The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

China in Afghanistan
Reasons for seeking India’s cooperation

India is getting feelers from China that they need to cooperate in Afghanistan so that religious extremists --- the Taliban --- are not able to take advantage of the situation that will arise after the withdrawal of the US-led foreign forces from the war-torn country. This single factor is the main source of worry for both New Delhi and Beijing. The Taliban factions are feeling upbeat with the scheduled departure of foreign troops not being far away. Despite their negative role in Afghanistan, which has suffered so much as a result of the activities of the Taliban, the extremists’ support base in the landlocked country remains formidable. The US-led anti-terrorism drive in Afghanistan has not been able to discredit the Taliban or make these elements insignificant.

That is why Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai has now become soft towards the Taliban as a practitioner of realpolitik. Interestingly, nowadays he uses harsh expressions more against the US than the Taliban. This shows that if a Karzai-sponsored candidate wins the coming presidential election there, Taliban factions will have a greater chance of being inducted into the government. Including the Taliban in the new government that will be formed has already been endorsed by the US and influential European countries.

The Western backing to a political dispensation to be run in partnership with the Taliban is part of a strategy for bringing about stability in Afghanistan. But the strategy has a major weakness: allowing the Taliban to share power in Kabul will embolden the extremists in Xinjiang in China, Jammu and Kashmir in India, all over Pakistan and elsewhere in South Asia. Thus, taking the help of the Taliban for peace in Afghanistan will amount to sowing the seeds of instability in parts of South Asia and China. The West is, therefore, pursuing a faulty strategy. The strategy of India and China in Afghanistan is based on their development projects. Both New Delhi and Beijing believe that development can work as an antidote to extremism represented by the Taliban. However, the two Asian giants can succeed in sidelining the Taliban only if China stops Pakistan from pursuing its negative policy of backing the Taliban for short-term gains.

Rural posting or punishment?
Doctors need incentive

THE government has tried every trick under its hat to make MBBS graduates’ mandatory one year service in the rural area work. But, as it turns out, a perfect solution still eludes. It is common knowledge that the young medical graduates who cannot escape rural posting for one year, often use this period by proceeding on earned leave. In the case of female doctors, maternity is timed and maternity leave is consumed during the period followed by earned leave, which defeats the sole purpose of making rural service mandatory. It is a fact that medical education in government colleges is highly subsidized; the government pays up to Rs 30 lakh on each student per year for his/her medical education. Of the total 370 medical colleges in the country, about 170 are in the government sector. The country produces about 45629 MBBS doctors annually.

Such high subsidy paid by the government lends legitimacy to its demand for asking young doctors to spend only a year in the service of the rural population. At the same time, the absence of basic infrastructure facilities in rural areas, where young doctors feel their skills go waste, gives some validation to their reluctance in joining the rural health programme. Sitting on these horns of dilemma, two years ago the government had proposed a three-and-a-half-year Bachelor of Rural Health Care course to create a cadre of separate public health specialists for rural India. But the proposal met with stiff resistance from the Indian Medical Association that said the government would create half doctors by way of the new scheme and it was not in the interest of health care delivery.

So far the government has been thinking on the lines of punishment; from denying admission in PG courses or, for registration on the Medical Council, without the mandatory rural service. It should now think of offering incentives for rural service, by making the rural health programme attractive and lucrative both. Else, the rural population will continue to remain deprived of quality health service.

Thought for the Day

A film is a petrified fountain of thought.

— Jean Cocteau

ARTICLE

US resolution on Lanka
DMK using it for poll purposes
by Kuldip Nayar

THE US-sponsored resolution, adopted by the UN Human Rights Council a few days back in Geneva, was watered down to suit the temperament of Colombo. The resolution simply calls upon the Sri Lankan government to conduct an “independent and credible” investigation into allegations of violations of international human rights law and the untold atrocities committed in the last phase of the war involving the LTTE.

In this whole matter, one message that comes out loud and clear is the loss of face for India. Despite supporting the US-sponsored resolution, New Delhi has not been able to see through certain amendments it has proposed. The 47-nation strong body, led by the US, not only brushed aside the Indian sentiments but also refused to make modifications which India considered important. The withdrawal of support to the government by the DMK makes the point untenable.

