The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

A party is born
Manpreet gets going

With his People’s Party of Punjab, Manpreet Singh Badal has formally emerged on the state political scene as a force which is hard to ignore. Whether he has a future will be known after the poll verdict 11 months from now. He has begun well. After his high-profile breakaway from the ruling Badals, he has held his own. He has raised issues which make sense. Be it the soaring debt, targeted subsidies, spending on VIPs, political retirement at 70, drug abuse or unemployment, he has his finger on the pulse of the people. Manpreet does not stoop to conquer. He scores over rivals by avoiding personality-based politics and mud-throwing so common with Punjab leaders.

The seasoned leaders of the Congress and the Shiromani Akali Dal may be dismissive of Manpreet Badal, but they followed him to Khatkar Kalan in a desperate bid to cash in on Shaheed Bhagat Singh’s martyrdom. Sensing the mad scramble, Manpreet opted out of the messy political arena. He cleverly postponed the launch of his political party to March 27. He would not have got as much media attention then. A skilful communicator and operator, Manpreet knows how to manage the media. His focus on youth, women and NRIs may be politically rewarding. His decision to avoid big rallies is sound. While he has made it known that he is sensitive to inconvenience caused by political rallies to travellers, he is also aware that people may soon tire of him and his message — no matter how well delivered— and that he lacks money power his opponents have.

Manpreet definitely has something to say, something that holds out hope for Punjab. He knows what is wrong and what should be done though he did little of what he professed when he was Finance Minister. He may say he needs a free hand, but will he get a chance to play the saviour he projects himself to be? If the crowds that follow Manpreet vote for him and get him some Vidhan Sabha seats, he would be able to play the king-maker, if not the king himself, and take a shot at changing the political fortunes of top leaders. The next elections will decide his, and in some ways Punjab’s, destiny.

A woman’s touch
Managing villages, fighting prejudice

When this village sarpanch from Rajasthan speaks, the world listens. Chhavi Rajawat has indeed made an impact on the international stage by participating in the 11th Info-Poverty World Conference held at the United Nations, where she spoke about the need to rethink various strategies to achieve Millennium Development Goals even when resources are limited. She also struck a note that will resound among many others of her ilk when she sought to harness technology to provide better facilities, including governance to rural India.

A new face of rural India, Rajawat has an impressive academic and corporate background, which she is now harnessing to provide leadership and deliver better facilities to the villagers who are under her charge. The sarpanch of Soda village has a delicate balancing act to perform; both her age and gender challenge the traditional feudal order. Yet, by electing her, the villagers have shown that they are willing to be part of a change that takes them on to the path of development.

Since 33 per cent of the seats for the position of panch are reserved for women, it would be logical to expect many sarpanches to be women. But this is not so, and in fact many women candidates for the reserved panch seats too are seen as proxy candidates for their husbands. During the freedom struggle, women participated in large numbers to ensure that the nation was freed from the foreign yoke. Women who had never stepped outside their houses exposed themselves to the coercive power of the state, and even faced imprisonment because of their political activities. However, in the decades that followed, women’s participation in politics decreased. Today, women must be a part of the political process, especially at the grassroots level, to shake off the feudal mindset that limits their grown and thus makes the country truly free.

Thought for the Day

A smile is the beginning of peace. — Mother Teresa

ARTICLE

China’s growing military might
A major challenge for India
by Harsh V. Pant

After announcing a mere 7.5 per cent jump in its defence budget, the first time since the 1980s when its defence spending increased in single-digit percentage, China is back to its double-digit defence budget. Beijing has announced that its official defence budget for 2011 will rise by 12.7 per cent from the previous year.

China’s largely secretive military modernisation programme is producing results faster than expected. Beijing is gearing up to challenge the US military prowess in the Pacific. It is refitting a Soviet-era Ukrainian aircraft carrier for deployment next year and more carriers are under construction in Shanghai. China’s submarine fleet is the largest in Asia and is undergoing refurbishment involving nuclear-powered vessels and ballistic missile-equipped subs. Its anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) system, developed specifically to target US carrier strike groups, has reached initial operational capability much earlier than expected. And earlier this year, photographs appeared on Chinese Internet sites of what is apparently China’s first stealth fighter during a runway test in western China.

