BBC Column, Soutik Biswas – Is hope a fiction for India’s poor?

Soutik Biswas, Delhi correspondent

Wednesday, 15 February 2012. “We try so many things,” a girl in Annawadi, a slum in Mumbai tells Katherine Boo, “but the world doesn’t move in our favour”.

Annawadi is a “sumpy plug of slum” in the biggest city – “a place of festering grievance and ambient envy” – of a country which holds a third of the world’s poor. It is where the Pulitzer prize-winning New Yorker journalist Boo’s first book Behind the Beautiful Forevers is located.

Annawadi is where more than 3,000 people have squatted on land belonging to the local airport and live “packed into, or on top of” 335 huts. It is a place “magnificently positioned for a trafficker in rich’s people’s garbage”, where the New India collides with the Old.

Nobody in Annawadi is considered poor by India’s official benchmarks. The residents are among the 100 million Indians freed from poverty since 1991, when India embarked on liberalising its economy.

‘Garbage justice’

Boo’s story – a stirring and gritty non-fiction narrative, one of the best ever written by a foreigner on India – revolves around the self-immolation of a cantankerous, one-legged slum woman called Fatima Sheikh and how her neighbour and a hardworking, young garbage trader called Abdul and his family are framed on a charge of murdering her. Fatima’s death is a liberation from enervating poverty, and a chance for some eighbours to make money from Abdul’s family, who are making a bit more money than the rest from selling recyclables.

This is when Abdul realises that the Indian criminal justice system was a “market like garbage” – “innocence and guilt could be bought and sold like a kilo of polyurethane bags”.

Boo adopted what she calls the “vagrant-sociology approach” and followed Abdul and his neighbours of this unexceptional slum over the course of several years – November 2007 to March 2011 – to see “who got ahead and who didn’t, and why, as India prospered”.

She used more than 3,000 public records, many obtained using India’s right to information law, to validate her narrative, written in assured reported speech. The account of the hours leading to the self-immolation of Fatima Sheikh derives from repeated interviews of 168 people as well as police, hospital, morgue and court records. Mindful of the risk of over interpretation, the books wears its enormous research lightly.

Boo’s narrative is peopled by a vast range of gripping characters from Annawadi, the world from which New India shies away.

An aspiring slum boss woman who volunteers for a local Hindu right-wing party. A man who paints his horses with stripes and rents out the fake zebras to birthday parties of middle-class children. A corrupt nun who runs a children’s home. A deranged man who talks to a luxury hotel building skirting the slum.

Then there’s a bunch of young scavengers and thieves, ravaged by rats and high on white correction fluid, who live, work and die quickly. They are the young flotsam that India breathlessly parades as its demographic dividend when, in reality, the children, tired and brutalised, are already past their sell-by-date.

Bleak

The people of Annawadi are also caught up in the hideous web of corruption and official venality which hurts the poor most, and lead utterly de-humanising lives in a city that aspires to become India’s Shanghai. It is far removed from the dreadful stereotype of the happy-poor Mumbai of Slumdog Millionaire.

Behind The Beautiful Forevers  

The local councillor runs fake schools, doctors at free government hospitals and policemen extort the poor with faint promise of life and justice, and self-help groups operate as loan sharks for the poorest. The young in Annawadi drop dead like flies – run over by traffic, knifed by rival gangs, laid low by disease; while the elders – not much older – die anyway. Girls prefer a certain brand of rat poison to end their lives.

Behind The Beautiful Forevers is a bleak, heart-breaking book, which leaves you numb with anger, helplessness and pain. In this age of globalisation, Boo writes, hope is not a fiction. But hope flickers dimly in Annawadi as the “unpredictability of daily life has a way of grinding down individual promise”.

Boo asks some uncomfortable questions: What is the “infrastructure of opportunity” in India? What capabilities does the market offer? What capabilities are wasted? Why don’t places like Mumbai where filthy slums stand cheek-by-jowl with the world’s priciest buildings explode into violence? Why don’t unequal societies implode? What happens to the powerless when, among powerful Indians, the distribution of opportunity is “typically an insider trade”.

Boo has an interesting take on corruption, rife in societies like India’s. Corruption is seen as blocking India’s global ambitions.

But, she writes, for the “poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained”.

On the other hand, Boo believes, corruption stymies our moral universe more than economic possibility. Suffering, she writes, “can sabotage innate capacities for moral action”. In a capricious world of corrupt governments and ruthless markets the idea of a mutually supportive community is a myth: it is “blisteringly hard”, she writes, to be good in such conditions. “If the house is crooked and crumbling”, Boo writes, “and the land on which it sits uneven, is it possible to make anything lie straight?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-17038326

Dawn – Shift the focus, please!

Shyema Sajjad, Deputy Editor at Dawn.com

Karachi, 13 January 2012. The current political situation is like one of those soap operas that go on for decades. The characters remain the same and keep appearing after intervals in different guises and roles. The twists start becoming predictable and the plot gets drab and stretches on and on. Yet, we tend to follow it, focus on it and guiltily, want more of it.

In the midst of this, we tend to forget what really matters – or at least should matter.

Every single day the front and back pages of our daily newspapers are filled with details of our key political players, their controversies, their statements, their empty promises and their unrealistic plans. Sure, national security is important, sovereignty is crucial, foreign relations are essential and democracy is vital – but what about the bullet-riddled body found in Surjani Town? What about the four-year old girl who was raped and killed? What about the flood victims who are STILL awaiting aid? Are their stories not as important, if not more? Don’t they deserve the front-page and prime air time? Apparently not.

