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A new
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Pillai’s
remarks Hockey
shame
Qureshi
is queering the pitch
Only
numbers?
The
General comes shopping Left in the cold
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Pillai’s remarks
Instead
of sharpening our strategy to deal with Pakistan, a debate is on in India over Union Home Secretary GK Pillai’s remarks made during the July 15 India-Pakistan talks in Islamabad. Pillai declared that the ISI was controlling what happened on 26/11 in Mumbai from the beginning till the end. The Home Secretary’s revelations, based on the disclosures made by Pakistani-origin US national David Headley, a terrorist mastermind cooling his heals in a Chicago jail, came at a crucial time — during External Affairs Minister SM Krishna’s visit to Islamabad for talks with his Pakistani counterpart SM Qureshi. India had invested much in the dialogue, with Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao having visited Islamabad earlier to do the necessary groundwork. What Pillai had stated was, no doubt, the truth that came to light first after the interrogation of Pakistani terrorist Ajmal Ameer Kasab. This hard reality had been corroborated by Headley. But why did Pillai decide to do what he did? Did he act on his own? On an occasion like the India-Pakistan dialogue, any utterance indicating a lack of synergy between the Home and External Affairs ministries in New Delhi cannot be in the larger interest of the nation. That is why Krishna says that the timing of Pillai’s remarks on the ISI’s involvement in the Mumbai terrorist attack was “very unfortunate”, though what the Home Secretary stated was “very much in order”. Thus, the controversy that has arisen could have been avoided if the bureaucrat had waited for the minister’s return from Islamabad to pin down Pakistan with Headley’s confessions. Two kinds of views have been expressed in the wake of the unsavoury controversy. Some people are of the opinion that every Indian, including the minister concerned, should defend Pillai so that we do not appear to be on the side of Pakistan in criticising a bright, well-meaning senior bureaucrat. Others hold the view that to push home the advantage, it is all about timing and keeping India’s larger interest in mind. India’s national interest can be well served only if it is in a position to look beyond Pakistan.
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Hockey shame
What
a nosedive it has been for Indian hockey, both on and off the field! While the world conquerors now stand close to the bottom, seedy details about how the hockey girls were sexually harassed by the chief coach further make the country hang its head in shame. It is a disgusting picture indeed, with several former India players coming out in support of the current bunch. According to them, girls have had to face sexual harassment and inappropriate behaviour at the hands of officials for long. They had to suffer the ignominy in silence, because senior administrators were protecting them and also because the girls feared that if they raised their voice, they would not be selected. That is exploitation pure and simple and the perpetrators must not escape stringent punishment. M.K. Kaushik, the coach accused of sexually harassing national level player Th. Ranjitha, has resigned and M. Basavraja, the videographer whose photos in compromising situations with various “escorts” were circulated among officials and the media, has been sacked. But that should not be the end of the story. There is need for a thorough cleaning of the cupboard so that all skeletons come out. After all, Ranjitha’s complaint has been endorsed by other team members though they did not support her specific allegation. Since such things have been going on for long, this is a failure of the top bosses and heads must roll. How can the players be expected to win medals when they have to put up with such maltreatment? Worse, similar allegations have also been made by woman boxers, archers and cricketers in the past. However, since the accusations have come just one week before Hockey India (HI) elections, there are many who see politics in the whole episode and an attempt to settle personal scores. If indeed that is so, it just shows how deep factionalism runs in the organisation. Even if one believes, for argument’s sake, that all allegations are untrue, how could Indian hockey prosper when there is so much friction and rivalry within its ranks?
