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A feather in Anna’s cap
Punjab looks up
Killing of a cleric |
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Pakistan in difficult straits
Worldly-wise
War in Libya: Truth is the casualty
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A feather in Anna’s cap
IT is a matter of much relief that social activist Anna Hazare has ended his fast-unto-death following the Union Government’s issuance of a notification to set up a joint committee of five Union ministers and five representatives of civil society to deliberate on the long-pending Lokpal Bill. With the committee expected to work with an unfamiliar sense of urgency to finalize a draft bill that would then go before Parliament for adoption in the ensuing monsoon session of Parliament, a legislation that has been 42 years in the making has apparently finally come to the threshold of adoption. While Anna has become a symbol of hope for millions of people who are outraged by the rampant corruption around them, there is a lesson for the country’s powers-that-be that there is a new awakening among the youth which can prove their undoing if politicians in general do not mend their ways. However, as Anna Hazare pointed out as he spoke before breaking his 98-hour long fast, “our responsibility has increased after the first success that we have received after this notification. It is a long road ahead. We have to put more pressure on the government to eradicate corruption.” It is not the time for euphoria and complacency. The Lokpal Bill is only the first in the series of battles civil society needs to wage to deal with the awesome politician-bureaucrat-business nexus which is often deleterious. The manner in which black money rules the roost in the country, the honest are being squeezed and tormented as never before. Civil society must realize, however, that while it must hasten the process of reform and zealously guard national interest, the ultimate responsibility of preparing the legislation on the Lokpal must rest with Parliament. There cannot be any shortcuts to the process for debating the bill when it comes before the two Houses. The positive from the just-concluded phase of the agitation is the sense of awakening and the signal that would predictably have seeped into the conscience of the corrupt. The negative that must be avoided is the arrogance that could stem from a mob mentality. Anna Hazare deserves the nation’s gratitude but it is incumbent on him and his loyal band of supporters to keep the movement insulated from self-seekers and other
vested interests.
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Punjab looks up AS in other states, Census-2011 has collected copious and invaluable data about population, gender and literacy in Punjab. These provisional statistics have to be seen from three different perspectives. One, how do the figures compare with the situation that existed a decade ago or earlier? Two, what is the overall situation today and, three, how has the state performed in comparison to other states? Obviously, there are miles to go on every front but what is heartening is that there is considerable improvement overall. Let us take the population growth to begin with. While the decadal growth was 20.10 per cent in 1991-2001, it was only 13.73 per cent in 2001-2011. Although partly it could be because there is a dip in migration, there is apparently more awareness about family planning as well. There is need for greater stress on curbing population growth because the state already has 27.7 million mouths to feed. In 2001, there were only 876 females for 1000 males. Now the sex ratio stands at a slightly healthier 893. This improvement is pretty widespread, with every district having over 800 girls for 1,000 boys. More important is the sex ratio among children in the 0-6 age group, because that reflects the gender bias more accurately. Although it has gone up from 798 in 2001 to 846 in 2011, Punjab is still among the worst performers in the country. Similarly, the literacy rate, which was only 34.12 per cent in 1971, now stands at 76.7 per cent. Significantly, the gap in literacy between males and females has come down considerably. While in 1971, 42 per cent males and 24 per cent males were educated, now it is 81.5 per cent males and 71.03 per cent females. The policy planners ought to continue promoting female education till they come on a par with their male counterparts. Punjab is one of the prosperous states of the country. It should take a lead in all positive parameters instead of being just an also-ran. Movements like “Nanhi Chhan” have come to the aid of the daughters but a lot more remains to be done.