It seems that the memo scandal, judiciary proceedings and the government’s perpetual tiffs are what matters most – and because this point of view is further perpetuated by the print and electronic media, we hardly object.

Instead of tangling itself in constant controversies and feuds, the government should be taking the lead in paying attention to these issues. It should put a lid on its hourly statements on democracy, put aside its foreign-element paranoia and instead deliver what it promised to the common man – relief.

Instead of constantly setting up benches to hear proceedings on various cases against the government and former politicians, the judiciary should instead open the dusty files which have been waiting in line for decades and deliver what it promised to the masses – justice.

Instead of allowing one dubious character to create such a fuss over national security, the military should instead focus on the airspace violations, border protection and the discovery of OBL in Abbottabad. Instead of being caught up constantly in the midst of a political confrontation, the military should to do its core duty – protect (the good guys, that is).

Why do these leaders spend more time talking than doing? Because unfortunately we are providing them with the platform to do so, with a silent nod to go on. Be it our criticism or praise, we allow them to assume that this is their show – when clearly it is not. The show belongs to the party worker who was gunned down outside his home. It belongs to the mother collecting money to pay ransom for her kidnapped child and it belongs to the families who have no gas to cook their meals with.

The government has succeeded in continuing their term until now; however, it has been a rocky journey. So paranoid has this government been thus far, that instead of focusing on all of the issues of the common man, it has instead spent all its time nervously clutching its chair in fear of losing it. It has failed to provide any kind of relief and instead brought some (literally) dark times to the masses. The masses who they proudly claim, support them. The common, downtrodden man doesn’t support them or their beloved fight for democracy. The common man only supports the element that will give him food and shelter.

This blog and others of its kind unfortunately will fall on deaf ears but to those to whom it matters, achievement for this government will not be in completing its term, instead achievement will be in the form of solutions for the energy crisis, minority rights protection, educational reforms and provision of healthcare.

Accomplishment will not be in pushing forward a deceased leader’s agenda but in providing welfare to a state which is called a failure and the term can hardly be disputed. Triumph will not be in having a free judiciary but in having a functioning judiciary that is independent and prioritises what is important to the nation – not the leadership. Victory will not be in repeatedly declaring Pakistan’s sovereignty but instead proving that it is a nation that can stand on its own.

Until the leadership and the common man are not on the same page about what achievement and triumph means, Pakistan will continue to go around in circles of self-destruction to which the outside world will be nothing more than mere spectators to.

http://www.dawn.com/2012/01/13/shift-the-focus-please.html

Dawn Blog – The hypocrisy of misdirected faith

by Fahad Faruqui

22 October 2011. After reading the news that Saudi morality police — acting as “God’s agents” on earth to prevent sin — beat up a woman and a man accompanying her on suspicion of dating. I asked myself this question: what right do these “keepers-of-faith” have to rigorously impose Islamic morals on other people. The woman and man turned out to be relatives.

When the members of Haia realised their folly, they tried to hush up the Yanbu woman, who was accompanying her uncle for work in Medina, by paying for their hotel stay, SR 500 in cash, and mint leaves, with hopes that she would not lodge an official complaint.

The image of God’s men welding iron rods, exerting force on women and being afraid of an earthly complaint is all a bit odd when thinking of the Prophetic character. Do they really think they’re furthering God’s wishes on earth? If so, why does their lack of tact so contradict the manner of the last prophet who, through kindness, won the hearts of the rigid Meccans?

To answer my initial question, it is important to ponder upon what constitutes faith. Being a practicing Muslim man, who has experienced Muslim life in the United States, London, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Pakistan, I’m often driven to despair by the emphasis on outward appearance as opposed to one’s manners, morals and ethics.

“Why do you not keep a beard?,” I am often asked, whether I am at the Regents Park Mosque, in London, or the mosque on 96th Street and Lexington Avenue, in New York City. Some have more forcefully tried to convince me that it’s feminine to have a clean shave. “If you keep a beard, my heart will automatically draw toward you because you’ll be fulfilling a sunnah,” said a man, who hardly knew me, at the Columbia University prayer room that I frequented during my undergrad and graduate-school days. But it surprised me that the gentleman never bothered to actually get to know me; if he did, he would have found a man eager to lead an ethical and moral life and someone who was working toward bettering himself spiritually.

Over the years, I have taken heat from many Muslims for using prayer beads because it’s a “despicable innovation in Islam,” for getting a western-style haircut because “the prophet either kept long hair or shaved his head” (mind you, there were no scissors then), for wearing black because “it’s a color for women and men are supposed to wear white,” and for my interest in Sufism because “all those Sufis had gone astray” from the right path and some of them were “heretics.”

This is only a fraction of the list of things that others commanded that I address in order to be granted a place in heaven, in addition to finding myself an honorable wife who would keep me away from the “lure of women.”

If the true measure of faith for men is a four-finger beard and for women is to wear hijab miserly, covering every lock of their hair, then what about the prophet’s teaching: “The most excellent jihad is that for the conquest of self.”

Surely, Islam talks about modesty, but what is it? “Modesty is ultimately an awareness of both our sensual energy (our marvelous capacity for mischief) — and whence, also an awareness of our capacity for restraint (our awareness of limitations),” Abdallah Adhami, a prominent Muslim scholar explained. “Modesty in this sense is, therefore, inextricably linked to humility.”