If the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) clause, as suggested by India, had been incorporated in the resolution, it would have allowed an impartial international probe which, in turn, would have brought the skeletons out of the Sri Lankan cupboard. But by allowing the Sri Lankan government to investigate human rights violations on its own, the resolution has not helped anybody’s cause, more so of the Tamils, who have been suffering at the hands of President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government.

The U-turn by the US in using a weak language, instead of a more condemnatory tone, with several changes in the final version of the resolution must have come as a relief to the Rajapaksa government. Though the previous draft had noted with great concern the failure of the government of Sri Lanka to fulfil its public commitments, the new resolution does away with it, giving a free hand to Colombo. The biggest blow to the new resolution is the request to Sri Lanka to present a mere oral report instead of an “interim report” that was sought from the government earlier.

It was understandable that any move which India undertook either at the behest of the US or on its own to amend the resolution would have been suspect in the eyes of Sri Lanka. Even otherwise, there would have been resistance from Colombo as it considers and views such resolutions against Sri Lanka are driven by lobbies with clear-cut agendas against the country. Hence, it was not surprising when Sri Lanka opposed yet again the resolution which sought to drop the controversial clause which mandated Colombo to allow an international probe into the alleged war crimes during the civil war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2009.

The Sri Lankan representative at the UNHRC, criticising the resolution, has said: "The government of Sri Lanka totally rejects the attempts by the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner and proponents of this resolution." The Sri Lankan representative lamented that “there are other ongoing conflicts and reported violations of rights as we speak in several parts of the world. Our concern is why this preoccupation with Sri Lanka? Why is this inordinate and disproportional level of interest in a country that has successfully ended 30 years of conflict against terrorism?"

President Rajapaksa is known for his bold, autocratic ways of functioning. He is not the one to give in to such diktats, particularly when he has befriended countries like China in the region. Chinese President Xi Jinping elevated the island nation's profile by including President Mahinda Rajapaksa in the first list of five phone calls he made after formally taking over from Hu Jintao. In other words, when China puts Sri Lanka on a par with Islamabad, Rajapaksa is emboldened. In fact, soon after the 2012 resolution, which came as a real wake-up call for him, he had remarked that it was an attempt to divide the country. In any case, when the 2012 version of the resolution did not bother him even one bit, how does one expect the latest resolution to worry him now? No doubt, the resolution has put India in a piquant situation, particularly the ruling UPA government, with general elections just a year away.

Against this backdrop, the anguish expressed by UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi at the Congress Parliamentary Party meeting the other day should come as a relief and reassure the Tamils in Sri Lanka. “We are most pained at the manner in which their (Tamils) legitimate political rights continue to be denied to them. We are anguished by reports of unspeakable atrocities on innocent civilians and children, especially during the last days of the conflict in 2009,” she said.

This may be the strongest possible statement to come from an Indian leader, more so from the UPA government, since the genocide in Sri Lanka. But it came a little too late in the day as the DMK, the UPA’s ally at the Centre, after handing out a threat to pullout from the government, ultimately severed its ties. Perhaps the DMK wanted to make some political gains out of it before the parliamentary elections next year.

MIDDLE

The reverse gear
by N.S. Tasneem

THE other day a celebrated Punjabi novelist said in a tete-a-tete with me that a writer could not give his best unless there was an understanding woman behind him. Of course, there is a hackneyed phrase, “Behind every great man, there is a woman.” Mostly we consider this woman no other than his beloved, as a result of which some sort of a Mona Lisan smile flickers on our faces.

Little do we know that the beloved may be a source of inspiration to the celebrity, but the person who sustains this inspiration is the wife herself. Now the question arises as to why a wife cannot play the part of a beloved in such a situation. It is indeed possible if the adjective “beloved” is allowed, at the same time, to qualify the noun, wife. The resultant term, “the beloved wife”, would do the trick.

Mostly the villain of the piece is not the husband but his beloved wife who creates such an ambience in the home as is congenial to the flights of her hubby’s imagination. Left to me, I am envious of the person whose wife evinces, in the early days of their marriage, indifference to the Muses with a view to ensuring her marital bliss in the years to come. As a consequence, the poor man is saved from the agonising experiences of a scribbler.

Indeed, there are certain incorrigible persons who rush in where angles fear to tread. I know of a person who did not pay any heed to his wife’s timely warnings and composed a novel during her long absence from home. He, however, saved himself from the guilt-complex by devising a novel method of dedication—

“To my wife, but for whose absence from home this work could not have come into existence.”

