Book Corner

The UN Secretary General and Secretariat

2006-12-01T21:57:00.000-08:00

IT is not the Soviet Union, or indeed any other big powers who need the United Nations for their protection; it is all the others. In this sense, the organisation is first of all their organisation," said Dag Hammarskjöld, the greatest of all the U.N. Secretaries-General, a few weeks before he died. He sought to make the organisation "a dynamic instrument" rather than "a static conference machinery".

His tenure in office (1953-61) saw the world body playing an effective role in Suez, Hungary, Lebanon, Laos and the Congo, where he met his death.

The U.N. Charter, drawn up at the San Francisco Conference in 1945, was based on the unity of the P-5 (the five permanent members of the Security Council). The latter fell apart before the year ended. The U.S. bypassed the Security Council, which was paralysed by the Soviet Union's veto, and activated the General Assembly, where the U.S. had a dependable majority, to serve its ends during the Cold War. By the 1990s, the Third World acquired a majority there and acted as recklessly on occasion. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the U.S. as the sole superpower made the majority in the General Assembly more submissive to the U.S.' pressures and the Secretary-General all the more careful not to antagonise it.

This book is one of the first in the "Global Institution Series". Its author, Prof. Leon Gordenker of Princeton University, has written extensively on the U.N. This monograph reflects his mastery of the subject by its conciseness, clarity and incisiveness.

It makes a timely appearance in a year in which a new Secretary-General has been elected.

The office of the U.N. Secretary-General grew only to be stunted in its growth. Men like Kurt Waldheim and Boutros Boutros-Ghali did little to enhance its prestige. A careful study of Kofi Annan's record is very necessary.

The author discusses the evolution of the office, the role of the Secretary-General as head of the Secretariat, his duties as "world constable" and his potentialities and limitations. "Although he has been allowed or asked to furnish analytical advice to the Security Council, he never has had the staff facilities, the diplomatic networks, the intelligence services of governments even in the second or third power rank. Nor did pleas for better arrangements get much sympathy from governments that masked their suspicion of international organisation with claims of sanctity or their own financial penury. Even when the Security Council mandated field missions operated with military personnel, the Secretary-General had only the slenderest staff for military advice."

The Secretary-General is compelled to be sensitive to the enormous egos of American Senators. They determine the flow of funds to the U.N., though the U.S. is bound by the Charter to pay up its dues.

"Whether the United States has fully accepted the notion of an international civil service is open to doubt. A continuing stream of opinion in the Congress opposes giving what it regards as special privileges to American nationals, such as diplomatic immunity, while on U.N. business. This stream has broadened at times to make sure that financial contributions to the United Nations include accounting for the precise use of American funds. It has also resulted in congressional decisions that reduced the United Nations to the verge of bankruptcy. This obviously has impaired the authority of the Secretary-General. Similarly, the United States for many years closely monitored appointments to the Secretariat, giving advice that would be costly to ignore."

It remains to be seen how the office evolves in the days to come, under the newly elected Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

By A.G. Noorani

The Last Mughal: A Story of Bahadur Shah Zafar

2006-11-16T23:00:00.000-08:00

This is not a novel of crime fiction. Though it has plenty of intrigue, murder, mayhem, blood and gore, it is a work of serious scholarship of a horrendous episode in Indo-British relationships based on hitherto untapped archival material gathering dust in India, Pakistan, England and Burma. It shows the way history should be written: not as a catalogue of dry-as-dust kings, battles and treaties but to bring the past to the present, put life back in characters long dead and gone and make the reader feel he is living among them, sharing their joys, sorrows and apprehensions. Those who have read the City of Djinns and the White Mughals must have sensed that only William Dalrymple could have written The Last Mughal. Though a white Scotsman, he has no racial prejudices against browns or blacks: if anything, he is biased against his own people and in favour of those they wronged. It makes great reading.

The rebellion of 1857 lasted only a few months—from May to September 1857—but it shook the whole of India like a severe earthquake, taking a toll of thousands of lives.

Its epicentre was Delhi, the capital of the Mughal empire founded by Babar in 1526. By the time it struck, the empire had shrunk to a few square miles around the city. As the adage went: Sultanat Shah Alam az Dilli ta Palam—the kingdom of Shah Alam extends from Delhi to Palam. By the time the last of the emperors ascended the throne, it had shrunk further and was confined to Red Fort; his subjects comprised his vast harem of begums, concubines, their offspring, maidservants and manservants, most of them living in hovels without much to eat. The fort was guarded by an English officer; the so-called emperor received a living allowance from the British Resident and had little to do with governance. He spent his time composing poetry, practising calligraphy, watching his elephants being bathed in the Yamuna, and praying. Once in a while, he rode on his favourite elephant to the royal mosque, Jama Masjid, amid bursts of fireworks, or visited his wife's relations in the city. What he most looked forward to was holding poetic symposia (mushairas) in the Red Fort or in Delhi College outside Ajmeri Gate where his latest composition was read out first, followed by recitals of other poets, both Indian and European. The mushairas usually ended with recitals by masters like poet laureate Zauq and the greatest of them all, Mirza Asadullah Ghalib, in the early hours of the morning. As Ghalib put it, the candle burns brightest before it flickers and dies out.

A few decades before the outbreak, relations between Indians and Britons were reasonably amicable. Quite a few Britishers acquired Indian customs and styles of living, spoke Persian and Urdu; some married native women. Sir David Ochterlony had 13 bibis in his harem, James Skinner (Sikander Sahib) had 14. Besides building St James Church at Kashmere Gate, Colonel Skinner built a mosque for his Muslim wives and a temple for the Hindus. They wore Indian clothes, ate Indian food and smoked hookahs. It was one-way matrimonial traffic. Nubile English girls who came to India were not willing to share their nuptial beds with rival wives. But there was the Kashmiri dancing girl Farzana Zebunnissa who converted to Catholicism, cohabited with whites and carved out a principality of her own and became Begum Samru of Sardana near Meerut.

Relations between whites and natives began to sour with the aggressive evangelical zeal of clerics who attempted to convert Indians to Christianity. The Christian missionaries were confronted by jehadi elements from madrassas who looked down on both Christians and Hindus as infidels. However, the English topped the jehadis' hate list.

Read more about the book here.

Jamia Millia Islamia: Partners in Freedom

2006-11-09T09:37:00.000-08:00

THE Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi is an authentic offshoot of India's freedom movement. In September 1920, as part of its programme of non-cooperation with the British rulers, the Indian National Congress resolved at the historic Calcutta session under Gandhi's leadership on a boycott of educational institutions "owned, aided or controlled by Government" and for "the establishment of national schools and colleges". Maulana Mohammed Ali and Maulana Shaukat Ali supported this resolution.

In less than four months were born the Kashi Vidyapith, the Gujarat Vidyapith, the Bengal National University and the National Muslim University of Aligarh as a revolt against its parent, the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU). It became the Jamia Millia Islamia and was established on October 29, 1920, on the campus of the AMU. Hakim Ajmal Khan was its first Chancellor (Amir-e-Jamia), Maulana Mohammed Ali, the first Vice-Chancellor (Shaikh-ul-Jamia).

Among the first to be enrolled was a promising student at the AMU, Zakir Hussain, who became its Vice-Chancellor and put on the Jamia the impress of his personality. He returned to the AMU in 1957 as its Vice-Chancellor and became President of India in 1967.

The Jamia's present Vice-Chancellor, the distinguished historian Professor Mushirul Hasan, and his able colleague Rakshanda Jalil, Media Coordinator at the Jamia, collaborated to produce a history of this fine institution in a well researched book that draws on the archives and is illustrated profusely with photographs that evoke a great past.

Precisely because Dr. Zakir Hussain was close to Gandhi and Nehru, Jinnah vetoed his membership of the Interim Government at the centre in 1946, using unbecoming language.

It is a measure of Zakir Hussain's reputation and tact that he was able to secure Jinnah's presence at the Jamia's Silver Jubilee Celebrations on November 17, 1946, just as the country was being torn apart. Jinnah came with his sister Fatima and his right hand man Liaquat Ali Khan. Also present on the dais were Nehru, Maulana Azad and Rajaji.

Zakir Hussain delivered one of the best speeches of his career. He traced the history of the Jamia, the travails it had to undergo and said in a moving oration:

"You, gentlemen, are the stars of the political firmament. You have a secure place in the hearts of millions of people. Taking advantage of your presence here, I wish to submit in great sorrow a few words for your consideration on behalf of the educational workers. The fire of hatred is fast spreading which makes it seem mad to tend to the garden of education. This fire is burning in a noble and humane land. How will the flowers of nobility and sensibility grow in its midst? How will we be able to improve human standards which lie today at a level far lower than that of the beasts? How shall we produce new servants devoted to the cause of education? How can you protect humanity in a world of animals? ... . An Indian poet has remarked that every child who comes to this world brings along the message that God has not yet lost faith in man. But have our countrymen so completely lost faith in themselves that they wish to crush these innocent buds before they blossom?

"For God's sake sit together and extinguish this fire of hatred. This is not the time to ask who is responsible for it and what is its cause. The fire is raging. Please extinguish it. For God's sake do not allow the very foundations of civilised life in this country to be destroyed."

There were moist eyes when he concluded. Among those who were seen wiping their tears was his friend, Nehru. This is a superb record of a great national institution whose credo is very relevant to our times.

By A.G. Noorani

'Culture Means A Mix Of Things From Other Sources'

2006-11-09T01:13:00.000-08:00

'And my town, Istanbul, was this kind of mix. Istanbul, in fact, and my work, is a testimony to the fact that East and West combine cultural gracefully, or sometimes in an anarchic way, came together, and that is what we should search for'

The following is a telephone interview with Orhan Pamuk immediately following the announcement of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, October 12, 2006. The interviewer is Adam Smith, Editor-in-Chief of Nobelprize.org.

Orhan Pamuk: Hello.

Adam Smith: Hello, may I speak to Orhan Pamuk please? Hello?

Orhan Pamuk: Hello.

Adam Smith: Hello, may I speak to Orhan Pamuk please?

Orhan Pamuk: Speaking.

Adam Smith: Oh, my name is Adam Smith and I'm calling from the official website of the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm.

Orhan Pamuk: Yes.

Adam Smith: We have a tradition of recording very short conversations with new Laureates immediately after the announcements.

Orhan Pamuk: OK.

Adam Smith: So, first of all, many, many congratulations on being awarded ...

Orhan Pamuk: Oh, thank you very much. It's such a great honour.

Adam Smith: I gather you're in New York. What were you doing when you received the news?

Orhan Pamuk: Oh, I was sleeping, and thinking that, in a hour, probably they will announce the Nobel Prize, and then someone would maybe tell me who won it. And then I'm thinking, so what am I going to do, what's today's work? And I'm a little bit sleepy. And then the phone call, and then I'm "Oh, it's already half past seven". You know, this is New York and I don't know the light, so I don't feel pretty ... And I answered, and they said I won the Nobel Prize.

Adam Smith: That's an extraordinary phone call to receive. There was an enormous cheer went up at the press conference when they announced the prize.

Orhan Pamuk: Really, of course, that's great, I'm very happy to hear this. This is great.

Adam Smith: We've recorded it on the website so you can, when finally you get off the phone you can go and relive the moment.

Orhan Pamuk: And also I saw so many journalists you know, wanted me to have it, so I'm pleased about that. I'm very pleased about all these details. Thank you very much, sir.

Adam Smith: You're the first ever Turkish writer to be awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature. Does that give the award a special significance for you?

Orhan Pamuk: Well, unfortunately, that makes the thing very precious in Turkey, which is good for Turkey of course, getting this prize, but makes it more extra sensitive and political and it somehow tends to make it as a sort of a burden.

Adam Smith: Yes, because it's been quite a public year for you.

Orhan Pamuk: Yes.

Adam Smith: So I imagine this will add to that. The citation for the award refers particularly to your "quest for the melancholic soul of (your) native city", and there's an extremely long tradition of writing about Istanbul, and in praise of Istanbul. Could you describe briefly what it is about the city that has acted as such a strong draw for people's imagination over the years?

Orhan Pamuk: Well, it was at the edge of Europe, but different. So it was the closest ‘other'. And it was really both close and, in a way, other. Mysterious, strange, uncompromising and totally un-European in ways, although in its spirit there was such a great place for Europe [words unclear].

Adam Smith: And referring to the phrase "melancholic soul", how would you describe Istanbul to those who've never seen it?

Orhan Pamuk: I would say that it's one of the early modern cities where modernity decayed earlier than expected.

For the complete interview, read here.

Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan

2006-11-01T10:41:00.000-08:00

A resurgent Asia is now emerging as the global pivot. With the world's fastest-growing markets, fastest-rising military expenditures and most-serious hotspots. Asia holds the key to the future global order. Underpinning its renaissance, Asia has become the world's economic locomotive, even as its arts, fashion and cuisine regain international recognition. Yet, with interstate competition sharpening, Asia faces complex security, energy and developmental challenges in an era of globalization, including how to move beyond historical legacies and tap its dynamism for greater prosperity and well-being. The colossal shift in global geopolitics presents new opportunities to Asia and tests its ability to assume a bigger role in international relations.

This book examines the ascent of Asia by focusing on its three main powers - China, India and Japan. A qualitative recording of power in an Asia characterized by tectonic shifts in challenging strategic stability and affecting equations between these powers. How the China-Japan, China-India and Japan-India equations evolve in the coming years will have a crucial bearing on Asian and global security. Constituting a strategic triangle, these powers are Asia's largest economies. Their interests are getting so intertwined that the pursuit of unilateral solutions by any one of them will disturb the peaceful environment on which their continued economic growth and security depend.

The author analyses the global ramifications of the emerging Chinese colossus. He also highlights the fact that Japan’s quiet, undeclared transition from pacifism to a ‘normal’ state will help shape the future of Asian and global geopolitics. Even as it has reinvigorated its military ties with the United States. Japan is beginning to rethink its security and international role. The third major Asian player, India, is coming of age by displaying greater realism in economic and foreign policies and moving towards geopolitical pragmatism. India now recognizes that it can wield international power only by building up its economic and military strength.

By Brahma Chellaney
HarperCollins Publishers, India
Publication: 2006

The One Percent Doctrine: An Intelligence Abuse

2006-10-21T11:05:00.000-07:00

If there's a one per cent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping Al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response... It's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence... . It's about our response. - The Cheney Doctrine

COOPERATE, or you will be bombed back to the Stone Age." This was the sum and substance of an alleged threat by the then U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage to Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) Director in the months following 9/11. This sensational revelation was made by Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf during a recent interview over CBS, the reputed American television network.

Speaking at a press conference the next day at the White House in the presence of President George W. Bush, the General refused to expatiate on this, saying that he was restrained by an agreement to maintain silence with his publisher Simon & Schuster. (Musharaff's memoirs In the Line of Fire released on September 25 confirms this charge against the U.S.)

Reacting to this allegation, Bush said with a straight face that he was surprised at the strong language which one of his deputies had allegedly used. Interestingly, he did not upbraid Armitage, nor did he take the position that Armitage could not have made such insensitive remarks. Whatever be the justification for the threat hurled by a superpower at a lesser power in a moment of extreme stress and anguish, objectively viewed, if true, this arm-twisting bordered on insolence and arrogance of the most objectionable kind.

That this was the cavalier fashion in which the White House formulated all major post-9/11 decisions is the theme that runs right through Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind's absorbing work The One Per Cent Doctrine. The book has evoked a mixed response, but on the whole it has attracted wide attention among those who support the current U.S. administration as well as those who are bitterly opposed to it. While the former brand it as a tissue of lies, the others look upon it as yet another confirmation, if one is needed, of how Bush and his coterie have made a mess of the post-9/11 opportunities to neutralise Osama bin Laden.

The merits of the U.S. decision to invade Iraq for its alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) are being questioned to this day by friends and foes alike of President Bush the world over. Domestically, opposition to this war has waxed and waned. Beneath this, there is a lot of scepticism on whether this involvement in an unwinnable war was in the best interests of the U.S. and its allies. What was the rationale behind hitting at Saddam Hussein is the question that dominates the debate. Was it really to dispossess Saddam of his WMD or was it aimed at taking control of the oilfields in the region?

Suskind is categorical that marching into Iraq was the outcome of an American urge to tell the rest of the world that it was not demoralised by the decisive blow that Al Qaeda had dealt it and that it could still retaliate in a theatre of its choice. Also, President Bush's contrived rhetoric - something in the vein of what is attributed to Armitage - is intended "to show that there is no fear, or doubt... . At least not in his mind."

Suskind denounces this stance vehemently, and surprisingly draws from Mahatma Gandhi to amplify the point: ("Manliness consists not in bluff, bravado or lordliness. It consists in daring to do the right and facing consequences whether it is in matters social, political or other.") This appropriate quotation should gladden every Indian reader, at a time when many decision-makers in our own country are known to care little for the Mahatma or what he stood for. If not for anything else, at least for performing the laudable task of re-emphasising the relevance of the Father of the Nation to our times, Suskind deserves to be read by us in India with some seriousness.

The commonly held belief that crystallised itself in the months following 9/11 was that President Bush was being led up the garden path by a neo-conservative coterie headed by Vice-President Dick Cheney and including, among others, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The latter two had a long friendship dating back to President Gerald Ford's time. Suskind reports that they had collaborated in many dubious past ventures, including the sidelining of Henry Kissinger and the installation of George W. Bush Sr. as the chief of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Suskind's focus is now on Cheney - how he became the focal point for all decisions and how he exploited the President's impatience with details and urge to act on impulse rather than on independent analysis and deliberation. Here and there `Rummie' also comes for some not-so-flattering scrutiny for his effort to prop up the Pentagon's intelligence-collection prowess by exposing the CIA's own failings and vulnerabilities. He was credited with the highly hilarious statement: "Every CIA success is a DoD failure." In India too, there have been turf wars between the Intelligence Bureau/Research and Analysis Wing on the one hand and Army Intelligence on the other.

In the days following 9/11 there was not only chaos within the White House but supreme fear of another wave of attacks, something that was reported by CIA Director George Tenet as most probable. Cheney seemed to thrive on the uncertainties of the time. His bona fides were not suspect, and he was every inch a patriot, but with some megalomaniac traits. He seemed to believe that it was his divine right to take charge of the situation, especially because the nation could otherwise head for disaster. It looked as if he had virtually taken control of access to the President.