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The coward’s weapon, poison. — Phineas Fletcher
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Qureshi is queering the pitch NO twist or turn in India-Pakistan negotiations can surprise anyone. But what has happened after the Foreign Ministers’ talks in Islamabad is more than usually bizarre. In effect, what Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, has done is to excel his performance and raise the ante so much as to queer the pitch for the present at least. At the end of the joint Press conference the only saving grace was that the talks hadn’t broken down, that the two sides had agreed to remain engaged, and that Qureshi had accepted the invitation of his Indian counterpart, S. M. Krishna, to visit India in December to pick up the threads. By then India and the rest of the world would have known whether or not Pakistan was taking adequate and effective action against all the perpetrators and masterminds of the dastardly terrorist attack from Pakistani soil on Mumbai in November 2008. Let us overlook the petty and hurtful things Qureshi said about India and Krishna at the apparently orchestrated joint Press conference or the next morning when he flip-flopped even while trying to do some damage limitation. Soon afterwards, he stunned almost everyone by magisterially laying down conditions for his visit to Delhi. He was not interested in going to Delhi for a “leisure trip”, he said. He would accept the invitation to go there only if India were ready for “meaningful”, “result-oriented” and “constructive” talks on all issues. How provocative the Pakistan Foreign Minister’s declaration was should be clear from the reaction of Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao, who had made every possible effort to avoid the impression that the parleys in Islamabad were a failure. “It is for Pakistan to decide whether a statement like this (Qureshi’s) can help in building up trust. The ball is now in Pakistan’s court,” she said. By the time Qureshi’s pronouncement hit Delhi, the real reason why nothing could be done about even such doable ideas as separate meetings on trade, tourism, even water. In response to Pakistan’s insistence that dialogue should be focused on 26/11 but should cover all major issues like Kashmir, peace and security, Siachen, etc, that amounted to a virtual return to “composite dialogue”, India went the extra mile. Stretching its mandate, it offered to schedule talks at appropriate levels later. It added that progress on 26/11 would be a “catalyst” for the purpose. But Qureshi wanted nothing less than a precise timeframe. This killed any kind of deal. Moreover, Pakistan refused to include in the joint statement even a vague commitment to action against terrorism and 26/11 in particular. However, notwithstanding Qureshi’s tall claims on his behalf — implicit in his mean and false remark that Krishna was getting frequent phone messages from New Delhi even in the midst of talks while he (Qureshi) needed no such instructions — the fact is that he is not the maker of Pakistan’s foreign policy. He is its mere implementer. Plenty of evidence to underscore this has trickled out. For instance, the schedule for Krishna’s calls on President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani was abruptly changed because the country’s all-powerful Army Chief, Gen Ashfaque Kayani, wanted to see the two dignitaries first. It was only after the General’s meetings with the top two leaders of the ineffectual civilian government that Qureshi’s attitude at the conference table hardened conspicuously. Nor is it a mere coincidence that apparently inspired reports of a two-year extension to General Kayani, with the possibility of a third year being added to it, appeared immediately after the Foreign Ministers’ meeting. At Thimpu where, on the sidelines of the SAARC summit, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Pakistani opposite number met and directed their Foreign Ministers to resume the dialogue, the Indian side had gathered the impression that the Pakistan Army had “empowered” the civilian government to take the India-Pakistan peace process forward. This was clearly a misperception. For, while the Pakistan government did go through the motions of preparing the ground for the Foreign Ministers’ meeting, the Pakistan Army pursued its objective of accentuating the friction with its “main enemy”, India, particularly in Jammu and Kashmir, relentlessly. There has been a surge in the infiltration of Pakistani militants belonging to the Lashkar-e-Toiyaba (LeT) and other terrorist outfits into Kashmir. Moreover, on its own, the Pakistani Army has unabashedly increased its violations of the ceasefire along the Line of Control (LoC). A particularly vicious violation took place on the night of the Foreign Ministers’ talks in the Poonch sector. The infiltration issue is very serious and Krishna raised it during the talks. But the answer that Qureshi gave at the joint Press conference was offensive. Yet neither the Foreign Minister nor anyone in the Indian delegation challenged it. This is strange, indeed shocking. For, this country has rightly reacted strongly to Qureshi’s crude attempt to equate Hafiz Sayeed’s hate-India speeches with Indian Home Secretary G. K. Pillai’s factual statement on David Headley’s testimony. Many have, in fact, blamed Krishna for delaying his defence of Pillai until after his return home. It is all the more surprising that no one has slapped down Qureshi’s statement on increasing infiltration from Pakistan. For this is what the Pakistani Foreign Minister said rather superciliously: “Infiltration is not the policy of the Pakistan government or of any of its intelligence agencies. Period. If stray people come in, deal with them firmly.” In other words, the influx of Pakistani terrorists into Kashmir is India’s business, and Pakistan has nothing to do with it! The whole basis of the peace process is President Musharraf’s commitment to Prime Minister Vajpaee in January 2004 not to allow Pakistan’s territory to be “used against India”! The key question is where do we go from here? The BJP’s anger against Qureshi’s fulminations at the end of an unsuccessful meeting might be understandable. But its strident call for an immediate “suspension”, if not termination, of India-Pakistan talks is uncalled for. Nations talk to their enemies even in the midst of war. The Prime Minister’s vision of a “peaceful and prosperous” South Asia is laudable. But there are two problems with it: Are there at least some in Pakistan’s ruling establishment ready to reciprocate? And is anyone trying the build up public opinion in this
country?
