The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

ARTICLE

Undoing the Indian identity
Northeast policy needs to be thought through and revamped
BG Verghese

Various elements in our society continue to encourage divisiveness by exploiting identity politics

The death of a 19-year old Arunachalese student, Nido Taniam, after an allegedly violent altercation with a Delhi shopkeeper who had reportedly taunted him on his appearance and hair style, means more than the terribly sad and wonton extinction of a young life. The case will be investigated and the guilty must be punished. Beyond due process, the shocking incident reflects a form of racial arrogance that challenges the very idea of India. The pride and genius of India has been a welcoming acceptance, indeed, celebration of diversity. This has perhaps made India by far the most plural society in the world in terms of faith, language, race, culture and customs.

This state of bliss has increasingly been rudely challenged by a reassertion of caste, communal and local identities, the manifestation of prejudice against those darker-skinned, in displays of racism against Northeasterners, Ugandans and other Africans and antagonism towards "outsiders" who are not sons-of-the-soil .This is a deeply disturbing trend and threatens the unity and integrity of India and calls for deeper remedies than just punishing individual wrongdoers.

The teaching of history, social education, comparative religion, cultural appreciation and the affirmation of fraternity has been neglected. Children's stories and folk tales from various parts of the country and illustrated volumes depicting the people, flora and fauna and natural and built heritage of the country may be available. But are these sufficiently wide ranging, attractively produced, low priced, available in all languages and readily accessible through schools, bookshops and libraries? Has anyone attempted a brief history of the Northeast, which probably knows as little of itself as others know of it? And why is the "mainline" Indian history so full of Aryavarta to the neglect of "regional" histories and little traditions? This straightway differentiates between the "mainstream" and the periphery.

Though well-intentioned, the long-time featuring of tribal folk dancers as exotica has tended to create wrong stereotypes in many minds, though these are beautiful and meaningful in their natural setting. Some films and TV shorts have been made to portray the rich diversity and traditions of India but not nearly enough.

The National Integration Council has never lived up to its designation and has been reduced at best to a low level crisis management group without the least idea as to what its role should or might be. Its very composition has been so highly politicised as to defeat its purpose. Nothing is being done to resurrect it and give it a truly nation-building role.

Instead of striving to move steadfastly towards equality, various elements in our society continue to encourage divisiveness by exploiting identity politics. Rather than being sensitively used as an instrument for social and political engineering, as has occasionally been the case, identity politics has been exploited for petty political gains and to further self-serving interests. In the Northeast, smaller identity formations have been promoted and even encouraged as a means of building confidence among long-isolated peoples and soothing latent antagonisms arising from unfamiliarity even with the larger local landscape. That phase is now more or less over and the need is now to use these building blocks to create more viable political edifices without disturbing the structures of grassroots governance or steamrolling local cultures.

The government, indeed, the nation's Northeast policy needs to be thought through and revamped. We are currently trapped between "peace agreements", parallel governments thriving on extortion and latent violence, blackmail by armed groups, AFSPA and an unviable top-tier governance structure. Hopefully, these will be reviewed after the general election so that, as in Kashmir, a policy of drift does not continue to prevail.

Elsewhere, alas, caste and community differences continue to be exploited. The treatment of dalits and tribals leaves much to be desired and prejudice and hatred, though penal offences, do not attract the punishment prescribed under the law. Manual scavenging is still widespread as are various forms of social and communal discrimination. Privately produced school texts continue to circulate and spread divisiveness. The recent grant of minority status to the Jains, a small but well advanced and prosperous community, may actually work to their long-term disadvantage. Was this really necessary? The same may be said of efforts to demand quotas and reservations for an assortment of claimants, Gujjars, Jats, OBCs et al, many of which are all too often conceded. Again, the promotion of superstition and dead habit through medieval bodies like khaps and myriad cult groups of sants and fundamentalist clergy should be firmly discouraged, not encouraged. Why a universal civil code has not been legislated, for all the wrong reasons, remains an abiding mystery of India's misplaced secularism that has been hollowed out by relentless vote-bank politics.

A committee has been set up to look into why Northeasterners face discrimination and rude sexual attention in other parts of the country. This may produce some useful recommendations. But the terms of reference are too limited to serve the larger purpose of promoting national integration and cultural understanding.