China has already shown its prowess in anti-satellite warfare and has redeployed its nuclear warheads onto mobile launchers and advanced submarines. In a marked shift in China’s no-first-use policy, Chinese leaders have indicated that they would consider launching pre-emptive strikes if they found the country in a “critical situation”, thereby lowering the threshold of nuclear threats. There is a growing debate in the PLA about whether to discard conditionalities on China’s commitments to no-first use.

China is a rising power with the world’s second largest economy and a growing global footprint. It would like to have a military ready and willing to defend these interests. But it is the opaqueness surrounding China’s military upgradation that is the real source of concern. China does not believe in transparency. In fact, the PLA follows Sun Tzu who argues that “the essence of warfare is creating ambiguity in the perceptions of the enemy.”

China continues to defend its military upgradation by claiming that it needs offensive capability for Taiwan-related emergencies. But clearly its sights are now focused on the US. China wants to limit American ability to project power into the Western Pacific. It wants to prevent a repeat of its humiliation in 1996 when the US aircraft carriers could move around unmolested in the Taiwan Strait and deter Chinese provocations. Not surprisingly, the steady build up of a force with offensive capabilities well beyond Chinese territory is causing consternation in Washington and among China’s neighbours. This comes at a time of Chinese assertiveness on territorial disputes with Japan, India and Southeast Asian countries.

Beijing has started claiming that the bulk of South China Sea constitutes Chinese territorial waters, defining it as a “core national interest,” a phrase previously used in reference to Tibet and Taiwan. This has come as a shock to regional states such as the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam and Taiwan who also have territorial claims in the sea. This sea passage is too important to be controlled by a single country and that too by one that is located far away from these waters. China would like to extend its territorial waters, which usually run to 12 miles, to include the entire exclusive economic zone, which extends 200 miles. China is challenging the fundamental principle of free navigation. All maritime powers, including India, have a national interest in the freedom of navigation, open access to Asia’s maritime commons and respect for international law in the South China Sea.

American technological prowess and war-fighting experience will ensure that China will not be able to catch up very easily. China is still at least a generation behind the US militarily. But the Pentagon’s most recent assessment of China’s military strategy argues that despite persistent efforts, the US understanding of how much China’s government spends on defence “has not improved measurably.” It is clear now that Beijing is configuring its military to fight the US. China’s focus on anti-access and area denial weapons is designed to prevent the US from operating without fear in the Western Pacific.

At a time when the US is increasingly looking inwards, China’s military rise has the potential to change the regional balance of power to India’s disadvantage. It is not entirely clear that China has well-defined external policy objectives though its means, both economic and military, to pursue policies are greater than at any time in the recent past. Yet, there is no need for India to counter China by matching weapon for weapon or bluster for bluster. India will have to look inwards to prepare for the China challenge. After all, China has not prevented India from pursuing economic reforms and decisive governance, developing its infrastructure and border areas, and from intelligently investing in military capabilities. If India could deal with stoicism the Chinese challenge in 1987, when there was a real border stand-off between the two, there should be less need for alarm today when India is a much stronger nation, economically and militarily. A resurgent India of 2011 needs new reference points to manage its complex relationship with the super power-in-waiting — China.

China’s Global Times had warned last year that “India needs to consider whether or not it can afford the consequences of a potential confrontation with China.” India’s challenge is to raise the stakes high enough so that instead of New Delhi it is Beijing that is forced to consider seriously the consequences of a potential confrontation with India. But it is not clear if the political leadership in New Delhi has the farsightedness to rise to this challenge.

The writer, who teaches at King’s College, London, is the author of “The China Syndrome”.

