The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

In a poll of blood
Punjab violence a result of high stakes

A Congress leader has been murdered in cold blood in the Patti Assembly constituency of Punjab’s Tarn Taran district. The attack came a day after another clash between Congress and Akali workers, which left one Congress man injured. The violence is apparently in connection with the zila parishad elections, for which campaigning is under way. It is distressing to see that a relatively developed state like Punjab — with greater media penetration, public awareness and communication infrastructure — has still not evolved beyond the violent ways of the elections of the seventies, seen particularly in states like UP and Bihar. All elections other than those conducted by the Election Commission of India continue to be vitiated by rampant violence and rigging.

In the immediate context, there can be only two explanations for this. Either the state government has failed to provide adequate security, or the police deliberately looks the other way. Either way, it is bad. Fear of definite police action goes a long way in keeping violence at bay. In the larger context, it needs asking why are so many people prepared to take to guns — staking their own and others’ lives — to ensure victory in elections. Perhaps it is because there is as much at stake in a quid pro quo system of governance sustained on personal and material favours. To have political power does not mean simply serving the people but to have discretionary access to public resources. This is a legacy of the feudal system that the democracy has as yet not been able to wipe away.

For now, the violence is a reflection on the SAD government’s approach to governance and power. As many privileges accrue to individuals associated with a party in power, Akalis have been able to draw a majority of the influential fence-sitters across the state, thereby consolidating the hold gained from winning the Assembly elections. However, this very asset is beginning to be a liability, as most of them are there for the benefits, and not ideology. Unless the top leadership reins in the wayward elements — better still, weed them out — the apparent strength could well boomerang.

Poorly run cooperatives
Youth aspirations go beyond handicrafts

If the elegant Kashmiri handicrafts, with their classic motifs and fine work fail a government-run scheme for reviving handicraft sector in the state of J&K, the fault could only be that of a half-baked government approach. Under no circumstance, the rich tradition of Kashmiri handicrafts, known the world over for their exquisite beauty, be blamed for the failure of such a scheme. It is strange, while the private handicraft dealers from the state never fail in handicraft business, customers’ demand for delicate pashminas, fine carpets or the painstakingly created papier mache items never seems to fade, at home and abroad, in government hands, these very items become a loss making proposition. In the last five years, about 64 per cent of the cooperative societies established by the state government for promoting crafts and providing employment to youth are said to have become defunct. And close to Rs 15 crore, tax payers ‘hard-earned money spent on the scheme has gone down the drain.

This problem is not unique to the J&K government. Almost all state-run emporiums, supposed to promote the state’s handicrafts, shut shop after they exhaust subsidies, or sell products that lack finish compared to what one would get from private dealers. Multiple factors chart out this failure. One, the babus who head these societies lack empathy for the people and their traditions. They impose their uninformed ideas on traditions that survived without any interference for centuries. Two, they fail to create aggressive marketing network for their products procure raw material at cheap rates for the artisans, the only help these artisans require. Three, most of these crafts are handed down through generations within a family; they need a very imaginative approach to be taught to outsiders.

The most important factor that ensures the failure of such government schemes is its inability to read changing aspirations of youth. It’s high time, before wasting public money on such schemes, the government conducted a survey for the viability and demand for such schemes.

Thought for the Day

We may give without loving, but we cannot love without giving. — Bernard Meltzer

ARTICLE

Worst phase since 1947
Governance, ethics at virtual end
by Inder Malhotra

DURING the two-thirds of a century since the tryst with destiny there have been grim interludes of gloom and doom in this country. These have ranged from the trauma of the 1962 border war with China to the mid-1970s nightmare of Indira Gandhi's emergency, to the pawning of our gold in Europe in 1990-199l, to the demolition of the Babri masjid and the madness that followed. In the meantime, Pakistan-backed insurgencies in Kashmir and Punjab had led to catastrophic consequences, especially in Punjab. And during the mid-1990s it had appeared as if the country would have to endure a general election a year.

Even so, seldom before has there been such deep depression in the country as during the current phase of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance-II's misrule, which now seems to have reached its nadir.

Yet another session of the 15th Lok Sabha has been a washout though, mercifully, the Budget has been passed. All important Bills the government swore by are stymied. This is the result, on the one hand, of the rising mound of massive scams and scandals that have smothered the Manmohan Sing government, and on the other, of the utter irresponsibility of the principal Opposition party, the BJP, that has arrogated to itself the right to disrupt Parliament with such regularity as to make it dysfunctional and thus endanger the future of parliamentary democracy itself.