Undoubtedly, it was he who decided on what his boss needed to know, a situation that had obviously received sanction from the latter. He lorded over the CIA with its Director kowtowing to him.

It was during a meeting in November 2001 that the CIA referred to Cheney a reported meeting between bin Laden and two Pakistani officials who had sold nuclear technology to Libya and bin Laden. This was an uncorroborated report that, because of its huge importance to global security, warranted attention but not to jumping to conclusions. Cheney was stirred and took the position that the troubled times they were living in did not brook delay. One could not lose precious time demanding proof. Presumptions of probabilities were enough to act. This was perhaps faultless logic at a time of great national danger.

This is how the celebrated Cheney doctrine was born, and thereafter everyone, including the mighty CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had willy nilly to fall in line. Intelligence did not shape policy, but it had to be tailored to what had already been made.

Suskind's diagnosis of the scene may look naively simple. But the circumstances in which Tenet was shown the door later - because a beleaguered White House managed successfully to circulate the impression that it had been misled by intelligence into believing that Iraq had WMD - engender in one a strong belief that Suskind was possibly correct when he said that intelligence agencies were being dictated to. Suskind is widely known to have had the right sources - one of which was probably Tenet himself - who spoke to him at length while writing The One Per Cent Doctrine.

Cheney and his cohorts seemed hell bent on keeping the CIA and the FBI on their toes by feeding them with bits and pieces of dubious information that they had received from their untested sources.

One questionable and controversial character was Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi dissident and a friend of the neo-conservative gang in the U.S. Chalabi by all accounts was feeding Rumsfeld with information that was suspect and which did not excite the CIA.

President Bush himself did not rate Chalabi highly and wanted his administration to distance itself from him. This did not, however, happen for quite a while, notwithstanding the CIA's strong reservations about Chalabi. This was one clear instance of how the coterie could defy and also get the better of one from whom it derived its strength.

Another accusation is that Cheney's team was unabashed in its efforts to cherry-pick information received from the CIA to suit its own ends. The tactic was to use intelligence reports selectively, cull out portions that suited its own perceptions and ignore the other parts that ran counter to its own pre-conceived notions. Another ploy was to send the CIA information received from some source or the other for verification, and if the CIA did not find it to be true, keep on asking it to check and cross-check until it found something that seemed to support the coterie's case.

One such instance was the reported meeting of one 9/11 hijacker, Mohammed Atta, and Iraqi intelligence. Picked up by Cheney, the report said the meeting took place in Prague five months before the 9/11 attack. When CIA Director Tenet subjected this to considerable scrutiny, there was nothing to suggest that the report was true. Cheney was not exactly pleased that the CIA had found his source to be unreliable, although he did not make an issue of it.

Suskind is no doubt hypercritical of the White House's misuse of the intelligence machinery. Efforts to wrest from the CIA in particular reports that would suit the administration were not all that subtle. President Bush seemed to be acting by the proxy that Dick Cheney had readily agreed to become. But then would this coterie have succeeded if it did not have a pliable civil service?

Tenet was by all accounts a highly rated operative known for his integrity and professionalism. Then why did he become an unquestioning ally of an administration that was steamrolling things? Suskind provides the answer. Tenet, who was appointed by the Democrats, was retained by Bush (presumably under the advice of his father). He was also not fired after the 9/11 debacle, something that raised quite a few eyebrows.

More than this, whenever the CIA was under the direct line of attack from the Democrats, Bush went to Tenet's support in the strongest possible language. ("The nation is at war. We need to encourage Congress to frankly leave the man alone. Tenet is doing a good job. And if he's not, blame me, not him.") Here was therefore a CIA Director living on borrowed time, and whatever be his mettle his survival depended on his loyalty to the Chief Executive. So, if he appeared complicit one could not blame him.

It was an entirely different matter that Tenet had to leave abruptly in June 2004, ostensibly for "personal reasons" but more probably for allegedly misleading the administration on the WMD issue. The popular surmise was that he was being made a scapegoat for the failures of the coterie that was somehow trying to justify the action in Iraq. This was a sad end to a distinguished career. But then, life in high places is very insecure.

Suskind writes with remarkable clarity. There are some who berate him for taking liberties with facts. I do not know how far they are right. Whatever be the truth, The One Per Cent Doctrine gives more than a glimpse of the processes that render policy-making an intricate adventure. To both honest and not-so-honest leaders, the path to decisions can be tricky and craggy. Some survive and march gallantly and some stumble never to recover.

This absorbing work (The One Percent Doctrine by Ron Suskind, Simon & Schuster, London 2006) has attracted wide attention among both the supporters and the opponents of the current U.S. administration.

Reviewed by R.K. RAGHAVAN

Post Modern Gandhi and Other Essays

2006-10-05T08:55:00.000-07:00

This book by former professors of political science at the University of Chicago could not have come at a better time. With Lage Raho Munnabhai having revived interest in Gandhism, and even having given us a new term—‘Gandhigiri’—the youth have suddenly become willing to experiment with the idea. Gandhigiri, for instance, inspired some youth in Lucknow to distribute roses as their form of protest against a wine shop rather than adopt any aggressive way. That Gandhi was always relevant—in fact, more so now than the times he lived in—was clear to anybody with even a slight interest in the man. The Rudolphs’ book analyses Gandhi’s thoughts, especially from his Hind Swaraj, and demonstrates that Gandhi was well ahead of his times.

For instance, while the world was overwhelmed with the modernisation project, Gandhi was already critiquing it. He opposed machines whenever they took away jobs. Fittingly, when the government decided for the first time in independent India to give its poorest citizens an Employment Guarantee Act, machines were banned under it. Gandhi advocated celibacy or restraint in sexual behaviour and we are already advising our citizens publicly about this as part of aids awareness programmes.

Gandhi stood for Gram Swarajya, that is, a decentralised political system and control of local people over their resources. We are beginning to realise the pitfalls of mega development projects and centralised decision-making. Gandhi supported non-violent methods of struggle to gain one’s rights and we’ve witnessed how groups believing in violent ways of resistance, like the People’s War or separatists in Kashmir and Nagaland, have shown more willingness in recent times to discuss issues across the table. Similarly, the way people across the world are coming out in large numbers on the streets to protest against American military misadventures echoes a commitment to the Gandhian values and non-violence. We may not explicitly refer to Gandhi everytime we follow some values dear to him, but we do justify his philosophy by many of our actions.

I differ from the Rudolphs on other counts. They dwell at length on the comparison between Gandhi and Christ. It almost seems that it is hard for Christians to digest the fact that the one man in history who most closely resembled Christ in thought, words and deed was not a Christian. There is also a separate chapter on ‘Gandhi in the Mind of America’. One can’t understand why this should be so, since America then wasn’t as important a player in global politics as it is today and Gandhi never visited the US nor had many associations there. Probably, Gandhi in the mind of the British or South Africa or even Pakistan would’ve made a more interesting case study.

The book also gives the western world credit for most of Gandhi’s progressive ideas. It is a moot point whether Gandhi would have developed the same worldview that he did had he not had a chance to go to Britain. If we look at Gandhi’s choices—vegetarianism, celibacy, truth, non-violence, giving up western clothing in favour of the traditional Indian dhoti, his emphasis on using the right means to achieve right ends—it is quite clear that Oriental streams had more influence on Gandhi than the West. Also, going by Gandhi’s childhood and youth, the values of truth and non-violence were inherent in him. Even if he had not left the shores of the country, chances are that he would have arrived at the same point through a different set of experiences. This makes the book’s basic premise—that the credit for Gandhi’s holistic, democratic and humanitarian worldview goes to his exposure to the western world—flawed.

This apart, Gandhi comes across in a positive light and the book may inspire a few more individuals to adopt Gandhigiri as a lifestyle.From that standpoint, this is a very valuable piece of work, a collection of essays which, even though academic in nature, would have great practical value. Any work on Gandhi, if it cannot inspire a few more individuals to act in similar ways, would not be considered worthwhile, given the fact that Gandhi was a practitioner and an activist in addition to being a theorist.

By Sandeep Pandey

Spy Princess

2006-07-21T03:02:00.000-07:00

Spy Princess: The Life of
Noor Inayat Khan
By Shrabani Basu
Roli. Price Rs 395;
pages 234

Spy thrillers are always good to read. To thrill, they have to be fiction. Real spies, we are told, are dull people like us-no vanishing inks, parachute daredevilry or passwords. Only secret transmissions.

But no. Even real-life spy stories can thrill. Shrabani Basu's Spy Princess thrills. And also makes us proud and sad.

Very few in India would have heard of her. Noor Inayat Khan was pretty-looking, born of an Indian father and an American mother in Moscow. She lived in Paris, trained in England, spied for England in France, and was captured and killed by the Germans.
Her distant relatives still live in India. They are the descendants of Tipu Sultan, who fought against the British. Ironically, Noor laid down her life for the British.

The author, a journalist in London, who authored Curry: The Story of the Nation's Favourite Dish, has done painstaking research to unravel the story of Noor. She got a good part of the story, on the working of the secret service, from the British archives which were declassified just when she was about to start work on the book. Then she traced Noor's brother in France and got the family story.

Noor was the first female wireless operator to be flown into German-occupied France. She worked there under the code name of Madeline and sabotaged German lines of communication.

Even after she learnt that all her fellow-spies had been captured, she remained in France, refusing an offer from her handlers in England to fly her back. Thus, for a while, Noor's was the only wireless operating for the Allies in occupied Paris. Perhaps the most gripping part of the account is-as in fictional thrillers-the part when she is finally betrayed (for 100,000 francs) by the sister of her first contact in Paris, and is trailed by the Gestapo. Even then she manages to cut her tail, but is finally cornered in her flat. She attempts to escape from her interrogation room through the bathroom window, but as in a movie scene, her tormentor waits outside, telling her, "Give me your hand."

All the same, Noor couldn't be cracked. She went down with her secrets in a German prison, where she was shot dead. The French honoured her with Croix de Guerre and the British with George Cross. India forgot her.

By R. Prasannan
http://www.manoramaonline.com/

A Hundred Horizons

2006-07-21T02:54:00.000-07:00

A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire
By Sugata Bose
Permanent Black
Price Rs 695; pages 333

In November 1903, when he undertook a flag-waving voyage from Karachi towards the Persian Gulf and beyond, George Nathaniel Curzon gave India a dream. The die-hard imperialist that he was, Curzon dreamt of a British-ruled India that had its strategic perimeter extending to the Persian Gulf in the west and the Malacca Strait in the east.

Post-Independent India, fighting continental wars, forgot that dream. Till the Tamil rebels of Sri Lanka started pin-pricking the sole of India's feet and a ragtag rebel group unseated President Gayoom of the Maldives. Suddenly, about eight decades after Curzon left the shores of India, India looked to the ocean. But not deeply enough-till the tsunami hit. As Sugata Bose says, "The unity of the Indian Ocean world had been demonstrated in the most tragic fashion by a great wall of water moving at the speed of a jet aircraft."

Bose, a professor of history at Harvard, however, seems to disagree with those who exhort India to adopt a Curzonian strategic doctrine. He says neo-conservative polemicists and strategic analysts are calling on the US to take up Britain's imperial mantle and India to adopt a Curzonian strategic doctrine. This, he says, reflects selective amnesia. Bose then gives two aspects of this amnesia.

Unfortunately, both relate to the bluster about the American role. Bose's book is extremely well-researched, and poetically written, but is a disappointment to an Indian reader. It appears the author wastes all his researched knowledge and writing skill in a cesspool of neo-left confusion. Bose himself finds in the British, or Curzonian, continuation of Mughal regalia an attempt at drawing historical legitimacy. And then commits the same mistake that ultra-nationalist historians make-of forgetting that republican India's prime ministers address the nation on I-Day from the Mughal fort and the pageantry that heralds the swearing-in of a President in the Rashtrapati Bhavan is much that same pageantry that accompanied viceregal inaugurations.

So, despite post-imperialist deconstructivism, old strategic urges remain, imperialistic or otherwise. Just as communist USSR could not escape the insecurities of Czarist Russia, republican India cannot break out of the strategic insecurities and expansionist urges born out of those insecurities, experienced by British India. The humanistic urges of a Tagorean voyage through almost the same route that Curzon took cannot be mutually negating-rather, a dispassionate historian should find them complementary. To be brutally historical, they are just as complementary as the Bible-wielding missionary was to the colonising colonel.

To have a strategic vision is not being expansionistic. Here again, the example of Curzon would suffice. Though an unabashed imperialist, Curzon was against imperial over-reach in the Mesopotamian campaign (appropriately, and thought-provokingly, described as the first Gulf War by Bose).

The book is a well-crafted attempt but this reviewer would submit that the strategic link, sought to be replaced, emerges stronger. The other flaw is that it has an overdose of Bengali intellectualism, complete with Tagore and Bose.

By R. Prasannan
http://www.manoramaonline.com/

Elementary Steps

2006-07-10T23:36:00.000-07:00

APART from the general theme, the two books under review have much in common. Both consist of chapters by different authors and there is considerable overlap of contributors. More important, both volumes are based on field studies conducted in eight States - Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. The studies were sponsored and supported by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and coordinated by Santosh Mehrotra.

The Economics of Elementary Education, completed earlier but published later, deals with each one of the States separately, but follows a fairly common format. For each State, issues of access to elementary education are dealt with - literacy, enrolment and dropout - as also the agencies dealing with elementary education, that is, government and local bodies, private aided and unaided agencies and unrecognised bodies. Teaching and performance, buildings, teaching aids and costs in each of these segments are examined, in most instances with comparisons of the government and non-government segments. Public expenditure on elementary education is featured. The costs to households in providing elementary education to children are assessed along with the attitude of parents towards the schooling of their children. Recent initiatives to improve elementary education and the challenges ahead are also discussed. This book is a valuable source of information to those who are concerned and are dealing with elementary education.

In Universalizing Elementary Education, the treatment is thematic, drawing on the findings from the States and keeping in view the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan commitment of 2002 to achieve universal elementary education (UEE) by 2010. It has useful international comparison and a discussion of the critical role played by the UEE in the economic progress of a country. In certain respects the country has made enormous progress in elementary education. The number of primary schools has increased from a little over 200,000 in 1950-51 to over 660,000 in 2001-02 and that of upper primary schools from about 13,500 to around 220,000 during the same period. Enrolment too has increased phenomenally, about six times at the primary level and 15 times at the upper primary level. At the primary level 94 per cent of the country's population has schooling facilities within a kilometre and at the upper primary level it is 84 per cent.

However, drop-out levels are high and participation by girls and other disadvantaged groups is low. Inadequate school infrastructure, teacher shortages and absenteeism, and a serious lack of textbooks are other negative points. In terms of education indicators, the six most populous States of India do not fare much better than sub-Saharan Africa, and India has a third of the global total of children out of school. These are the general issues against which the problems of elementary education are examined in the two volumes.

The Constitution had envisaged that UEE would become a reality within a decade, that is, by 1960. That did not happen then and it has not happened so far. An examination of the international experiences of the past and the present may indicate the reasons for this failure.

The chief among them is inadequate effort by the state. Germany was the first country in the world to attempt universal, compulsory schooling up to 14 years. Even before the unification of the German-speaking territories of Europe in 1871, Prussia, one of them, had launched a programme of UEE by making it free and compulsory. It was a matter of state policy, though traditionally education was provided by private agencies. After the programme was launched, there was a striking increase in public schools financed through taxation. After Prussia defeated France in 1870, the latter also launched a big public effort in UEE, again with the state taking the lead. Other states also followed suit and by the end of the century elementary education had become free almost throughout Europe.

In the United Kingdom, religious bodies were traditionally responsible for education, but from 1833 the state began to stimulate the growth of education by subsidising these agencies. The Factory Act of the same year obliged factory owners to ensure that their child workers were receiving a regular education either in the school run by the factory or elsewhere. And by 1880, the state made general education compulsory.

Turning to the contemporary situation, again, the active role of the state can be seen in the case of all high achievers - Sri Lanka, South Korea, Indonesia and Thailand in Asia; Botswana in Africa; Costa Rica and Mexico in Latin America.

The scene in India is different on many counts. Education in the country does not receive the kind of attention it deserves. For instance, the total share of Central and State spending on education has been less than 3.5 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP), as low as 2.4 per cent in the 1970s, though 6 per cent of GDP is considered desirable and many countries, including developing ones, spend around 4.5 per cent of their GDPs. Second, although during the First Five-Year Plan period (1951-56) close to half of total spending on education was devoted to elementary education, in later years the share came down sharply, to about a third by the end of the 1970s, because of the emphasis given to higher and technical education in the 1960s and 1970s. The share went up again after the government decided to fund elementary education following the National Policy on Education in 1986.

Lack of state funding of elementary education has meant that in many parts of the country, private agencies play a significant role in that sphere, especially at the upper primary level. There are three different categories, private schools aided by the government, private unaided schools and unrecognised private schools. In aided schools, the government usually pays salaries while the management meets other expenses. In general the managements recruit teachers and often they do not adhere to the qualifications prescribed. In practically all private schools, teachers' salaries are lower and the fees higher than in government schools, but teaching and general facilities are usually better.

The configuration of public and private schools and the differential conditions prevailing in them have their bearing on elementary education in the country. In practically all the States the bulk of the enrolment in rural areas in the primary school segment is in government and local body schools. The major exception here is Kerala where the government and private sectors almost equally share the total enrolment. However, the authors who are responsible for the analysis of this aspect in the first volume point out that private aided schools, which account for 41 per cent of the enrolment, are not only substantially funded by the state, but are under government supervision so that "it is the publicly provided or financed system that is the backbone of the education system in Kerala" also.

In urban areas, a significant proportion of all enrolled children is in private schools, aided and unaided - 40 per cent and above in several States, 70 per cent in Uttar Pradesh and about 80 per cent in Haryana. The private sector has a higher presence in the upper primary segment. What this implies is that in the urban sector generally, and in the upper primary segment specially, elementary education, which is meant to be free, is not free for many children and their families. To be sure, many families voluntarily accept (some, indeed, actively go after) fees-charging elementary education. On the other hand, inadequate provisioning of free elementary education through government and local body schools must be accepted as a major reason for the failure to universalise elementary education more than half a century after Independence.