MIDDLE

Cricket as classical drama
by Rajan Kashyap

In our country cricket has become an elixir for the masses. Young or old, wealthy or insolvent, celebrity or unknown, all Indians are addicted. Forgotten are distinctions of class, community, region and language. No matter which the opponent, the day Team India plays is an occasion to shut shop, office and school. Forgotten are personal rivalries and differences. The country is united in anticipation of a triumph to come. Few are privileged to witness the event in person, but millions are spectators on the television screen.

What explains this amazing fixation?

An answer can be found in a text from ancient Greece, written in the year 330 BC by the father of philosophy, political thought and literary criticism, Aristotle himself. His treatise on poetry and drama, titled The Poetics, explains why drama, especially tragedy, has universal appeal. Astoundingly, all the elements of great classical drama predicated 2500 years in the past are the ingredients of a cricket match of today. A sensational plot, dramatic suspense, brave deeds, heartbreak and euphoria, all these features embellish a one-day international cricket encounter.

As in the theatre, so too on the cricket field. Colourful characters move from success to misfortune, or from misfortune to happiness. The personages are noble, but not perfect. In Greek drama, the hero falls from grace on account of a single flaw in personality, ‘hamartia’. On the green field, a missed catch, an unforced error of judgment, turns the game on its head. Within a moment hero worship turns into ridicule.

In Aristotle’s words, ‘a likely impossibility’ often results in the denouement, or resolution of conflict in a play. In cricket parlance this corresponds to the glorious uncertainty that spells doom for favoured teams, and triumph for the minnows. India’s sole World Cup victory in 1983 falls in the same category.

By chance or design, one-day cricket adheres to the classical unities of time, place and action. The drama unfolds in a single day, closely observing Aristotle’s injunction of continuity, moving through the stages of a beginning, a middle, and an end. In ancient Greek plays a Chorus prophesied, and commented on the events on stage. This role is performed loudly by today’s print and electronic media.

The audience of a powerful play waits with bated breath for the outcome of a clash of the protagonists in the arena. So is it for us today. Suspense builds. We identify totally with the fortunes of our hero. A turn of events, resulting in his downfall, rouses in us passions similar to those that Aristotle observed on the Greek stage. Defeat in a prestigious match creates a ‘catharsis’ of these emotions of pity and fear. A strange emptiness, a void, fills the despondent fans of the losing team, even as feelings of elation and triumph rule the followers of the winner.

Classical drama had for its subject monumental events that impacted the destiny of states. In our region, the game is seen even as a diplomatic interlocutor in international relations. Aristotle would be thrilled with this modern adaptation of Greek drama.

OPED WORLD

An intriguing mixture of tradition, oil, politics, despots and dictators clashing with modern and avowedly democratic forces, the Middle East is in a flux. Political developments have upset many an establishment even as the world seeks to keep pace with new dispensations that are challenging, and at times, replacing, the old regimes.
Middle East upheaval offers new opportunities
Shyam Bhatia

An oil terminal after it was retaken by rebels from Muammar Gaddafi’s forces in Zueitina, 850 km east of Tripoli on March 27. Reuters photo

The unrest that continues to sweep through the Arab world is as wayward and unpredictable as the tsunami that hit Japan.

Many Arab analysts now admit that the popular ‘intifadas’ (uprisings) caught them by surprise and they, like the rest of the world, are still trying to work out the long—term consequences.

When the Tunisians first took to the streets, most Arabs saw their outpouring of popular anger as a purely local phenomenon that had nothing to do with the rest of the Arab world. The common refrain at the time was that this so—called Tunisian revolution would never spread to neighbouring Arab countries.

Within days, however, Tahrir Square in the centre of Cairo was filled with hundreds of thousands of Egyptians demanding regime change. In the end the sheer scale of the unrest in Cairo, as well as the number of casualties, dwarfed the Tunisian upheaval. The Egyptian regime was older and better entrenched than its Tunisian counterpart, so Mubarak’s downfall was an even bigger event.

Right to the bitter end, Mubarak’s closest advisers kept insisting that their man was not like Tunisia’s ousted dictator, Zine al-Abidine Bin Ali, who escaped with his personal hoard of gold bars to Saudi Arabia.