If the BJP makes the absurd claim that it has the right to hold Parliament to ransom until the Prime Minister resigns the Congress is acting equally preposterously by turning combative and declaring that none of its ministers - not Law Minister Ashwini Kumar, nor Railway Minister Pawan Bansal - would quit, to say nothing of the Prime Minister. Even to listen to the demand for his resignation is anathema to the ruling party. The belligerency with which the Congress is refusing even to countenance the demand for ministerial resignations is also inimical to the basic norms of democracy.

The BJP, of course, indulges in overkill when, at the drop of hat, it hastens to ask for the Prime Minister's ouster. But it does have a point in relation to the loot in the allocations of coal blocks, for throughout the relevant period Dr. Singh was the Coal Minister, too. However, the case for the resignations of Mr. Ashwini Kumar and Mr. Bansal is so strong as to be compelling. In a normally functioning democracy these two would have put in their papers immediately.

Mr. Kumar's culpability is by far much the greater. The Supreme Court has already pronounced that as Law Minister he had no authority to summon the Director of the Central Bureau of Investigation and to vet the report the CBI had to submit to only the apex court. The court has passed strong strictures against the government and fixed the next hearing on July 10. The government, meanwhile, is sticking to its policy of brazening it out until then. It flatly refuses to discuss anything sub judice. All concerned are painfully aware, however, that the stain of interfering with the CBI can reach the Prime Minister's door.

Mr. Bansal's mortification would be better appreciated if it is viewed in the context in which it was exposed to the light of day. For, the context underscores how much damage an inept government can inflict on itself and the country in the course of just one day - in this case on Friday, May 3.

Come to think of it, that date was, in fact, the Day of Sarabjit Singh. His body had arrived at Amritsar the previous night and was being taken to his home village for cremation with full state honours. The Punjab government had declared him to be a martyr. All political parties had rallied behind him and the mass sentiment for him was phenomenal. Deft TV commentaries had hammered home the perfidy of Pakistan in ignoring all warnings and allowing inmates of Sarabjit's prison fatally to wound him. There was even talk of "ISI conspiracy".

And then in a matter of minutes it was all over. Someone in a Jammu jail did unto a Pakistani prisoner, Sanaullah exactly what the Pakistanis had done to Sarabjit. India instantly lost the moral high ground. Having got off the hook, Pakistan is now levelling against this country charges it had attracted earlier in relation to Sarabjit. It was soon thereafter that from Chandigarh came the sensational news alleging that a nephew of Mr. Bansal, Vijay Singla, was arrested by the CBI while receiving a bribe of Rs. 90 lakh for getting a senior railway official, Mahesh Kumar, promoted to a post coveted by him.

This, however, has nothing to do with the Law Minister's conduct. Yet the Congress Core Committee, after confabulations for two days, has decided to reject the demands for the resignations of both these ministers equally firmly.

The right thing for Mr. Bansal to do is to step down gracefully now and, of course, return to his Cabinet post if and when exonerated of the charges against him, rather than say he won't go until the CBI investigations reach their conclusion. One gnawing thought evoked by this affair is that no one would pay several crores of rupees to secure a job unless he/she expects to make several times that amount in the new job.

The Sunday night settlement of the face-off with the intruding Chinese in Depsang valley in eastern Ladakh would give the government some relief from the charge that it has been following a namby-pamby policy towards China and Pakistan. The details of the agreement with China are, of course, not yet known. However, the fact remains that the government is allowing India's neighbours, including the tiny Maldives, to take liberties with India. Sri Lanka has retaliated for the Indian vote against it at the UN Human Rights Council recently. It has asked for a major change in a decade-old agreement to run the petroleum storage tanks there or the agreement wouldn't go into effect at all. The entire BJP-led National Democratic Alliance was at Rashtrapati Bhavan the other day requesting President Pranab Mukherjee to do something about the "visible weakening" of Indian foreign policy.

Oped Security

Tandoori nights
by Sanjeev Trikha

In my town we have to face unusually lengthy power cuts, lengthy enough to exhaust the inverter buffer. On one such occasion we were pushed to the unusual darkness combined with summer heat and humidity. The whole house saw much hue and cry, frequent calls to the complaint centre returned with the annoying busy tone. Such discomfort usually magnifies when the inverters in the neighbourhood are still working, making you sizzle and simmer in the heat and fire of jealousy.

My brother and his family were also with us due to summer vacation. The ladies in the house had their own worries of cooking food in the quirky ambience of the candle-lit, humid and hot kitchen.

My wife decided to use the tandoor lying abandoned in the courtyard and floated the idea that dinner would be cooked and served there in the open. The children for whom it was a novel idea, hoping to enjoy something unique, instantly approved the suggestion and pulled their socks and started collecting the necessary material for the tandoor cooking. They amazingly witnessed the entire exercise from heating this desi gadget to cooking garma garam chapattis.