What a way to flatter someone whose blissful ignorance resulted in the emergence of a despicable presence! Perhaps, there is no easy escape route when a woman establishes conjugal relationship with a man who has been bitten, deeply or otherwise, by the literary bug. In that case, not all the virtues of mankind can atone for the sins perpetrated against a writer’s wife by relentless destiny. Lately, of course, the winds of change have started blowing. Some women have taken up the pen, instead of the cudgel, in their hands and have started playing the roles which had been earlier earmarked only for their spouses. Indeed, they seldom marry a person who is sailing in the same boat.

Obviously, the drift of these musings of mine is towards my own predicament. Taking a hint from a Persian phrase, “Aamdan bar sare matlab”, I now want to come to the point. My foray into the world of words has done me and the members of my family little good of which I may feel proud. At times, however, I feel elated to have a glimpse of the joy of creation. Undoubtedly, I have been dedicating and rededicating my books to the near and dear ones, particularly my wife, during the course of the past five decades.

Contrary to the high hopes that I associate with my literary endeavours, no one in the family entertains great expectations from me on this account. As ill luck would have it, some literary persons, who have precious little to show by way of their achievements, were recently given prestigious awards at a state-level function. I took this event in my stride as such things had happened earlier for the umpteenth time. My wife had also become accustomed to these things.

But I was rudely shaken this morning when my wife placed all the copies of my books, which I had presented to her over the years with soulful inscriptions, at the side table along with the cup of my morning tea.

OPED — WORLD

BRICS: Search for new paradigm
The aftermath of the Durban BRICS summit has witnessed a flurry of cynical commentaries. A common theme that runs through nearly all of them paints BRICS as a motley of parochial power seekers with little in common
Zorawar Daulet Singh

BRICS leaders (From L) Dr Manmohan Singh, President Xi Jinping of China, South Africa's President Jacob Zuma, Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
— AFP

IN India, there is also the persistent China factor that seems to overshadow any far-sighted conversation on larger questions of global governance. There is a "cut your nose to spite your face" logic in some arguments where if China stands to benefit then India must automatically belittle an idea.

This is a flawed prism to explicate the idea of BRICS. The real potential of BRICS has always been not simply to balance the material power of advanced states but to offer an alternative ideational approach to the governance of the international political economy.

The Ancien Régime is on its last legs. The 2008 economic crisis shook the foundations of the post-1970s neoliberal economic consensus that defined the essence of global governance in recent decades. Ironically, even the Bretton Woods twins no longer propagate their earlier norms regarding macroeconomic management or microeconomic interventions in national economies. In recent years jumpstarting the global growth engine has been the overriding policy goal everywhere. Reforming the structural framework that produced the economic crisis has received only perfunctory attention.

BRICS as an opportunity

In the aftermath of the crisis some western economists viewed BRICS as an opportunity to resurrect the present mode of globalisation with minor tactical reforms. The argument being that since BRICS have flourished during the phase of globalisation that is now under stress, it is in their self-interest to

shore up the system that underpins their growth. After all, since 2001 BRICS have accounted for over 30 per cent of global economic growth.

On the surface, this argument is compelling. However, if we undertake a dispassionate cost-benefit analysis of the structure of growth that emerging economies have actually witnessed, such as, investigating the consequences on social inequality, human capital development, ecological degradation, indigenous technological innovation, and financial instability we will conclude that BRICS has an ugly underbelly that reflects their active participation in the imbalanced and unequal global economy. In fact, some BRICS members are seriously lagging even low-income Southern economies on per capita human capital and socio-economic indicators even as absolute statistics advertise national success.

The 'ecological footprint'

Sections of the BRICS' policy elite have acknowledged some of these contradictions though there is still no consensus on the deeper lesson of the global crisis, which is that replicating western capitalism is ultimately suicidal both nationally and for the entire planet. Resource constraints are such that BRICS, which account for 43 per cent of the world's population, cannot assume per capita consumption levels of non-renewable energy and other natural resources at the level of the North without severely undermining the globe's and their own ecological stability. Plainly put, BRICS cannot emulate the 'ecological footprint' of the North in their future development strategies.

Furthermore, the present spectrum of available technological solutions to overcome 'Malthusian' type shortages is in itself resource and fossil fuel-intensive in its applications, thus, imposing even greater demands on the finite resources available. It is also in this context that the present agenda of climate change is inadequate for it merely seeks to limit the growth potential of the South without fundamentally altering the essence of the present fossil fuel-dependent technological mode of industrialisation or modifying the global capital accumulation structure itself. Logically, it is imperative to envision a completely new spectrum of technological solutions to sustain growth in a resource-constrained world. No state can go it alone in this endeavor.