So, what is humility? “Like modesty, humility begins in the heart, and inwardly, it is the most radiant manifestation of inner calm; outwardly, again like modestly, humility exudes dignity, poise and restraint,” the scholar noted.

Ah! So it starts from within.

I can dress modestly, but what good is it if I don’t restrain my glance when a woman passes by. What if I am only pretending not to look? I often hear that an unintentional glimpse of the opposite sex is forgiven, but I’ve seen glimpses that last for 60 seconds, jokes apart.

Forbidding the wrong and commanding the good with use of force will never generate the effect that inward stirrings of the faith would. One can force the other to read a religious text but it is unlikely that the person will drink deeply from the fountain of divine wisdom. The requisite factor for modesty, humility and piety is the intention and the will to change and progress.

Counseling is effective when the other is seeking counsel. With force you can create a social deviant, but not steer somebody toward religion. In response to a question on the mannerism of good counsel, Faraz Rabbani, a leading scholar of Islam, wrote: “Our age is an age where the Prophetic mercy, gentleness, gradualness, and wisdom need to predominate and condition any “promotion” of both virtue and law.”

The only plausible reason for the morality police — may they be government funded or otherwise — to intimidate devotees to follow their commands is that it takes less effort to tell other people to do something than it takes to do something yourself. There is a psychological benefit in the knowledge that they are fulfilling God’s wishes by preventing sin. And there is also an element of pride in being God’s agent.

It is easier to counsel others to keep a beard and to dress modestly than to counsel others on how to be a better human being. All you have to do is to pontificate for a few minutes, scare the other person with talk of hellfire or threaten them with an iron rod or just beat them up — after all, you’re only ensuring that they’re making headway to heaven (pun intended) — and you can feel the instant gratification from demonstrable change.

Conversely, for real change, one would have to take the pains to mold the other person in a way that would enable them to start thinking for themselves which, in affect, brings an inward change.

If you ask me, until you’re squared away on the bigger issues — manners, morals and ethics — don’t go out picking on the minor shortcomings of other people. We’re all works in progress. Live by example and inspire others to improve themselves.

Fahad Faruqui is a journalist, writer, and educator. Alumni Columbia University.

You can email him at fahad@caa.columbia.edu.

http://www.dawn.com/2011/10/22/the-hypocrisy-of-misdirected-faith.html

Dawn – In reverse gear

Ardeshir Cowasjee

3 July 2011

Pakistan continues to flounder. The 2010 Environmental Performance Index ranked 163 countries on 25 performance indicators across 10 policy categories covering environmental public health and ecosystem vitality. We came in at 125.

The 2011 Asian Green City Index, a study analysing the `green` performance of 22 major cities, placed Pakistan`s largest metropolis, Karachi, at the bottom, in the `well below average` category.

In 2006, the World Bank reported that annual degradation of its ecology was costing Pakistan $365m, equivalent to six per cent of the GDP. Since economic growth at that time was also around six per cent, this was simply a case of taking one step forward and one step back. Recent WB data, however, shows yearly degradation swelling to $485m, equivalent to over seven per cent of the GDP. As economic growth is now below three per cent, Pakistan is actually in reverse gear.

To pretend to tackle this backward movement, two Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) hearings were conducted this week by the Sindh Environmental Protection Agency (Sepa). The first dealt with the extension of the Nestle bottled-water plant in Port Qasim Authority (PQA) industrial area, which was relocated in 2007 from Education City under the orders of the Sindh High Court (2005 CLC 424, 2007 PLD 11), which found that the extraction of water in large quantities from underground aquifers would disturb the environment. Under the fifth-century common-law Public Trust Doctrine, natural resources such as air, water, and the sea and its shores are gifts of nature and must be kept freely available to everyone.

NGOs also pointed out at the 2007 EIA hearing that the brine waste products of the underground-water desalination had a higher level of pollutants and salts than was allowed by the National Environmental Quality Standards for effluent entering municipal sewers and treatment plants (which PQA does not have) or the sea, into which PQA dumps untreated, toxic sewage, slowly decimating marine flora and fauna. Ignoring everything, Sepa issued a clearance to Nestle.

Last Tuesday`s hearing had concerned citizens expressing the same objections again, while asking why Sepa had not been monitoring the situation on a quarterly basis over the past four years, complying with 2007 no-objection-certificate conditions in accordance with the law. The disposal of PET plastic bottles was also an issue of concern, as most containers are not recycled and find their way into landfills and water bodies in which over a million seabirds and more than 100,000 marine mammals die every year from ingesting plastic debris.

The second hearing examined the GasPak Liquefied Natural Gas terminal proposed at Chan Waddo Creek near the mouth of the Indus. This column has previously extensively covered the potential fire and explosion hazards to other shipping (40 per cent of Pakistan`s traffic), fishing vessels and nearby habitations from possible terrorist activities against LNG carriers and terminals in PQA`s jurisdiction. Although the terminal itself is not actually situated in the channel, incoming LNG tankers will come up the Ahsan Channel for about 25km alongside other vessels and will require massive security arrangements.

Citizens attending the hearing were extremely critical of the quality of the EIA report (full of mistakes, plagiarised material, poor primary-data investigations and inadequate information on the project and re-gasification process). It was prepared by the same consultant who last year submitted a similarly low-quality report on the Turkish rental-electricity barge anchored in Korangi Creek (with fraudulent data on prevailing wind direction and the amount of air pollution being showered on the residents of Karachi, especially Korangi).