Another aspect that is brought out is that even when elementary education is free (that is, non-fee-levying) families have to bear substantial costs to educate their children. These costs are of two kinds. First, there are costs associated with schooling - books, stationery, uniform, footwear, lunch, and transportation as also tours, annual festivals, and donations where these are applicable. Obviously, there are wide variations in these costs between rural and urban areas, different parts of the country, primary and upper primary segments and so on, and hence the figures indicated must be taken as providing orders of magnitude. "Household expenditure on primary education in rural areas varies between a low of about Rs.508 in Andhra Pradesh to a high of Rs.948 in a poor State like Rajasthan. In urban areas, the range is between Rs.1,169 in the case of West Bengal and Rs.2.061 in the case of Assam" (Universalizing Elementary Education; page 295). "Household costs for the upper primary schooling of children in rural areas vary between Rs.903 in Assam and Rs.1,841 in Tamil Nadu. In urban areas the range is from Rs.1,392 in Andhra Pradesh to Rs.2,655 in Assam" (page 296). It goes without saying that these expenses can and do act as a major deterrent for poor households in enrolling and retaining children in elementary education.

Poor households also have to reckon with the opportunity cost - the earnings of the children, especially boys who work instead of going to school, and the many household chores that girls attend to by staying at home. These, particularly the latter, are not easy to quantify and will show greater variation. It can also be argued that children below the age of 14 should not be engaged in work. But this noble sentiment does not have a binding impact in the case of households where every opportunity to earn a rupee or two makes a big difference to its well-being.

When Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan was launched in 2002 to provide quality elementary education to all children in the 6-14 age group by 2010, the idea was to ensure that all children went to school by 2003 and that all children completed five years of primary education by 2007. The first has not been achieved and in 2006 it does not take a futurologist to predict that the second will not be achieved. The indications are that the goal of UEE is unlikely to be reached by 2010.

What is to be done? Continue to make pious resolutions that will never be implemented thereby not only denying millions of children the opportunity to receive schooling even up to the elementary level, but also ensuring that the country will remain a cesspool of adult illiterates in the future as well?

Herculean efforts are required if these are to be avoided. However, little is gained by merely calculating the financial requirements to achieve well-defined targets and urging the state to make the funds available. Something different is called for.

MADHYA PRADESH'S INITIATIVE

The Economics of Elementary Education suggests some possibilities. In going through the financing of education it pays special attention to new initiatives to improve the coverage and quality of elementary education. Among these the recent attempts in Madhya Pradesh to involve local communities in efforts to spread elementary education deserve special mention. The State has one of the lowest literacy rates in the country, especially female literacy. It also has a high proportion of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe populations, and is largely rural also.

Following the introduction of the NEP, Madhya Pradesh launched `Operation Blackboard' with the aim of improving the physical and teaching faculties in elementary schools. This was followed in 1994 by the District Primary Education Programme (DPEP), which aimed at improving the quality of education and experimenting new methods of teaching and learning. These programmes were part of the national efforts to strengthen primary education in the States.

In 1997, Madhya Pradesh introduced its own Education Guarantee Scheme (EGS), under which the government guaranteed the appointment of a teacher to any rural, particularly tribal, community where there were 25 children who had no school within a kilometre. The teacher, known as guruji, had to belong to the village and was to be identified by the community but paid for by the government. The community had to provide the space for the school too.

The EGS idea caught on throughout the State and according to official reports and independent field studies, EGS centres have been considered to be functioning more effectively than government schools in terms of enrolment and retention of children and enthusiasm and commitment of teachers. Also, the costs involved have been exceptionally low.

Realising the effectiveness of the EGS, Madhya Pradesh pressed ahead with further decentralisation of elementary education. Village Educational Councils and Parent Teacher Associations in local areas were mandated by law. A mass mobilisation for literacy was also launched with initiatives coming from local groups. One of the related aspects of these efforts has been that most of the teachers recruited are either women or belong to the socially disadvantaged groups.

Madhya Pradesh has not solved all problems relating to elementary education, but "there is little doubt that in what just a decade ago was one of the most educationally backward parts of the entire country, there is strong evidence of change - demonstrated both in enrolments as well as literacy" (page 214). The State's experience also shows that the way to realise the objective of UEE is for the civic community at the local level to accept it as its project and use the instrumentality of the state at that level - through the panchayati raj institutions - for its implementation. The role of the State and Central governments will be to facilitate these local efforts through adequate financial support.

Together the two books offer detailed factual material and analysis of the present situation and suggestions for the tasks ahead.

By C.T. Kurien (www.frontlineonnet.com/stories/20060714000507500.htm)

Social Dimensions of Security

2006-06-11T23:50:00.000-07:00

UNDERSTANDING SECURITY — A New Perspective: T. K. Oommen; Macmillan India Ltd., 2/10, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi-110002. Rs. 320.

Addressing the recent annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank in Hyderabad, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh remarked perceptively that the aspirations of Asian nations for economic development should be accompanied by a desire to enhance levels of security in the region. Only this would provide an attractive incentive for investors looking first for a climate of political and social stability before deciding to put their money on projects. Dr. Singh was thus expanding the traditionally narrow concept of national security.

He was possibly visualising a scenario wherein nations no longer fought among themselves placing individuals and the lives of whole nations at risk, but offered levels of order and sanity conducive to creativity and uninterrupted economic activity. Dr. Singh's observation comes appropriately at a time when almost all countries in our neighbourhood are going through a distressing spell of disorder, a mark of failed governance and an ambience of low security.

Interpretation

Four years after 9/11, the Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden continue to dominate our thought processes, and we see visible symbols of our fear in those who guard our houses, public offices and airports. We however tend to ignore multitudes all over the globe for whom 9/11 is a mere dot in an unjust world order. They are those who do not know when and from where their next meal would come. For them, the danger from bullets or explosives is not as compelling as that from an empty stomach. Against this background, the term `security' needs a very liberal interpretation.

There are then threats to our environment about which policy makers talk eloquently but do precious little. Security from depleting levels of the ozone layer receives scant attention. It is no doubt a matter of debate whether, while talking of security, we can equate the adverse effect of pollution of air and water with the fallout from an insidious terrorist movement. Nevertheless, unquestionably we are threatened as much from the abnormal release of carbon dioxide as we are from the mindless suicide bomber.

Threats from society

The author, T. K. Oommen is a respected voice in the area of social science. When he pleads for a very comprehensive definition of `security', he is very much plausible. In his strikingly original work that examines the whole gamut of modern security studies, he convinces us that we should move away from a state-centric approach that dwelt mainly on military and nuclear threats. Rather, we would do well to evaluate the consequences of poverty, hunger and social oppression, all of which could come under one rubric: threats from society.

Those like P. Sainath, who write prodigiously and realistically on rural poverty, especially in the context of the tragically mounting numbers of farmer suicides, can write a whole volume on security as is perceived in rural India. Medha Patkar's titanic struggle is an example of a heroic demand for security that not many of us will comprehend if we stick to our traditional notions.

Security scenario

Oommen also cites the cruel hierarchy of castes that still dominates rural life, which makes life insecure to the core. Mapping the security scenario around us, the author discards the traditional division of the globe into the Third World and the rest. From a security perspective he would be happier with the categories of the New and the Old World, the former dominated by settler-majority regions, where prior to colonisation there were hardly any recognisable political-administrative units. Here, colonisation did bring in substantial security issues. Genocides and, deliberate and tendentious exercises to bring about cultural homogenisation — synonymous with `ethnic cleansing' — state-sponsored or otherwise, also make life insecure for minority groups, and we have seen enough of this both in Europe and Africa. A well-written history of how the concept of security has evolved over centuries can hardly gloss over these happenings.

`State-making and the Problematics of Security' is a brilliant chapter that dissects the complexities of South Asia in the form of secessionist movements and those either seeking rights for the `sons of the soil' or trying to eliminate artificial territorial divisions of composite cultural and linguistic communities. The localised yet strong movements in North-East India and the linguistic affinity of groups such as Bengalis and Tamils living across two or more countries have their own implications for security, although one cannot exaggerate their import for the stability of the massive nation that we are. They cannot be ignored either.

Oommen's is a bold attempt to provoke contemporary thinking on a vital subject that will continue to be debated among intellectuals as well as the unlettered. After all, is there not unanimity that we should not go back to the Hobbesian state of anarchy, but live in peace with those who may dress differently from us or speak in a tongue alien to us, if only to share the fruits of modern science and technology?

By R. K. RAGHAVAN
www.thehindu.com

Glibalization 3.0: The World is Flat

2006-06-08T23:59:00.000-07:00

The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Globalised World in the 21st Century
by Thomas Friedman
Penguin/Lane £20, pp496 (paperback edition Rs.491/-) (India)

The rise of China and demise of America is well- trodden literary territory. When tackled by Europeans, it invariably includes a large dose of Schadenfreude. Thomas Friedman, New York Times super-columnist and multiple Pulitzer Prize winner, as his publicists never cease to remind us, thinks differently. He sees as many opportunities as problems for the USA in the irresistible new global world order.

In the crowded market of globalisation books, this is an entertaining, informative and occasionally annoying addition. Rather like Bob Woodward, Friedman cannot resist dropping powerful names, with the grating epithet 'my good friend' applied to ambassadors and politicians alike. He has clocked up many an air mile, travelling to all points on his flat world, but devoting most of his time and energy to the superpowers of the future, India and China.

He defines three eras of globalisation: from Christopher Columbus's first journey in 1492 to around 1800, when the discoveries of new lands shrunk the world from large to medium; from 1800 to 2000, the era of industrialisation to the hegemony of the multinational which made the world small; and the new, flat, tiny world where 'the creation of a global fibre-optic network has made us all next-door neighbours'.

It is the detail and the research that make this book intriguing. Friedman tells us, for example: 'There are 245,000 Indians answering phones from all over the world or dialling out to solicit people for credit cards or cellphone bargains or overdue bills.' These, he adds, would constitute low-wage, low-prestige jobs in America, 'but when shifted to India they become high-way, high-prestige jobs'. He spends some time hanging out at one such monolithic call centre, appropriately called 24/7, talking to the staff about being at the receiving end of American and European strops.

In China, he talks to a few of the army of young people applying for student visas to the US and learns about their tactics for getting into the country. One consular official was charmed by the student who told him: 'My mother has an artificial limb and I want to go to America to learn how to build a better artificial limb for her.' He points to the sheer scale of the Chinese and Indian information revolution, the number of graduates at top US universities on an exponential climb.

America's solution? Americans and, presumably, Europeans (although the continent is almost completely ignored) will have to work harder and tap into the huge new export markets that an upwardly mobile Asia presents. Erecting barriers to goods and services simply will not work. One of the obvious answers, Friedman says, lies in low unit labour costs.

The model is inevitably Wal-Mart, the biggest and most profitable corporation on the planet. Wal-Mart's supply chain is finely honed. During hurricanes in Florida, it knows that people eat more Pop-Tarts, play games that do not need electricity and drink more beer. So they adjust their production lines on the basis of weather forecasts for anywhere in the world. As for the distribution centre, 'a computer tracks how many pallets each employee is plucking every hour to put on to trucks for different stores, and a computerised voice tells each of them whether he is ahead or behind schedule'.

That would be most right-minded people's vision of Hades, but his optimism does not flag. He notes that if China continues on current growth-rate trends, its imports of oil will double by 2012, requiring a new source the size of Saudi Arabia to keep pace. He suggests, vaguely, some kind of crash US-Chinese programme, a latterday Manhattan Project, to develop renewable energy sources. He attaches himself firmly to the Bush administration's free-market, democratisation strictures, but concedes that US actions post-9/11 did not quite endear it to the rest of the world.

Friedman says he is worried for his teenage daughter's generation, deprived of the easy certainties of the 1960s generation. He points, at times uncertainly, to a route map to cope with the twin threats of terrorism and the new economies, but he refuses to make the pessimistic conclusions most others have drawn.

By John Kampfner, the new editor of the New Statesman
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/politicsphilosophyandsociety/0,,1484064,00.html

A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

2006-06-04T00:08:00.000-07:00

By Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Morrow. 242 pp. $25.95 (in India by Pinguin Books, Rs.250/-)

Freakonomics sounds like a text on the business structure of rap music. The subtitle is similarly puzzling. What's a "rogue" economist -- one who has stopped taking calls from his CIA handler? Who wears disguises when he sneaks into the library to crunch numbers? Turns out Freakonomics is about the field of behavioral economics, which attempts to combine the pure-logic tools of classical economics with understanding the emotional impulses of human behavior. And the book's principal figure, Steven D. Levitt, is anything but an outsider. Levitt is a chaired professor of economics at the University of Chicago, meaning he sits at the very pinnacle of his profession's establishment. Nothing "rogue" about that.

Levitt is regarded as among the most creative thinkers in contemporary economics, gifted at drawing connections among seemingly unrelated forces. He believes, for example, that there is a relationship between legalization of abortion and the decline in crime -- more on that in a moment. Levitt is the latest winner of the American Economics Association's John Bates Clark Medal, granted biennially to the top economist under the age of 40. Clark medalists often become influential figures: Paul Krugman, an economist at Princeton and a closely read columnist for the New York Times, was a Clark winner, for instance. In typically dry economics-speak, the Clark judges declared, "Steven Levitt is the most innovative empirical researcher in his cohort." American Economics Association, just come out and say it: The guy is interesting!

Freakonomics presents Levitt's findings in accessible, non-academic terms. It is an engaging and always interesting work, rich in insights, full of surprises. Readers, though, may find themselves in a perpetual state of confusion regarding just what it is they are reading. The book is by Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, a writer whose previous books include Turbulent Souls and Confessions of a Hero-Worshipper . You're never sure who is speaking. Sometimes Levitt or his work is spoken of in the third person, as if Dubner were writing of them in a detached way; sometimes the text sounds like Levitt addressing the reader; sometimes the book spends pages discussing work done by people other than Levitt, yet the impression given is that it's all Levitt's thinking. Often the reader must flip to the source notes to try to figure out what's going on.

The mishmash quality of Freakonomics seems to trace to its origin. In 2003, Dubner wrote a New York Times Magazine article on Levitt's quirky theories. The piece was a great read, and Levitt and Dubner began to collaborate on articles. According to Freakonomics , Levitt then agreed to write a book, but only if Dubner actually did the writing. (Writing is work, as any economist will tell you!) Yet it seems the two never resolved the question of whether Dubner would ghostwrite for Levitt or write about Levitt. The result feels too much like a magazine article padded to book length. Each chapter of Freakonomics even begins with quotations from the Times piece, as if it merited study by future historians.

Confusing structure aside, Freakonomics is packed with fascinating ideas. Consider Levitt's notion of a relationship between abortion access and the crime drop. First, Freakonomics shows that although commonly cited factors such as improved policing tactics, more felons kept in prison and the declining popularity of crack account for some of the national reduction in crime that began in about the year 1990, none of these completes the explanation. (New York City and San Diego have enjoyed about the same percentage decrease in crime, for instance, though the former adopted new policing tactics and the latter did not.) What was the significance of the year 1990, Levitt asks? That was about 16 years after Roe v. Wade . Studies consistently show that a disproportionate number of crimes are committed by those raised in broken homes or who were unwanted as children. When abortion became legal nationally, Levitt theorizes, births of unwanted children declined; 16 years later crime began to decline, as around age 16 is the point at which many once-innocent boys start their descent into the criminal life. Leavitt's clincher point is that the crime drop commenced approximately five years sooner in Alaska, California, Hawaii, New York and Washington state than it did in the nation as a whole. What do these states have in common? All legalized abortion about five years before Roe .

Other Levitt theories span the landscape. Along with sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh of Columbia University, Levitt has found that drug gangs are structured essentially like street versions of Fortune 500 corporations. Levitt studied high-tech car alarm devices and found they benefited the people who did not buy them almost as much as those who did, by discouraging all auto theft. Levitt has shown that campaign money has almost nothing to do with who wins elections. He has even looked at how parent name children. Parents who expect their children to go far in life give them classy-sounding names such as Katherine; parents who do not expect their children to go far give them names such as Brittney. (That Levitt can cite statistics for all this -- you'll have to read the book -- is impressive.) For amusement value, Levitt makes a case that academic cheating differs little from cheating in sumo wrestling.

Not all of Levitt's ideas meet the test of originality. He proffers that real estate agents serve themselves rather than their clients when they push sellers to take the first bona-fide offer, even if holding out might bring a better price. The agent wants the seller to take the first solid deal because then the agent gets the commission right away; holding out might mean weeks or months of extra work for the agent, while increasing his or her commission only slightly. Freakonomics presents the notion that homeowners and real-estate agents may have conflicting monetary incentives as big news. Memo to the University of Chicago Economics Department: Everyone who has ever sold a house already knows this.

Freakonomics proposes four basic notions: that incentives govern life, that conventional wisdom is often wrong, that "dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle causes" and that experts sometimes use their "informational advantage" to pursue private agendas. Valid points -- but is there anyone who disagrees with any of them? There is no requirement that an economist's work have any larger theme: To be a good professor and produce interesting papers is more than most accomplish. But Freakonomics leaves the reader with the sense of encountering an assortment of clever ideas that have been crowbarred together into something that doesn't really work as a book. Academic careers may not need unifying themes; books do. ·

By Gregg Easterbrook, a fellow of the Brookings Institution, an editor of the New Republic and author, most recently, of "The Progress Paradox."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/28/AR2005042801328.html

Red by Irwin A. Sealy

2006-05-17T01:10:00.000-07:00

RED
by Irwin Allan Sealy
Picador India
344 pages Rs 465

It’s best to keep Matisse’s The Red Room and The Painter’s Family at hand while reading I. Allan Sealy’s fourth novel, Red, itself an object of great beauty with its deep red cover and embossed title in deeper red, balanced by a trochaic "Irwin Allan Sealy" on the back cover. Within lies even greater beauty.

There’s a plethora of books about painting recently, including Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red.