Capital accumulation

New norms require a new discourse before they can be accepted. The main obstacle to constructing a new discourse has been the illusion among the BRICS policy elite that their economies exemplify the untainted winners of the globalisation boom. In retrospect, the scale of global growth witnessed in recent decades would have been impossible to attain without ravaging the ecological system and degrading (underpricing) the value of labour and human initiative, and, with most of these costs being borne disproportionately by the global South. If true, then doesn't BRICS have a strategic self-interest in producing a discourse that dis-incentivizes unrestrained capital accumulation?

First, one of the enduring insights from North-South interdependence is that as emerging economies plugged into globalisation they found capital accumulation easier than 'intellectual accumulation', the latter strategically guarded by Northern MNCs. To overcome this, BRICS' elites should end their overriding obsession with GDP growth rates, and, focus more on metrics that actually gauge social realities, human capital, innovation and the technological potential of their economies.

In many BRICS economies, and, across the global South in general, we observe that despite high GDP growth rates, there has been modest progress on human development indicators, food security and nutrition, science and technology, and, healthcare and education systems.

Furthermore, if BRICS economies aim to improve the terms of trade with the North, that is move up the value chain by increasing the quality of local value-addition, it is people-centric development as defined above that alone will sustain the rise of the emerging South.

'State versus market'

Second, BRICS can promote a discourse whereby the logic of unrestrained profit accumulation inherent in capitalism is balanced by a dynamic, responsive, and, a strategic state. For Russia and China's political economy this has been less of an issue. In other BRICS economies there is an implicit or even open contempt for the state. For instance, the emergence of an anti-statist ideology in India is, ironically, even undermining the prospects of big capital who are now discovering that the receding of the state in socio-economic life diminishes their own long-term prospects for capital accumulation!

As the developed world's history shows, the dichotomy of 'state versus market' is a contemporary and erroneous invention emanating from the Reagan and Thatcherite transition to anti-statist neoliberalism, and historically, both elements have been indispensable for capitalism to function. Without a robust state, there can be no governance, no agency to establish and enforce property rights, and nobody to ensure the development and systematic flow of commodities, labour, and capital. Indeed, as some historians argue, the Westphalian state is the most enduring legacy of European capitalism.

Third, it is now evident that interdependence between Northern capital and BRICS labour has adversely affected the latter's workers. Indeed, the BRICS workers cannot be faulted for wondering why their hard-earned savings were not reinvested in productive domestic capital or social infrastructure but 'recycled' back into western debt to finance western profligacy with the state mediating this process.

The 'New Deal'

What is required is an ideological reconstruction of capitalism and a new compact between capital and labour akin to the 'New Deal' forged during the 1930s as a response to the then crisis of 'over accumulation' in the West. The contemporary difference being that the globalisation of the production process requires such a compact to be on a global scale. The state will inevitably assume a central role in regulating and sustaining this new deal. Unsurprisingly, the political economy of the North rejects such a 'New Deal' and its implied redistributive features not only as ideologically abhorrent but also because it would imply ceding wealth, and thus power, to the emerging South.

BRICS, however, cannot rebalance their own economies without forging a compact between capital and labour. And the fact that BRICS provides both the spatial and human inputs vital to global production, potentially represents a bargaining leverage that the BRICS states could collectively benefit from.

For now, the intensity of intra-BRICS competition makes it difficult to practise any collectivist strategies.

Perhaps, the BRICS can take a leaf out of the Western playbook: if the US, Europe and Japan can fiercely compete among their industrial and consumer MNCs without compromising on their common strategic agenda to preserve their asymmetric advantages in the global terms of trade and finance, surely BRICS too can learn to reconcile the logic of competition with a parallel strategic collectivism to adapt the fallible norms of the West?

The Southern policy elite is reluctant to recognise that the old policy paradigm cannot be the basis of future national and global rejuvenation. BRICS offers an international political network to articulate new norms that can adapt globalisation for the emerging era of resource-driven ecological pressures and social convulsions that await many of the economies of the emerging South, including this one.

How can eschewing the prospect of change be in India's national interest?

The writer is a PhD candidate at King's College London