Politics of negation

If the AAP continues to rock and roll down the road to anarchy, the other parties seem to be doing no better. The government's posthumous award of a Padma Bhushan to the late Justice J.S. Verma was a crude case of damning him with faint praise. These national awards have alas been steadily devalued by poor selection, raucous lobbying and political patronage.

With another Third Front in the making, the Samajwadi Party and, for other reasons, the BJP have said they will block the UPA's closing legislative programme to enact a set of anti-corruption Bills to complement the passage of the Lokpal Act. The reason: to prevent the Congress from claiming credit for these enactments, which the Opposition had frustrated by disruptive parliamentary tactics over the past two years. Instead of seeking to share credit for helping enact the much-needed and long-awaited legislation, these parties would prefer to snub the Congress rather than see the nation march forward! This is the politics of negation.

Further, the BJP Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Sushma Swaraj, has blocked the nomination of an eminent lawyer, P.P. Rao, to the Lokpal selection panel on the ground of being a Congress loyalist. This is an unfair charge. In insisting on a consensus when outvoted 3:1 in the nomination collegium, she was insisting on a veto. Here is negative politics at play again.

At the other end of the scale, Rahul's Gandhi's first formal press conference, with Arnab Goswami of Times Now, can only be described as a total public relations disaster. The less-than-artful dodger had absolutely nothing to say. No secret that, but an extremely poor advertisement of the Congress's projected leadership as it seeks to lead the country into a brave new world.

www.bgverghese.com

MIDDLE

The enduring idea of India
Lieut-Gen (retd) Baljit Singh

Twelve generations of Independent India have witnessed, may be without a conscious thought, what is perhaps among the world's few very sombre and yet flamboyant performances, namely "Beating Retreat" by the massed bands, pipes and drums of the armed forces, which brings to end the Republic Day celebrations. The audience of several thousand Indians drawn from the lowly aam aadmi, right up the scale to the heads of the country's legislature, the executive, the judiciary and the diplomatic missions is usually seated, twenty minutes before the commencement and it is therefore natural that the specially created, vast open amphitheatre centred on the Vijay Chowk, would hum like the beehive.

That was the setting a few days ago, when President Pranab Mukherjee alighted in the six-horse-drawn state coach, in itself a work of art and antiquity of over ninety years! In clock-work precision, two posses of eight trumpeters sounded the fanfare and intuitively, the spectators fell silent and searched for the source of the music score, "Herald The Chief"! The trumpeters played their hearts out, from beneath the domes surmounting the two towers of the North and South Blocks, directly above Vijay Chowk, bringing the spectators on the edges of their seats as they watched the President take his seat.

Further enhancing this ceremonial ambience was a troop from the President's Mounted Body Guard, attired in scarlet tunics with intricate gold lace-work and white mole-skin breeches, astride well groomed and manicured horses, a heritage stretching to the Madras Governor General's Guard, raised way back in 1778. The guard salutes, and the massed bands strike the national anthem exuberantly as the national flag is hoisted, at the venue. The audience bursts in vigorous clapping, every face having misted eyes and wreathed in a smile! Now, that indeed is symbolic of the enduring spirit of India and let no one tamper with it.

Over the next 45 minutes the spectators cannot avoid tapping their feet to the rhythm of martial music. The under lying theme of every tune is focused on patriotism and glory of the Republic, such as "Kadam kadam budhaye chall, khooshi kay geet gaey chaall, yeh zindgi hay kaumn ki too kaumn par lootaye chall….!" As though to fortify this resolve, they next play out the rousing "Dhawaj Kay Rakshak", leaving nothing to chance that the fortress is under trustworthy and unfaltering vigil. The "Drums Roll" which follows, creates the auditory crescendo of the thunder and volley on the battle field.

The "Last Post" played by massed buglers, the national flag lowered and some 400 battle-inoculated, soldier-bandsmen wearing immaculate ceremonial uniforms, symbolising time-tested loyalty to the country and heritage of valour, march up the Raj Path playing to perfection "Sare jahaan say achha…!" As though to underline that resolve, Rashtrapati Bhavan, the North and South Blocks, and Parliament are flood-lit, signifying the eternal light even amidst darkness. And the lotus fountains of Vijay Chowk cascade water in the colours of the national flag. That too is the enduring idea of India and let every Indian mount vigil against those who may dare to mess with it, ever.

oped-neighbour

Middle East after the Arab spring
In view of the changing political scenario in the Middle East, policy makers in New Delhi have little idea of what to expect from the new regime
Shyam Bhatia

Thanks to the lapsed and much-lamented Arab Spring, Israel is more secure today than it ever has been since the creation of the Jewish state in 1948. The demands for democracy and reform in the Arab world have promoted a process of disintegration that Israel’s most optimistic military and political strategists admit they did not anticipate.

