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A contentious ruling
India, Pak must talk |
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End the deadlock
Nepal under Khanal
Living in heaven
UK’s
role in Egyptians’ suppression
Quiet heroines whose courage kept uprising going
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A contentious ruling
THE central government is certain to file a revision petition against the Supreme Court ruling that held that mere membership of a banned organisation would not be enough to hold a person guilty of terrorist acts. The ruling was given on a petition filed by a suspected member of the banned United Liberation Front of Assam ( ULFA) Arup Bhuiyan. The latter had been held under the Terrorist & Disruptive Activities ( Prevention) Act. The apex court held that the evidence produced against him was weak and the entire case against him seemed to be based on his purported confession made before the police, which is admissible under the anti-terror laws. Taking a dim view of the manner in which the police extracts confessions, the court ruled that unless a person indulges in an act of violence, incites people to violence or creates public disorder, his life and liberty cannot be compromised. Even Joan of Arc, the Bench observed, confessed to being a witch after she was tortured. That there is some merit in what the Supreme Court observed is unquestionable. A case in point is the plight of 14 people, accused of being members of the banned Students’ Islamic Movement of India ( SIMI) and charged with their role in the Jaipur blasts in 2008. The detained, according to media reports, include an elderly physician and a labourer. Their only fault, established during the trial so far is that they allegedly attended meetings addressed by a person described by the police as the mastermind behind the serial blasts. While misuse of the draconian provisions of the anti-terror laws and the very real possibility of persecution of the innocent were factors prompting the ruling, the dismay of the government is also not unreasonable. The police needs to deal with facilitators, given the difficulties in apprehending the terrorists. Between the government and court, however, it should be possible to evolve a better mechanism and improved checks and balances, so that the innocent do not suffer and yet, national security is not compromised. It is necessary at the same time to ensure that security agencies are adequately trained and equipped to collect scientific and better evidence.
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India, Pak must talk
External
Affairs Minister S. M. Krishna has clearly hinted that the doors for India-Pakistan sustained engagement have opened with the Foreign Secretaries of the two countries having discussed the subject in a cordial atmosphere in Thimphu, Bhutan, on Monday on the sidelines of the SAARC Council of Ministers’ Conference. Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao and her Pakistani counterpart Salman Bashir discussed the modalities of a fresh dialogue process and how to start building bridges of trust, understanding and mutual confidence which could be seen after the Composite Dialogue Process that got snapped in the wake of the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack. This was what the extremist elements in Pakistan wanted because an atmosphere of tension between the two neighbours suited their destructive designs. Unfortunately, the Pakistan establishment has been using these elements as part of its policy to achieve its geopolitical objectives. Now it claims that it has launched a drive against terrorists and extremists in the interest of peace and stability in Pakistan. But has it really done so? Why is it not pursuing these evil forces with the same vigour as noticed in the case of the Taliban and Al-Qaida? Why has it not brought to book all those involved in the Mumbai mayhem despite enough evidence provided by India? Why is Pakistan allowing many terrorist training camps to remain intact despite its pledge not to allow its territory to be used for terrorist attacks on India? Why is it helping these elements indirectly to sustain themselves by changing the names of their outfits? These questions are bound to be raised during the Foreign Minister-level talks that may be held between India and Pakistan in the near future. Those who argue that there is no point in holding any kind of dialogue with Pakistan under the prevailing circumstances miss the vital point that there is no better alternative to talks. Pakistan’s insistence on calling it the Composite Dialogue Process is pointless. All the issues that have been coming in the way of normalisation of India-Pakistan relations can be discussed in any dialogue process. What is important is that the two countries must remain engaged, giving precedence to promoting people-to-people contacts, trade relations and cultural exchanges, which together can create an atmosphere when it will be easier to tackle sensitive issues like cross-border terrorism and Kashmir.