Sepa was taken to task for not subjecting the LNG EIA report to mandatory preliminary scrutiny before asking for public comments. It seems that such critical EIA processes are spiralling into mere formalities heavily tainted by political influence and bureaucratic corruption, contributing to the WB-identified intensification in ecological deterioration in Pakistan. Under attendee pressure, Sepa directed the consultant and proponent to submit an amended EIA report incorporating rectification of all lacunae identified at the hearing.

The upgrading of the EIA report and the subsequent 30-day public-study period will probably not suit the Turkish firm, Global Energy Infrastructure, which is determined to fast-track its approvals. With a former (1991-93) federal minister of environment as an advisor/facilitator, a retired petroleum and natural resources federal secretary as local CEO, and an ex-managing director of the Sui Southern Gas Company on the project team, this foreign entrepreneur has developed the muscle required in Pakistan to sprint ahead of leading local competitors GasPort (which has already secured Sepa clearance) and Engro-Vopak (whose Sepa no-objection certificate has been held up for over two months).

LNG World News

Pakistani companies resent the fact that GasPak, which recently came up from behind, is being favoured by the powers that be. reports: “Every government department is going out of its way to help little-known Global Energy. It has been issued relevant licenses in a matter of months, while other companies have waited years.” The press revealed in May 2011 that the company`s effort to bypass the EIA process was reluctantly turned down by the PQA.

While 17 expressions-of-interest for LNG import were recently submitted to the Sui Southern Gas Company, which is retaining a consultant to identify parties for pipeline capacity allocation, industry wisdom estimates that a maximum of four LNG terminals can be accommodated for the time being — two at the PQA and two at Khalifa Point at the other end of Karachi`s shoreline. Much of the imported gas can be `wheeled` (transported through pipelines) to private buyers in the north of Pakistan.

While there is no doubt that we need more gas, can we not import it safely, use it more efficiently, promote renewable energy, protect the beleaguered environment and make conservation of energy our daily motto ?

To contact Ardeshir Cowasjee :
arfc@cyber.net.pk

http://www.dawn.com/2011/07/03/in-reverse-gear.html

BBC News – Why India is in dire need of electoral reform

Soutik Biswas

28 June 2011

India’s democracy is facing serious challenges.

Nearly a third of MPs – 158 of 543, to be precise – in the parliament face criminal charges. Seventy-four of them face serious charges such as murder and abduction. There are more than 500 criminal cases against these lawmakers.

These MPs hail from across the political spectrum.

Twelve of the 205 MPs or 5% of the lawmakers in the ruling Congress Party face criminal charges. The main opposition BJP fares worse with 19 of 116 – or more than 16% – of its MPs facing charges. More than 60% of the MPs belonging to two key regional parties, Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party – who profess to serve the poor and the untouchables – face criminal charges.

Then there are allegations of rampant vote-buying by parties, especially in southern India.

The Election Commission seized more than 600 million rupees ($13.3m; £8.3m) in cash in Tamil Nadu in the run-up to the state elections in April. It believes that the money was kept to buy votes.

In an US embassy cable leaked by WikiLeaks in March, an American official was quoted as saying that one Tamil Nadu party inserted cash and a voting slip instructing which party to vote for in the morning newspapers – more innovative than handing out money directly to voters. The party concerned denies the charge.

Independent election watchdogs believe that candidates routinely under-report or hide campaign expenses. During the 2009 general elections, nearly all of the 6753 candidates officially declared that they had spent between 45 to 55% of their expenses limit.

After the recent state elections – in three states and one union territory – elected legislators declared that that the average amount of money spent in their campaigns to be only between 39% and 59% of their limits in their official declarations. A total of 76 legislators declared that they did not spend any money on public meetings and processions.

There is something seriously amiss in the state of democracy in India. That is why, most believe, the country urgently needs electoral reforms.

India’s most respected election watchdog Association For Democratic Reforms (ADR) has rolled out a pointed wish-list to clean up India’s politics and target corruption. I am sharing some of them:

- Any person against whom charges have been framed by a court of law or offences punishable for two years or more should not be allowed to contest elections. Candidates charged with serious crimes like murder, rape, kidnapping and extortion should be banned from contesting elections. India’s politicians have resisted this saying that opponents regularly file false cases against them.

- To stop candidates and parties seeking votes on the basis of caste, religion and to stop divisive campaigns, a candidate should be declared a winner only if he or she gets more than 50% plus one vote. When no candidate gets the required number of votes, there should be a run-off between the top two candidates.

- Voters should have the option of not voting for any of the candidates.

- A law against use of excessive money in elections by candidates.

- Despite the clamour for the state funding of elections, it is still not clear how much elections cost in India. Political parties do not come clean on their revenues and expenses, and until there is a clearer picture of how much they spend, it will be difficult to fix an amount. So political parties should give out verifiable accounts, which should be also available for public scrutiny.

The desire for electoral reform is not new.

Since 1990, there have been at least seven hefty comprehensive government-commissioned reports for such reforms.

The Election Commission of India has been saying since 1998 that candidates with pending criminal cases against them should not be allowed to contest.

If there is an overwhelming consensus about these reforms, why have governments sat on it for more than two decades? Ask the politicians.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-13692575 

Dawn Column – Friction, not breakdown

Ardeshir Cowasjee

26 June 2011

Mid-June was a particularly fraught period for that strange relationship that prevails between the mighty US, which remains the world’s foremost superpower, and the dysfunctional chaos that is the Republic of Pakistan.