Many are popular histories, currently being called biographies. At first, Sealy’s Red seems to be about Henri Matisse, but like every novel Sealy has written, there are half-glimpsed shadows and depths, like figures in a dappled forest that tempt one into pursuit. Like the narrator, N, the painter is and is not in The Painter’s Family. Matisse’s wife and children are definitely there, but six slashes of red define his illegitimate daughter, who seems to Zach to leap out of the picture and turn into a visitor at the Hermitage, a thin red line of underwear visible as she leans forward to stare at the painting, the red fleetingly joined by the red of bricks and tractors in Dariya Dun, India.

N sees the world as colour, his friend and fellow Anglo-Indian Zach sees it as music. N divides his manuscript into 26 small bytes, corresponding to the letters of the alphabet, each byte beginning with the definition of a word or two, sometimes going no further, filling parts

Sealy gets a certain oddness of life exactly right. Our days are filled with shards of conversation and activity. Sealy looks for the colour and nocturnal rhythms that make comprehensible patterns out of these fragments with a dash of self-reflexive irony. Like Matisse, N seeks the safety of the frame. It makes problems easier to handle, but the aboriginal Gilgitan prefers life outside frames. Gilgitan’s modern equivalent is the Internet which tempts N out of the security of pen and paper into virtual virtuosity. Like the blue arabesques that crawl up the tablecloth and on to the wall in Matisse’s The Red Room, restraint and liberation spill through Sealy’s book, to become its main pattern. The Internet makes it easier than ever to discover the spaces of meaning between unexpected juxtapositions. Google for "red", link the information that pops up, and there’s your narrative. But the reverse happens to N. A virus programmed to delete every "red" infects his machine.

Colour is liberation, a painting is restraint, but it can be freed as Aline demonstrates by cutting a painting into fine strips to reveal that its patina of dots has a vertical history, like geological layers. Then there is Gilgitan. "The aborigines of India, treated as slaves by all later invaders except the British, outcastes for the last three millennia, settled on the worst land," were made to live by the most odious work of cleaning, but Gilgitan is more independent preferring the itinerant life of jobbers.

Red is like the Internet with its endless patterns, definitions, and meanings. N and his broken marriage; Z and his love for Aline; Gilgitan the snake worshipper and thief who loves black paint; music; paint; real and virtual journeys are held in Sealy’s beautiful prose. There aren’t too many writers whose next book one awaits to renew the joy of language and imagination, but Sealy is definitely one of them. Red has been worth waiting for.

Let me leave you with Sealy’s description of newly commercialised Dariya Dun: "Once upon a time the city, any city, meant light: now it means noise. Sound, young Z would say, not noise. Send peace in our time, O Lord is a good prayer.At night ambulances howl, a new noise; there were none a few years ago. You rented a taxi or a rickshaw; a few years ago I saw a concussion patient trundled through the streets on a trolley with castors. Today white vans prowl looking for custom, the word AMBULANCE painted backwards importantly under the windscreen, a proud theft from foreign TV. The jackals of my earliest childhood, whose yowling first set a horizon, have disappeared. Think of it: a presence older than Aesop vanished just the other day."

By SHOBHANA BHATTACHARJI,
Reader in English, Jesus & Mary College, Delhi University
(www.outlookindia.com)

Orientalism and Its Discontents

2006-05-16T03:35:00.000-07:00

For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies by Robert Irwin; Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2006; pages 409, œ25.

THE spectre of Edward Said still haunts the Western scholastic world. In a rather unacademic manner, Robert Irwin takes him to task for being a supporter of the Palestinian cause and for his contempt of the Jewish community. There is absolutely no reason why a scholar cannot have ideological leanings and focus his scholarship through analysis of history to show how the West has been responsible for biased interpretations of the East. When Bernard Lewis or Ernest Gellner took up cudgels on behalf of their discipline, Said was there to refute them. Now dead, he can conveniently be criticised and lambasted for "carrying out a conspiracy" against America and Israel, for there will be no rebuttal by him. Almost 30 years after the publication of Orientalism, along comes Robert Irwin with a counter-conspiracy to demolish a thesis that has an inherent logic behind it.

Undeniably, histories are a construction, and it was relevant to the anti-colonial mood to set the record right or to decolonise histories fashioned with the motives of endorsing Western agendas.

By 1968, after the formation of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), Said had firmly resolved not to separate the personal from the political. Time had come to "rub culture's nose in the mud of politics". The outcome of this decision was to write a dissident and subversive account of Western representations of the East.

The enormity of the task of renewal within the context of a transnational economy and the collapse of socialist projects, particularly the proclamations of the Western bourgeois school of thought dominated by Francis Fukuyama and the "End of History" syndrome, posed problems for Said. His major works need to be discussed in this context by arguing out his position as an intellectual who critiques and questions history, culture, and literature as systems of thinking that represent images of their own creation for reasons of maintaining hegemonic structures of knowledge and power. The role of the intellectual and the relevance of the issues of culture and identity stand behind his unabashed commitment to an ideology of historical reconstruction by critical and political involvement.

The rigour of Said's work has been ignored in Robert Irwin's For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies. No consideration has been given to Said's explorations of critical issues of cultural representation by unfolding epistemological shifts that have taken place under the sway of colonialism, orientalism, nationalism and xenophobia. Said uses his position of an exile to advantage because he can then raise himself above the functionless jargon and cowardice of academic intellectuals who refuse to support ideological issues to which a commitment is called for.

The tensions and contradictions present in his writings that seem to obsess critics such as Ernest Gellner and Aijaz Ahmad and now Irwin are the fundamental ingredients of a critic who is located ambivalently in the realms of both his professional exigencies and his public involvement, his transnational theoretical framework and his status as a representative of the marginalised Palestinian exile. Master narratives here collide with local histories and academic criticism with public-spirited political involvement. One sees the working of the hybrid and heterogeneous narrative of a literary historian who pays as much attention to aesthetics as well as the politics of aesthetics, which are underpinned by the meta-languages of colonialism and culture.

CONTRIBUTION OF CULTURE

Said brings to the foreground the contribution of culture to the making of arts and histories. He stresses the need for literary criticism to see itself as inextricably joined to the realities of human experience along with the imperialist institutions of power and authority. Where in Orientalism, he showed how Western knowledge, far from being academic, is tainted by power and political motivation, he carried forward these conclusions into Culture and Imperialism where the creative writer's consciousness is seen to be shaped by the imperialist tendencies prevailing in 19th century England. To Said, such intellectual and critically responsible intervention is the hallmark of a secular critic necessary to draw the attention of Western readers to non-Western cultures and recognise their significant role in the ongoing processes of history.

Said has often been blamed for engaging in almost a ritual of accommodation and assimilation that does not allow him to be at home in any one culture or, for that matter, with a single theoretical position. Being geographically dislocated, he has tried to negotiate his position in the context of globalisation, yet he has disrupted inter-cultural hegemony by taking an antagonist stance against any reconciliation with Western hegemonic positions and the production of knowledge. He is, on the one hand, aware of cultural conflict and, on the other, a defender of hybridity, urging the rejection of the "rhetoric of blame". While he understands that powerful representations do get naturally accepted, his writings argue that their inherent stereotypical nature be countered by an alternative discourse, which is always conscious of the strategies of power.

Said's writings have contributed substantially to the history/theory debate in the last two decades. By taking truth to be only situational and political, he opens up the discipline of history to subaltern writing and intervention. Said does not fully reject the validity of the empirical method, but his marshalling of facts, and emphasis on the iconography of signs, symbols and language helps to provide the social and literary historian with a wider vision of history. Although it is unfair to say that all accounts of the past are false, Said sets out to demonstrate that different writings of European scholars were shaped by ideological and political exigencies of empire-building, with racial and cultural superiority inherent in the palpable designs of their political aims.

While examining Irwin's book, the reader must bear in mind the areas of historiography and representation, which are vital to Said's writings owing to their problematic nature in the area of textuality. Our understanding of the past has been hugely enlarged and deepened by Said's analysis of literature and culture, which throws light on different classes of people and large categories of experience that we were as yet unaware of. In order to stress the political character of all such literary pursuit, Said offers alternative epistemological systems to dislocate the Eurocentric perspective, which is shaped by Western literature and histories. He focusses his attention on the intervention of history and literature in historical writing itself, showing how literary narratives and politics are inextricably bound up in the texts of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Verdi's opera "Aida". As he argues in Culture and Imperialism: "I suggested that studying the relationship between the `West' and its dominated cultural `others' is not just a way of understanding an unequal relationship between unequal interlocutors, but also a point of entry into studying the formation and meaning of Western cultural practices themselves. And the persistent disparity in power between the West and non-West must be taken into account if we are accurately to understand cultural forms like that of the novel, of ethnographic and historical discourse, certain kinds of poetry and opera, where allusions to and structures based on this disparity abound."

On the other hand, post-Orientalist history writing attempts to demystify this delusive enterprise, which conceals, in the words of Gertrude Himmelfarb, "its ideological structure behind a scholarly facade of footnotes and the pretence of facts". But it is equally vital that all such representations promulgated in the name of "authentic" and "true" accounts are also questioned, and their authority and coherence closely re-examined. As Said writes: "Stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world; they also become the method colonised people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history." This bifocal view of any writing, which is always a representation, brings into play the creative combination of fact and fiction hinting at the multitudinous and infinite possibilities of writing.

UNDERSTANDING IDEOLOGIES

Representing reality from either side can never be an ideologically neutral activity. Said realises the problem of representation in contemporary historical and mythical-religious contexts, fully aware how they falsify and caricature and demean. His work becomes part of a larger body of theoretical analysis, which spells out the understanding of ideologies behind the writing of history and the use of materialist criticism in coming to grips with the literary mode of production. Exercising considerable influence on the direction of literary studies in universities around the world, Said has helped to turn "reading against the grain" into a critical methodology that at one level reconciles with postmodernist thinking and at another warns literary theoreticians to take a sceptical view of the lapses into extreme relativism.

There is a deep-seated concern in Said with keeping ideological phenomena at the forefront of dialectical analysis. His emphasis is on the adoption of a more globally oriented stance that rejects totalising viewpoints and academic compartmentalising to subvert the intentions of the author.

One may relate the earlier alignment of Said's liberal humanist cultural tradition imbibed from Eric Auerbach and Lionel Trilling with the larger concerns of contemporary literary theory and its post-Enlightenment loss of faith in "origins", "centre" and "end". Implicit here is the notion of unequal relationships of economic and political power that work behind myths of representations about the Orient which is integral to the European discourse and its material civilisation. Without this discourse analysis, Said argues in Orientalism, "one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage - and even produce - the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period."

David Pryce-Jones, who belongs to Irwin's camp, in his recent indictment of Said and Orientalism is, therefore, absolutely off the mark: "That book shifted the intellectual climate - more exactly, degraded it - by propagating a new and unusual sort of hatred, aimed at scholarship and scholars. But in Said's opinion, everybody who had ever studied or written about the Middle East [West Asia] had done so in bad faith. Epigraphists, archaeologists, grammarians and linguists, papyrologists, geographers, the lot, including poets and travellers, had nothing to do with the advancement of learning or the recording of their findings and impressions. With sinister purpose, they were imposing themselves upon innocent and harmless people. Century after century, the activity of these assorted men was not at all what it might seem but only `a rationalisation of colonial rule' and, since for most of the time there was no colonial rule, a justification of it `in advance'."

Like Pryce-Jones, Irwin forgets that, in fact, the book has to a great extent been responsible for provoking serious scholarship. Recent explosions in scholarly research on the subject of imperialism as a phenomenon that continues to dominate our understanding of culture both theoretically and empirically have shown the consequences wrought by the European colonial enterprise. The concept of cultural imperialism is now integral to the critical vocabulary of both cultural theory and international politics, and throws light on many existing systems of value, and on the ways the West looks for power structures they can understand and promote; if they do not find one, they create one. Through its contrapuntal practice, the methodology underscored by Said as well as its impetus towards the building of an interrogative practice in studying the construction of histories inspired scholars throughout the world to decontextualise and recontexualise Western scholarship and thereby endeavour to decolonise knowledge.

CULTURES TO BE SUBJECTED

The Western narrative paradigm in which the author-anthropologist fashions the other is a form of domination created through a hegemonic discourse formation whose sensationalism and inaccuracy is now being questioned through the revisionist programmes of historians and post-colonial cultural critics. It is clear that the Victorian travelogue conceived of the East as "a grand harem" with endless possibilities for pleasure and perversion, thereby suggesting its moral inferiority and dog-headedness. Owing to this feature it was, therefore, ripe for colonisation. The travel narrative with its exaggerated information and fantastic accounts of far away lands produced an ethnological discourse of immense significance as it offered information about the native cultures that were to be subdued. It became the agent of the "superior" civilisation forging images of the alien by imposing its own self-perpetuating categories and alterations from the norms.

For instance, Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines is a clear account of Western imperialism and its accompanying patriarchal discourse that sets out to take control over the colonised woman, a material commodity at the disposal of the dominant power. Haggard's map of the mines converts the female sexuality repressed as a captive under the technology of Western enterprise into a site for economic production. Gender here, therefore, becomes something more than only the sexual category; it takes on the semantics of not only labour, but also exploitation and control.

Similarly, Baudelaire would experience intense passion for the black woman, Jeanne Duval, on his first journey to Mauritius. For her he would experience sexual passion and for a white-only love. Duval symbolises for him, as Rana Kabbani mentions in her excellent study of orientalism, "a voyage East, providing sexual possibilities but precluded from respectability". Her dark body becomes the "flower of evil" for him. You crave for it and yet it ruffles and agitates. We see how "Europe was charmed by an Orient that shimmered with possibilities, that promised a sexual space, a voyage away from the self, an escape from the dictates of the bourgeois morality of the metropolis".

Although Irwin gives a detailed account of research on Islam by scholars such as Hammer-Purgstall in Germany, Ignatius Kratchovsky in Russia and Ignaz Goldziher in Budapest, he ignores the strategies of the likes of Macaulay who set out with the aim of emphasising the inferiority of Eastern culture.

It is understandable that scholars such as Robert Irwin or David Pryce-Jones are still stuck in foundationalism that views narratives and historical research as free from ideology and containing basic objectivity. Controversies concerning objectivity or subjectivity, singularity or plurality, relativity or universality of truth abound in the revisionist post-orientalist historiography which treats areas of knowledge, culture, and tradition as sites of conflict. Its main purpose is freedom from essentialism. Apparently, this is a reaction to Western anthropologists and ethnographists who have traditionally followed the conservative assumption that culture is a sphere of privileged social expression.

It is this history and the writing of it that has given rise to recent exchanges between the foundationalists and the post-foundationalists, the modernists and the post-modernists. And behind these debates Said sees the struggle to reformulate variant identities and unstable polities.

Ideological expediency is always behind the biased narratives of history. On one side lies the romance of knowledge and research carried out for reasons that are not motivated by utilitarian philosophy. Whether there was intellectual curiosity or imperial conspiracy behind the corpus of knowledge of the Arabic world is debatable. Irwin mentions interesting examples of the research of the 17th century German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, who worked on Egyptian hieroglyphics absolutely out of conjecture. So was Richard Burton, who pretended to be a serious Arabic scholar only to realise at a late stage that he should have been reading from the right to the left instead of the left to the right. Irwin disparages the work of 19th century French writer Ernest Renan who is almost put on a pedestal by Said for his remarkable research. Here too Irwin is wrong in claiming that Renan researched on Ibn Rushd from Latin translations of Arabic, whereas Renan claims that not a single text was available on Rushd in Arabic.

Irwin's arguments thus indicate that there was either not much serious research of any consequence or innumerable disagreements in the findings of scholars that lends the field of orientalism a rather ambiguous character. Said's account of the Arabic history too has been put under scrutiny and found wanting. However, it cannot be denied that there were a few serious Arabic scholars such as Sir Hamilton Gibb or Albert Hourani, and in contemporary times, Said, who do offer support for Arab nationalism and explore significant aspects of Islamic culture, thus awakening an interest in Islamic history.

However, many scholars not only had little knowledge of either spoken or written Arabic, they never visited the East, or had any contact with the Arabic people. Those who did venture forth, lacked the linguistic ability to communicate. Irwin rightly emphasises this. He has thus committed the very mistake that he accuses Said of. Cataloguing research by various Arabic scholars, he emphasises the inaccuracy of knowledge about the East, a view that is more in agreement with Said than a refutation of it. It is therefore, clear that orientalism exists as a body of contradictory accounts where various scholars are either guilty of ideological bias or have an inadequacy of communication skills.

On the other hand, recent explosions in scholarly research on the subject of imperialism as a phenomenon that continues to dominate our understanding of culture both theoretically and empirically have shown the consequences wrought by the European colonial enterprise.

The concept of cultural imperialism is now integral to the critical vocabulary of both cultural theory and international politics and throws light on many existing systems of value, and on the ways the West looks for power structures they can understand and promote; if they do not find one, they create one. Much that critics may argue that the existence of disinterested truths is an antidote to the anti-humanism of post-modernist thinking, there is yet hardly a body of writing that can claim the value of unbiased "truth".

Said might have desired a reconciliation of Israel and Palestine before his death, arguing for a common human understanding, but such utopian envisaging of a future at the moment seems to be remote.

By Shelly Walia (www.frontlineonnet.com)

Crisis of Secular Nationalism in India

2006-05-09T03:01:00.000-07:00

THE INSURRECTION OF LITTLE SELVES — The Crisis of Secular Nationalism in India: Aditya Nigam; Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 650.

The focus of this book is the `ideological configuration called secular nationalism', which constituted the dominant discourse of Indian politics and nationhood during the post-Independence period. The trials and tribulations that secular nationalism faced during the formative phase of the Indian nation have had several commentators; some sceptical, others optimistic about its future. All of them, however, recognise that secular nationalism has been facing a crisis, particularly because of the threat posed by the communal forces represented by the Hindu right.

The concern of the work of Aditya Nigam is not limited to the unravelling of the crisis, but takes into account the overall context of the moment that constituted the crisis. This is achieved by invoking what the author calls, borrowing from Michael Foucault, the insurrection of little selves, which the Indian polity experienced since 1980 and its consequences for secular nationalism. In other words, the study covers a broad canvas, comprehending several strands of contemporary politics, as unfolded during the last few decades, impinging upon the state of secular nationalism.