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End the deadlock
EVEN though Tuesday’s all-party meeting convened by Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee on the impasse in Parliament over the Opposition demand for a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) probe into the 2G Spectrum scam remained inconclusive, reports of an apparent breakthrough at the meeting seem to suggest a thaw in the deadlock. The fact that both the government and the Opposition have expressed their readiness to resume the functioning of Parliament is good news. After the meeting, Mr Mukherjee, the Centre’s key troubleshooter, has said that no price is too high to let Parliament function. Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Sushma Swaraj has said that the government is likely to convene another meeting on the issue before the Budget session of Parliament starts from February 21. Other leaders such as Mr Sitraram Yechury (CPM), Mr Gurudas Dasgupta (CPM) and Mr D. Raja (CPI) have all emphasised the need for resuming the functioning of Parliament. It is not yet clear how the government intends to break the deadlock. However, one possible solution that the government is contemplating is to move a substantive motion in Parliament when it meets for the Budget session. A substantive motion is one that reflects the sense of the House. It is a reflection of the collective wisdom of Parliament. There has been a national outcry over the disruption of Parliament’s winter session. The Centre held that there was no need for a JPC because the 2G Spectrum allocation scam was already being probed by the Public Accounts Committee, the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate. The Supreme Court is also monitoring the CBI probe. The BJP-led Opposition, however, held that a scandal of such a magnitude needed to be probed by the JPC in all its ramifications. It upped its antenna after the arrest of former Union Telecom Minister A. Raja, his private secretary R.K. Chandolia and former Telecom Secretary Siddharth Behura. In a democracy, there are bound to be differences between the government and the Opposition over any issue. However, these are best resolved through debate and discussion in Parliament and not in the streets. We can strengthen democracy only by running Parliament effectively and not by disrupting the noble institution which is the chief repository of the people’s will. It is good that both sides have at last realised the imperative need for a meeting ground on running Parliament at any cost.
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The best way to destroy an enemy is to make him a friend. — Abraham Lincoln
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Nepal under Khanal MR Jhalanath Khanal’s election as Prime Minister of Nepal on February 3, after 16 electoral rounds, ended the seven-month-old stalemate on government formation in the Himalayan country. It will be the third communist-led government in Nepal since the dethroning of monarchy in 2008. Mr Khanal’s election became possible due to an unexpected change in the Maoists’ tactics when its supreme leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal (Prachanda) withdrew from the prime ministerial race in favour of the chief of the rival communist party, the United Marxist Leninist (UML). This was a cleaver move based on a hurriedly arrived seven-point understanding between the Maoist and UML leaders. It was triggered by the surprise entry of a Madhesi (Terai) party leader, Mr Bijay Gachhadar, into the prime ministerial race aimed at spoiling the prospects of Mr Prachanda, securing the support of some of the Madhesi groups. If Mr Prachanda had continued in the race the possibility of either the Nepali Congress winning the prime ministership in the second count or the stalemate persisting could not be ruled out. Thus, by his move, Mr Prachanda not only avoided his personal defeat and frustration but also ensured a dominant say for him and his party in the running of the Khanal government under the seven-point understanding. The implementation of the understanding may not be very smooth as there are a couple of sensitive issues. Difficulties in the distribution of portfolios have already surfaced, as the Maoists wanted the portfolios of Home and Foreign Affairs. There are also tensions on the principle of rotation and “supervising mechanism” built into the seven points. A more sensitive issue, however, is related to the peace process; of integrating Maoist armed cadres into Nepal’s security forces. The understanding arrived at between the two leaders provide for the integration of Maoist combatants either as a “separate force” or an “alternative force combining the PLA and other security forces”. This is not acceptable to many within Mr Khanal’s UML or in the Nepali Congress and other parties. The army has serious reservations on any en-bloc integration of Maoist combatants into the security forces. They want individual induction only after scrutiny. These reservations have played an important role in obstructing the integration process to advance as the Maoists reject the army’s position but the major political parties like the Nepali Congress, the UML and some Madhesi groups endorse it. India and the US also prefer to go along with the army’s position and want to see a very small number of the Maoist combatants accommodated into Nepal’s security forces after close scrutiny at the individual level. The Maoists have not had an easy relationship with the UML in the past. Both parties have been rivals, engaged in capturing the leadership of the left in the Nepali political space and even poaching each other’s cadres. The Dahal-Khanal alliance forged under the seven-point understanding has been questioned within both these parties. While the Madhav Kumar Nepal and K.P. Oli groups have raised objections within the UML, one of the Maoist Vice Presidents, Mr Baburam Bhattarai, submitted a written dissent to Mr Prachanda on the withdrawal of his candidacy. The Nepali Congress and the Gachhadar-led Madhesi groups may also want to see this alliance collapse. The Maoist-UML alliance, however, looks far more stable than the previous UML-led government headed by Mr Madhav Nepal and supported by the Nepali Congress. The Maoists and the UML put together have comfortable numbers