The unique experience of enjoying the delicacy of home-made makkhan on the crisp tandoori roti and 'mukkimar pyaz' (onion crushed with hand) and the omni-present aam ka achar (mango pickle) and that too with the cool natural breeze in the open court yard was enjoyed by all in such magnitude that the children named the dish Makhanni roti da piazza which has become quite a routine in our household menu.

Thanks to the electricity department and the exhausted inverter, the abandoned tandoor was back in the limelight. After the sumptuous dinner we decided to pull the bedroom mattresses to the open courtyard and enjoyed the natural air. Amidst chatting nobody knew when they fell asleep.

The night was so enjoyed by everybody that it was named as the 'tandoori night' and has become a regular feature whenever the whole family gathers. My nephew, who has a special liking for such moments and tandoori rotis, has named my wife and his taiee as 'Tandoori Taiee'. My wife proudly acknowledges this name as it speaks volumes of her culinary traits.

We are not afraid of power cuts any more as we have a silent inverter, a silent tandoor and a not so silent Tandoori Taiee at our disposal. Keeping in view the creative instincts of my nephew with regard to giving names, I have categorically told my wife not to try her hands at jalebis for him otherwise that naughty little devil would retag her from Tandoori Taiee to 'Jalebi Baiee'.

OPED

Pak policy smacks of nuclear blackmail
In dismissing India’s nuclear deterrent as driven by pride and prestige, Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent is sought to be projected as somehow more justified, as unlike India it is said to be driven by so-called real security threats.
Shyam Saran

Shyam Saran, former Foreign Secretary, studies Pakistan’s nuclear posturing and failure of India’s strategists to clear the air about its own nuclear programme. The article is the last in a three-part series.

The Pakistani motivation is to dissuade India from contemplating conventional punitive retaliation to sub-conventional but highly destructive and disruptive cross-border terrorist strikes such as the horrific 26/11 attack on Mumbai. AFP file photo

Shrill articulation of imaginary security threats by Pakistan has justified its rapidly growing nuclear arsenal in the eyes of some motivated analysts. The next link in the argument would be that if only India could be persuaded to discard its pride and false sense of prestige and status, a strategic restraint regime, if not a non-nuclear regime, between the two sides would become possible and the world relieved from having to deal with the “most dangerous part of the world”.

Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are certainly focused in large part on the threat from India, real or imagined. In the present case, the Pakistani motivation is to dissuade India from contemplating conventional punitive retaliation to sub-conventional but highly destructive and disruptive cross-border terrorist strikes such as the horrific 26/11 attack on Mumbai. What Pakistan is signalling to India and to the world is that India should not contemplate retaliation even if there is another Mumbai because Pakistan has lowered the threshold of nuclear use to the theatre level. This is nothing short of nuclear blackmail, no different from the irresponsible behaviour one witnesses in North Korea. It deserves equal condemnation by the international community because it is not just a threat to India but to international peace and security.

Perceived threats of Pak

Should the international community countenance a licence to aid and abet terrorism by a state holding out a threat of nuclear war? But today given the evidence available, is it even possible to claim that the so-called Indian threat is the sole motivation which drives Pakistan’s nuclear programme?

Some of the significant shifts that have taken place recently in Pakistan’s nuclear posture, taking it from declared “minimum deterrence” to a possible second strike capability, are:

There is a calculated shift from the earlier generation of enriched uranium nuclear weapons to a newer generation of plutonium weapons.

Plutonium weapons would enable Pakistan to significantly increase the number of weapons in its arsenal, Pakistan is reported to have overtaken India’s nuclear weapon inventory and, in a decade, may well surpass those held by Britain, France and China.

Progress has been claimed in the miniaturisation of weapons, enabling their use with cruise missiles and also with a new generation of short-range and tactical missiles. This is not yet fully verified but the intent is clear.

Pakistan has steadily pursued the improvement of the range and accuracy of its delivery vehicles, building upon the earlier Chinese models (the Hatf series) and the later North Korean models (the No-dong series). The newer missiles, including the Nasr, are solid-fuelled, which can be launched more speedily than the older liquid fuelled ones.

Pakistan’s nuclear programme brings its scientific and technological accomplishments into the limelight. Pakistan repeatedly draws attention to its being the only Islamic country to have a sophisticated nuclear weapons programme. This gives it a special standing in the Islamic world. One should not underestimate the prestige factor in this regard.

These developments are driven by a mindset which seeks parity with, and even overtaking India, irrespective of the cost this entails. However, it is also driven by the more recent fear that the US may carry out an operation, like the one mounted in May 2011 to kill Osama bin Laden in Abbotabad, to disable, destroy or confiscate its nuclear weapons. The increase in the number of weapons, planned miniaturisation of warheads and their wider dispersal, are all designed to deter the US from undertaking such an operation. This aspect has acquired increasing salience in Pakistani calculations.