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Only numbers? HAVE we journalists who work in a conflict zone become insensitive to the tragedy being faced by others, and the death of human beings is confined to only figures for us? A few days ago while travelling in a bus from Jammu to Delhi I saw a red Maruti car overtaking our bus. Suddenly the car rammed into a tractor coming from the opposite direction. Following the accident the traffic on the highway was halted, we all got down from the bus to help the people trapped in the car; soon the police arrived on the spot to find that nobody travelling in the car had survived. I had seen a small girl playing in the car when it had overtaken our bus, but now that girl was lying motionless in a pool of blood. Though for some time the tragic accident kept me mum, but then my journalistic mind started to work. I forgot that some people had lost their lives. I started enquiring about the death count and calling my journalist friends in Jammu asking them to do a story. In Kashmir too for the past many days, a large number of people have lost their lives in the ongoing turmoil. Some have lost their sons, some lost their father, some their husband and many dreams were shattered as some lost their only breadwinner in the family. When thousands of people run to the houses of the people who die to console their relatives, we journalists too run there, not to show our sympathy but to get a good story and a good photograph. A wailing relative, fainting children and shell-shocked mother and wife make a “good” photograph. While the relatives make preparations for the funeral of the deceased, we try our best to get their quotes; we ask shameless questions to the father who lost his young son as to how he feels on the death. We celebrate when our story depicting the pain of others get a front page. We never visit the house of the deceased again to know what the family is going through. At times we go there to see what the government has done for the family, that too for a story. We forget the agony of others. We forget that the one who died was a human being, a son, a father, a husband. For us these are only numbers and in the morning a byline showing four dead, four injured. For journalists working in the conflict zone the lives are just restricted to
numbers.
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The General comes shopping India prepares to roll out the red carpet when General Than Shwe(77) comes calling next week. The ruthless military dictator from Myanmar is described by Foreign Affairs journal as the third worst dictator in the world. But driven by strategic and energy needs, India appears ready to deal with him. " If India can deal with Pakistan, why not wth the junta in Myanmar" is the rationale. The Tatas are planning to
set up a plant and GOI is planning to invest in exploring the oil and
gas deposits in Myanmar.
In the run-up to a long promised but still unscheduled general election, the first in 20 years, Burma’s military dictator, Senior-General Than has directed ministers to resign from the army. Those faceless generals who adorn the front page of the New Light of Myanmar, the regime’s daily newspaper, inspecting fish-packing factories and barrages, will still be running the country, and anything resembling democratic governance will be as far away as ever.
"Senior-General Than Shwe is facing a mutiny among his subordinates," it claimed last week. "There are growing signs of discontent among his cabinet ministers... They have been betrayed by their boss." "Like it or not, army
uniforms are a symbol of authority in Burma," it went on. "Those who
wear them always get priority over those who don’t. They are respected and can
expect easy co-operation from others. Suddenly they will lose that
privilege."