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Killing of a cleric THE Jamaat Ahle Hadees, a religious organisation which does not believe in giving much importance to shrines, has been a peace-loving movement. Yet militants killed its Kashmir unit chief, Maulana Showkat Ahmed Shah, while he was on the way to leading Friday prayers in a Srinagar mosque on April 8. His “crime” was that he condemned violence and did not support separatist ideas. Two other prominent religious personalities of Kashmir, Mirwaiz Mohammad Farooq of Central Kashmir and Anantnag Mirwaiz Qazi Nisar, who lost their lives at the hands of militants in the past belonged to different schools of Islamic thought. But they too were opposed to the ways of militants. The conclusion is obvious: those who talk of peace in Kashmir are not safe even today. Interestingly, the Ahle Hadees cleric has been killed soon after the General Officer Commanding, 15 Corps, Lt-Gen S. A. Hasnain, told a gathering in Handwara that the “training camps in PoK are full and the militants trained there are waiting to infiltrate into Kashmir. So, we can’t say that militancy is on the decline”. He has proved correct: when militants are getting trained across the border, it is not possible to eliminate the scourge root and branch. Their training camps must get dismantled by Pakistan in the interest of peace and stability in the subcontinent. It is surprising that the authorities in Islamabad are allowing these camps to exist despite Pakistan having promised many times in the past that it would ensure that no territory under its control was used for promoting militancy in India or any other country. If Pakistan really gets tough with Kashmir-bound militant outfits, these anti-peace movements would die their natural death. Very few people is Jammu and Kashmir now subscribe to the militant viewpoint. These destructive organisations have virtually no support base in Kashmir today. That is why in desperation they are adopting tactics to revive militancy in a big way. One can see through their designs in blaming organisations like the Bajrang Dal and the Shiv Sena. There is need to hold a thorough probe to establish the identity of Maulana Showkat’s killers.
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The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economise. — Franklin D. Roosevelt
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Pakistan in difficult straits THE architect of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, in his inaugural speech on August 11, 1947, to the newly constituted Pakistan National Assembly outlined his vision for his infant nation. Jinnah unequivocally expressed to his predominantly Muslim legislators that “You are free, you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or any other place of worship in the state of Pakistan”. The newly born Muslim nation’s Quaid-e-Azam (Supreme Leader) further clarified that “You may belong to any religion or caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the state”. Six decades later the inclusive dreams of Pakistan’s creator lie fully shattered at the altar of worsening Islamic radicalisation — a collapsing economy, a sham democracy, a weak government gasping for army-administered oxygen to survive, an army bigger than the state and the sole arbiter of its destiny. Pakistan displays all the attributes of a failing state with its very existence at stake. Jinnah rightly envisioned an “ideological balance” in his nation, but surprisingly, it was the rule of an army dictator, Gen Zia-ul-Haq which sowed the seeds of Islamic fanaticism corroding even state institutions, including the army. This strategic blunder caused much damage from which Pakistan has not been able to rescue itself and is now sliding down inexorably to an ominous destination which may have grave repercussions for the entire region. Pakistan remains the hub of terror and instability. The terror machine and the terror infrastructure it developed, for operations in India and Afghanistan, is haunting it now with frequent blasts targeting innocent Pakistani civilians, religious shrines, high profile army and intelligence assets, etc. The recent assassinations of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti, the sole Christian minister in the Pakistani cabinet, within weeks of each other, both for supporting the repeal of the one-sided blasphemy law portends the dangerous slide towards Islamic fundamentalism. Prominent Washington Post journalist Thomas Friedman recently expressed that “ What are we doing spending $110 billion this year supporting corrupt and unpopular regimes in Afghanistan and Pakistan that are almost identical to the governments we’re applauding the Arab people for overthrowing?” Pakistan continues with its myopic and inimical policies towards both India and Afghanistan forgetting the basic tenets and usefulness of good neighbourliness in today’s changing world. It persists with double-dealing with its financial mentor, the US, by its duplicitous participation with them in the so-called war against terror. It continues its patronage of fundamentalist parties like the Jamaat-e-Islami, the Jamat-ud-Dawa and its terror syndicate, the now internationally banned Lashkar-e-Toiba(LET) and the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen for anti-India operations in Kashmir. Obsessed with its outdated fixation for “strategic depth” in Afghanistan, Pakistan has kept supporting the Haqqani network, the anti-US Afghani Taliban and the old warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in the hope of having a pro-Islamabad government in Kabul as and when the US departs from Afghanistan. Thus, it remains not overly enthusiastic in taking on the Afghani Taliban and Al-Qaeda elements in the badlands of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and South Waziristan. In keeping with its highly anti-India stance in Afghanistan, Pakistan through its ISI and local agents persists in targeting Indian personnel engaged