The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

EDITORIALS

Baptism by fire
J & K CM has learnt on the job

Omar Abdullah, against all odds, completed three years in office this week as the Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir. The youngest Chief Minister of the most sensitive state in the country, he has had a rough time on the hot seat and the temptation for him to give it all up and return to a corporate job would have been great. Given his relative youth and inexperience, career politicians in the state would like to see him fail and they have scarcely missed an opportunity to lampoon him. Uncharitable remarks that the state is being administered by the Governor and security looked after by the Union Home Minister, would have rankled. Talks of governance-deficit and trust-deficit in New Delhi would have led to his isolation. His own persona would have added to his discomfiture. Appearing aloof and impersonal in public, his inability to connect spontaneously with people is cited as a weakness. His failure to deliver on the promise of a corruption-free government and hold elections for civic bodies are also held against him.

But the last one year has been the most peaceful in two decades, resulting in a record arrival of tourists. The state successfully conducted panchayat elections after a gap of 37 years and the government set up the State Accountability Commission and the State Vigilance Commission. The Right to Information (RTI) Act was implemented, the Right to Service Act put on the fast track and steps were initiated to equip the youth from the state with skills so that they compete better for jobs. Omar Abdullah himself is reaching out to the people, travelling to the districts more frequently, acknowledging mistakes like releasing the names of rape victims and, above all, reacting faster to flash points. He has also retraced his stand on lifting the Armed Forces Special Power Act (AFSPA), pledging that the Act would be lifted only if peace prevails.

Indeed, Omar Abdullah has a tough balancing act to perform in a state which is admittedly a minefield. His priorities seem clear enough though. Peace is an imperative but an imperative over which he has little control. It would be unfair, therefore, to hold him responsible for all that has or that can go wrong in the state.

Alliance in trouble
Cong ties with Mamata face acid test

THE strains that have developed in relations between the West Bengal Congress and Chief Minister and Trinamool supremo Mamata Banerjee were not unexpected considering Mamata’s track record. The stormy petrel of Bengal politics has always been a difficult ally. The NDA found that to its cost when Mamata was in the Vajpayee government at the Centre and the Congress too has had a taste of Mamata’s ire many a time. The UPA government at the Centre gave in to Mamata when she refused to yield on FDI in retail. Again, on the Pension Fund Bill, all was well until the Trinamool Congress put its foot down against it. Then, Mamata’s opposition stymied the Lokpal Bill when all attempts to get the Bill passed failed at her door in the winter session of Parliament. Both on foreign investment in retail and on the Lokpal issue, Mamata Banerjee’s tough stand was not without logic or reason. She was playing to and perhaps fuelling her people’s sensitivities and making the Centre look like a supplicant.

The latest point of contention is Mamata’s resolve to re-name Indira Bhavan, a building named after the former Prime Minister, as Nazrul Bhavan after the legendary Bengali poet Kazi Nazrul Islam. Agitated Congressmen have launched a movement against it, blocking roads and railway tracks day after day propelling Mamata to claim that the Congress is colluding with her arch-rivals, the CP M. In other signs of fissures, the Trinamool Congress has made it known that it is not open to a compromise on the Lokpal Bill issue, and insists that the Centre must talk to all political parties to evolve a consensus. At the same time, the party is looking at a possible alliance with non-Congress parties in UP and Goa in the upcoming elections.

It may be premature to think that Mamata’s alliance with the Congress is on the chopping block just yet but the direction that she is taking cannot be comforting to the Congress. Perhaps, that explains why the Congress is looking at the Samajwadi Party as a possible post-poll ally in UP to swell its numbers in the Rajya Sabha so that it can then shed its dependence on the Trinamool Congress.

Sell-off plan fails
Cash crunch stares govt in the face

THE Centre’s plan to raise Rs 40,000 crore through the sale of its shares in public sector undertakings (PSUs) seems to have floundered. On Wednesday the Cabinet deferred its decision to raise the badly needed cash due to differences with the ministries of coal and petroleum, which felt the move to buy back PSU shares would hit the cash balance of the companies under them. A steep fall in the stock prices has made it difficult for companies, both private and state-run, to raise capital through public offers.

To help the government, the regulator, SEBI, had on Tuesday allowed the promoters with more than a 75 per cent stake in their companies to reduce their stock-holdings through an auction of shares to institutional investors. But inter-ministerial differences and also a shortage of time have scuttled the government plan. Government finances are in tatters. The debt crisis in Europe, the shaky recovery in the US, costlier oil, high inflation and interest rates have slowed down growth. As a result, the government revenue has got shrunk to Rs 9 lakh crore, which is Rs 32,000 crore less than the budget estimate.