Leaving the army also means that those ministers will not be included in the 25 per cent quota that the army has reserved for itself in the planned new parliament. "Now they are on their own," Irrawaddy columnist Bamargyi pointed out. "Unless Than Shwe supports them with some dirty deals from behind the scenes, they are sure to lose. Once this happens, they are down the drain." In trying to re-brand his military dictatorship as a civilian administration, the 77-year-old soldier who has been the boss of his nation of 50 million people for the past 18 years, and who was recently named by the journal Foreign Affairs as the world’s third-worst dictator after Kim Jong Il and Robert Mugabe, thus faces a major challenge. How, in other words, to live out the rest of his days enjoying the billions he has plundered from the state, without ending up like his late boss Ne Win, Burma’s dictator from 1962 to 1988, who, on Than Shwe’s orders, ended his life locked in his lakeside villa in Rangoon under house arrest while his sons languished in jail under sentence of death ? How to avoid the fate of Khin Nyunt, the military intelligence chief and for many years Than Shwe’s number two, who is also under house arrest with no prospect of release (while some of his underlings were tortured to death) after China hailed him as "Burma’s Deng Xiaoping"? According to Ben Rogers, author of the first-ever biography, Than Shwe: Unmasking Burma’s Tyrant, which has just been released in London, acute anxiety about his security is behind the fact that, two years after announcing elections, the senior general has yet to say when they will be held. A similarly secretive, paranoid approach dictated the most extraordinary decision of Than Shwe’s career, and the one which, for good or ill, will assure him immortality of a sort: the removal of Burma’s capital from Rangoon to a hot, malaria-infested, seismically sensitive wasteland in the centre of the country. The idea of moving the army’s HQ out of Rangoon had been in the air for a number of years, and may have been mentioned by Than Shwe to Aung San Suu Kyi in one of the fruitless meetings they held in 1994, while the opposition leader was under her first spell of house arrest. Rangoon is in the far south; for an army engaged in multiple counter-insurgency operations in the north and east, a base in the centre made strategic sense. But unknown to the outside world, Than Shwe nursed a far more drastic plan. "At precisely 6.37 am on 6 November 2005," writes Rogers, "hundreds of government servants left Rangoon in trucks shouting, "We are leaving! We are leaving!" ... Five days later, a second convoy of 1,100 military trucks carrying 11 military battalions and 11 ministries left Rangoon. Perhaps influenced by astrologers, Than Shwe had decided to move the country’s capital. He had given government officials just two days’ notice." So Naypyitaw, which translates as "Seat of Kings" and is dominated by oversize statues of Than Shwe’s favourite royal forerunners, will be this man’s monument. "It’s the most awful place you’ve ever been to," said Mark Canning, a former British ambassador to Burma. "It’s a collection of buildings scattered over scrubland. But they are all just dispersed, and there are two or three kilometres between each building. One can only presume it’s so they don’t get bombed or something, to spread out the targets." As a resident of Naypyitaw told one foreign journalist, "Although [Than Shwe] is a king, he is afraid of many things. He thinks that here he will be safe." The comments of those who have had dealings with him are uniformly unflattering. "Short and fat with not a strong voice," says one. "Relatively boring," says another. "No evident personality." "Our leader is a very uneducated man." "There were many intelligent soldiers but he was not one of them...a bit of a thug." "You feel that he’s got there by accident..." The closest Than Shwe gets to being complimented is in the description of a former World Bank official: "He is such an old fox!" Than Shwe’s mediocrity may have had its effect on Western attitudes towards him: he is easily under- estimated. As Rogers points out, he "has demonstrated time and again his skill at offering just enough of a concession to hold the international community at bay whenever pressure intensifies...Each time the pressure eases, Than Shwe quietly abandons his promises." According to Sergio Pinheiro, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Burma from 2000 to 2008, writing in 2009, "Over the past 15 years the Burmese Army has destroyed over 3,300 villages in a systematic and widespread campaign to subjugate ethnic groups." At the same time he has kept Burma’s civilian population in poverty and hopelessness. The only "reforms" he has pushed for have had the aim of perpetuating military rule under a disguise that fools nobody. It is safe to predict that sooner or later Than Shwe will get his come-uppance. It may come from his immediate subordinates, furious at being kicked out, and an army that has never held him in esteem. The civil servants of Naypyitaw, incandescent at being exiled from the civilised comforts of Rangoon, may play their part. The monks, whom he arrogantly and foolishly refused to appease in 2007, could have a role. But however certain his eventual downfall, you would have to be a very brave optimist to predict that he will be replaced by someone significantly better. By special arrangement with The Independent
