d lovingly spread out for the new year start). Making up for
Dec 31 The next evening, that is Jan 1, saw many making up for Dec 31. The SAHMAT programme was largely attended despite the biting cold. Shubha Mudgal rendered these powerful lines of Firaq Gorakhpuri: “Sar Zameen Hind par / Aqwam-e-alam ke Firaq/ Kaflai baste gai / Hindustan banta gaya! Jammu and Kashmir’s former Chief Secretary Ashok Jaitley with current wife Sabina Sud, mime supremo Maya Rao, Safdar's widow Moloyshree who even staged Jan Natya Manch’s play ‘Woh bol uthi’ on women working in factories, artists , Shamshad, Veer Munshi and others were present. Salman Rudhdie couldn’t attend the concert because of flight delay , but he paid a courtesy call on SAHMAT volunteers the very next day at Vithalbhai Patel House office. He sat and talked to them over cups of tea. Yes, Rushdie is in the Capital but his movement is completely curtailed because of threats to his life. This reminds me to mention that another celebrity is landing here. Mallika Sarabhai has been permitted by the courts to stage her scheduled performances in New Delhi on Jan 4 and 5. |
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Kashmir Diary There
is new hope around as the curtain goes up on the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC)
at Islamabad. I am reminded of the Colombo summit in July ’98. No other summit attracted foreign mediapersons by the hundred. They were waiting for the Indo-Pak bilateral meet with as much tension as those who covered the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Geneva in November ’85. The tension was such that I remember a top hawk from the Ministry of External Affairs slipping well past midnight into the room of an Indian journalist who had met Pakistani officials earlier that evening. That hawk said he had dropped in for a drink but he was hardly able to disguise his eagerness to know everything that had been said and implied by the Pakistanis. Even the arrangements for the press conferences and briefings, including those that followed the bilateral meeting, became contentious and both sides soon decided that journalists from the other country were not welcome. That left journalists either ignoring the other version — as desired — or scrabbling on the phone with friends from the media of the other country: “Kya kaha bhai tumhare logon
ne?” What an opportunity was lost in the years following that summit. Indeed, having stayed in Kashmir for prolonged periods since ’99, I cannot help thinking morosely of the many lives that have been wasted since. It was at the Colombo summit that, contrary to the expectations generated by the nuclear tests, Vajpayee reached out to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif with an olive branch. It was too sudden an initiative and so it was only on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly that the ice was truly broken and the road to Lahore paved. By the time Vajpayee travelled to Lahore by bus in February ’99, there was such euphoria of friendship that it was difficult to reconcile that mood with the one that had prevailed at Colombo just seven months before. I had positioned myself beside the door of the large hall at Colombo’s Taj hotel, which was packed for Vajpayee’s press conference immediately after his bilateral meeting. From there, I watched him emerge from the meeting room down the corridor and walk to the hall and up the side aisle to the microphone. Many of us have since got used to watching Vajpayee walk extremely slowly but I have never seen him walk so dejectedly, head downcast. In retrospect, it is clear how much building peace with Pakistan meant to him. He has persevered even after the long pauses caused by the Kargil assault and the terrorists’ attack on Parliament House on December 13, 2001. The Islamabad summit is beginning with the same agenda that Vajpayee has remained firmly committed to and which the tensions within Pakistan have derailed since ’99. We are not only talking of trade, cultural interaction and the Delhi-Lahore bus link but also now of a bus across the Line of Control through Uri and even the possibility of creating a parallel European Community in South Asia. I call these past few years a waste because, although Pakistan still maintains that everything hinges on resolving the “core issue” of Kashmir, its actions over the past couple of months tell a different story. Even General Musharraf — who came to power in the mess that followed Kargil — now seems to be reconciled to India’s consistent line: that all contentions will get sorted out once an atmosphere of trust and friendship is established. Not only does Pakistan seem willing for a bus link across the Line of Control — something that Nawaz Sharif’s track two negotiator Niaz Naik had reportedly nixed in the spring of ’99 — it even seems willing to watch from the sidelines as India negotiates a solution with a section of Kashmiri secessionists that Pakistan does not trust. Although Pakistan Information Minister Sheikh Rashid stated unambiguously during his November visit to Delhi that Pakistan recognises only Ali Shah Geelani as the Hurriyat Conference, Pakistan is silent on India’s decision to start dialogue with the Hurriyat Conference headed by Maulana Abbas Ansari, which Geelani split a few months ago. The tremendous goodwill generated by Vajpayee’s trip to Islamabad will have a more lasting impact than his trip to Lahore by bus. |
This earth is higher than all heavens; this is the greatest school in the universe. — Swami Vivekananda As God blesses, so is one blessed. — Guru Nanak It is only logical that the pauperisation of our soul and the soul of society coincide with the pauperisation of the environment. One is the cause and the reflection of the other. — Paulo Soleri Virtue and vice, religion or irreligion is a thing of the heart. Good or bad actions have to do altogether with the state of your mind. They have nothing to do with your good physical actions. To reform yourself therefore it is not your body but your mind that has to be rehabilitated, reconstituted, regenerated. — Swami A. Parthasarathy |
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POLITICS is a weird game. A few years back former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Kalyan Singh had turned into a bete noire of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and called him “a tired and retired leader”. Now he stands in the front row at a BJP workers meeting in Lucknow to lyrically greet the PM on the eve of his birthday: “Tum jiyo hazaron saal, aur sal ke din hon pachas hazar” (you may live for a thousand years, with each year comprising 50,000 days), indicating strong possibility of his home coming. Barely five years back, Kalyan Singh had adopted a non-cooperative attitude in the Prime Minister’s election campaign in the Lucknow constituency. His no-holds-bar hostility against PM led to his expulsion from the BJP and the former CM floated his own party, Rashtriya Kranti Party. Kalyan Singh now appears to have shed his hostility against the Prime Minister. To everyone’s surprise, a beaming Kalyan Singh stepped forward to greet the Prime Minister at the meeting.
THE year that has gone by has been most unusual for my family and me. It has been one of extremes both personally and professionally. From the fifth floor of my Delhi Police Headquarters I found myself on the planes and taking elevators to the 22nd floor of the United Nations, early in the year. Unbelievable indeed for a home hooked person like me! And one who had a dependable and very organised support system to work almost round the clock. Accompanied by rather uncompromising habits of food, dress, work, living, walking, exercise and writing, etc.