in development activities in Afghanistan, not even sparing the Indian Embassy in Kabul by targeting it twice. A Washington-based NGO, the Fund for Peace along with the prestigious magazine, Foreign Policy, based on a survey of 177 countries, has ranked Pakistan as the 10th most failed state with Somalia as the first and Afghanistan at number 7. Myanmar is ranked 13th and India at a respectable 87th ! Norway ranks as the most stable country in the world. The survey adjudges Pakistan as the world’s most dangerous country and the areas astride the Durand Line and especially FATA and South Waziristan as the sanctuary of the top leadership and cadres of Al-Qaeda, and the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban. It notes that since 2009 nearly 3 million Pakistani civilians have been uprooted owing to counter-insurgency operations — “the largest single movement of people since the Rwandan genocide. The report also opines that President Asif Zardari heads a lame-duck government which has virtually no control over its nuclear-armed forces or the ISI, which nurtures the Afghan Taliban. An assortment of political, economic and social indicators, including developmental indices, also point to the precarious state of Pakistan. As the leading country in South Asia and its immediate neighbour, India has a vital stake in the stability of a nuclear Pakistan. For years, India has made many friendly overtures to it in the larger interest of peace in the subcontinent, including the offer of a no-war pact by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Pakistan over five years back. He showed political courage in inviting his Pakistani counterpart to the World Cup semi-final cricket match at Mohali. Now Pakistan has to seriously introspect to ensure its own existence as a progressive and moderate nation-state. The first and foremost step the Pakistanis need to adopt is to eschew utilising terror as an extension of state policy and stop support to terrorists of all hues, countless-terror organisations and dismantling the terror infrastructure. It must whole-heartedly participate in the war on terror in cooperation with the US, India, Afghanistan and Iran. Pakistan must realise that ensuring good neighbourly relations with India, in particular, is not a zero-sum game and it will itself benefit immensely. Pakistan must comprehend the fact that India does not behave as a regional hegemon and all outstanding problems can be resolved in a spirit of mutual accommodation. However, it has to discard the export of terror to India, overcome its Kashmir-fixation and must appreciate the current ground realities. Whether Pakistan can ever achieve true democracy or not is, in reality, their problem but even under an army dispensation, it can strive for improvement in its relations with India for mutual benefit. Pakistan must never forget its many perilous faultlines, and only when it accords respect and succour to its minorities and the hapless people of Baluchistan and Sindh will its internal situation improve. Meanwhile, the Pakistan army has to meticulously ensure the security of its nuclear wherewithal to prevent them from falling into wrong hands as the world fears. To survive and become a modern and moderate state as envisioned by its founder, Pakistan has to change tack. Perhaps, its most powerful state institution, the Pakistan army, has to take the lead and finally retire to the
barracks! The writer was the first Chief of the Defence Intelligence Agency
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Worldly-wise MY son was a student in one of the well-known schools of the city. Things seemed to be going well when mid-session I received a note from the class teacher saying that he had received several ‘de-merits’ in the preceding fortnight. The school had an in-house incentive-disincentive system whereby a child was awarded ‘merits’ for performing well and punished with a demerit for breaking rules. Greatly perturbed, I sought an appointment with the teacher and met her the very next day. The teacher admitted to being completely mystified by the sudden slew of de-merits. She shook her head sorrowfully and kept muttering: ‘He was such a good boy.’ With some trepidation I asked her what the problem was. She consulted some notes and whispered conspiratorially: ‘He was caught talking in class’. She squinted at the notes some more and like a baton master directing the build-up of a crescendo announced: ‘He was rude to the monitor’. ‘Monitor?’ I spluttered in shock. ‘Is he the deciding authority on handing out demerits,’ I asked in disbelief. The teacher nodded her head proudly. ‘Ours is a mini-democracy’, she intoned smugly. I left somewhat precipitately fearing I would vent out my frustration if I didn’t. Back home, I cornered my son and sat him down for a heart-to-heart. I looked him in the eye and asked him what the problem was. He looked back calmly and with a wisdom far exceeding his 13 years asked me point blank if I was ready to listen to his truth. At my nod he announced: ‘The monitor is very fond of chips and kurkure’. I was completely befuddled. How were the monitor’s culinary likes linked to de-merits? Patiently my son continued: ‘You’ve seen Bollywood films where ‘hafta’ is paid by the common man to the ‘powers that be’? I nodded, still puzzled by the strange simile but slowly enlightenment dawned. The monitor, apparently, demanded chips and kurkure from the students. He was no bully and the demand was made in a very amiable fashion. He used his own home-grown carrot-stick policy to implement his demand. Those who ‘paid up’ were awarded with a chance to represent the school in an inter-school activity. But woe betide those who did not pay up. They were punished with demerits. Before I could think of taking up cudgels against such a blatant barter system, I was sworn to secrecy. I could do nothing but lament a psyche that had tainted even the very young. But perhaps we have cause to celebrate. After all, the youngsters are becoming
‘worldly-wise’.