Accusations and perceptions were rife, both here and there, in statements made by the movers and shakers of both sides and in the media. They continue, but in somewhat abated form (for how long?). David Ignatius writing in the Washington Post on June 16 opened: “It’s always painful to watch a love affair go sour, as the unrealistic expectations and secret betrayals come crashing down in a chorus of recrimination. That’s what’s happening now between the United States and Pakistan, and it has a soap-operatic quality, in Washington and Islamabad alike. ‘How could they treat us so badly?’ is the tone of political debate in both capitals.”

Well, the relationship can hardly be described as “a love affair”. Pakistan, from 1947 onward, has been the supplicant and the US, always of course, in its own national interest and taking into account geography, has been the provider.

Such relationships can never be healthy. The supplicant suffers from an inferiority complex which it unsuccessfully attempts to disguise, whilst the provider actually does have every right to demand ‘do more’. Realism has to come into the equation somewhere.

Ignatius is hopeful. He sees a “cooling-off period” with a different relationship emerging — this is difficult to visualise if Pakistan continues on its old tack, though noises are now being made about an intended change (but they may just be temporary noises to distract). The “old embrace” has indeed become “suffocating with the Pakistan military looking to its public like a lackey of the United States”.

Jane Perlez of the New York Times, writing from Islamabad on June 15, imparted news about the “seething anger” rife in all ranks of the Pakistan Army, hinting the army chief may well be “pushed out.”

Now, since neither Kayani nor his brother-in-arms ISI chief Shuja Pasha have seen fit to resign, it would seem that the NYT is indulging in a little bit of kite-flying. After all, it has been predicting the fall from grace of Asif Zardari and his disastrous government for almost three years — it has not happened nor is it likely to, for as far as the US is concerned Zardari really could not ‘do more’ than he has done and continues to do. So, with the US-gifted three- year extension that Kayani has (whether wrong or right matters not a whit) the US, it would seem, is unlikely to change horses in midstream — which is where it now is.

Pakistan’s man in Washington has had a rocky time attempting a damage control exercise but his problem is that he gets little help from home. He has tried to calm the media and Congress nerves but it’s all uphill. How can we expect the US media, Congress and the US taxpayer at large to be sympathetic when Pakistanis in general do little but rant against the US and its perceived perfidy? Do we expect them to condone insane behaviour?

It is time the streets, parliament and the establishment were toned down and were factually told what is what when it comes to dealing with the US. Burning flags will not conquer America — it simply wastes cloth, kerosene and matches and serves to inflame tempers. The US remains unaffected. ‘Ghairat’ is a lost cause and does immeasurable harm. The real lesson to be learnt from the OBL raid — that is if we wish to learn — is that the US can find its enemies, no matter how long it takes, and with impunity eliminate them.

Defence Secretary Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen in a Defence Department briefing on June 16 made eminently sensible noises which should be emulated by our lot over here.

Gates admitted to ebbs and flows and stressed the point that both sides have to work on the ‘relationship’, complicated as it may be (neither side seems to have worked out which needs the other more at this particular point in time). Communications between the two governments need to be as open and as honest as is possible — though naturally there are innumerable restraints to honesty.

Mullen stressed the strong ‘relationship’ he has had with the Pakistan Army and was full of praise for Kayani, carefully avoiding any hint as to his staying powers. “What the Pakistani military’s going through right now, obviously is considerable introspection based on recent events” is how he tactfully put it.

The region, as Gates said, is not going to go away. The US can, of course, get out and get away, but that is highly unlikely to happen in view of its strategic needs and its ‘national interest’. Pakistan is where it is and will be so for as long as it can exist.

Ardeshir Cowasjee
<arfc@cyber.net.pk>

http://www.dawn.com/2011/06/26/friction-not-breakdown.html

The Asian Age – Revenge of the voter

Inder Malhotra, Asian Age Columnist

18 May 2011. The main point about the Assembly polls, which the political class can ignore only at its peril, is that no ruler can survive the pent-up rage of the people however docile they may seem. This is what lies behind the spectacular triumph of Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal and of J. Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu. Those that have used the word “tsunami” in this context are not off the mark. Legitimate anger drove 80 to 85 per cent of voters to polling booths where they stood in queues for several hours, in scorching heat, to democratically settle scores with their tormentors. Most of them were poor and downtrodden. A parallel with what happened to Indira Gandhi in 1977 after the nightmare of the Emergency is not at all out of place.

Of course, in West Bengal, Ms Banerjee’s leadership was essential to mobilise the mass fury against the Marxist-led Left Front’s misrule, to put it no more strongly than that. In the southern state a viable alternative was available in the charismatic personality of Ms Jayalalithaa, who has already been its chief minister twice. The difference in the causes that destroyed the Communist bastion in the east and the family rule of Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) patriarch M. Karunanidhi in the south is also significant.

To take up West Bengal first. Were circumstances there normal, any party or combination ruling the state for 34 continuous years would have been voted out as a matter of course. But normalcy and West Bengal can’t be uttered in the same breath. The Left Front, led and dominated by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), was routed not because of the longevity of its stay in power but because of its egregious errors and excesses. After its initial land reforms — Operation Barga in the late Seventies — it abandoned the rural folk, presumably expecting them to be grateful forever. Nor did it do anything to set up industries, small, medium or big, to provide employment to the swelling army of job seekers.

When it realised this mistake, it swung to the other extreme, forcibly taking over farmers’ lands and handing these to the tallest of the tycoons.

No wonder Singur and Nandigram followed.