Rise of `infra-nationalism'

What makes this study attractive is its conceptual and theoretical sensitivity, even if one does not agree with some of its formulations. To the structure of nationhood inherited from the nationalist struggle and consolidated over the early decades of independent India a major challenge was posed by the political discourse emerging during the 1980s and 1990s. New forces appeared on the political horizon, leading to a redrawing of the cultural boundaries of the nation.

These forces, in the words of the author, are represented by the emergence of the "return of the repressed discourses of caste and community, the eruption of `subnational' assertions, and the emergence of the women's movement as a major political force and finally, the challenge to the ideology of developmentalism posed by ecological movements." The author calls this process, for want of a better term, the rise of infra-nationalisms, distinct from `subnationalism' in that they did not ever express in themselves the desire for another nation.

Simultaneously occurred a political churning leading to the `unravelling' of the Congress and the growth of the Hindu right. As a consequence the terms of public discourse were refashioned, even turned upside down. Secular nationalism hence came under severe strain and the Hindu communal (nationalist, in the author's vocabulary) discourse gained ground in the void created by the retreat of secular nationalism.

The author holds that the emergence of the Hindu right was "the response of the hitherto privileged upper-caste Hindu elite to the challenge posed by the nation's repressed selves. To that extent, these developments point to a certain kinship between the hegemonic secular nationalist discourse and the resurgence of the right, at least in terms of maintaining the privileges cornered by this elite."

Debate on secularism

The argument is indeed attractive and logical, but perhaps too schematic, of a political transformation rooted in changing social and cultural consciousness. Whether the impact of these movements was disruptive of secular nationalism, even if they undermined its overarching character, itself is a debatable point, if they were to be reckoned as part of the process of democratisation.

It is, however, true that whenever under strain nationalism in India revealed Hindu colours. In fact, Indian nationalism always betrayed an undercurrent of Hindu religious sensibility, which has adversely affected its secular character.

It points more to the weaknesses of secular practice, rather than the concept of secularism. The social and political space that the Hindu right seized was created partly by the retreat of secularism due to the weaknesses of its practice.

An analysis of secular practice rather than the Indian debate about secularism, for which the author has devoted considerable space, could have been more rewarding for an understanding of the crisis of secular nationalism. The place of minorities and Dalits in the nation is an important factor in the fortunes of secular nationalism. The author argues, "The very project of Indian nationalism was an impossible one, precisely because it was impossible to have one common history."

"The different histories of communities and intercommunity relations that provided the ingredients for different imaginations of selfhood led to different articulations of nationalism in Hindus and Muslims." The author's point is not that there was no shared cultural ground between Hindus and Muslims but that it did not comprise the entire arena of inter community relations. That it was so is in the least surprising, as it would never be the case in any intercommunity relations.

Need for dialogue

What is pertinent in this context is that despite the long historical tradition of commonly shared social and cultural life why social relations built over a long period are shattered even by insignificant incidents. In recent times the strongest defenders of secular nationalism have been the Marxists. From interviews of the activists of the Marxist Party of India in Bengal the author has highlighted their uncertainty in dealing with religious beliefs and practices.

Drawing upon this experience the question the author raises is extremely important: how to conduct the dialogue with the masses who had already been constituted as Hindus, Muslims and, Christians.

The success of secular nationalism would partly depend upon the answer to this question, which as one of the leaders of the party in Bengal has said the Marxists have not yet found or alternatively, have not even been seeking.

As Jyoti Basu has rightly said what is important is not what Marx or Lenin has said about religion or what we personally believe, but bring out the fact that from within our soil itself we can find the resources of `dharma nirapekshata'.

It is not a question limited to the Marxists alone, but to the liberal secular forces as a whole. Aditya Nigam's work both informs and provokes. It deserves close reading and serious discussion.

By K.N. Panikkar
(www.thehindu.com)

An Ayodhya Story by Rao

2006-05-08T23:02:00.000-07:00

Ayodhya - 6 December 1992
By P.V. Narasimha Rao
Viking/Penguin
Pages: 317; Price: Rs. 395

Had December 6, Black Sunday, 1992, not been, P.V. Narasimha Rao might have gone down in history as one of our most erudite prime ministers, a man who left an indelible mark on the making of contemporary India by his response to the economic crisis that overtook our country just as he took office and his reshaping of our foreign policy in the face of the collapse of the Cold War. Tragically, he died unwept, unhonoured and unsung—all because of his version of Lord Dalhousie’s "Masterly Inaction" as the Babri Masjid crisis built up.

Narasimha Rao’s virtues were the same as Neville Chamberlain’s: both preferred appeasement over conflict and confrontation. They acted from the highest of motives: "peace with honour". Their failings too were the same: they failed to assess the nature of the beast. They believed the other side to be like themselves, reasonable men with reasonable objectives—and, therefore, apt to resolve a resolvable issue. What saved us from Germany’s fate was India’s inherent secularism, a secularism running deep and true that recoiled in horror at the outrage in Ayodhya and ended forever the BJP’s hopes of turning this India of all religions (and no religion) into a "Hindudom"—Savarkar’s own translation of his own coinage, "Hindutva".

The crux of Rao’s position is stated on page 48: "The BJP’s pseudo-religious movement could not have sustained itself on a purely religious plane; it needed a political reaction, to flourish politically.

I cannot escape the uneasy feeling that we Congressmen (while in government) supplied it with just that. We also let our own religious susceptibilities go by default, with the same subconscious inhibition that any expression of religious sentiment on our part, even if we felt strongly, would be seen as ‘non-secular’. As a result, the BJP became the sole repository and protector of the Hindu religion in the public mind."

This, of course, is indistinguishable from the BJP’s perception of itself. This country of 85 per cent Hindus has never regarded the BJP as the "sole repository and protector of the Hindu religion". That is why, not even at the best of times for the BJP have they been able to win anything more than a fifth of the Hindu vote. Hinduism does not need a self-appointed "protector". It has the strength and resilience to protect itself, a genius to synthesise and evolve, a proven track record of five millennia of flourishing in diversity. There is no question of a political party being the "repository" of Hinduism. Hindus know that the only enemy to broad-minded Hinduism is narrow-minded communalism. The quintessential Indian ethos is not "Garv se kaho hum Hindu hain" but "Garv se kaho hum Hindustani hain". We Indians are secular not because someone has asked us to be but because we are. Period.

Moreover, it just is not true to say that secularists "let our own religious susceptibilities go by default". Was Gandhiji ever overtaken by a "subconscious inhibition" that proclaiming himself a Hindu would be ‘non-secular’? Did Indira Gandhi’s rudraksha mala hide her beliefs? I was with Rajiv Gandhi on all those 13 campaigns through Tamil Nadu where he was unfailingly taken to every temple of any significance, besides hours at the Om Shakti ashram at Melmaruvathur. And as for Jawaharlal Nehru’s known agnosticism, he confesses in a letter to Gandhiji from prison in 1933 how easy it is for the likes of himself and Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru ("neither of us has any religion worth talking about") to carry their secularism on their sleeve. Implicitly, the greatness of the Mahatma lay in his being both religious and secular, indeed in his deriving his secularism from his spiritualism.

But when it came to religious bigotry challenging the secular order, Nehru insisted that principle must override all other considerations, including petty electoral apprehensions.

In consequence, he won every political battle—worsting the doubting Thomases within the party and driving the likes of Shyama Prasad Mookerjee to form the Bharatiya Jana Sangh where it mouldered for 32 long years and continues now to moulder after a brief and unhappy stint in office. Let none of us ever forget Gujarat ’02. Nehru’s life and work show that in India hard, uncompromising secularism is not only sound idealism but practical politics. In the real India of unity in diversity, as distinct from the Hindudom of the Hindutva fantasy, secularism yields the big political dividend, communalism a momentary triumph.

Rao could have easily been both religious and secular, as most Congress leaders are—religious in his personal beliefs and secular in his political thought and action. But he thought, quite erroneously, that to politically prevail over the BJP, it was necessary for the Congress to rival the BJP as "protector and sole repository of the Hindu religion". Thus, he allowed those whose political convictions were based on their alleged religious beliefs to trick him into trusting them.

Rao describes in detail the unravelling of his misplaced trust. Although it had become obvious from as early as July 1992 that the Vishwa Hindu Parishad et al were determined to move ahead on building the temple where the masjid stood, even as late as October-November 1992, the prime minister remained deeply convinced that his coming triumph lay not in determined action by the State to maintain public order, even if this meant dismissing the Kalyan Singh government, but by remitting the resolution of the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid to a conclave of men of religion. So, while the sadhus and the sants had a field day being escorted in and out of Race Course Road by ministers acting as escorts in the full glare of television cameras, hubris, as in a Greek tragedy, lay just round the corner. For, notwithstanding every measure and half-measure that Rao took to appease Advani and his merry band of savants and shankaracharyas, UP chief minister Kalyan Singh and his cohorts repeatedly asserted that nothing in the law or the Constitution or the courts would be allowed to stand in the way of the oath they had taken: Ram ki saugandh hum khaate hain/Mandir wahin banayenge, "wahin", of course, being the merab of the masjid which must needs be destroyed if the garbha griha of the temple was to come up there.

Thus, after an utterly hypocritical intervention at the National Integration Council meeting on November 2, 1991, at which he "gave an assurance" of his government’s commitment "to protect the structure", reiterated at the nic meeting on July 18, 1992, Kalyan Singh, in his one-on-one meetings with the prime minister on November 18-19, 1992, "refused to budge from his stand that the only comprehensive solution to the Ayodhya dispute was to hand over the disputed structure to the Hindus". The UP government then objected to central forces being stationed at Faizabad for use in the event of the kar sevaks transgressing their limits. The Centre responded by piling up yet more forces knowing full well that Kalyan Singh had repeatedly made clear that he just would not use them, whatever the provocation. These acts of defiance were capped by Kalyan Singh declining to participate in the next "short-notice" meeting of the nic called on November 23, 1992. That emergency meeting, through a unanimously adopted resolution, "extended its whole-hearted support and cooperation in whatever steps the prime minister considers essential in upholding the Constitution and rule of law and in implementing court orders". That was the moment to act.He had all of a week before him in which he could have taken over the state government, deployed the central forces to ensure that the kar seva was conducted within the bounds prescribed by the Supreme Court, and sent the kar sevaks home before they wreaked any further damage. Instead, Rao got himself coiled in niceties of constitutional propriety. The missed opportunity could not be retrieved.

He tells in his book of his address to the Congress parliamentary party meeting on the morrow of Black Sunday. I was there. I recall listening in bewilderment as he explained how the kings of old would always seek the views of religious gurus, but the gurus would then defer to the king’s decision once the decision was taken. This time the gurus had betrayed their king. It was this misplaced concern for "religious susceptibilities" in matters of state, this parleying with sants and mullahs in the mistaken belief that they represented the real India, that paved with good intentions his road to Nemesis. Instead, he should have heeded the words of his great predecessor Nehru, who, while fully respectful of religious sentiments that he himself did not share, placed his trust in the essential and unflinching secularism of the Indian people: "If any person raises his hand to strike down another in the name of religion, I shall fight him to the last breath of my life, both as head of the government and from outside."

By Mani Shankar Aiyer
( www.outlook.com )

On Kargil War: A Book by the General

2006-05-08T03:22:00.000-07:00

Kargil: From Surprise to Victory
by Gen. V.P. Malik
Harper Collins
436 pages/Rs.595/-

The perennial debate over the functioning of the intelligence agencies between the Army and the agencies has once again been revived following the publication by Gen. V.P.Malik, who was the Chief of the Army Staff (COAS) at the time of the Kargil conflict in 1999, of his memoirs titled, Kargil: From Surprise To Victory.

He states that Pakistan's successful intrusions reflected a major deficiency in our system of collecting, reporting, collating and assessing intelligence. He throws stones at the agencies from his safe sanctuary of retirement, hoping that people would have by now forgotten his sins of commission and omission. The book is about how despite being, according to him, let down by the intelligence agencies, he and the army, operating under his leadership, retrieved the honour of India and ejected the Pakistani intruders from the mountain heights they had occupied.

As I read his claim and his account of his great leadership of the war as projected by him, my mind went back to December 1971 when I was a young officer in the Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW), India's external intelligence agency, then headed with great distinction by the late R.N. Kao. Kao was professional to his finger tips and known for his operational brilliance and personal humility and a readiness to give credit where it is due and to accept the inadequacies of the organisation, which he headed for nine years.

After the brilliant win of the Indian Army against its Pakistani counterpart in 1971, General (he was not yet a Field Marshal) Sam Manekshaw wrote a very warm letter to Kao, expressing his appreciation of what he described as the brilliant work done by the R&AW in the months preceding and during the war. Kao marked the letter to Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister and the political architect of the victory, for perusal.

The letter came back from her with the remark : "The General is generous in his praise because he won the war". Left delicately unsaid was the truism that the army would have been the first to put the blame on the intelligence agencies had it lost the war. The Indian army is yet to produce a leader, who does not look for scapegoats when faced with failure. And what easier scapegoats than the intelligence agencies! One cannot blame General Malik for not being an exception to this rule.

Even during the 1971 war, while the Indian Army covered itself with glory in the Eastern sector, it did not do that well on the Western sector. Its senior officers responsible for the Western sector shifted the blame for their lack-lustre performance to the intelligence agencies.

Why was the Indian Army taken by surprise in the Kargil heights? What was the surprise about? How did it happen? The Army was in the habit of withdrawing from the LOC in the Kargil area every winter and returning to its posts after the onset of spring. Thus, the LOC used to remain unprotected throughout the winter. Pakistan took advantage of this after General Pervez Musharraf became the Chief of the Army Staff (COAS) in October,1998. During the winter of 1998-99, he sent his troops across the LOC and occupied the heights left unguarded by the Indian Army.

To put it in simple words, General Malik's contention is that the Indian intelligence should have come to know of the intentions and plans of the Pakistan army.

According to him, it was not aware of the full extent of the increase in Pakistani Army deployments and movements across the LOC, which would have preceded the Pakistani Army's foray into our territory during the winter.

The fact of the matter is that as early as June,1998, even before Musharraf had taken over as the COAS, Shri Shyamal Dutta, the then Director of the Intelligence Bureau, had sent a detailed wake-up call to the Prime Minister, the Army headquarters and others, warning of the training of large numbers of Pakistani irregulars across the Kargil sector. He also reported that increased Pakistani military activity had been noticed along the LOC in the Kargil sector. In July,1998, the IB further reported new mine-laying and other ominous activities by the Pakistan Army. The R&AW reported the induction of new Pakistani units into the area. It also warned that the Pakistani troops were being given special training.

What would an alert Army chief have done in the light of these reports? He would have asked for an assessment from his own officers as to what these activities could mean. He would have requested the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) for an assessment on the likely implications of these activities. He would have referred the JIC's assessment to the Defence Minister and the Cabinet Committee on Security and recommended that in view of these activities it would not be advisable for the army to withdraw from the LOC during the winter and leave the heights unguarded. He would have requested the government for the urgent sanction of the funds required for equipping the army units concerned to enable them to stay put where they were even during the winter.

Did General Malik do any of those things? No. As a professional Army officer heading the Army, it was his responsibility to have warned the government of the various likely scenarios in the light of the intelligence reports and advised on action to be taken. He failed to do this. And, when after the onset of spring, his troops, while returning to their posts, found the Pakistanis ensconced there, he blamed the intelligence agencies for not warning him that the Pakistanis intended to do this.

Months later, during a one-to-one meeting with Kao to discuss the report of the Kargil Review Committee (KRC) headed by Shri K.Subramanyam over which Kao had expressed his misgivings, Shri A.B.Vajpayee, the then Prime Minister, asked him for his considered opinion as to why the Kargil conflict happened. Kao told me that he replied to Shri Vajpayee as follows: "Sir, General Malik went into a happy sleep during the winter. He is now blaming the intelligence agencies for not preventing him from sleeping."

It was alleged that an Army Brigadier posted in the Kargil area, who had also warned General Malik of likely Pakistani intentions and moves, was sought to be intimidated into silence by General Malik through a departmental enquiry when he tried to go to the media with his story. It was also alleged that a distinguished journalist was sought to be black-listed and denied access to the army headquarters when in one of his articles he pointed out that there were no Pakistani intrusions in the areas where the Border Security Force (BSF) was deployed because it did not withdraw its men from the LOC during the winter, despite being ill-equipped to meet the rigours of the cold.

During his tenure as the COAS, General.Malik sought to marginalise the role of the JIC and make the COAS not only the Czar of the armed forces, but also of the Aviation Research Centre (ARC), the Special Frontier Force (SFF) and all technical intelligence (TECHINT) capabilities.

The Special Task Force for the Revamping of the Intelligence Apparatus, which the Vajpayee Government had set up after the Kargil conflict, had asked the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS) to prepare a statement of inputs received by the JIC and its successor the NSCS from the intelligence agencies during the months before the conflict.

Its statement showed that the largest number of inputs came from the R&AW, followed by the IB. There were hardly any inputs from the Directorate-General of Military Intelligence (DGMI). The Task Force asked a senior officer of the Army why the Army had stopped sharing with the JIC and other agencies the military intelligence collected by it. It was taken by surprise when he replied that since the army was the end-user of all military intelligence, it did not have to share with others the military intelligence collected by it.

During the testimonies before the Task Force, the army sought to damn the performance of the civilian agencies. The Air Force and the Navy were more objective and balanced and highlighted the good as well as the bad points. The efforts of General Malik to get control of the ARC, the SFF and the TECHINT capabilities of the R&AW failed partly due to strong opposition from the Air Force and the Navy to his demands and partly due to his failure to convince the Task Force of the need for such action.

The Task Force had the benefit of a detailed presentation by some senior officers of the Army on the performance of the civilian intelligence agencies before and during the Kargil conflict. In an attempt to buttress General Malik's demand for the transfer of the ARC to the control of the Army, one of the officers strongly criticised its performance. The Task Force confronted him with a copy of a letter which General Malik had written to Shri Arvind Dave, the then chief of the R&AW, after the war was over praising the performance of the ARC. He and the other officers were confused. After brief consultations among themselves, the officer replied:" That is one of the routine letters of appreciation which the chief writes to everybody after a war is over. It does not mean anything." That was the attitude of General Malik and his officers to the intelligence agencies.

