Vajpayee’s Moscow mission

INDIAN prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s official trip to Moscow prior to his arrival in the US acquired a special significance because of its timing. Some observers saw it as a calculated balancing act designed to improve New Delhi’s bargaining counter vis-a-vis the Americans.

The Indians are finding it rather hard to digest their marginalization in the US-led coalition against terrorism, more so because Pakistan is the preferred ally and is being courted by all and sundry. Vajpayee can ill-afford to press harder than he already has for the acceptance of the Indian agenda by the US. New Delhi was clearly told by the visiting US officials, Colin Powell and Rumsfeld in particular, that making trouble for Pakistan at this juncture will undermine the campaign against terrorism.

The Indian stratagem to project Pakistan as a security risk for the coalition has drawn a blank; particularly its scaremongering tactic suggesting Pakistan’s nuclear weapons may have already fallen into the hands of the terrorists has been dismissed as nonsense. What has added insult to New Delhi’s injury is the high praise being showered on Pakistan as a trustworthy and indispensable coalition partner, and promises of support and assistance to strengthen and stabilize the government in Islamabad.

Needless to say there has been bitter disappointment in India with the tepid US response to New Delhi’s bid for a meaningful role in the coalition. More significant is its domestic fallout for the Vajpayee government which has of late come under fire for making a mess of diplomatic manoeuvring. Some Indian critics have accused the government of undignified behaviour saying, “we are begging for support, trying to register our FIR on Kashmir in Washington and Moscow.”

Whether or not the policy of wooing the Americans at any cost should be pursued is a bone of contention among opinion leaders in India. An influential lobby believes that the Americans will turn their attention to the question of “cross-border terrorism” in Kashmir once they have accomplished their mission in Afghanistan. The US, it says, cannot ignore India for long since a strategic partnership with India is a long-term objective of the US foreign policy while Washington’s present upgraded relationship with Pakistan is at best a transitory, tactical arrangement. However, there are quite a few alarmists among the Indian opinion leaders who have been warning New Delhi against ‘missing the bus’ and therefore advocating a multi-pronged political and diplomatic offensive to neutralize Pakistan’s key position in the coalition. Using the ‘Russian card, is part of the prescription they suggest for securing leverage in doing business with the Americans. No wonder, the Indian prime minister made it convenient to go to New York via Moscow and renew pledges of Indo-Russian friendship and cooperation before he had an audience with George W. Bush.

Although Vajpayee discussed a wide range of issues with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the centre-piece of his agenda in Moscow was to secure legitimacy for the Indian stance on the so-called ‘war against terrorism’. As the two sides signed an accord called Moscow declaration, underlining the “overwhelming identity of views on international issues” and reaffirming their “strategic partnership” as real, the opportunity was also used to conclude a multi-billion-dollar agreement for the purchase of Russian arms and to renew a 13-year old agreement for building two nuclear power plants in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Putin called for a greater Indian role in the post-Taliban dispensation in Afghanistan, and assured support to India’s claim for a permanent UN Security Council membership. But what must have relieved Vajpayee’s heavy burden of tension and worry was Putin’s discourse on terrorism.

The Russian president warned against, what he called “double standards”, saying there cannot be good and bad terrorism as he urged the US president to include Pakistan-backed insurgents in Kashmir and Chechen rebels in Russia in the list of terrorists to be targeted by the US-led coalition. The joint declaration making a clear attempt to tie Chechnya and Kashmir together said, “In multi-ethnic and democratic countries as India and Russian Federation, violent actions being perpetrated under the slogan of self-determination in reality represent acts of terrorism which in most cases have strong international links”.

Contrary to the growing demand in Third World countries, which was reverberated in the UN General Assembly recently, that the term ‘terrorism’ should first be defined and a clear line drawn between ‘freedom-fighters’ and ‘terrorists’, both Russia and India have a vested interest in supporting the idea of a UN-sanctioned carte blanche amounting to a licence to kill anyone in the name of combating terrorism.

However, Vajpayee’s consolation was not as substantial as he would have wished since Vladimir Putin refused to endorse India’s war-mongering over Kashmir and asked India in explicit terms to resume talks with Pakistan for the settlement of all outstanding disputes. Some Indian observers acknowledged that it was a rebuff to the Indian prime minister who nevertheless refused to take the Russian advice to return to the conference table for a settlement of all differences with Pakistan.

Vajpayee’s call at a news conference in Moscow for a massive US ground attack to finish off the Taliban resistance also evoked criticism at home. A commentator said the US military presence in Afghanistan was not something India should feel happy about. One is not aware of the Russian reaction to Vajpayee’s recipe for ending the Afghan war quickly, but Moscow certainly does not relish the prospect of losing a potential sphere of influence to the Americans.

The Russians have been banking heavily on the Northern Alliance to protect their interests in Afghanistan and the Indians have been Russia’s partners in funding and arming the Northern Alliance, and the two are in total agreement on the composition of a future political set-up in Afghanistan. On this score the Indo-Russian lobby does not have any basic disagreement with the Americans except on the question of including the so-called moderate Taliban in a future ruling set-up.

For all practical purposes, the Americans have been helping the Northern Alliance in its military campaign though the Alliance was told to stop short of entering Kabul until a new coalition of forces is put together to take charge in Kabul. But if the Americans seem to be facing difficulties in genuine Pakhtoon representatives willing to accept the Northern Alliance as a major component of the post-Taliban coalition, no wonder some Indian observers say the Pakhtoons should not be equated with the Taliban.