Mubarak himself was until the last minute quoted as saying he would never leave, although in the end he and his family members were helicoptered from their lavish Cairo palace to the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

As they face the wrath of their people, Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh argued that they were not like Tunisia and Egypt. But if analysts are willing to put their reputations on line and make any predictions, the vast majority would today predict that it is only a matter of time before these three do minos also fall.

It does not need an analyst or a soothsayer to predict that this political tsunami can only grow and spread still further. The other regimes at risk include the many sheikhdoms of the Gulf, such as Bahrein, as well as Oman and Saudi Arabia.

Five million Indians, as well as other foreigners working in the Gulf, have good reason to worry for their future. All indications are that the uprisings due to hit their countries of residence will not be as ‘peaceful’ as the ones in Tunisia and Egypt. As events in Libya have shown, violence on city streets may easily turn into armed confrontation between pro—and anti—government forces. Tens of thousands of foreign workers, including many Indians, fled Libya, losing their livelihoods in the process.

It took many years for stability to return to America, following the war of independence, and France was unstable for a long period of time after the revolution. The Arab world faces a similar prospect. Civil war, anarchy and prolonged political instability are all on the cards where the Arabs are concerned.

In the short term, however, Arab families can lie back and enjoy the kickbacks that are being offered to them by their ever more desperate and collapsing regimes.

Weeks after Ben Ali and Mubarak stepped down, political uncertainty and fear of civil war are twin prospects that still growl on the street corners of their capital cities. Protests continue because, as far as the revolutionaries are concerned, their presidents have been brought down but the regimes till survive.

Some of the fault lies in the hands of the revolutionaries themselves. They have successfully ridden the crest of their respective tsunamis, but have been unable to produce their own leaders for the post revolutionary era. Those few candidates who tried to ride the next wave have been shouted down and dismissed as opportunists.

Egypt’s Nobel Prize winning Mohammed El-Baradei is a case in point. He had the guts to challenge Mubarak when the former President was still in office, and some saw in him an alternative to the 82-year-old ousted dictator. Yet, when Baradei arrived at a Cairo polling station to cast his vote in the recent national referendum, he was booed and pelted with shoes by a crowd that shouted, “Go home, American agent.”

Optimists underline how regime change has been facilitated by enthusiastic, largely Western educated, Internet users who belong to the so-called Tweet and Facebook generation. It is they who continue to lead and successfully expose the atrocities and human rights violations in their respective countries.

Similarly Internet users in Egypt played a parallel role in bringing to public attention the case of a young Egyptian, Khaled Saeed, who was tortured to death while in police custody in Alexandria.

Yet, for all the optimism generated by a combination of youth, high technology and liberal Western values, there is another side to the emerging new republics. They are not necessarily pro-West and they are certainly anti-Israel. When US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently visited Cairo, she was shunned by the ‘leaders of Tahrir Square’ who accused her administration of supporting for decades the discredited Mubarak regime.

The same sentiments are being echoed on the streets of other Arab capitals where anti-government demonstrators have been also chanting anti-Israel and anti-US slogans.

For New Delhi the regional uncertainty presents both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is linked to the upward trajectory of fuel prices. The opportunity arises from the popular perception of India as an independent country and not as the handmaiden of Washington, the so-called big ‘Satan’ interested only in supporting Israel at all costs and preserving privileged access to the region’s oil fields.

When India voted to abstain the recent United Nations Security Council authorising a ‘no-fly zone’ over Libya, this was seen on the Arab street as further evidence that New Delhi follows its own instincts where West Asia is concerned. The old cliché that one man’s misfortune could be another man’s blessing may well apply when it comes to assessing how India’s regional interests could be affected.

It is all about oil
Lt Gen Vijay Oberoi (retd)

In the last few days there has been a dramatic and explosive change in the events in Libya. The events, which have held centre—stage in the media and in most capitals of the world, have suddenly gained urgency on account of two reasons. The first is the UN Security Council resolution permitting the establishment of a ‘no fly zone’, so as to restrain the Libyan leader, Muammar Gadaffi from using military measures to subdue what the western media and the western governments are calling peaceful protests by a section of the populace of Libya. The second is the unleashing of massive military force to tame if not permanently neutralise both Gaddafi and his army. The two are obviously not compatible.