on their side —- 343 in a House of 600. They also got support from fringe left groups as well as breakaway Madhesi groups from the Sadbhawana Patrty and the Tarai Madhes Loktantrik Party, taking their tally to 368 that voted for Mr Khanal. There is a strong possibility of Mr Gachhadar’s rival faction led by Mr Upendra Yadav representing Madhes joining the Khanal government to take the number nearer to a two- thirds majority in the Constituent Assembly. If this happens, the finalisation of the Constitution and advancing of the peace process being promised by Mr Khanal and Mr Dahal will be considerably facilitated. This will end the specter of uncertainty and instability in Nepal. Patronage of power gives Mr Dahal and Mr Khanal an advantage in dealing with their intra-party dissenters. It may also be recalled that Mr Dahal, Mr Khanal and Mr Yadav have a certain compatibility with each other as was evident in the support extended by the latter two, in their personal capacities, to Mr Dahal in his futile exercise of sacking the Nepal Army Chief, General Katawal, in May 2009. If they could then carry their respective parties along on this issue the Maoists government could still be in power. The policy makers in South Block will have their own assessment of the Khanal-Dahal alliance, but to the dispassionate observers, both within and outside Nepal, this is the fourth major setback to Indian diplomacy. The first was the failure of the Karan Singh mission in April 2006, then came the “unexpected” victory of the Maoists in April 2008 elections, followed by the unprecedented rise of anti-Indianism in Nepal characterised by the pelting of stones on the Indian Ambassador, and now the formation of a Maoist-UML government. Indian diplomacy in Nepal in recent years seems to have been relying rather heavily on inept inputs of its intelligence agencies, personal prejudices and egoistic assessments of its diplomats and exaggerated obsession with China’s influence. It was widely believed during Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao’s visit to Nepal last month that India would accept any government there except the one to be headed by either Mr Dahal or Mr Khanal, the so-called pro-China communist leaders. The Maoists have publicly blamed Mr Gachhadar’s candidature for prime ministership as a move blessed by India to keep Mr Dahal and Mr Khanal out of power. It was this move that precipitated the alliance between Mr Dahal and Mr Khanal. Mr Dahal, while withdrawing his candidature, openly asserted that he was doing so to frustrate India’s interference in Nepalese affairs. China has naturally capitalised on India’s lapses by promptly identifying itself with the Khanal-Dahal alliance. India now clearly has two options in Nepal. It can pursue its present line and work with all those domestic forces that want to pull the Khanal government down and frustrate the writing of the Constitution and completion of the peace process. This will make Nepal unstable, damage India’s long-term interests and encourage China to expand and strengthen its strategic presence there. As an alternative, India can attempt a course correction and encourage the Nepali Congress and other Madhesi groups to join the Khanal government and shape the Constitution making and peace processes in a more constructive direction. A broad-based coalition will naturally reflect national consensus, restraint the dominant communist alliance from taking the polity solely in their chosen direction and make governance more democratic and
responsive.
The writer is Visiting Research Professor, Institute of South Asian Studies,
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Living in heaven
When I first moved to Dharampur I found great pleasure and joy when my visitors raved over the beauty of my house, the lovely location and the tremendous sense of peace and tranquillity. “I hope you realise that you are living in heaven,” many said. Yes, I did realise that I was living in heaven and I have written at length about the gurgling rivulets, the heavenly bird song and the wafting fireflies. But now, after six months when I have had a chance to deal with the nuts and bolts of daily living I raise a quizzical eyebrow when I hear this gushing. I have come to realise that like everything else in the world, my heaven too is not perfect. The first imperfection was with my water supply — it was sporadic and inadequate. As a result, the wisteria looks as if it has definitely seen better days, the hydrangeas, hardy as they are, seem tired with life and the geraniums look like something that the cat brought in. The second imperfection is with the erratic power supply. When I first settled in, there was a constant flicker in the lights .This was because a timber yard got its connection from the same line. A transformer took care of that. But amazingly there were frequent power cuts in what is touted as a surplus state as far as power generation is concerned. I found a way out by investing in a small inverter. But this is no help when the lights go off in the middle of an interesting movie and come on for the cast and credits or when they go off on a cold winter night and you are left without the comfort of the room heater. You ring up someone called Hemraj who tells you to get in touch with Karamchand and kindly gives you his number. When you ring up Karamchand someone called Suresh picks up the phone and politely tells you that this is not his section. When you ring up the complaints again you are told that Hemraj has gone home and they do not have his number. And so you learn to live with the power cuts and accept them as part of life. Then there is the telephone that goes dead even without the provocation of a storm and remains dead sometime for as long as ten days at a stretch. No, I don’t need to tell you why I don’t make an effort to complain. Since the broadband is connected to the phone that too remains dead. I look back to the time when I lived in a real heaven, my 17 years as teacher and housemaster in Sanawar. During the summers the water was so strictly rationed that one had often to get up at four to avail one’s turn. The lights often went off during the winter and I had no telephone. I am convinced that if I could find perfect happiness without these creature comforts then, I can find it now even in my imperfect
heaven.