What aggravated people’s woes was the Left Front’s almost criminal neglect of education and healthcare. From the top of the chart on education, together with Tamil Nadu, West Bengal has plummeted to third position from the bottom — just above Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. However, all this pales when compared with the Left’s crowning idiocy of imposing on the state something akin to Stalinist tyranny. It erased the dividing line between the party and the government. West Bengal went under the “Marxist cadre raj” — for the arrogant Marxist cadres, violence was the first instrument to enforce its will. This did invite counter-violence, especially from Ms Banerjee’s Trinamul Congress, with Maoists contributing their mite. But who can match the combined power of the state and the ruling party’s goons?

Authoritarianism and high-handedness did play a role in the deserved downfall of Mr Karunanidhi and the DMK. But it was rather limited, notwithstanding the shenanigans at Madurai of M.K. Alagiri, Mr Karunanidhi’s son and Union minister for chemicals and fertilisers. The DMK’s district secretaries also tended to behave like CPI(M) cadres in West Bengal. What made the five-time chief minister of Tamil Nadu bite the dust was corruption that was monumental and brazen beyond belief. It was also “in-house”, confined to Kalaignar’s extended clan. Nothing more needs to be said in view of the drama unfolding in the courts of law. But there is one more fact of which the country ought to take notice.

Was it purely coincidental that nobody, but nobody, foresaw the poll results in Tamil Nadu while almost everybody expected Ms Banerjee’s big win in West Bengal? The most pundits and psephologists would say was that either side could win. Exit polls even gave victory to the DMK. Why? It is worth pondering that, perhaps, the self-respecting Tamils were hurt by the assumption in what they call “Upper India” that they would, as usual, be happy with freebies and cash delivered to them with the morning paper, and would happily return the DMK to power. They obviously decided to decimate the DMK but disclosed it to no one. In Tamil Nadu it was a “silent wave”, obviously because of some kind of fear.

Has the Congress, the core of the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) at the Centre, read the election results right? To be sure, it has every reason to be proud of its achievement in the usually divided state of Assam where it has staged a hattrick. The credit for this goes primarily to Tarun Gogoi who will be Assam’s chief minister for the third time running. As a conciliator he thwarted attempts at polarising the state and has paved the way for a peaceful settlement with the United Liberation Front of Asom. It is also understandable that the Congress should feel happy about the pathetic plight of the Bharatiya Janata Party that contested almost all seats in Assam and Kerala and a great many in West Bengal. In the process, in the words of a usually sympathetic commentator, it has made itself a “joker in the pack”. For the rest, the Congress’ claims when not misplaced are exaggerated.

For instance, its boast that it and its UPA allies have won in three of the five states is a fact that obscures the truth. In West Bengal, the Congress is no more than a peripheral appendage to the victorious Trinamul Congress. As for Kerala, where every election has led to regime change, this time around the irony is that the winner came second. The United Democratic Front has a wafer-thin majority. In tiny Puducherry, the mighty Congress has lost two-to-one to a former Congressman. And if it goes on underplaying the issue of corruption in Tamil Nadu, it may yet again be singed by it.

The worst message to reach the Congress headquarters is from Kadapa in Andhra Pradesh where a single Lok Sabha byelection has proved more catastrophic than all other losses put together. Congress’ biggest bastion is now history.

http://www.asianage.com/columnists/revenge-voter-326

BBC News – Is communism dead in India?

Soutik Biswas

14 May 2011

Did the communists in West Bengal expect the drubbing they received on Friday at the hands of the upstart Trinamool Congress?

In the gloomy headquarters of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in Calcutta, the usually convivial apparatchik, Biman Basu, glumly tells us that the results were “totally unexpected”. A collective gasp goes up in the room. A slew of opinion polls, exit polls and reportage had all predicted the rout. But, no, the communists and their allies had not expected it.

So what went so horribly wrong leading to such a debacle for a party which had ruled the state for 34 years without a break, and prided itself on reading the pulse of the people like no other party? “The opposition slogan for ushering in parivartan [change] was endorsed by the people. We didn’t understand that,” Mr Basu says. So are the communists out of touch with the people? “We have grassroots connection with people, but people didn’t open their mouths, and we couldn’t assess their stirrings for a change,” he says.

Does that mean India’s communists are losing their touch – with the people, and the fast changing world around them? Have people stopped believing them?

It does appear so. A few months ago, the communists announced two big ticket schemes they promised to implement if were voted to power – cheap rice at two rupees a kilogram for families earning up to 10,000 rupees a month, and free medical insurance for the poor. In many states such welfare schemes, which critics call populist, would have easily fetched votes for the party behind them. No such luck for the communists in Bengal – people simply refused to believe that they could deliver on promises.

Which, many say, is a little tragic in a state where the communists had a few standout achievements after they were swept into power in 1977.

The party carried out far-reaching land reforms, ushered in local democracy through village councils and gave the peasants and working class some dignity. There was a sharp decline in poverty and a perceptible rise in living standards of a very politically conscious people. Nobody can take away the credit from the communists here.

Somewhere down the line in a fast-changing world the communists, many believe, began losing their way. After the first wave of farm reforms had exhausted its potential, they needed fresh ideas as governments cut back on spending, and private capital was touted as the main driver of growth and jobs. Land reform had run its course in Bengal, and farm produce prices were falling. Peasants, with enough food in their bellies, now aspired to better lives.

But a largely gerontocratic and hidebound leadership – already stunned into stasis by the break-up of the Soviet Union – “lost its way coping with the pressures of a globalised market”, says social scientist Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya.

