O P I N I O N S

Guest Column
India will have to hard sell itself to the US
New Delhi will have to exercise its diplomatic muscles to ensure that Pakistan military’s adroit efforts to ingratiate itself with US policymakers encounter some serious hurdles.
Sumit Ganguly
An acrimonious and expensive presidential election has just concluded in the US. It was marked with considerable incivility with both parties resorting to attacks, mostly through their surrogates.

fifty fifty
Women’s vote key to political power
Indian political parties had better watch out for the day women in India cast their vote as a single cohesive group, bringing in women candidates or those sympathetic towards them.
Kishwar Desai
This week I had been invited by the Cambridge University India Society (started initally by Jawaharlal Nehru when he was studying at Trinity College) to speak about my novels and why India can no longer be considered a safe country for women. However, the chips were stacked in favour of my tragic argument given the fact that women have just been banned from praying at the famed Haji Ali shrine in Mumbai and every day brings new reported cases of acid attacks, rapes and honour killings.

Grond Zero
The Valley simmers, this time over LPG
With over 100 million consumers of LPG facing confusion over registration for connections not just in Kashmir but all over the country, it’s time the Central govt came up with innovative solutions.
Raj Chengappa
Winter has set in in the Valley and temperatures in Srinagar touch freezing point early in the morning. A flock of geese doze in the placid Dal Lake as idle shikaras bob up and down on its banks. Leaves of the chinar trees have turned a rusty brown and the poplars a brilliant gold.

Guest Column
India will have to hard sell itself to the US
New Delhi will have to exercise its diplomatic muscles to ensure that Pakistan military’s adroit efforts to ingratiate itself with US policymakers encounter some serious hurdles.
Sumit Ganguly

An acrimonious and expensive presidential election has just concluded in the US. It was marked with considerable incivility with both parties resorting to attacks, mostly through their surrogates. It was also a costly election — expenses amounting to nearly $6 billion. As the Obama Administration gears up for a second term, it is seeking to put aside much of the rancour that characterised the campaign and to tackle the most pressing problems confronting the nation.

Even though the immediate focus of the administration will be to avoid, what is popularly referred to as the “fiscal cliff” (the yawning budget gap), it will also have to devote much attention to critical questions of foreign and security policy. One of these will inevitably deal with the critical question of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Despite the withdrawal of forces, it is widely believed that the US will maintain a small, but lethal force in Afghanistan.

Roll call: US wants India to play a practical role in Afghanistan.

That said, it will, in all likelihood, count on regional powers such as India to step up to the plate to help maintain some semblance of stability in the country. As it seeks to do so, it will, almost without question, face some pushback from Pakistan’s military establishment. Quite belatedly, the Obama Administration, like its predecessor, came to the realisation that regardless of a change of guard within the Pakistan military, its duplicitous behaviour had not come to an end, otherwise it would have alerted Rawalpindi about its plans to carry out the strike that led to Obama bin Laden’s death.

The administration, to ensure that the Pakistan military does not undermine its efforts to stabilise Afghanistan, will no doubt open some discussions with it. To insinuate itself into the good graces of the US, it will quite deftly highlight its putative sacrifices in the quest to terminate terrorist networks on Pakistan’s soil, promise increased cooperation and may even deliver a few wanted individuals to demonstrate its bona fides.

In turn, there are some in US policy circles, who thanks to their long association with Pakistan, will again fall prey to these blandishments. They will underscore the seemingly renewed cooperation and apparent reasonableness of the military and argue forcefully on its behalf. They will, among other matters, also suggest that the weapons spigot be reopened for Pakistan; its concerns about the Kashmir dispute given consideration yet again; and some pressure exerted on India to make suitable concessions.

This scenario is far from chimerical and India’s policymakers would be wise to be cognisant of its likely emergence. How might they then forestall such a possibility? Among other matters it will entail bolstering ongoing discussions with the US, speeding up agreements that remain in abeyance and moving forward with defence contracts. It will also involve proffering meaningful, viable and forward-looking ideas about how India can play a practical role in Afghanistan as the US thins out its military presence.

Beyond these efforts, New Delhi will have to exercise its diplomatic muscles to ensure that Pakistan military’s adroit efforts to ingratiate itself with US policymakers encounter some serious hurdles. This may require India’s foreign policy apparatus to ensure that its views are adequately and forcefully represented, not only at Foggy Bottom, but also Capitol Hill. Attempting to fend off the revival of a US-Pakistan security relationship for the ostensible purpose of combating terror in Pakistan and its environs will prove to be a fool’s errand. It must instead be the goal of Indian diplomacy to ensure that such a nexus is not forged in the first place. Accomplishing this end will necessitate a full court press effort to remind key policymakers, members of Congress and the attentive public in Washington, DC, that Pakistan’s military establishment has consistently dissembled about its dalliance with terror, that appeasing it with periodic rewards has produced few meaningful results and that it is not about to change its behaviour.