Recent articles which claim that the US has contingency plans to take out Pakistan’s nuclear weapons in case of a jihadi takeover of its government or if the Pakistan army itself splits into a pro-jihadi and an anti-jihadi faction with the danger that the country’s nuclear arsenal is no longer in safe and secure hands, must have heightened the paranoia among Pakistan’s military and bureaucratic elite.

Multiple nuclear actors

Pakistan has, nevertheless, projected its nuclear deterrent as solely targeted at India and its strategic doctrine mimics the binary nuclear equation between the US and the Soviet Union which prevailed during the Cold War. But in a world of multiple nuclear actors, there is pervasive uncertainty about how the nuclear dynamic will play itself out even if a nuclear exchange commenced with only two actors. What may be a zero-sum game with two actors may not be so for a third or a fourth actor. For example, the long history of the Sino-Pakistan nuclear nexus determines that China will be a factor influencing security calculations in New Delhi, Islamabad and Washington. How will a nuclear exchange, often posited between India and Pakistan, impact on China and would India be prudent not to factor that into its nuclear deterrence calculations?

In the context of Japan and South Korea, can the nuclear threat posed by North Korea be delinked from China’s strategic posture in the region? How would these calculations affect the US nuclear posture? And how would Russian strategists react? It is because of this complexity that notions of a flexible response and counter-force targeting, which appeared to have certain logic in a binary US-Soviet context, lose their relevance in the multi-dimensional threat scenario which certainly prevails in our region. It is no longer sufficient to analyse the India-Pakistan or India-China nuclear equation only in the bilateral context. Therefore, Pakistan’s nuclear behaviour should be a matter of concern not just to India but to the international community. It obviously is for the US though it is usually made out to be a matter for and related to Pakistan’s relations with India.

It is also this complexity in multiple and interlinked nuclear equations which argues for an early realisation of global nuclear disarmament through multilateral negotiations and India’s championing of this cause is not all contradictory to its maintenance of a robust nuclear deterrent in the meantime. The above background must be kept in mind when evaluating India’s continued insistence on the central tenet of its nuclear doctrine that India will not be the first to use nuclear weapons, but if it is attacked with such weapons, it would engage in nuclear retaliation which will be massive and designed to inflict unacceptable damage on its adversary.

The label on a nuclear weapon used for attacking India, strategic or tactical, is irrelevant from the Indian perspective. A limited nuclear war is a contradiction in terms. Any nuclear exchange, once initiated, would swiftly and inexorably escalate to the strategic level. Pakistan would be prudent not to assume otherwise as it sometimes appears to do, most recently by developing and perhaps deploying theatre nuclear weapons. It would be far better for Pakistan to finally and irreversibly abandon the long-standing policy of using cross-border terrorism as an instrument of state policy and pursue nuclear and conventional confidence-building measures with India which are already on the bilateral agenda. An agreement on no-first use of nuclear weapons would be a notable measure following up on the commitment already made by the two countries to maintain a moratorium on nuclear testing.

As would be apparent, in the case of India, it is the security narrative which is the most significant driver of its strategic nuclear capability though India has consistently followed a cautious and restrained approach. India’s nuclear doctrine categorically affirms India’s belief that its security would be enhanced not diminished in a world free of nuclear weapons. The elements of pride and prestige are supplementary as they always are in the complex basket of elements that influence strategic choices which countries make.

People must know

The mostly self-serving and misconceived notions about India’s nuclear deterrent that have found currency in the recent past, have much to do with the failure on the part of both the State as well as India’s strategic community to confront and refute them. The ease with which motivated assessments and speculative judgments invade our own thinking is deeply troubling.

The secrecy which surrounds our nuclear programme, a legacy of the long years of developing and maintaining strategic capabilities, is now counterproductive. There is not enough data or information that flows from the guardians of our strategic assets to enable reasoned judgments and evaluations. There has been significant progress in the modernisation and operationalisation of our strategic assets, but this is rarely and only anecdotally shared with the public. The result is an information vacuum which then gets occupied by either ill-informed or motivated speculation or assessments. To begin with, the government should make public its nuclear doctrine and release data regularly on what steps have been and are being taken to put the requirements of the doctrine in place.

It is not necessary to share operational details but an overall survey such as an annual strategic posture review should be shared with the citizens of the country who, after all, pay for the security which the deterrent is supposed to provide to them. An informed and vigorous debate based on accurate and factual information should be welcomed, because only through such a debate can concepts be refined, contingencies identified and the most effective responses formulated. In a democracy, this is critical to upholding a broad consensus on dealing with the complex and constantly evolving security challenges our country confronts.

— Excerpted from a lecture organised by the Subbu Forum Society for Policy Studies and the India Habitat Centre on April 24 in New Delhi. The views expressed are personal.