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Left in the cold
Aung San Suu Kyi
turned 65 in June this year. She was 45 when her party, National League for Democracy (NLD) won a landslide victory in the election, polling 80 per cent of the votes. But the military junta did not allow NLD to govern and Suu Kyi herself was placed under house arrest. With Than Shwe shopping for legitimacy, she is increasingly getting isolated, perhaps even irrelevant. Suu Kyi’s brother, an engineer, lives in the United States. Her husband is in England and the Generals will be happy if she decides to give up and live in exile. But the daughter of Aung San, the man who negotiated with Britain for Burma’s independence but who was assassinated soon thereafter, refuses to leave her people. Barring two brief periods the Nobel Peace Prize recipient has been under house arrest for the last 20 years. The University Avenue in Rangoon is now barricaded and the only glimpse visitors can have of her villa is from the other side of Lake Inya. If and when elections are held later this year, she will not be contesting. Because the Constitution foisted by the military junta debars political parties with political prisoners as members from registering. The only option before the NLD was to disown Suu Kyi and 400 other members in prison and then contest the election. This was not acceptable to Suu Kyi and her party agreed that contesting such an election would be undignified. Not everybody agrees and some analysts feel she lost out on an opportunity to turn the table on the Generals. But her party has now failed to register for the election. So, effectively the NLD no longer exists. The new Constitution lays down that the government must be led by a former army man. A quarter of the seats in Parliament are reserved for officers of the armed forces and there is no provision for an opposition. Speaking against the Constitution is a criminal offence punishable by imprisonment. Suu Kyi loyalists point out that she could not have given legitimacy to such undemocratic provisions by agreeing to the terms. The last time she was freed and allowed to travel outside Rangoon in 2002, people walked through the night to catch a glimpse of her. In 2003 her convoy was attacked and dozens of her supporters killed , following which she was placed in under house arrest. Since then, for the last seven years nobody, barring a few diplomats, have met Suu Kyi. More countries, including India, now ready to sup with the General, chances of her getting her freedom to lead her people appear remote.
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Corrections and clarifications n
The same news has been repeated as “Toyota rolls out diesel variant of Altis” (July 22, Page 17) and in the Lifestyle supplement under the headline “Diesel dazzler”. n
In the report “Olga’s expenditure: Rs 2 lakh a month…” (July 22, Page 3 The Tribune) nowhere is it mentioned that the reference is to the Russian spy case. n
The headline “Legal adviser has CHB top officials divided,” (Chandigarh Tribune, July 22, Page 1) does not convey the sense of the story. n
In the interview of Suresh Kalmadi, Chairman, Organising Committee, Commonwealth Games (July 22, Page 11), it was mistakenly mentioned that Mr M. S. Gill was in China and could not attend the Queen’s Baton release ceremony in London though he was invited. In fact, he attended the London ceremony, but was not present at Wagah later to receive the Baton since he was away to China. Despite our earnest endeavour to keep The Tribune error-free, some errors do creep in at times. We are always eager to correct them. This column appears twice a week — every Tuesday and Friday. We request our readers to write or e-mail to us whenever they find any error. Readers in such cases can write to Mr Kamlendra Kanwar, Senior Associate Editor, The Tribune, Chandigarh, with the word “Corrections” on the envelope. His e-mail ID is kanwar@tribunemail.com. Raj Chengappa
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But the look of things will
have changed. The ministers will wear longyi, the traditional Burmese
sarong-like garment. And crucially for them, they will no longer enjoy the
status and respect which, in a country ruled with an iron fist by the military
for half a century, is the army’s prerogative. Irrawaddy, the expatriate
Burmese news website, predicts trouble.