The government expenditure, on the other hand, has shot up — largely due to higher oil and fertilizer subsidies. To meet the shortfall in revenue the government has borrowed Rs 52,800 crore and Rs 40,000 crore in two installments. Still, the fiscal deficit is set to rise by one percentage point from the budgeted level of 4.5 per cent of the GDP. Poor fiscal management is one of the reasons driving foreign investors out of the country. Nothing seems to be working right for the government in its efforts to fix the finances or push reforms. Intra-party politics, stubborn allies, disruptive opposition parties and Team Anna’s antics and agitations have largely occupied the economist-led government’s attention, which ideally should have focussed on finding ways to perk up the economy.

Thought for the Day

Men are so accustomed to maintaining external order by violence that they cannot conceive of life being possible without violence.

— Leo Tolstoy

ARTICLE

Security-driven ties with Israel
India needs to review its policy
by G. Parthasarathy

ON November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly passed a Partition Plan, with a two-thirds majority, dividing the British Mandate of Palestine into two states — Jewish and Muslim. The resolution was accepted by the Jewish leadership and rejected by the Arabs. A newly independent India, torn apart by the massacres that followed its communal partition, predictably voted against the partition of Palestine on communal lines. Just over two years later, responding to international realities, India recognised Israel. But the seeds of partition of Palestine were sown half a century earlier, when the First Zionist Congress held in Switzerland in 1897, called for the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the “Land of the Pure”, or Palestine.

Arab intellectuals responded two decades later, demanding the independence from the Ottoman Empire of all Arab provinces, including Palestine. Refusing to recognise the State of Israel, invading Arab forces were humiliatingly defeated in wars with the Jewish state in 1948, 1967 and 1973. The Egyptians made peace with Israel in 1979 and have since maintained a normal, but sometimes uneasy relationship with it. Jordan soon followed suit.

Ever since then a number of Arab countries commenced overt or covert ties with the Jewish state. Some, like Kuwait and Oman, shut their doors to the free entry of Palestinians. Moreover, Arab-Israeli differences now lie largely subsumed in Shia-Sunni tensions within countries like Iraq and Bahrain. Historical Arab-Persian rivalries between Shia-dominated Iran on the one hand and its Sunni Gulf Arab neighbours led by Saudi Arabia on the other also tend to dominate Arab attention today, even more than the Palestinian issue.

An Israeli delegation led by Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinians led by Yasser Arafat strove in 1993 to find a peaceful solution to their differences through what became known as the Oslo peace process. A crucial milestone in this process was Arafat’s letter of recognition of Israel’s right to exist. Since then the “Mid-East Quartet” comprising the US, the EU, Russia and the UN has taken centrestage in promoting direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians. Neither India nor China nor any other Asian country has a role in this effort.

Driven by its domestic political compulsions, the dynamics of Cold War politics and its role in the nonaligned movement, India hesitated in moving towards establishing diplomatic ties with Israel, even though ties at covert levels continued, with Israel providing India with urgently needed military supplies, during and after the 1965 India-Pakistan conflict. But with the end of the Cold war and the Arabs and Israelis themselves talking directly to each other, India moved, albeit belatedly, to establish diplomatic ties with Israel, in 1992. What has emerged since then has been a burgeoning security relationship between the two countries.

For Israel, this relationship has attained greater importance after Turkey turned hostile to it, in recent years. Israel, however, has normal and friendly relations with China, Japan and a number of East Asian countries. It also has friendly ties with India’s neighbours like Sri Lanka, Nepal and Myanmar.

The India-Israeli relationship has quietly been security driven. While many aspects of the relationship, particularly in the spheres of defence, aerospace and counter-insurgency, have been kept under wraps, they are now coming into public focus in studies by Indian and Israeli scholars. Over the past decade, Israel has emerged as the second largest supplier of sophisticated weapon systems to India. Former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam played a crucial role in promoting this effort, after his visit to Israel in 1996, as Scientific Adviser to the Defence Minister. This has now led to a vastly expanding collaboration in areas like crucial air defence systems and missiles, upgrading of the aging Soviet-era equipment, including tanks and fighter aircraft, and cooperation in areas of research and development, in highly advanced night vision devices, sensors and unmanned aerial vehicles, which have a crucial role in dealing with cross-border terrorism. Sadly, our former Ambassador to Israel Raminder Singh Jassal, who played a key role in shaping the strategic directions of relations with Israel, died recently in Turkey.

As India seeks industrial development in areas of high technology and the involvement of its private sector in fields like defence and aerospace, Israel has emerged as an important partner. The Tatas have become the first Indian company to seek manufacturing and R&D facilities through collaboration with Israel in areas like radars, electronic warfare and homeland security systems. Cooperation in aerospace with Israel commenced with an agreement reached in 2003 that India would launch a satellite developed by Tel Aviv University.