None of this will be easy. Indian policymaking, especially when it has involved the US, except on rare occasions, has been both timid and hesitant. It has also been held hostage to the memories of the Cold War when the two sides were frequently at odds. Instead of remaining trapped in a time warp, New Delhi has to recognise that it has a distinct opportunity to forge a more robust, reliable and significant relationship with the US, based on shared regional and even global security concerns. These interests clearly intersect in Afghanistan. A failure to seize this moment will constitute the squandering of a vital opportunity to build a more secure region.

The writer is Director, Center on American and Global Security, Indiana University, Bloomington.

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Women’s vote key to political power
Indian political parties had better watch out for the day women in India cast their vote as a single cohesive group, bringing in women candidates or those sympathetic towards them.
Kishwar Desai

This week I had been invited by the Cambridge University India Society (started initally by Jawaharlal Nehru when he was studying at Trinity College) to speak about my novels and why India can no longer be considered a safe country for women. However, the chips were stacked in favour of my tragic argument given the fact that women have just been banned from praying at the famed Haji Ali shrine in Mumbai and every day brings new reported cases of acid attacks, rapes and honour killings.

The Cambridge evening turned out to be an interesting one, even though we had to change the venue as the ceiling collapsed in the original room (without my having said a single word!) A lot of fiery questions were thrown at me by young students, many of whom confessed that they had been so busy studying that they had no time to ponder about these issues.

dismal: A lot has to be done for the uplift of Indian women.

It was an eclectic mix of students but unlike many other functions where gender is discussed, this was a happily gender-balanced audience with an almost equal number of men and women. The discussion was exciting because at the end of it everyone, including the young men present, tried to come up with solutions on how to improve the sex ratio in India. The salutary interventions from this group of thoughtful young men and women made one hope that the future of India rested in safer hands.

One of the male students even suggested that gender issues, especially foeticide and infanticide, should be taught in school, and wondered why that was rarely done. And he is right! Until we involve the youth of our country in sorting out these issues, how will the present environment ever improve? Yet the others in the audience were swift to point out that the manner in which some of them had been educated in India, left them with very little time to imbibe examples from ‘real’ life, or ask uncomfortable questions.

Obviously few of them, really, even had the time to examine whether their country was fair to women. Fortunately, none of them tried to dismiss the problem, and I came away thinking that if all young Indian men thought in this manner, the women would soon be able to feel secure.

But this is very unlike the attitude that an aging politician from India, Mulayam Singh Yadav, displayed recently. A former Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Yadav has rarely tried to hide his angst over the Women’s Reservation Bill and he has always come up with unpalatable, misogynistic remarks. Despite the fact that his son and UP Chief Minister, Akhilesh Yadav, selected his own wife Dimple to run almost unopposed as a Member of Parliament, Yadav senior has now complained that the present Women’s Reservation Bill would support the entry only of English-speaking urban women into Parliament. The implication appears to be that it is alright for his family to put them in, but not for the others.

And this time he has gone a step further saying that rural women will not stand a chance of being elected if the Women’s Reservation Bill is introduced in its present form, as they are simply not ‘attractive’ enough. Of course, he covers up his objections by stating that the Bill must have provisions for Dalit and Backward Castes as well as Muslim women.

The fact is that Yadav, unlike the young men and women I met in Cambridge who are keen that their country bridge the gender divide and help women to improve their status, would prefer to somehow keep his casteist and religious clout in doling out seats, even to women.

The question to be asked is why Yadav (who would lose miserably indeed if votes were cast on the basis of ‘attractiveness’) does not start by introducing reservation for women within his own party, even on his own terms. What is truly shocking is that none of the major political parties have even begun to appreciate the vote bank that lies within easy reach, mending their ways.

All they need to do is analyse how women have voted in the recent US elections. The fact that the Republicans were seen to be waging a war on women — on their reproductive rights as well as on healthcare — meant that President Obama actually polled more of the female votes than his challenger, Mitt Romney.

One of the major lessons from the elections, and the cause of the Democratic victory in the US, is reflected in the jump in the number of women representatives. There had been a steady increase in their numbers in previous elections as well. This time, there will be 20 women among the 100-seat Senate. Apart from that, there is a gay Senator among them, Tammy Baldwin, and there are at least five women Senators entering Parliament for the first time, replacing men. Overall, among the Democrats, there has been a positive push for women — and the approximate 200 Democrats in the 113th Congress will have a record 61 women.

On the other hand, the Republicans who were perceived to have been far more regressive in their attitudes have ultimately paid the price for it.

This is why Indian political parties had better watch out for the day women in India cast their vote as a single cohesive group, bringing in women candidates or candidates sympathetic towards women. Perhaps, if the political parties continue to ignore them, they might be forced to jump onto Arvind Kejriwal’s bandwagon and start their own Women Against Misogyny Morcha! (WAMM) — Not a bad acronym, any takers?