In other countries of the world, whenever an enquiry is ordered into military allegations of an intelligence failure, the enquiry committee has a representative of the intelligence agencies to ensure that the committee, in its deliberations, is fair to the intelligence agencies. The KRC had no representative of the intelligence community. The Committee showed an incorrect eagerness to protect General Malik from any blemish despite indications, which did not reflect well on the way General Malik had handled the situation in the days before his visit to Poland when worrisome reports regarding the extent and the nature of the Pakistani intrusions started flowing in from his own units.

General Malik created a messy situation for himself, but he came out of it with a brilliant victory. Why blame him for creating the messy situation in the first instance, when he and his men had won a brilliant victory in the end at a tremendous sacrifice? That seems to have been the attitude of the KRC. They put the blame on the intelligence agencies for whatever had gone wrong and whitewashed the sins of commission and omission of General Malik.

Our civilian intelligence agencies are not perfect. They have many inadequacies. They were found wanting on many occasions. I have myself drawn attention to these in many of my articles. Despite this, I still retain, 12 years after my retirement, many friends and well-wishers in the intelligence community because I try to be scrupulously fair in my criticism.I was known for my fairness while I was in service. I am known for my fairness even today.

Unfortunately, General Malik was not known for his fairness while he was in service. He was perceived by many in the community of senior government servants and national security managers as a compulsive fault-finder and scapegoat-seeker. Even six years after his retirement, he has not changed. That is evident from his book.

One person in the government of India, who is completely in the picture on the totality of the performance of the intelligence agencies is the Prime Minister of the day. One person, who is totally in the picture regarding their performance in the collection of military intelligence is the Defence Minister.

Shri Vajpayee, the Prime Minister at the time of the Kargil conflict, and Shri George Fernandes, the Defence Minister, both denied allegations of intelligence failure immediately after the war was over.

Whom to believe: Shri Vajpayee and Shri Fernandez or General Malik?

By B. Raman is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi. He was a member of the Special Task Force for the Revamping of the Intelligence Apparatus set up by the Government of India in 2000 to recommend follow-up action on the report of the KRC .

( www.outlookindia.com )

The Royal Nepal Army

2006-04-26T23:56:00.000-07:00

The Royal Nepal Army: Meeting the Maoist Challenge
By Ashok K. Mehta
Rupa & Co
Pages 110
Price Rs 295

The Gurkhas constitute about half a dozen battalions of the Indian Army, and a couple in the British Army. They are among the world’s best soldiers. Yet, why aren’t their brothers in the Royal Nepal Army winning the war against the Maoists in their home country, Nepal?

Ashok Mehta, a retired major-general from the Indian Army, himself an ex-Gurkha officer, offers the answer right in the beginning of this book. "The ceremonial nature of the RNA, lack of combat experience, absence of a regimental system, excessive preoccupation with UNPKO [United Nations Peace-Keeping Operations], lack of intelligence, the assumption that the RNA should have a policing as well as a fighting role and the feudal nature of Nepal’s ruling classes have prevented the RNA from developing into a representative and national fighting force capable of taking on the Maoist challenge."

Mehta goes on to explain: "The Maoists have identified the weaknesses of its [their] enemy. But the real enemy is not the RNA per se, but an RNA that is controlled by the King and all that he represents."

In other words, a soldier becomes a good soldier only under good command. And that is what the political and military leaderships in Nepal lack. The Royal Nepal Army, the author says, has not just been trained to be a real combat force.

The lack of intelligence is appalling. According to the author, the RNA failed to foresee a civil war coming up for six years after insurgency broke out. "It was an Indian Army veteran who predicted in 1989 that a Sri Lanka type conflict would soon break out in Nepal," he says.

The book not only reveals the weaknesses in the RNA’s higher command system, but is also the most detailed study on the military structure of the Maoists, with names and locations. Traditionally, military thinkers have held that guerrillas always would have certain tactical advantages over conventional armies. This is more so in Nepal where the Maoists seem to have mastered the guerrilla tactics of deception and surprise.

Mehta, however, does not think that the Maoists are a threat to India. He pooh-poohs the theory (given by funds-seeking state police forces in India) that the Maoists would be able to create a compact revolutionary zone from Amlekhganj in Nepal to Adilabad in Andhra Pradesh. Mehta says that the character, objectives and motivation of the Maoist movements in Nepal and India are different. "Their collusion is limited to tactical and logistic support so as to bolster each other’s capacities in their areas of operation," he says.

This is perhaps the first study of the Royal Nepal Army in the context of the ongoing civil war in the country. There have been other books, coffee-table productions by British writers, on the Gurkha martial race, but none that has so contextually placed the RNA in the present political problem.

By R. Prasannan
Writer's World,
The Week (April 30 2006)

Politicisation of Violence: A Story on Gujarat Pogrom

2006-04-25T18:25:00.000-07:00

What are your recollections of Gujarat 2002? Images of a burning train in which about 60 people were burnt to death? The violence that followed for several days killing a thousand people and rendering some 150,000 homeless? The picture of Qutubuddin Ansari with his hands folded pleading for mercy, flashed across the country and beyond over TV and newspapers may be fresh in the minds of many. The gruesome incident of a pregnant woman's belly being slit open to pick up the unborn child, and mother and child being thrown into the fire may be haunting others. The many trials of the notorious Best Bakery case and the twists and turns of its chief witness, Zaheera Sheik, keep memories alive.

Were these isolated instances or crazy manifestations of mass fury? Neither, says Dionne Bunsha, the award-winning author of this book. The happenings in Gujarat in 2002, according to Bunsha were experiments with violence in India's Hindutva laboratory. The theme is worth pursuing.

Politicisation

Gujarat, it will be recalled, became the first State in the country to have a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government with a clear majority. But soon the BJP's position there appeared to be shaky. Shankarsinh Waghela, the BJP's strong man left the party and formed a party of his own first, and later merged it with the Congress. In the local body elections in 2000, this combined force routed the BJP in many parts of the State, especially central Gujarat. The BJP decided on a change in leadership, removing Keshubhai Patel and bringing in Narendra Modi from the party office in Delhi as the new Chief Minister in 2001.

Modi, the staunch Rashtriya Swayam Sevak (RSS) pracharak, fully committed to the Hindutva ideology, was eager to make Gujarat the vanguard for converting the country into a `Hindu Rashtra'. Dealing with the State's less than 10 per cent Muslim population was crucial to the goal, and Modi set out with firm determination, giving active support to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bajrang Dal in their anti-Muslim campaigns. In mid-February 2002, at a VHP meeting, its leaders spoke about the need to remove Muslims from the predominantly Hindu villages and swore to `break their necks'.

The carnage

Then Godhra happened on February 27, 2002. Till today it is not clear how compartment S6 of the Sabarmati Express in which many kar sevaks were travelling caught fire just a few minutes after it left Godhra station. To be sure, during its four minutes' stay at the station there was a fight between the kar sevaks and a Muslim tea vendor. That was enough for Chief minister Modi to state within a few hours of the tragedy that "it [the burning of the train] was a pre-planned act. The culprits will have to pay for it... It was a violent, one-sided collective terrorist attack by only one community." The Chief Minister instructed the police to "let the Hindus vent their frustration" and warned, "the police should not come in the way of the Hindu backlash."

And so started the carnage. It was not only mob violence targeting Muslims. The Chief Minister permitted and encouraged it. His ministers sat in the police control room overseeing whole scale slaughter. It was an organised and institutionalised terror meant to complete the well-designed programme of marginalising the minorities.

Modi went a step further. He decided to convert his victory in the `field' to an electoral victory too, and so dissolved the Legislative Assembly prematurely to hold elections. His campaign was sharp and shrill: "It is not an election for MLAs or choosing a Chief Minister. It is an election related to religion." "This is a fight which will decide who is the protector of Hindus." "This is a deciding moment... Come out in large numbers and kick the jehadis and fundamentalists out."

And the BJP under Modi won the December 2002 state elections decisively with 126 of 181 seats, improving on its previous tally of 117 seats. Its vote percentage increased from 44.8 in 1998 to 49.8. In central Gujarat where the worst carnage occurred, the BJP's performance was particularly impressive.

The issues

So, did the experiments with violence in the Hindutva laboratory succeed? What has been happening to the people of Gujarat, especially those who were pushed out of their homes and localities? What is the nature of politics in Gujarat today? How is it likely to affect the rest of the country? What about another experiment which was also taking place even during those mad days of violence and murder — of Hindus at great personal costs to themselves for protecting their Muslims neighbours against the atrocities of the mob; of young people standing firm to marry from hostile communities because of love and personal commitment that transcended communal barriers? Which of these two experiments will prove successful in the days to come?

If you are interested in these issues it is unlikely that you can get anything better than Dionne Bunsha's account which is meticulous, moving, sensitive, thought-provoking — and, yes, even disturbing in places.

By C.T. Kurien (www.thehindu.com)

For Growth Beyond All Barriers

2006-04-16T21:58:00.000-07:00

Development with Dignity: A Case for Full Development
By Amit Bhaduri, 2005;
National Book Trust, New Delhi;
Page: 107; Price: Rs. 45 (USD 1)

THE message of the book can easily be summarised in the words of the author: "Our unforgivable failure has been the persistence of mass poverty and destitution. It is a matter of utter shame that nearly six decades after Independence, we have anywhere between one-third and one-fourth of our people desperately poor and denied of the minimum conditions for human existence - the largest number of illiterates, millions of children crippled or blinded due to malnourishment" (page 3). There is more on matters of utter shame in the next couple of pages. But it is not a tale of woe alone.

Fairly soon, on page 11, can be seen the following words of reassurance and hope: "The developmental process that we must strive for is not simply a higher growth rate; nor should it mean simply an elaborate bureaucratic mechanism for income transfer to improve the distribution of income in favour of the poor. It has to be viewed from a different perspective altogether in which growth and distribution are integrated into the very same process, while breaking systematically the social barriers of discrimination and prejudices based on gender, caste, language, religion or ethnicity. This is what Development with Dignity must mean for us in India" (emphasis added throughout). The author, one of our internationally recognised theoretical economists, adds with authority: "This is not a utopia. It is the only reasonable economics that this country can pursue with the support of the majority of its citizens who are poor to varying degrees" (page 11).

The claim from a theoretical economist that it is the only `reasonable economics' may put off some readers who think that even elementary economics is beyond them. But there is no need for apprehension. The book is part of the commendable attempt by the National Book Trust to make available `Popular Social Science' and is written in simple non-technical language that any interested reader will be able to follow.

The first proposition that the author puts forward is that `growth', which is celebrated by economists, politicians and the media, is not the proper route to development with dignity. Not that increase in production is not a necessary condition for poverty eradication. The problem is two-fold. First, it is not feasible to let growth take place and then to have it redistributed to the poor and needy. Second, each process of growth has a distributional pattern built into it, and hence `growth' is not a socially neutral process. `Growth', after all, is a summation of the wide-ranging production activity taking place in the economy. In an economy where production takes place in response to price signals that the market sends out, the goods produced will be determined largely by those who have high levels of purchasing power. "Nowadays in big cities, and even in small towns, bottled drinking water is available at a price, which at most only the top 10 per cent of the income earners can afford. And yet, while the market naturally has no compulsion to make a basic good like safe drinking water available to the poor, it might produce more of bottled water and this could step up our statistic of the rate of growth!" (page 14).

That being the case, a basic requirement for poverty eradication is to ensure that the poor have purchasing power. This is not to be achieved by distributing cash to those who need it, because what people need is not cash as such, but goods and services, and these need to be produced. The way out, therefore, is to provide employment to anyone who needs it at a reasonable wage rate, and to ensure that such employment generates goods and services that will come to be demanded by those who are employed newly. Thus, in a basically market-driven economy, productive employment for the masses is the most reasonable and the surest way to lift everyone to a tolerable level of living.

This is the crux of Bhaduri's proposal and he makes the claim that this process of development with dignity is feasible even within our existing socio-economic-political system. Indeed, it is a market-friendly solution; and since the vast majority of our people have such low purchasing power that leaves them in deficit in terms of goods such as food, clothes and houses and services such as education and health, it is also a democratic solution.

But is it too idealistic a solution, and will it really work? Bhaduri takes up some of the questions that can be raised about the feasibility of the solution and examines them in detail.

Consider first the possibility of a mismatch between the kind of employment that is most likely to be taken up under the mass full employment scheme and the goods (and services) that are likely to be demanded. Public works for infrastructure development (road construction, for instance) are the most natural and quite legitimate form of mass employment: the demand generated, again quite naturally, is for food, clothing and housing. At present this is no problem because India produces more grain than what is necessary (resulting in large stocks in the godowns not because people do not need food, but because those who need it do not have the purchasing power). The textile and cement industries have excess capacity that can be put to use if there is demand. If demand exceeds the existing excess capacity, the market will signal that additional capacity will have to be created through investment.

The explanation given clarifies two crucial aspects of the Bhaduri proposal. First, it is not a `limits to growth' approach. Production will and must grow and thus the thrust on `growth' will continue. But the composition of growth, the product mix, will change because the process mix has been altered. Second, in this age of globalisation, the Bhaduri proposal is not against increased foreign trade, nor against opening up the economy to foreign capital. But conditions do apply. It will be insisted that foreign capital is not debt creating, nor primarily profit absorbing (portfolio investment). To the extent it is capacity-creating and employment-generating, foreign capital will be welcome. The bottom line, however, is that the Indian economy will be largely domestic-oriented, systematically generating an expanding domestic market and domestic capital formation.

A question that can be raised legitimately is whether we can afford to go in for full employment, or in other words, how the public finance for the proposal is to be managed. In financial terms, the cost of providing 300 days of employment a year at Rs.60 a day for an estimated 33.6 million currently unemployed members of the labour force is about Rs.65,000 crores. Does that appear too big a sum? If so, please be assured that it constitutes only less than 3 per cent of our gross domestic product (GDP) and in actual figures far less than the amount we spend every year on defence.

So, the issue is really not whether we can afford it, but how to go about doing it. In this context it is important to note that there is a fundamental difference between private finance and public finance. Without going into details it may be pointed out that as along as the employment scheme results in productive activity (this is crucial) it is immaterial whether the government finances it from tax receipts, through public borrowing, or even by printing currency.

That does not mean that anything goes. The scheme will have to be very carefully administered, taking into account the enormous diversity of the country in terms of physical features, economic activity and even social conditions. A strong case can be made for not entrusting the scheme to bureaucratic administration at the Central and State levels, but handing it over to panchayati raj institutions. Thereby both the economy and the polity will be strengthened at the local level, giving power to the people, making democracy - the rule of the people, by the people, and for the people - more effective.

The message is clear - development with dignity, a programme to enable all members of the labour force to earn a tolerable level of living, is possible straight away.

I fully endorse Bhaduri's recommendations. I would like to make some suggestions to strengthen his arguments, which can be taken up when he revises the book for its second and subsequent editions. First, the statement on page 13 that "economic growth rate is just a neutral number" is not correct as shown by the examples and explanations in the pages that follow immediately. Economic growth rate is a heavily loaded number reflecting the "voting according to purchasing power" (page 14) which, in turn, is a reflection of the way non-labour resource power is distributed in the system.

Secondly, Bhaduri will do well to devote a page to expose the illusory nature of the post-reform growth rate celebrated both by the National Democratic Alliance's "Indian Shining" election campaign and now repeated ad nauseam by the leaders of the United Progressive Alliance regime. Since the total output of the economy (and consequently its rate of growth too) depends on labour productivity and that, in turn, is measured by earnings, the post-reform growth rate substantially reflects the bloating of salaries of those in the organised sector, both public and, increasingly, private. The growth, therefore, is not only `jobless' (as Bhaduri points out) but also one that is the experience of a minority.

And, thirdly, the plea for full employment for the masses must be reinforced by the need to re-skill those who are likely to be thrown out of their traditional skills. Development with dignity is a matter not only of being able to earn a living, but of being able to do that with a sense of self-esteem. A general upgradation of technology in the work that the masses will take up has also to be emphasised.

For the record, it must be pointed out that what has been designated "the Bhaduri proposal" is not altogether new. This reviewer recalls an article with the title: `Strategy for Development' the opening statement of which was: "The development process in India has not yet become a mass movement. The development process cannot become effective until it becomes a movement" (Seminar, January 1972). It went on to say: "If development is for the people it has to be by the people also. Herein lies the connection between development and mass movement." Interestingly, the main policy recommendation of that piece was a public works programme by a district-level Land Army of those who were looking for work.

The piece was written in the context of the haribi hatao political slogan and in response to an economic model by the brilliant economists who were responsible for the `poverty eradication' Fifth Five-Year Plan which claimed that a stepping up of `growth' and a redistribution of income from the top 30 per cent to the bottom 30 per cent of income earners were to be the strategy of the Plan.

The reference to the Seminar article is not meant as a futile exercise in "who said it first", for it must be said over and over again. As a matter of fact, one of the earliest statements championing the cause of the `weaker sections' was written a couple of centuries ago. The writer asked: " Is this improvement in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people to be regarded as an advantage or inconveniency for society?" and went on to say: "What improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloth, and lodge the whole body of people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged."

This plea for a `just growth' was not put forward by any cranky leftist or sentimental do-gooder; it was written some 230 years ago by a man named Adam Smith. He would have made no compromise on growth or the role of the market.

So the Bhaduri Proposal has the backing of the Master himself. It must immediately be translated into our major languages to constitute a large circle of those convinced about it and will canvass for it. It must also be made compulsory reading for those in authority and they should be obliged to respond, in simple language of the kind that Bhaduri has used, indicating why it cannot be implemented immediately. And if they have no valid arguments or objections, they should be forced to launch Development with Dignity, right now.

By C.T. Kurien (www.frontlineonnet.com)

The Passion Of Amartya Sen

2006-04-11T01:51:00.001-07:00

IDENTITY AND VIOLENCE: THE ILLUSIONS OF DESTINY
by Amartya Sen
Penguin 2006
215 pages; Rs 295

Passion isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Amartya Sen. His is a measured, reasonable, persuasive voice, that marshals evidence, lays out a case, and constructs an edifice of ideas through logical steps, causal connections, elegant equations, and statistical and empirical data. That’s what people who win Nobel prizes for economics are usually expected to do.