He continues: “With the growing influences of market forces in the national economy and heightened competition between states to attract private capital, the communists found it increasingly difficult to match its anti-corporate, anti-globalisation rhetoric with the practice of competitive federalism.”

So in the past few years, the communist government stumbled and fell flat on its face trying to push through a chemical hub and a car factory by acquiring farming land and antagonising the same peasantry which it had empowered by giving them land.

Then there was the party’s stranglehold on the people. In what many call a Stalinist streak, Bengal became what Dwaipayan Bhattacharya says was a “party-society”. To put it simply, politics in Bengal did not revolve around solidarities based on caste, religion, language or ethnicity. It instead lay in the communist party, which mediated everything you did in your personal and work life, “often transgressing the lines of separation between private and public, civic and political, social and familial”.

I remember visiting villages in Bengal in the 1990s where people who had voted for the opposition had been virtually “excommunicated” and deprived of the many benefits that came with being a party supporter.

The decline of the communists possibly means that the “party-society” is now unravelling, and politics in Bengal is entering a new phase. A regional party like Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress which has defeated the communists is largely a regional party, tapping into Bengali nationalism, and seeking to restore the bruised Bengalis’ pride and identity.

Identity politics is also now making inroads in Bengal with local parties – like the Gorkha parties demanding a separate state in Darjeeling in eastern India – seeking to address local aspirations. “A one-party-meets-all-aspirations” has become a political anachronism in India, and Bengal may be going the same way.

So does the defeat of the communist party in Bengal and Kerala, their showcase states, mean that communism has lapsed into irrelevance in India? Hardly. Functioning in a democracy, the Communist Party has increasingly resembled social democrats with Stalinist tendencies when it came to forging the party together and packing key institutions with its cadres.

And as I wrote in a previous piece, Ms Banerjee of the Trinamool Congress has basically usurped the communist space with similar rhetoric. “I am not against Communism,” she is believed to have said, “but I am against the Communist Party.”

With their reserves of dedicated cadres, the communists may well bounce back. But, as Bengal shows, they can no longer take voters for granted.

And with mainline Indian parties trying to clothe policy in egalitarian ethics to appeal to the poor majority, the communists have very little new to offer. So will this rout force India’s communists to reinvent themselves? Going by history, the prospects of them doing so are slim.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-13395074

BBC Column – The Jaitapur riddle; Nuclear Plants

Soutik Biswsas

24/04/2011

V S Naipul wrote eloquently of India’s million mutinies. Is Jaitapur one of them? Are the protests against the planned nuclear plant there prompted by a familiar and sometimes foggy debate over whether development is driving rural India into more misery, robbing villagers of their land and livelihoods? What do we make of this week’s violence in Jaitapur? Was it a genuine outpouring of peoples’ anger against a project that they feel will ruin them and “poison” their land and water? Or did the provocation come from somewhere else?

On the face of it, it is all this and more. By all accounts, the violence was allegedly instigated by a right-wing regional party which is struggling to regain lost political ground in the Konkan coastal area where Jaitapur is located. The upshot of such cynical politics: one ‘protestor’ dead when police fired on irate villagers, at least 20 wounded, a hospital damaged and passenger buses gutted by the mob. A BBC colleague who is travelling in the area reports that many of the locals feel that their movement against the proposed nuclear plant is now “getting lost in the political din”.

They also blame the right-wing party for trying to “hijack” their movement.

This is tragic because there are much more significant and vexing issues at stake in Jaitapur. After the disastrous tsunami-induced meltdown in Fukushima, Japan, should India reconsider its push towards nuclear energy? (With the landmark nuclear deal with the US under its belt, India can now import reactors and nuclear fuel.) Will acquiring large tracts of land for nuclear power stations again set the government on a collision course with sections of the unwilling – and sometimes uninformed – farmers?

There are no clear answers. Anti-nuclear energy campaigners are unequivocal about their opposition to the plant. They insist that India will have to pay a high social price for nuclear energy.

Critics like Praful Bidwai believe that India’s nuclear energy drive will sound the death knell of precious ecosystems – six 1,650 megawatt reactors will be built at Jaitapur on the west coast, it is planned, in what would turn out to be the world’s largest ‘nuclear park’. They say the government has forcibly acquired farmland using a colonial law to build the plant. Mr Bidwai, who visited Jaitapur, writes that the nuclear plant will be situated on fertile farmland, not barren wastelands as the government would have people believe. Then there is the threat the plant poses to thriving fisheries. Officials say no local will be displaced from his land, although more than 2,000 people have had to sell parts of their land. So are the protests about better compensation for land, and guarantees about safety?

Most scientists I spoke to dismiss a lot of what the campaigners say, insisting that nuclear power is really the only option India is left with to meet its growing energy needs. An astonishing 400 million Indians continue to live in the dark, without electricity. “You have to choose the lesser evil “more carbon dioxide or the threat of radiation,” one told me. Smoke-belching thermal power plants use the atmosphere as a “sewer” and impact climate change. Solar and wind energy cannot meet India’s energy demands, they say. Ergo, nuclear power, they say, is the only sensible and clean option. That is why India is planning to set up some 30 reactors over as many years and get a quarter of its electricity from nuclear energy by 2050.

Scientists agree the government has to tread carefully in building consensus at the grassroots and while acquiring farmland to set up the nuclear plants – there is no room for forcible acquisition of land at unremunerative prices.