The Israeli satellite “Polaris” was launched by ISRO in 2008. Shortly thereafter India launched an Israeli-made imaging satellite RISAT 2. India has also leveraged its ties with Israel to secure Congressional understanding in the US on several critical issues. While American concerns about the rise of China have secured India exclusive access in Asia to advanced early warning systems like the Israeli PHALCON, there are areas of concern where Israeli transfers to China are finding their way to Pakistan, for fighter aircraft like the Chinese J 10, which was designed and developed by Israel.

Under pressure from is communist allies, Dr Manmohan Singh’s UPA-I government avoided visits by Cabinet ministers to Israel. The CPM’s objections were strange, given the fact that two of its top leaders, Mr Jyoti Basu and Mr Somnath Chatterjee, had paid an extended visit to Israel in 2000 and sought Israeli cooperation in agriculture and industry. It has been fairly common for chief ministers of Indian states, ranging from Maharashtra and Himachal Pradesh to Haryana and Punjab, to visit Israel for collaboration projects in agriculture, horticulture, water management and sprinkler systems.

Reflecting a welcome change in what was a strange policy, driven by the “compulsions of coalition politics”, the External Affairs Minister, Mr S.M. Krishna, is now scheduled to visit Israel shortly. This does not signal a change in India’s principled position that Israel should avoid building settlements in territories occupied by it and work for a solution that leads to the emergence of a viable Palestinian state, while guaranteeing the security of all states in the region. Arab states tend to take India for granted by routinely supporting gratuitous anti-India resolutions on Jammu and Kashmir in the Organisation of Islamic Conference. They should be made to realise that friendship is a two-way street. India has taken an overly benign view of gross human rights violations and sectarian tensions in some Arab countries. The possibility of reviewing this policy should always be kept open.

MIDDLE

If Columbus had not discovered America
by Shelley Walia

Operation Geronimo, programmed to eliminate Osama bin Laden, brings back memories of schooldays, especially the excitement of using up one’s pocket money to purchase ‘Western’ comics that depicted the history and struggle of the native Americans spearheaded by Geronimo, the Apache leader who pitched his forces against American and Mexican armies in the late 19th century for the preservation of their tribal land. The conflict that began with the arrival of Columbus in the Bahamas in 1492 continues to this day.

As a weekly assignment, I recall we were once asked to write an essay on ‘If Columbus had not discovered America.’ Most of us, then, were nurtured on accounts of the ‘great’ discovery written from the perspective of the imperialists. After four decades, I begin to see the subterranean motives behind history writing and the stories replete with deception and lies. The past has its oral histories but not many natives remain to tell the truth. It is well said in Africa that until lions begin to write their own accounts, tales of hunting will always glorify the hunter.

Not many realise that if Columbus had not landed in the Bahamas on that fateful day in 1492, the Arawak Indians would have survived and slave trade might not have prospered. Although Columbus, in his diaries, notes the guileless and gentle disposition of the Indians, he also observes shockingly that the natives would ‘make fine servants’, which turned out to be a strategy intended to capture them for auction in Europe. Already thousands had been massacred because of their inability to supply him with gold. Unfortunately, American history books fail to mention the horrifying incidents whereby Spanish soldiers stabbed the natives for sport or dashed the heads of infants against rocks or threw them to ferocious dogs.

Interestingly, the natives had no concept of private ownership so that they took things belonging to the white invaders unhesitatingly only to be accused of theft. For this, they had to suffer torture and heartless mutilation. Many who were forced into labour went hungry and weak. Thousands died of sickness from smallpox, typhus and diphtheria, diseases which the Europeans had carried with them across the Atlantic to a land which had as yet not experienced such dreadful epidemics. Moreover, there was sexual brutality visited upon the amazingly beautiful women of the Bahamas, of Cuba and of Hispaniola. While this was a romantic adventure for Columbus and his men, it was a period of unspeakable horror for the natives.

How could we then mouth the celebrated but ridiculous nursery rhyme: ‘In Fourteen Hundred and Ninety Two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue’, a jingle that is taught to children across the world. The romance built into it is a legitimising strategy that manoeuvres public opinion away from one of the most nightmarish instances of genocide. The true account of such history is swept under the rug, and we as students brainwashed into applauding the daring of crossing an ocean which led to the discovery of a land without which contemporary world history would be inadequate.

It is appalling that the United States, a nation that speaks of freedom and justice, celebrates Columbus Day as a national holiday. It is equally outrageous that the existing histories lay more emphasis on Columbus’s ‘indomitable will’, his ‘seamanship’, etc, than on the ravages of disease, enslavement, rape and murder. The illusion of history has to be demystified not through celebration and glorification, but through the understanding of the underlying American psyche that views Columbus as a symbol of patriotism, of expansion and conquest.