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UK’s role in Egyptians’
suppression THE old slogan from the 1960s has come true: the revolution has been televised. The world is watching the Bastille fall on 24/7 rolling news. And smuggle his family’s estimated $25bn in loot out of the country, and to install a successor friendly to his interests. The Egyptian people — half of whom live on less than $2 a day — seem determined to prevent the pillage and not to wait until September to drive out a dictator dripping in blood and bad hair dye.
The great Czech dissident Vaclav Havel outlined the “as if” principle. He said people trapped under a dictatorship need to act “as if they are free”. They need to act as if the dictator has no power over them. The Egyptians are trying — and however many of them Mubarak murders on his way out the door, the direction in which fear flows has been successfully reversed. The tyrant has become terrified of “his” people. Of course, there is a danger that what follows will be worse. My family lived for a time under the torturing tyranny of the Shah of Iran, and cheered the revolution in 1979. Yet he was replaced by the even more vicious Ayatollahs. But this is not the only model, nor the most likely. Events in Egypt look more like the Indonesian revolution, where in 1998 a popular uprising toppled a US-backed tyrant after 32 years of oppression — and went on to build the largest and most plural democracy in the Muslim world. But the discussion here in the West should focus on the factor we are responsible for and can influence — the role our governments have played in suppressing the Egyptian people. Very few British people would praise a murderer and sell him weapons. Very few British people would beat up a poor person to get cheaper petrol. But our governments do it all the time. Why? British foreign policy does not follow the everyday moral principles of the British people, because it is not formulated by us. This might sound like an odd thing to say about a country that prides itself on being a democracy, but it is true. The former Labour MP Lorna Fitzsimons spoke at a conference for Israel’s leaders last year and assured them they didn’t have to worry about the British people’s growing opposition to their policies because “public opinion does not influence foreign policy in Britain. Foreign policy is an elite issue”. This is repellent but right. It is formulated in the interests of big business and their demand for access to resources, and influential sectional interest groups. You can see this most clearly if you go through the three reasons our governments give, sometimes publicly, sometimes privately, for their behaviour in the Middle East. Explanation One: Oil. Some 60 per cent of the world’s remaining petrol is in the Middle East. We are all addicted to it, so our governments support strongmen and murderers who will keep the oil-taps gushing without interruption. Egypt doesn’t have oil, but it has crucial oil pipelines and supply routes, and it is part of a chain of regional dictators we don’t want broken in case they all fall taking the petrol pump with it. Addicts don’t stand up to their dealers: they fawn before them. There is an obvious medium-term solution: break our addiction. The technology exists — wind, wave and especially solar power — to fuel our societies without oil. It would free us from our support for dictators and horrific wars of plunder like Iraq. It’s our society’s route to rehab — but it is being blocked by the hugely influential oil companies, who would lose a fortune. Like everybody who needs to go to rehab, the first step is to come out of denial about why we are still hooked. Explanation Two: Israel and the “peace process”. Over the past week, we have persistently been told that Mubarak was a key plank in supporting “peace in the Middle East”. The opposite is the truth. Mubarak has been at the forefront of waging war on the Palestinian population. There are 1.5 million people imprisoned on the Gaza Strip denied access to necessities like food and centrifuges for their blood transfusion service. They are being punished for voting “the wrong way” in a democratic election. Israel blockades Gaza to one side, and Mubarak blockades it to the other. I’ve stood in Gaza and watched Egyptian soldiers refusing to let sick and dying people out for treatment they can’t get in Gaza’s collapsing hospitals. In return for this, Mubarak receives $1.5bn a year from the US. Far from contributing to peace, this is marinating the Gazan people in understandable hatred and dreams of vengeance. This is bad even for Israel herself — but we are so servile to the demands of the country’s self-harming government, and to its loudest and angriest lobbyists here, that our governments obey. Explanation Three: Strongmen suppress jihadism. Our governments claim that without dictators