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War in Libya: Truth is the casualty
MOST
of us have a low feeling that we are not being told the real reasons for the war in Libya. David Cameron’s instinctive response to the Arab revolutions was to jump on a plane and tour the palaces of the region’s dictators selling them the most hi-tech weapons of repression available. Nicolas Sarkozy’s instinctive response to the Arab revolutions was to offer urgent aid to the Tunisian tyrant in crushing his people. Barack Obama’s instinctive response to the Arab revolutions was to refuse to trim the billions in aid going to Hosni Mubarak and his murderous secret police, and for his Vice-President to declare: “I would not refer to him as a dictator.” Yet now we are told that these people have turned into the armed wing of Amnesty International. They are bombing Libya because they can’t bear for innocent people to be tyrannised, by the tyrants they were arming and funding for years. As Obama put it: “Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different”. There was a time, a decade ago, when I took this rhetoric at face value. But I can’t now. The best guide through this confusion is to look at two other wars our government is currently deeply involved in — because they show that the claims made for this bombing campaign can’t be true.
Imagine a distant leader killed more than 2,000 innocent people, and his military commanders responded to evidence that they were civilians by joking that the victims “were not the local men’s glee club”. Imagine one of the innocent survivors appeared on television, amid the body parts of his son and brother, and pleaded: “Please. We are human beings. Help us. Don’t let them do this.” Imagine that polling from the attacked country showed that 90 per cent of the people there said civilians were the main victims and they desperately wanted it to stop. Imagine there was then a huge natural flood, and the leader responded by ramping up the attacks. Imagine the country’s most respected democratic and liberal voices were warning that these attacks seriously risked causing the transfer of nuclear material to jihadi groups. Surely, if we meant what we say about Libya, we would be doing anything to stop such behaviour? Wouldn’t we be imposing a no-fly zone, or even invading? Yet, in this instance, we would have to be imposing a no-fly zone on our own governments. Since 2004, the US — with European support — has been sending unmanned robot-planes into Pakistan to illegally bomb its territory in precisely this way. Barack Obama has massively intensified this policy. His administration claims they are killing al-Qa’ida. But there are several flaws in this argument. The intelligence guiding their bombs about who is actually a jihadi is so poor that, for six months, Nato held top-level negotiations with a man who claimed to be the head of the Taliban — only for him to later admit he was a random Pakistani grocer who knew nothing about the organisation. He just wanted some baksheesh. The US’s own former senior military advisers admit that even when the intel is accurate, for every one jihadi they kill, as many as 50 innocent people die. And almost everyone in Pakistan believes these attacks are actually increasing the number of jihadis, by making young men so angry at the killing of their families they queue to sign up. The country’s leading nuclear scientist, Professor Pervez Hoodbhoy, warns me it is even more dangerous still. He says there is a significant danger that these attacks are spreading so much rage and hatred through the country that it materially increases the chances of the people guarding the country’s nuclear weapons smuggling fissile material out to jihadi groups. So one of the country’s best writers, Fatima Bhutto, tells me: “In Pakistan, when we hear Obama’s rhetoric on Libya, we can only laugh. If he was worried about the pointless massacre of innocent civilians, there would be an easy first step for him: stop doing it yourself, in my country.” The war in the Congo is the deadliest war since Adolf Hitler marched across Europe. When I reported on it, I saw the worst things I could have ever conceived of: armies of drugged and mutilated children, women who had been gang-raped and shot in the vagina. Over five million people have been killed so far — and the trail of blood runs directly to your mobile phone and mine. The major UN investigation into the war explained how it happened. They said bluntly and factually that “armies of business” had invaded Congo to pillage its resources and sell them to the knowing West. The most valuable loot is coltan, which is used to make the metal in our mobile phones and games consoles and laptops. The “armies of business” fought and killed to control the mines and send it to us. The UN listed some of the major Western