But in Identity and Violence, what you come to grips with is—to put it in Biblical terms—‘The Passion of Amartya Sen’. In nine interwoven essays, Sen takes on the violence and threats to peace and intellectual liberty that spring from unexamined assumptions about culture and identity in the contemporary world. In doing so, Sen reveals the degree to which he feels angry, sad, joyous, irritated, pleased, hopeful, sometimes all at once. We hear him chuckle, complain, get exasperated, and occasionally, sigh. Sen revisits several of the debates from his earlier collection, The Argumentative Indian. He returns to them elliptically, sometimes repetitively, but always with a passionate, almost obdurate, intensity. As if the tasks he had set himself are unravelling before his eyes, and are in need of constant, repetitive acts of nurture.

Can the measured path of reason (which Sen invokes in the words of Emperor Akbar as rah-e-aql) be touched and ruddied by the warmth of sentiment? A close reading of Sen’s unfolding career as a moral philosopher and as a peripatetic public intellectual would suggest it can.

Sen the moral philosopher is a companionable interlocutor to Sen the economist, and Sen the sceptical intellectual is an interesting counterpoint to Sen the sentimental Bengali. And I mean sentimental not pejoratively but as a recognition of a certain depth and intensity of feeling. This reasoned depth and intensity is the basis of his principal intervention in this book.

Sen’s arguments can be read as an exercise in the contemplation of sympathy as a social force. For him, it is that which produces the feelings of identity with those we consider to be like ourselves, and which generates resonances with the feeling of people we might designate as ‘others’. Sen argues that our affiliations are in fact plural, and that we can be more than one kind of person, given a plurality of contexts. Thus, a person may be at the same time "an Asian, an Indian citizen, a Bengali with Bangladeshi ancestry, an American or British resident, an economist, a dabbler in philosophy, an author, a Sanskritist, a strong believer in secularism and democracy, a man, a feminist, a heterosexual, a believer in the rights of gay and lesbian people, with a non-religious lifestyle, from a Hindu background, a non-Brahmin and a non-believer in the afterlife".

The person whose portrait this is (can it be anyone but Sen?) is not a being without identity or a man without qualities, but one who engages different aspects of his self when encountering different kinds of people, situations or choices. His ‘sympathies’ are neither monochromatic nor monotonous. They articulate a broad spectrum of possibilities that need not add up to a consistent or even harmonious monad. As Sen says, with some poetry and much conviction, the horizons of the self are multiplied, not halved by history and circumstance.

Following Sen, we could say that it is precisely this matrix of complex ‘sympathetic’ resonances between different aspects of different selves that makes for the web we have come to think of as society. To think of any one of them as cardinal is to enter the trap of the illusion that we are destined to be one thing over all others. The refusal to entertain the ‘illusion of destiny’ entails a recognition that we choose to be who we are rather than who we are condemned to be.

The placing of people in boxes that designate one identity to the exclusion of others leads necessarily to impoverished, ‘miniaturised’ selves and stunted social possibilities. This impoverished self is what Sen designates as being under the sign of a ‘solitarist’ conception of identity.
This ‘solitarist’ notion of identity creates guided missiles of the self that keep hitting the same target. Thus, the contemporary Muslim or Hindu or Christian is shorn (by others and in many cases by himself) of any possibilities other than those underwritten by what Sen calls ‘Civilisational Incarceration’. She is condemned to become a shade of what she could be simply on the basis of a received idea of what it means to be Muslim, or Hindu, or Christian, or whatever. Sen demonstrates this process of the ‘impoverishment’ of a series of identities, be they configured as ‘Muslim’ or ‘colonised’ or ‘Western’ subjects, with an array of arresting examples and contrapuntal histories that span India, China, Ireland, Africa, the Arab and Islamic world. He patiently argues a case for an appreciation of the Islamic world’s contribution to science, technology, doubt, the freedom of thought and reason as a necessary countermeasure to the univocal registers of the theses of the ‘Clash’ and ‘Dialogue’ of Civilisations. He shows how uncritical ‘multiculturalism’ may very easily devolve into a set of plural ‘monocultures’. He argues for an acknowledgment of the debts the West owes the East, and vice versa. He searches for room in the difficult but vitally necessary intellectual space that is neither an elegy nor a dirge for the long history of globalisation. He is able to see the validity of the critique of immiserisation that many ‘anti-globalisation’ activists articulate and is also able to state (though not as convincingly) that the operation of global market forces can have a variety of consequences when qualified and attenuated by wider social choices and decisions about democracy, gender relations, health and education.

While reading Identity and Violence, I also read a remarkable testament to the violence of identification: a set of twin blogs in Hindi and English that documented the destruction of one of Delhi’s most alive and hospitable neighbourhoods—Nangla Machi—on the banks of the Yamuna, flanking the Ring Road as it arcs past Pragati Maidan. Thousands of hard-working, peaceable people were made homeless last week by bulldozers and riot police acting under the orders of the judicial apparatus, to the accompaniment of a deafening near-silence in the media. Accounts of wardrobe malfunctions at fashion shows took precedence over news of demolitions and the relentless violence of an unaccountable judiciary. The bloggers, young media practitioners who lived in Nangla Machi and some of their interlocutors, speak of a world of everyday sympathies and solidarities, of the complex map of identities that is embodied and lived in a working class neighbourhood in a city like Delhi.

Ironically, it was the residents’ inability to furnish proof of their ‘identities’ and documents, a grave failing in the face of a state mandated demand for ‘solitarist’ inscription as ‘legal’ inhabitants, that led to a shift in their status as trespassers over their claims to humanity and habitation in a city. This is what eventually contributed to the continuing violence of their eviction. It’s those who refuse to be identified, or those who sometimes cannot be adequately identified, who also bear the harshest brunt when the violence of identification comes calling astride a bulldozer armed with a court order. Underlying it is a total negation of any ‘sympathy’ on the part of the judge who writes the eviction notice towards those to be evicted. For him, there can’t be any point of intersection or resonance between their humanity and his eminence.After all, he reasons, they defecate by the road, and he purges in his chamber. A clear demarcation of identities between the judge and the judged, between the elite and the urban subaltern, is the necessary prelude to the role played by the foundational violence of the state in the process of the reconfiguring the city.

Reading Sen on violence and identity is an occasion that might help us find ways in which to think about this fact with precision and with sympathy, and consider ways of ensuring that it happens less often.

By SHUDDHABRATA SENGUPTA, Co-founder of Sarai

From Outlookindia.com

Review: Bush in Babylon

2006-03-30T17:24:00.000-08:00

Bush in Babylon: The Recolonisation of Iraq by Tariq Ali; Leftword, New Delhi, 2006; pages 280, Rs.195 (paperback).

IT takes a paragraph to explain why the Washington neo-conservatives wanted to capture Iraq. In 2000, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) published an influential report, "Rebuilding America's Defences." Angered by the slowdown in the astronomical Reagan-era growth of the United States military, the PNAC produced a "blueprint for maintaining global U.S. pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests." The U.S. government needed to maintain its unmatched military, whose power it had to demonstrate to those who might harbour ambitions counter to U.S. primacy. Iraq was a PNAC obsession. "The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

In 2002, the PNAC created the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq to lobby its enthusiastic former members: Vice-President Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. The 2000 report argued that the U.S. government would only follow this strategy if the U.S. suffered a "catastrophic and catalysing event, like a new Pearl Harbor." 9/11 provided the pretext; Iraq (and its sweet oil) the windfall. It takes a few pages to explain how the Atlantic governments rode roughshod over their populations. The public in neither the U.S. nor the United Kingdom had come over to the PNAC's calculations or to Bush-Blair's attempt to manufacture consent. In the U.S., where the media became a conduit for the White House's propaganda barrage, a CBS poll in March 2003 found that equal numbers supported and opposed the war. In Britain, meanwhile, 86 per cent of those polled by The Times in early February 2003 wanted the weapons inspectors to persist.

On February 15, 2003, these polls came to life on the streets as eight million people crowded the world's capitals to say what United Nations General-Secretary Kofi Annan told the BBC 19 months later: that the war on Iraq was "illegal". The Bush-Blair menu of war justifications included yellowcake uranium, suitcase bombs, linkages to Al Qaeda, U.N. Security Council resolution violations and what not. Conditioned by a long history of stereotypes about dangerous Arabs and fanatical Muslims, sections of the Atlantic population were tinder for misinformation's fire. The bombs began to fly three years ago. They continue to explode daily. All this is easy to establish, and there are now many books that do this work. What is harder to understand is how Iraq, with its considerable history, fell prey to the machinations of "Bush & Co."

Founded in 1934, the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) was able to galvanise the consistently anti-colonial sentiment of the population (the ICP was also the largest Communist Party in the Arab lands). Between January 20 and 22, 1948, the Iraqi population, led by the ICP, moved decisively to block the assertion of imperialism and its local subcontractors (the monarchy and its oligarchy of racketeers). These events, known as al-wathbah (The Leap), signify the immense political confidence of the Iraqi people. Between The Leap and the 1958 republican coup, the Iraqi people's political maturity grew. When the colonels took charge, they turned to the ICP for aid and assistance. The ICP's social programme had been absorbed by all political parties, itself a testament to its relevance and probity. Even the Ba'ath, no friend to socialism, adopted the ICP's programme, and went one step further at its 1963 Sixth Congress (much to the consternation of its founder, Michel Aflaq, and to its future leader, Saddam Hussein).

In May 1959, Husain ar-Radi, first secretary of the ICP, entered a Politburo meeting and argued that the time had come for the party to make a move for power. He was outvoted. The Ba'ath took the initiative; the U.S. backed it. The ICP defended the nationalist-military regime when the Ba'ath attempted its coup in October 1959. It quickly took charge of the Ministry of Defence and the communication network. This terrified the colonels, who began to decimate the ICP, their only organised defenders. The way for the Ba'ath had been prepared, and it eventually captured the state in 1963. The window to the future closed for the moment.

When Saddam Hussein's legions entered Kuwait in 1990, I remember turning to Hanna Batatu's impassioned scholarly book The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements in Iraq (Princeton, 1978) to understand the tragedy of modern Iraq. Batatu, a Palestinian Arab who taught at Georgetown University in the U.S., produced a measured account of the political economy of Iraq, of the nationalist sentiment of its population, and of the opportunities and vacillations of the ICP. The book has guided me since, as it has provided the British-Pakistani author and activist Tariq Ali with the basis for his own understandings, and of his 2003 book (now published in India with a special introduction).

Bush in Babylon is an "updated" edition of Batatu's book, although it is so much more than that. In 1990, when Ali heard a senior BBC interviewer say that Arabs are a people without culture, he began an extensive study of Arab society and history. In particular, Ali studied the cultural world of Spain during the rule of the Arab sultans. His studies resulted in four novels, the Islam Quartet (published in India this year by Seagull). In Bush in Babylon, Ali writes, "Perhaps there are some things in life too painful to be recorded in history and which are best left to fiction which can sometimes be more honest than history."

His book, unlike Batatu's study, gets under Iraq's skin. It begins with Arab (some Iraqi) poets who offer us a picture of hope and struggle, of betrayal and hesitation. Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri (1900-1997) commemorates the 1948 uprising with a poem that now appears timeless, "I see a horizon lit with blood/And many a starless night/A generation comes and another goes/And the fires keep burning."

Ali's book recounts the basic facts of Iraqi history from the 1920 uprising against the British to the ongoing resistance against the Atlantic Occupation. It reminds us that Iraq's hope was suffocated by imperialist intrigues of the Atlantic powers, by the unresolved class contradictions of its society and by the heavy hand of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the otherwise brave cadre of the ICP. The extirpation of radicalism by the Ba'ath nevertheless could not dampen the deep urge for freedom in the Iraqi people.

During the Ba'ath years (1963-2003), an opposition within and without Iraq fought for freedom and justice. Of this resistance, the most bold and quixotic came from the Popular Front for Armed Struggle, led by Khalid Ahmed Zaki. In 1968, this breakaway faction of the ICP organised an armed uprising in the southern marshes of Iraq and fell to the regime's guns. They acted a decade too late, by which time ar-Radi's assessment had become anachronistic. The revolutionary moment had passed. A grotesque tragedy unfolded in its aftermath, including the Iran-Iraq War and the Long War that ran from 1991 to the present (including the diabolical sanctions regime).

Of this current Iraqi resistance, one fighter told a Canadian journalist: "When we see the U.S. soldiers in our cities with guns, it is a challenge to us. I don't know a lot about political relations in the world, but if you look at history - Vietnam, Iraq itself, Egypt and Algeria - countries always rebel against occupation. The world must know that this is an honourable resistance and has nothing to do with the old regime. Even if Saddam Hussein dies we will continue to fight to throw out the American forces. We take our power from our history, not from one person."

Their history is well retold in Ali's offering. The resistance has already won, even as Iraqis have suffered casualties that number in the tens of thousands. They have begun to set the agenda. No longer is the White House able to dictate the pace of reconstruction of the country to its own ends, or even to control the most basic element of power: security. When the army began to use the word "pacification", it meant that it too conceded that it had no control over the population. The White House plan to move on Syria and Iran is on hold. The resistance is as uncompromising as it is brutal, but why should it bear the brunt of our displeasure? As Ali notes, "When you have an ugly occupation, you can't have a beautiful resistance." Ali's book reminds us that Iraq is not just the name of a war. It is also the name of a country.

By VIJAY PRASHAD (www.frontline.in)

The Argumentative Indian

2006-03-07T22:00:00.000-08:00

The Argumentative Indian is the latest book of Nobel Prize winner Prof. Amartya Sen. Urged by my curiosity about India and the nature of Indians who like to argue and talk about anything, I bought the book and read it with great admiration. The book gave a very illuminating depiction of India and the Indian tradition that long have been a part of the amazing civilization. So the following is a review of this interesting book by John Walsh*.

In the 3rd century BC, the Emperor Ashoka ordered the third and most prestigious of the Councils to be held to resolve various religious differences between contending factions. History does not record all that was said at the Council but it is easy to believe it was a lengthy occasion since, as AMARTYA SEN begins this splendid collection of essays, "Prolixity is not alien to us in India". But is it prolixity to any particular end? Sen's desire is to relocate India and Indian civilisation as centres in which, as for Ashoka's council, rational and calm attempts to resolve contentious issues take place. In doing so, he also seeks to show India as more than just the home for effete mysticism that it has been portrayed to be in some western societies.

Calm and rational are suitable words to describe Sen, of course, because his reputation as a Nobel Prize-winning economist was based largely on his efforts to reconcile economic analysis and its assumptions of rational human behaviour with the real ways in which people behave. Economic thought provides useful analytical tools but only when these are harnessed to a humanistic philosophy are they useful. Sen deploys these tools in a variety of fields, demonstrating a wide range of learning and of concerns. His arguments are persuasive, infused with concern for people of all stations and filled with the calmness that derives from a masterful employment of discourse.

The book is divided into four sections, each of four essays which were themselves written over the course of the past decade. Perhaps the best of these is the second section, entitled "Culture and Communication", which is instrumental in defining the overarching themes of the book. In "Tagore and His India", Sen re-establishes the work and reputation of Rabindranath Tagore as a polymath with concerns political and practical. In doing so, he reinstates Tagore to his rightful position. As Sen points out, Tagore's reputation has suffered in the west and his talents often ignored. Indeed, he shows Tagore to have established a reputation for intellectual breadth and depth that made him the equal in importance of Mahatma Gandhi, who has now become iconic in helping to bring about Indian independence. Gandhi is, again outside India, often considered to be saintlike in his dedication to peace and justice and these virtues became faults when translated into a political context.

If Tagore shows India in the modern world to be at least in part an upholder of a practical, secularist and rational mode of thinking, then the essay "China and India" demonstrates the roots of this tradition in the distant past. The stories of the pilgrimages of Chinese monks to India to secure Buddhist texts are well-known; less well-known are the travels and lengthy sojourns in China of Indian sages and their impact. The religious exchanges between the two countries are described and then set in a larger and more modern context. Religion was not the only subject in which exchanges took place. Practical issues such as food preparation and health care were also improved by cross-civilisation discourse. When Mao and the Communists ascended to power, universal healthcare improved many vital indicators of public health in China and vaulted that country above India. However, with the opening of the Chinese economy, inequalities in society have hugely increased while public health indicators show declines, so that India has again taken the lead. There are complex lessons to be drawn from the totality of this analysis.

In the section entitled "Politics and Protest", Sen again employs his technique with forensic precision to skewer the illogicalities and inequities inherent in the discrimination against women, low castes and the poor endemic in Indian society. He shows how these factors are deeply interrelated not only with each other but also with factors such as religion and ethnicity. He argues that it is not sensible or even possible to try to challenge one of these factors without simultaneously monitoring and affecting the change on the others. The same discursive techniques show how ill-served India has been by its resumption of the nuclear bomb testing program and the foolishness of religious extremism.

AMARTYA SEN is one of the leading intellectuals not just in Asia but throughout the world. His commitment to raising awareness of the ways in which poverty can be ended is well-known. In this collection of essays, he cements his reputation as a clear-thinking visionary for the future through his thorough understanding of both the past and the present.

*John Walsh is Assistant Professor at Shinawatra International University, Bangkok.

Book Review: The Trouble with Islam Today

2006-02-26T00:15:00.000-08:00

The Trouble with Islam Today, Irshad Manji, Vintage Canada, published in India by ImprintOne, 2005, p.258, Rs. 295.

There are ways and ways of raising questions and getting replies and Manji's method is "loud" and meant to provoke. Certainly, "Understatement" is not a word you'd associate with the self-proclaimed "Muslim refusenik", Irshad Manji. The burden of her song in the latest edition of her book The Trouble with Islam Today, first published in 2003 and republished in 2005 with an afterword from the author — with the word "Today" appended to the original title — is that ordinarily Muslims do not, or are not encouraged, to ask questions about their religion.