to suppress, torture and disappear Islamic fundamentalists, they will be unleashed and come after us. Indeed, they often outsourced torture to the Egyptian regime, sending suspects there to face things that would be illegal at home. Robert Baer, once a senior figure in black ops at the CIA, said: “If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear, you send them to Egypt.” Western governments claim all this makes us safer. The opposite is the truth. In his acclaimed history of al-Qa’ida, The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright explains: “America’s tragedy on September 11th was born in the prisons of Egypt.” Modern jihadism was invented by Sayeed Qutb as he was electrocuted and lashed in Egyptian jails and grew under successive tyrannies. Mohammed Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker, was Egyptian, and named US backing for his country’s tyrant as one of the main reasons for the massacre. When we fund the violent suppression of people, they hate us, and want to fight back. None of these factors that drove our governments to back Mubarak’s dictatorship in Egypt have changed. So we should strongly suspect they will now talk sweet words about democracy in public, and try to secure a more PR-friendly Mubarak in private. It doesn’t have to be like this. We could make our governments as moral as we, the British people, are in our everyday lives. We could stop them trampling on the weak, and fattening thugs. But to achieve it, we have to democratise our own societies and claim control of our foreign policy. The Egyptian people have shown this week they will risk everything to stop being abused. What will we risk to stop our governments being abusers? —The Independent
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Quiet heroines whose courage kept uprising going ASKED IN Cairo’s Tahrir Square if she was scared about what might happen, Mona Seif reflected for a moment before saying yesterday: “You know, I was feel scared. I hope I don’t die here, but even if I do I’ll have spent 10 days here with all these people and felt this is my country, and I have never experienced that before.” If this is a revolution, then 24-year-old Ms Seif is one of its quiet heroes. A post-graduate student in cancer biology at Cairo University, she is one of the leading figures who used blogs and Twitter to help spread the call for the first protest on 25 January. Protest runs in her family: her father is a well-known human rights lawyer, Ahmed Seif el-Islam, who was serving in a Mubarak jail when she was born and is among more than 20 lawyers who have been arrested. When Egypt cut the Internet last week, she was one of 20 activists who took their laptops to a private house and started the “Twitter Centre of the Revolution”, getting messages to the outside world thanks to one of their number being connected to an ISP which Egypt did not initially shut down because it almost exclusively serves financial services. “I use Facebook, and I have a blog but Twitter is my favourite tool for political issues,” she says. Ms Seif believes that the immediate catalysts for the escalating protests were the death of Khaled Said — the young man allegedly beaten to death by secret police in Alexandria last year — the uprising in Tunisia, and “the build-up over years of all the small scale strikes and protests”. She pays tribute to the still-unknown creators of the “We are all Khaled Said” Facebook page. But while she never imagined it would grow to this, what kept her going as the protest day approached was the memory of another demonstration she had taken part in last year. Her group managed to elude the police by not coming to Tahrir Square but another street downtown. A march of around 50 rapidly grew to around 1,000 before the police crushed it with some brutality. “For maybe 35 minutes we felt that the street was ours, which was incredible.” What outcome does she hope for? “I want Mubarak to leave and the regime to fall. Then a transitional government, which will hold proper democratic elections and whoever wins I will accept it.” Another woman from a very different background is also surprised to be taking part in such a huge protest. Middle-aged single mother, Safa Hamis Mohammed, has had trouble making ends meet as a home Koran teacher after losing her journalism job 17 years ago. But after Wednesday’s attack on the square by pro-Mubarak supporters, she found herself carrying stones to be thrown by those defending it. Gigi Ibrahim, 22, a secular US-educated politics major at The American University in Cairo, will not be casting her vote for the Brotherhood. The self-described “revolutionary socialist” says she has had continuous arguments with her upper middle class family — and especially her garment factory owner father — about the protests.
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