Then there is this shrill debate over the safety of the plant. Critics point out that the French-built reactor meant for Jaitapur has still not been approved by nuclear regulators worldwide. They say that the site is seismically hazardous – the area was apparently hit by 95 earthquakes between 1985 and 2005 – and since it will be built on the coast will be prone to tsunamis.

Scientists dismiss these arguments as naive and ill-informed. India, they say, will not buy these third generation reactors until international and local regulators clear them. India’s nuclear regulators say that Jaitapur is in a “significantly low seismic zone” compared with Japan and Fukushima.

Also, the reactors will be built on a cliff 82ft (25m) above the mean sea level. With its 20 reactors, India, scientists insist, has a good safety record. (There was a turbine room fire at a plant in 1993, and a sodium leak in another in 2000). “There have been no serious incidents. There has been no radiation leak. Our record is clean,” one official said.

In the tangled skein of conflicts bedevilling Jaitapur, it is easy to lose sight of the main issue: should India pursue nuclear energy to solve its crippling energy shortage? Or should it stumble along, uncertain about the alternatives and keeping 40% of its people in the dark?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/soutikbiswas/2011/04/the_jaitapur_riddle.html

Dawn Column – No Clear Path

Ardeshir Cowasjee

17 April 2011

The phrase ‘no clear path’ has a rather fine ring to it particularly if applied in general to Pakistan, the republic which bears an adjectival appellation to which it fails to live up.

In the present particular context, it emanates from the White House report to Congress on Afghanistan and Pakistan, March 2011, which was released to the press earlier this month.

On page 18, under the sub-heading ‘Objective 4: Develop Pakistan’s counterinsurgency capabilities; contrive to support Pakistan’s efforts to defeat terrorist and insurgent groups’ we read “…but what remains vexing is the lack of any indication of ‘hold’ and ‘build’ planning or staging efforts to complement ongoing clearing operations. As such, there remains no clear path towards defeating the insurgency in Pakistan….”

Of course, Pakistan and the US are at complete odds when it comes to taming the Taliban, the insurgents for whose funding, sustaining, training and arming Pakistan must take credit during the all-round destructive 1990s when our two main political parties were playing musical chairs.

Old habits die hard, or so the US believes, rightly or wrongly we cannot know. Accusations fly back and forth between the two allies and what is stated by both sides is for public consumption — we also cannot know what actually goes on in the continuous frequent meetings and discussions between the concerned civilian and military representatives.

The US tells us it is committed to a long-term relationship. This is fine and dandy but it can never be forgotten that from its very birth the US has made it clear to the world that it has and will not have no permanent friends, no permanent enemies that
its relationship with other countries has all to do with its own national interest. That is how it should be with all states.

That Pakistan has fluffed up on its own national interest is not in doubt — it has never had a ‘clear path’ in any direction, it has merely muddled through, helped (or cursed) at times with its geographical location which strategically has been both a boon and bane.

Yes, there is no clear path towards its efforts (that is if it is making any) to clear up the militancy in the country or to effectively deal with its ‘children’ the Taliban. Its politics have never been on a ‘clear path’, nor has its economy other than sporadically.

The IMF has also referred to our ‘path’ in a recent programme note which tells us that we have lost the ‘reforms path’ as far as the economy is concerned — that any reforms that were being pursued are now retarded or reversed. This beleaguered hapless government either cannot cope with any needed economic reforms or purposefully, in its own interest, avoids them.

Retardation and reversal applies on all fronts, the path chosen seems to be downwards, the easy path on which turning back is no easy task. In the process, our supposed friends who are few are fast growing fed up with Pakistan’s continual complaint that its ills are not of its own making but are imposed by external circumstances.

The presidential blame on the Afghan war for the government’s failures does not wash. That there is a governance gridlock is entirely the fault of the sitting government — as it has been for decades. That only 1.7 million of the 180 millions are income taxpayers, and that it is a known fact that our political classes contribute little or nothing to the national exchequer irks the taxpayers of the countries from which we beg and take. That the distribution of the nation’s wealth is criminal naturally comes in for bitter and valid criticism.

The American taxpayers are angry, as are the British. Writing in The Sunday Times on April 10, Christina Lamb who “has spent almost as much time in Pakistan as in Britain over the past 24 years” is justifiably angry. British Prime Minister David Cameron on his recent visit announced that £650m is to be given for education in Pakistan.

Why, asks Lamb? Why should Britain give money to a country “that has reduced its education budget to 1.5 per cent of GDP while spending several times as much on defence?” Why give to a country steeped, from the very top, in corruption, to a country which through its internal policies is bent on alienating its friends?

Why give to a country in which the education system is in crisis, in which at least seven million children are not in school.

Why give to a country where the education gap is filled by madressahs which become breeding grounds for militants?

She writes: “After spending two weeks travelling in Pakistan last month, I feel the situation has gone far beyond anything that a long-term strategy of building schools and training teachers can hope to restrain.”

As to a clear path towards the formal and liberal education of the youth of this country to attempt at some future point to bring it into line with the century in which we exist, a clear path is a far cry. We have just witnessed the HEC fiasco — the 18th Amendment to the over-amended constitution not having been fully thought out — and as has become the norm it has been left to our apex court to temporarily sort it out.

But in any foreseeable future, can there be a clear path towards enlightenment? Doubtful, if we listen to those who are exposed to what passes for a higher education system. The lunatic fringe, the intolerant and the bigoted are said to be no more just a fringe, they are the majority.

http://www.dawn.com/2011/04/17/no-clear-path-2.html