Let me rewind to place the events in Libya in the correct perspective. Following the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, the peoples of many countries in the Arab world commenced popular uprisings against the current authoritarian / monarchical governments demanding an end to rampant corruption, authoritarian / dynastic rule, human rights violations, curbs on civil liberties and ushering in the rule of law.

The countries that faced this unrest have responded differently to the emerging situation, with Egypt accepting the change after initial posturing by President Mubarak. However, the portents are that while the Egyptian people will eventually get a different regime, the Egyptian military will continue to call the shots!

In Libya, Colonel Gaddafi summarily rejected the uprising, obviously with the confidence of the support of his army, his tribal compatriots and a fairly large part of the population that he had apparently nurtured.

When the Libyan uprising, later called rebellion, commenced, everyone thought it was part of the domino effect that was sweeping that part of the world. However, it soon became apparent that there was more to it than what was projected by the Western media. Unlike Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen and other Arab countries, the rebels in Libya were acting in accordance with a plan. What was projected as a spontaneous movement of angry people, securing town after town while moving from the eastern part of Libya towards Tripoli to oust Gaddafi, was actually a well-planned move by an opposition group, with covert support from external powers. The façade was lifted when the Western nations saw the Libyan army rolling back all the gains made by the rebels and pushing them back to Benghazi.

A resolution of the UNSC was quickly moved and despite lack of consensus, as displayed by the abstentions by five important countries — India, China, Russia, Germany and Brazil — the military intervention was now well underway.

Many thought that having intervened in at least three countries in recent years — Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan — and having largely failed in achieving the aims they had set to achieve, the Western countries led by the US would refrain from getting involved militarily in yet another similar escapade. However, the three ingredients that have propelled them to do so once again are ‘oil’, ‘ego’ and the culture of dominating a country of the third world.

In this exercise, the UN was a convenient fig leaf and it has been used once again. Whether they are able to effect a regime change and foist a pliable alternative is at present a moot point, but they would certainly devastate a nation where the standard of living has been as high as any nation of the first world, including the sole super power!

Let me now briefly turn to the military aspects. The UN mandate, relating to the imposition of a no-fly zone, was ostensibly to prevent Gaddafi from using the Libyan Air Force to winkle out the rebels from Benghazi and areas around it. However, even in the operations so far, the superior Western air forces are bombing all types of targets, to include ammunition dumps, command posts, air defence units, tanks and artillery pieces, as well as what they perceive as Libyan troops.

It does not need a rocket scientist to understand that once again another third world nation will be devastated, large number of people will get killed or maimed, infrastructure will be destroyed and yet another prosperous country will join the ranks of the poor countries, despite its oil wealth.

The final outcome is hard to predict, especially when the Libyan military as well as important tribes continue to be loyal to Gaddafi. His personal wealth abroad may have been made inaccessible, but the dictators of his ilk always have numerous methods of keeping substantial amounts in places that may be inaccessible to the Western countries. Gaddafi is unlikely to succumb easily and hence a prolonged struggle is likely.

There is also a need to take a close look at oil that has brought wealth to the people of Libya and which the Western countries covet and usurp. Nearly all of Libya’s oil and natural gas are produced onshore. Libya’s 1.8 million barrels per day of oil output comes from two basins. The two are under the control of separate factions — Gaddafi and the rebels, backed by the Western powers. Libyan oil is largely exported to European countries; hence their unduly high interest in supporting the rebels! In terms of oil, which is the mainstay of Libyan economy, the battle lines seem to be set, but no one knows who will eventually prevail.

India has once again chosen to sit on the fence, even though the fence in this case is a barbed wire; it will poke us at every turn, but that is the way our diplomatic and security honchos are — follow the Buddha and adopt the ‘Middle Path’! The learned Buddha could manage it, but can our pundits?

The writer is a former Vice Chief of Army Staff.