corporations fuelling this trade, and said if they were stopped, it would largely end the war. Last year, after a decade, the US finally passed legislation that was — in theory, at least — supposed to deal with this. As I explain in the forthcoming BBC Radio 4 programme 4Thought, it outlined an entirely voluntary system to trace who was buying coltan and other conflict minerals from the mass murderers, and so driving the war. (There are plenty of other places we can get coltan from, although it’s slightly more expensive.) The State Department was asked to draw up some kind of punishment for transgressors, and given 140 days to do it. Now the deadline has passed. What’s the punishment? It turns out the State Department didn’t have the time or inclination to draft anything. Maybe it was too busy preparing to bomb Libya, because — obviously — it can’t tolerate the killing of innocent people. (Britain and other European countries have been exactly the same.) Here was a chance to stop the worst violence against civilians in the world that didn’t require any bombs, or violence of our own. If the rhetoric about Libya was sincere, this was a no-brainer. It would only cost a few corporations some money — and they refuse to do it. So the worst war since 1945 goes on. This all went unreported. By contrast, when the Congolese government recently nationalized a mine belonging to US and British corporations, there was a fire-burst of fury in the press. You can kill five million people and we’ll politely look away; but take away the property of rich people, and we get really angry. Doesn’t this cast a different light on the Libya debate? We are pushed every day by the media to look at the (usually very real) abuses by our country’s enemies and ask: “What can we do?” We are almost never prompted to look at the equally real and equally huge abuses by our own country, its allies and its corporations — which we have much more control over — and ask the same question. So the good and decent impulse of ordinary people — to protect their fellow human beings — is manipulated. If you are interested in human rights only when it tells you a comforting story about your nation’s power, then you are not really interested in human rights at all. David Cameron says “just because we can’t intervene everywhere, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t intervene somewhere.” But this misses the point. While “we” are intervening to cause horrific harm to civilians in much of the world, it’s plainly false to claim to be driven by a desire to prevent other people behaving very like us. You could argue that our governments are clearly not driven by humanitarian concerns, but their intervention in Libya did stop a massacre in Ben Gazhi, so we should support it anyway. I understand this argument, which some people I admire have made, and I wrestled with it. It is an argument that you should, in effect, ride the beast of NATO power if it slays other beasts that were about to eat innocent people. This was the argument I made in 2003 about Iraq — that the Bush administration had malign motives, but it would have the positive effect of toppling a horrific dictator, so we should support it. I think almost everyone can see now why this was a disastrous — and, in the end, shameful — argument. Why? Because any coincidental humanitarian gain in the short term will be eclipsed as soon as the local population clash with the real reason for the war. Then our governments will back their renewed vicious repression — just as the US and Britain did in Iraq, with a policy of effectively sanctioning the resumption of torture when the population became uppity and objected to the occupation. So why are our governments really bombing Libya? We won’t know for sure until the declassified documents come out many years from now. But Bill Richardson, the former US energy secretary who served as US ambassador to the UN, is probably right when he says: “There’s another interest, and that’s energy... Libya is among the 10 top oil producers in the world. You can almost say that the gas prices in the US going up have probably happened because of a stoppage of Libyan oil production... So this is not an insignificant country, and I think our involvement is justified.” For the first time in more than 60 years, Western control over the world’s biggest pots of oil was being rocked by a series of revolutions our governments couldn’t control. The most plausible explanation is that this is a way of asserting raw Western power, and trying to arrange the fallout in our favour. But if you are still convinced our governments are acting for humanitarian reasons, I’ve got a round-trip plane ticket for you to some rubble in Pakistan and Congo. The people there would love to hear your argument. — The Independent
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