That process started in late 2010 when Tunisian fruit seller Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire. His death in early 2011 brought together a wide range of anti-government groups, including students, lawyers, trade unionists and human rights activists fed up with police brutality and government corruption. A few weeks later Tunisian President Zine El Abidine was forced to flee to Saudi Arabia.

Soon afterwards, the unrest starting in Tunisia started to spread to Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Yemen, all countries that once hosted the PLO and other Arab militants violently opposed to Israel. Each are now too preoccupied with their own problems to bother with their traditional enemy.

Tunisians, still engulfed in their own internal rivalries and feuds, are unable to forge a consensus on their long-term goals.

Its immediate neighbour, Libya, is overwhelmed by tribal warfare. Egypt, the largest North African country that was once revered as the heartland of the Arab world, is in the grip of army generals, who ousted the democratically elected president. It is consumed by daily battles between the army and supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsi.

Only Morocco and, to a lesser extent, Algeria have escaped the full trauma of the Arab Spring. East of Egypt the civil war in Syria is spilling over into neighbouring Lebanon where car bombs and political assassinations have once again become part of the daily national routine.

As for Iraq, which has also been rocked by political assassinations on a daily basis, the future is just as uncertain. Iraqi Prime Minister Noor Al Maliki has been begging America to send ground troops to help him survive but Washington is unlikely to agree to this request. It has, however, agreed in principle to send drones to the authorities in Baghdad to help carry out surveillance of militants threatening the survival of the Al Maliki government. The US has also agreed to send thousands of M-16 and M-4 rifles as well as ammunition due to arrive in Baghdad after a few weeks. Still pending is Baghdad’s request for 100 Hellfire missiles.

President Obama was hoping that the US withdrawal from Iraq would mark the end of Washington’s meddling in the internal affairs of the Arabs. But the Arab Spring has drawn Washington back into the fray, resulting in the US administration making one mistake after another. The revolt of the Arab masses against their US-backed dictators caught Obama off guard, forcing him to endorse a zig-zagging policy in the Middle East — abandoning traditional allies like former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak — that has undermined US credibility in the Arab and muslim world.

Meanwhile, Arab militant groups seeking to destroy Israel appear to be in ever more serious trouble, leaving a wide smile on the faces of Israeli politicians.

Hamas, which is based in Gaza, is facing an existential threat, ironically not from its arch enemy, Israel, but from Egypt. Indeed it is a sign of the times that while Israel is helping people in Gaza, Egypt is destroying tunnels used for smuggling and also shutting down the border crossings. All this because the new military rulers of Egypt view Hamas as an extension of their own outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. In recent months, the Egyptian media has been full of reports implicating Hamas in terror attacks against Egyptian civilians, officials and soldiers.

So far the Egyptians have destroyed some 90 per cent of the smuggling tunnels that once kept Gaza alive. They were used to transport weapons, fuel, medicine, food, even cars. For Hamas former Egyptian President Morsi’s time in power was a golden era when they could travel freely to and from Egypt. Those Hamas leaders who travelled to Cairo were given a red carpet welcome by Egypt’s then president.

In India, Morsi was also viewed as a friend and a moderate, who would help to sustain the traditional close friendship between Cairo and Delhi. A few months before his overthrow, he was welcomed on a state visit to India when he spoke of a “much deeper engagement with India.”

Now that he has been replaced by a military dictator, and possibly by Muslim extremists in the longer term, policy makers in New Delhi have little idea of what to expect.

Similar uncertainty surrounds New Delhi’s future links with the Palestinians. India had very close links with the late Yasser Arafat. His successor Mahmoud Abbas was welcomed on a state visit to India in 2012 when he also opened a full-fledged Embassy of Palestine in New Delhi. But what happens to bilateral ties if the Palestinian movement is overtaken by Islamic radicals such as those from Hamas is an open question.

A short distance away in Syria, India, like the rest of the world can only wait and watch. The late Hafiz Al Asad was a friend of the Bhutto family who had priority over any links between Damascus and the governments of South Asia.