Any reasonable person — non-Muslim or Muslim — would concede that perhaps this is true of other religions too. But there are ways and ways of raising questions and getting replies, and just a few pages into the book, you discover that Manji's method is "loud" and meant to provoke.

Brief stint

As a well informed, inquisitive youngster growing up in North America whose parents sent her to the obligatory madressa for lessons in Islam, the author's brief stint at the madressa is marked by her altercations with a teacher she calls Mr. Khakhi. Predictably enough, he gets exasperated with the 11-year-old girl as she keeps asking inconvenient questions — such as why girls can't lead prayers or why she has to hate Jews — and throws her out of the madressa. He, of course, has the familiar reply: "Read the Quran".

Many non-Arabic Muslims are bound to empathise with her when she says how "most Muslims have no clue what we're saying when we're reciting the Quran in Arabic". It's a fact that most Muslim children are taught only to recognise the Arabic script, but remain in the dark as far knowledge of the Arabic language, and thus the Quran, is concerned. Small wonder then that many Muslims go through a lifetime of Quran recital without grasping its meaning.

But, after her expulsion from the madressa, the author does manage to get an English translation of the holy book, but says it left her with only more questions. She then goes on to make many provocative statements about the Quran that are bound to enrage devout Muslims. But then that seems to be the author's intention, to provoke angry response, hate mail, etc. It is with triumph she talks about the epithets given to her, such as a "traumatised madressa misfit", or the "death threats" she has received.

But it would be irrational to dismiss the content of the book just because the author's style is belligerent or because she makes flippant comments with the obvious intent to provoke, such as jihadis being promised seventy virgins in heaven! If you put aside Manji's raving and ranting, and separate the chaff from the wheat, the book raises some pertinent questions that need to be answered.

One of these pertains to women's status in Islam. "The Quran is not transparently egalitarian for women. It's not transparently anything except enigmatic," she observes. Another valid question she raises, and which is so relevant in the deeply polarised world of today, pertains to what the Quran has to say about treatment of non-Muslims.

Calling for both introspection and reforms to put an end to the worldwide misery of Muslims, she observes that Muslims will have to do more than just blame the United States and Israel ... all of which is true.

Uneven writing

But Manji's book takes you on a roller coaster ride; just when you find yourself empathising and agreeing with the author, along comes a passage that makes you sceptical. In the chapter titled "Thank God for the West", the author talks about the outpouring of support expressed for Muslims from within the American community post 9/11. Well, the Western media certainly failed to portray this generosity to ordinary Muslims in the aftermath of 9/11!

Of course, Manji will earn lots of brownie points from a part of the Western world that thinks Islam has nothing more to offer the world than a bunch of jihadis, for saying she's not "ashamed" of being rejected by an "intellectually atrophied and morally impaired mainstream". But would that take the need-for-change-in-Islam dialogue forward? Manji's call for questioning, self-criticism and introspection — a valid call — can be best addressed only if "mainstream" Muslims think her questions are compelling, legitimate and timely. But, unfortunately that is hardly likely to happen when a writer makes statements such as: 'The Quran's perfection is, ultimately, suspect.'

By RASHEEDA BHAGAT in Call for Interpretation, The Hindu, 05 Feb 2006
http://www.hindu.com/lr/2006/02/05/stories/2006020500260500.htm

Resensi Buku: Landscapes of the Jihad

2005-12-31T12:24:00.000-08:00

LANDSCAPES OF THE JIHAD - Militancy, Morality, Modernity: Faisal Devji; Foundation Books, Cambridge House, 4381/4, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi-110002. Rs. 395 (USD 9).

Sebuah pernyataan yang harus dibuat tentang buku ini sebelum memutuskan untuk membacanya sendiri adalah bahwa buku ini sangat sulit untuk dibaca. Buku ini menawarkan sebuah perspektif yang berbeda dari kerangka kerja analisa yang umumnya digunakan untuk memahami subjek yang menjadi pokok bahasan buku ini. Pembaca buku biasa akan menjumpai dirinya didalam situasi dimana dia tidak akan memahami beberapa frase kata yang digunakan oleh pengarang didalam buku ini. Namun begitu, seorang pembaca yang telah menyelesaikan buku yang hanya setebal 164 halaman ini akan mendapatkan pemahaman yang tak terbayangkan terhadap sebuah fenomena yang saat ini tengah menghantui dunia.

Kerangka kerja konseptual

Didalam prakata bukunya, Faisal Devji menjelaskan bahwa dirinya tidak berkeinginan untuk memberikan gambaran sosiologis atas konsep jihadnya Al-Qaida ‘ tetapi dia ingin memberikan gambaran yang sebaliknya’. Dan ketika dia mulai menjelaskan lebih lanjut akan tujuannya menulis buku ini, maka pembaca akan mempunyai bayangan bahwa dia sedang menuju kedalam sebuah perjuangan mental. Devji mengatakan bahwa tujuan penulisan buku ini adalah ‘untuk memberanikan diri kita untuk merefleksikan kepada landscape jihad tentang efek global melalui sebuah proses abstraksi yang bisa ditunjukkan melalui penggunaan kata ‘jihad’ sebagai sebuah kata untuk menggambarkan bentuk awal dari militansi Al-Qaida didalam sebuah bentuk konseptual.’ Dia juga menjelaskan bahwa pertanyaan yang ingin dijawab melalui buku ini juga merupkan sebuah pertanyaan konseptual yang umum – “bagaimana Islam bisa menjadi sebuah fenomena global bagi proyek jihadnya Al-Qaida?

Untuk bisa memahami pernyataan diatas, pembaca harus bisa mengetahui apa yang sebenarnya dimaksudkan oleh penulis tentang sebuah frase ‘lanscape of global effects.’ Devji mempunyai keyakinan bahwa serangan-serangan terror yang dilakukan oleh Al-Qaida di Afrika Timur pada tahun 1998 dan di AS pada tahun 2001 telah merubah jihad menjadi sebuah fenomena global. Dengan serangan-serangan ini jihad tidak lagi terbatas secara kewilayahan sebagaimana jihad dulunya dilakukan di Afghanistan ketika melawan Uni Soviet. Globalisasi jihad seperti ini telah menimbulkan budaya-budaya baru tentang teror dan keamanan. Istilah ‘landscape’ yang digunakan didalam buku ini berusaha untuk menggambarkan tatanan-tatanan kepercayaan dan praktek yang timbul karena tindakan-tindakan yang telah dilakukan oleh Al-Qaida.

Penulis berusaha untuk terus-menerus membuat pernyataan bahwa Al-Qaida tidak berkembang secara meyeluruh – dalam arti bahwa Al-Qaida melakukan rekrutmen aktif anggota-anggota baru diberbagai penjuru dunia – melalui propaganda ideologiny. Akan tetapi dia mengatakan bahwa Al-Qaida telah memberikan inspirasi kepada kaum muda di Inggris, Spanyol dan tempat-tempat lain dipenjuru dunia untuk melakukan bom bunuh diri terhadap target-target sipil melalui pelaksanaan ‘operasi-operasi syahid’ terhadap keduatan besar-keduataan besar milik AS di Afrika Timur, WTC dan Pentagon.

Fenomena

Devji berusaha untuk pergi meninggalkan kerangka-kerangka kerja analisa yang biasa digunakan untuk memahai fenomena tengan jihad. Dia berusaha untuk membuktikan bahwa kepercayaan-kepercayaan dan praktek-praktek yang dilakukan oleh Al-Qaida tidak semata-mata diambil dari pemahaman Islam melalui kacamata kelompok Salafi maupun Wahabi. Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri dan ahli-ahli teori tentang jihad saat ini adalah orang-orang yang mempunyai kemampuan untuk menggabungkan berbagai macam sumber untuk dijadikan dasar atas konsep jihad yang kemudian dijadikan landasan pembenaran atas tindakan-tindakan yang mereka lakukan. Penulis juga menunjukkan didalam bukunya bahwa para pelaku ‘operasi-operasi syahid’ yang disponsori oleh Al-Qaida bukanlah orang-orang Muslim yang sangat taat menjalankan ajaran Islam sebagaimana yang diinginkan oleh para pendukung gerakan Salafi dan Wahabi.

Didalam pemahaman Devji, konsep jihad yang dianut oleh Al-Qaida juga tidak bisa dikelompokkan kedalam usaha-usaha pembebasan politik maupun ekonomi. Sementara Osama sering kali menggambarkan tentang penyerangan-penyerangan yang dilakukan oleh Barat, terutama AS, terhadap dunia Islam, Devji berargumen bahwa Al-Qaida sendiri tidak yakin bahwa tindakan-tindakan balasan yang disponsorinya tidak akan bisa menjadi sebuah pengganti atas penyerangan-penyerangan yang dilakukan oleh Barat. Penulis berargumen, dengan sangat meyakinkan sekali, bahwa tulisan-tulisan ilmiah tentang subjek ini telah lupa untuk menggambark tentang ‘kenyataan yang tidak terlihat yang berhubungan dengan etika, seks, aestetik dan bentuk-bentuk tingkah laku lain’ yang mempunyai hubungan dengan jihad. Kenyataan-kenyatan yang tidak terlihat oleh umum ini lah yang berusaha untuk digambarkan oleh Devji didalam bukunya ini.

Mengglobalkan perjuangan

Menyimpulkan argumen yang diajukan oleh Devji, jihad harus dipahami melalui konteks dunia global dimana hegemoni AS menjadi faktor paling utama. Didalam situasi seperti ini, Al-Qaida telah memahaminya bahwa orang Muslim tidak mempunyai kekuatan untuk meminta ganti rugi atas tindakan-tindakan penindasan Barat (seperti okupasi terhadap wilayah Palestina) melalui perjuangan-perjuangan yang besifat lokal. Mereka hanya bisa melawan tekanan yang dilakukan oleh kekuatan global dengan melancarkan strategi serupa: menjadikan perjuangan meraka sebagai sebuah perjuangan global. Tetapi demi untuk menjadikan global perjuangan local yang sedang dilaksanakannya, para pelaku jihad harus menghilangkan pemahaman didalam pemikiran mereka sendiri bahwa usaha-usaha yang sedang dilakukannya akan segera mendapatkan hasil yang nyata. Sebaliknya, mereka harus melaksanakan misi-misi mereka sebagai sebuah tindakan sikap patuh terhadap Tuhan mereka.

Sebagai penutup, meskipun Devji mampu memberikan sebuah argumen yang persuasive, akan tetapi dia juga beresiko menggambarkan Osama dan Zawahiri sebagai tokoh yang lebih besar dari kenyataan mereka sebenarnya. Selain itu, adalah sebuah kenyataan sulit bagi kita untuk menerima pernyataan bahwa Osama dan Zawahiri adalah orang-orang yang berusaha untuk memberikan sebuah orientasi baru, mungkin positif, terhadap dunia Muslim.

Pada akhirnya, buku ini meskipun bagus, tetapi tidak cukup mampu untuk menghapuskan gambaran yang tertinggal didalam pikiran orang-orang yang telah mengikuti perjalanan karir Osama. Apakah dia sebenarnya sesuatu yang lebih daripada seorang laki-laki yang kurangan perlengkapan didalam menghadapi dunia modern yang kemudian menggunakan jihad untuk memberikan makna yang lebih bagi hidupnya? Wallahua’lam!

Resensi Buku: Why?

2005-05-07T12:18:00.000-07:00

WHY?
The deeper history behind the September 11th terorist attack on America
Oleh J.W. Smith

Buku yang ditulis oleh J.W Smith, seorang Ph.D dalam bidang ekonomi politik, berisi tentang sebuah kajian mendalam tentang alasan sebenarnya mengapa ‘teroris’ menyerang Amerika, negara adidaya satu-satunya di dunia. Buku setebal 197 halaman ini berisi sepuluh bab yang berusaha mengeksplorasi secara luas tentang sejarah konflik dunia hingga pada akhirnya terjadi penyerangan kelompok teroris terhahadap pusat ekonomi Amerika (WTC) pada tanggal 11 September 2001.

Di bab I, Smith menjelaskan tentang sejarah panjang peperangan antara Timur (Muslim) dan Barat (Kristen), lebih dari 1300 tahun, yang pada akhirnya dimenangkan oleh Barat. Kemenangan ini juga menandai awal mula usaha Barat untuk menguasai wilayah Timur (Timur Tengah dan sekitarnya) yang kaya akan sumber daya alam, terutama minyak, dan juga Afrika, demi untuk menjalankan roda ekonomi dunia Barat (Amerika dan Eropa). Kemenangan ini membuat proses penghancuran dengan kekerasan (plunder-by-raids) berubah menjadi penghacuran dengan perdagangan (plunder-by-trade) sebagaimana dijelaskan didalam bab-bab berikutnya (bab 2,3,4,5,6). Amerika yang menjadi pewaris tunggal tongkat estafet imperialisme dunia berusaha keras untuk menancapkan pengaruhnya dalam segala bidang, terutama dalam bidang ekonomi dan politik. Setelah menolak penerapan filsafat perdagangan bebas Adam Smith yang penuh tipu muslihat dan menerapkan filsafat perlindungan Friedrich List untuk kemajuan industri dan pasarnya, Amerika menyebarkan propaganda tentang kehebatan dan keuntungan fisafat perdagangan bebas Adam Smith kepada negara-negara lemah yang kaya akan sumber daya alam demi untuk memuaskan ketamakannya (bab 2). Seperti dijelaskan didalam buku ini, filsafat dan kebijakan perdagangan bebas Adam Smith jelas-jelas berusaha untuk memperendah pemasukan devisa negara-negara lemah tapi kaya sumber daya alam sehingga kekayaan yang ada ini bisa dinikmati oleh negara-negara kaya tapi miskin sumber daya alam (Amerika, Eropa). Jadi, pihak manapun yang ingin menerapkan filsafat Adam Smith, ia (negara tersebut) secara tidak langsung menyerahkan begitu saja kekayaannya kepada pusat-pusat imperialis (Amerika dan Eropa). Inilah kemudian yang dikenal dengan proses plunder by trade, penghancuran pusat-pusat kekayaan dengan tipu muslihat perdagangan yang mengakibatkan negara-negara yang kaya akan sumber daya alam menjadi semakin miskin dan negara-negara yang miskin akan sumber daya alam menjadi semakin kaya.

Dalam usahanya menerapkan filsafat Adam Smith ini, Amerika, melalui CIA dan juga badan-badan intelejen lain yang dimilikinya, telah melakukan berbagai cara seperti pembodohan intelektual dan disinformasi di dalam negerinya sendiri maupun luar negeri (bab 3), destabilisasi kehidupan demokrasi di negara-negara berkembang yang kaya akan sumber daya alam (negara-negara di Afrika dan negara-negara di Asia seperti Indonesia, Vietnam, Korea, Cina) dan juga usaha-usaha lain untuk menjaga supaya bekas negara-negara jajahan ini tetap berada didalam kontrol negara-negara imperialis (bab 4). Selain itu, destabilisasi negara-negara Eropa Timur yang begitu mapan dalam memenuhi kebutuhan penduduknya baik dalam masalah pangan, papan, kesehatan, maupun pendidikan, seperti Uni Soviet dan Yugoslavia, dalam bentuk perang dingin juga menjadi bagian dari usaha Amerika untuk menguasai seluruh kekayaan yang ada di dunia (bab 5 dan 6). Penyerangan terhadap Afghanistan dan Iraq yang baru saja dilakukan oleh Amerika juga menjadi bagian dari usaha penguasaan kekayaan alam dunia demi untuk menjalankan roda ekonomi dan kepuasan pribadi Amerika.

Usaha-usaha yang dilakukan oleh Amerika ini telah menimbulkan perlawanan dan penolakan dari mereka yang merasa dijajah kembali. Kelompok inilah kemudian yang berusaha untuk men-destabilisasikan kehidupan ekonomi dan politik di Amerika. Para ‘freedom fighters’ yang dididik oleh CIA untuk men-destabilisasikan Uni Soviet melalui Afghanistan, berbalik menyerang kepentingan dan keamanan nasional Amerika dan karenanya orang yang sama ini disebut sebagai ‘terorists’.

Di bab 7 dan 8, J.W. Smith menjelaskan tentang ketidaksamaan hak dan standar ganda penerapan hukum yang ada didunia serta tentang keharusan untuk menerapkan dan mempraktekkan persamaan hak dalam bidang ekonomi dan perdagangan. Disinformasi yang terjadi selama ini juga ditentang oleh J.W. Smith dalam bab 9 sehingga setiap orang akan bisa mendapatkan kesempatan untuk menerima informasi yang sebenarnya tanpa harus ada manipulasi dan penipuan.

Dalam bab 10 yang berisi tentang kesimpulan, J.W. Smith memberikan tawaran solusi terhadap permasalahan yang dialami oleh mereka yang tinggal di resource-wealthy poor nations. Secara singkat bisa dikatakan bahwa, menurut J.W. Smith, dengan memberikan hak penuh terhadap semua orang, maka permasalahan yang saat ini sedang dihadapi oleh dunia, seperti terorisme yang sekarang ini menjadi momok disemua komunitas, akan bisa hilang dengan sendirinya. Selama mereka tidak diberikan hak seperti semestinya, maka permasalahan ketimpangan yang terjadi yang menimpa dunia saat ini tidak akan pernah bisa hilang. Dalam alinea terakhir buku ini, dia menuliskan “World peace is not complicated. All that is necessary is that powerful nations “Be what they say they ara and do wha tthey say they do.”

Ditulis dengan bahasa yang lugas dan jelas serta isi yang cukup gamblang, buku ini sangat berguna bagi siapa saja, baik mahasiswa ilmu politik dan ekonomi serta kalangan intelektual lainnya dan juga pemerhati permasalahan yang menimpa dunia saat ini, terutama masalah ekonomi, politik, terorisme dan juga tentang dominasi negara-negara imperialis terhadap negara-negara miskin tetapi kaya akan sumber daya alam. Selain itu, setelah mengetahui kebobrokan dan tipu muslihat yang dilakukan oleh negara-negara imperialis yang sampai saat ini masih tetap ingin menancapkan kuku-kuku kekuasaannya, buku ini juga bisa dijadikan sebagai kerangka dasar pemikiran bagi penyelesaian permasalahan yang menimpa negara kita saat ini.