For his son and successor, Bashar, the overwhelming policy concern is one of survival in the country’s civil war in which Shias, Sunnis, Alawites and Kurds are among the many communities fighting each other to death.

On Israel’s northern border, army observers watch with deep satisfaction as the bodies of Hizbullah fighters killed in Syria are transported back for funerals in their home towns and villages in southern Lebanon.

Hizbullah is the Iranian-supported Lebanese Shiite movement — a sworn enemy of Israel — that takes credit for using suicide bombings and rocket attacks to stop the 18-year-old Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon that finally ended in May 2000.

Recently, Hizbullah tried to blame Israel for the recent deaths of some of its military commanders, a charge that Israel strongly rejects. “Hizbullah has made a fool of itself in the past with these automatic and groundless accusations against Israel,” said a spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry in Jerusalem.

“If they are looking for explanations as to what is happening to them, they should examine their own actions.”

The Israelis are not just excited by the daily vision of their enemies killing each other. Some are beginning to relish the prospect of a disintegrating Syria that could result in at least two and maybe three new countries in the next decade evolving from this part of the former Ottoman Empire.

Sectarian violence has dominated the whole of the Syrian state. The current predictions are that the ruling Alawite elite, a branch of Shia Islam, could eventually demand an independent state for their own community. Sunni Islamic militants in Al Qaida who want their country run from Aleppo, close to the Turkish border, currently dominate rural areas where alcohol is strictly banned and beheadings and lashings are routine daily punishments.

Apart from Alawistan and Sunni Islamistan, there is also talk of the Syrian Kurds creating their own independent homeland. If they make common cause with their Kurdish cousins across the borders with Turkey and Iraq, they could in theory forge a powerful new state in the Middle East.

Once upon a time, the Israelis viewed Syria as a major threat to their own security. Unlike Egypt and Jordan, Damascus never accepted the right of the Jewish state to exist. It always welcomed and even funded Hamas, Hizbullah and any other sworn enemies of Israel. But in the past 12 months, the Syrian regime has been so weakened by internal fighting that it hardly ever talks about the conflict with Israel.

The sheer misery of the Syrian conflict, which has left some 1,00,000 dead and millions homeless, has been widely reported by international media. At the Geneva Peace Conference, where the Syrian government and the opposition represented in the National Coalition have been brought together to negotiate an end to the conflict, the warring parties have been trading insults. Syrian government delegates representing President Bashar Al Asad have accused their Gulf Arab neighbours of “inciting terrorism.”

Syria’s foreign minister Walid Muallem has gone one step further by describing his country’s opposition groups as “traitors” while adding that some other unnamed states had “Syrian blood on their hands”.

Nostalgic Arabs recall what they describe as the more optimistic times of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, the hero of pan Arabism who talked of creating a grand Arab state, including Egypt, Syria and Lebanon. In Nasser’s era, Egypt and Syria did briefly come together as one country, the United Arab Republic, although that was a short-lived political experiment. For ordinary Arabs, the future now holds more schisms and divisions than ever before.

Additional conflicts predicted for the Arab world are mirrored in the ongoing experience of bitterly divided Palestinians who are now effectively operating two mini states of their own, one based in Gaza and the other operating from Ramallah in the West Bank. Such all-consuming Arab misery has a positive knock on effect as far as Israel is concerned. As the threat of invasion and terrorism recedes, at least for the time being, some Israelis believe they have been given an historic opportunity to explore new options for securing their country’s future.

India’s ties with Palestine

Uncertainty surrounds New Delhi’s future links with Palestine. India had very close links with the late Yasser Arafat. His successor Mahmoud Abbas was welcomed on a state visit to India in 2012 when he also opened a full-fledged Embassy of Palestine in New Delhi. But what happens to bilateral ties if the Palestinian movement is overtaken by Islamic radicals such as those from Hamas is an open question. A short distance away in Syria, India, like the rest of the world, can only wait and watch.

Turn of events

The United States has not had a good Arab Spring. It has failed to keep up with events in Egypt which elected an Islamist, Mohammed Morsi, and then saw him deposed by the army.

There are rising tensions between Sunni and Shia Muslims in many parts of the region. Shia-dominated Iran and Sunni majority Saudi Arabia are now effectively fighting a proxy war in Syria.