The Afghan scenario is too complicated to fall into a predictable pattern and the Indians cannot hope to gain much mileage from their Afghan linkages or collusion with Moscow, given the uncertainty about the course of events following the fall of Kabul and other cities to the opposition forces led by the Northern Alliance. Nevertheless they have been trying to put across the message to Washington that they can always fall back upon the military cooperation and political support of their long-standing ally if the Americans continue to overlook New Delhi’s perception of ‘war against terrorism’.

Vajpayee was obviously not pleased with Washington’s low-key response to his rhetoric about India being a victim of terrorism and therefore the need for enlarging the scope of ‘war against terrorism’ beyond the forces targeted by the US in Afghanistan. But he has certainly not been trying to distance New Delhi from America’s global design. Playing the Russian card was a tactical move and not an indication of a policy shift in Indian strategy.

No matter how intransigent is the Indian position on resuming a dialogue with Pakistan, New Delhi will have to agree, sooner or later, to holding talks, as no one, not even a close friend like Russia, supports a policy of indefinite confrontation with Pakistan. It is only a question of time, an Indian observer acknowledged. The BJP is now preoccupied with the polls campaign in UP and is desperately trying to salvage its dwindling political fortunes in India’s most populous state on a ‘communal plank’, since wooing the minorities has been given up as a hopeless prospect. While the Ram mandir issue is being brought to the fore, Vajpayee also needs to project himself, as he did during the Kargil conflict, as a ‘warrior’ who can cope with any threat from Pakistan. Therefore, it does not suit the BJP government to show any flexibility vis-a-vis Pakistan at this stage. In the given context, what will be New Delhi’s real agenda if and when it is ready to resume talks with Pakistan is an open question.

Including the excluded

KABUL fell one day after some 500 men and women from South Asia adopted at a meeting in New Delhi a statement on the sovereignty of Afghanistan. It was a premonition or wishful thinking on their part. And they said that the country was “a direct concern to all people in South Asia because, historically and culturally Afghanistan has for ages been part of this region.”

The South Asians were right. But their immediate concern was about “indiscriminate bombing of Afghanistan,” which in any case, becomes pointless when the Northern Alliance is in Kabul. The main attention of the meet was, however, focused on the next set-up in Afghanistan. Not a single person in the conclave dissented when it was resolved that the Afghans who had suffered through “a succession of oppressive regimes” should not be denied “their fundamental right to determine their future structure.”

In the South Asian context, this is also the demand for the entire region, embracing India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan — the demand to settle their affairs in their own way. Inevitably, the discussion centres on how to guarantee “democracy, rule of law and human rights.” The conclave justifiably felt that this was the region where “threats to national security, real and imaginery have been exploited to justify authoritarianism or infringement of the principles of law and human rights.”

Indeed, this is the region where people live amidst paradoxes: modernity vs tradition, poverty vs immense wealth, scientific advances vs illiteracy of huge proportions, emancipating philosophies vs narrow sectarianism and extremism, centuries of harmony and peaceful coexistence vs worst forms of belligerent intolerance. Yet this is the region which has to evolve common strategies to protect South Asia’s shared interests.

But who are these South Asians who have taken upon themselves the responsibility to change the attitude of the people and to resolve their differences? They are members of South Asians for Human Rights (SAHR). A few among them met last year at Neemrana, near Delhi, and set up a body to raise their voice against conflict and confrontation in the region. They also adopted a resolution to ask the South Asians “to realize their ideals and aspirations for peace, democracy, secularism and human security, while promoting pluralism in approaches towards social, political, economic and cultural development of different communities, ethnic, linguistic, religious and other groups.”

The Delhi conclave was meant to firm up a common approach to the common problems and to refurbish the South Asian identity transcending borders, religions and nationalisms. The two-day meet has created the “structure” — a 19-member bureau, an apex body, and a secretariat at Kathmandu under the charge of the secretary-general who is a Nepalese.

It must be sheer determination, if not optimism, that brought the South Asians together. They are fired by a common purpose they cherish — to work towards a more humane and just South Asia. Anyone from the region can be a member of SAHR. All they have to do is rise above chauvinism, fundamentalism and parochialism so that they may initiate in South Asia a movement which is secular and democratic in content and which helps people assume the responsibility to guide their communities towards freedom from injustice, want and squalor.

The participants, when they met, were haunted by their own problems: Indians by the Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance (POTO) to throttle dissent; Pakistanis by the absence of democracy in their country, Bangladeshis by the rise of fundamentalism in their Sonar Bangla, Sri Lanka by the smouldering threat of LTTE; and Nepal by the growth of Maoists in a traditional society. Still, the activists from the different countries agreed there was no alternative to peace and pluralism. They appealed to the governments in the region to repeal all legislation, policies and measures that divide the people on the basis of belief, ethnicity, gender or social status so as to end the exploitation of the weak and derogation of human dignity.

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, addressing the conclave, spoke in the same vein. He said: “The dividing line between the haves and the have-nots is not just a rhetorical cliche or an eloquent slogan, but, alas, a substantial feature of the world in which we live.” The fight for human rights, he said, will have little relevance till it “included the excluded.” According to him, the biggest challenge before the South Asian countries is the state of “marginal sections of society.”

Among the activists present were those who worked for the marginal sections of society. There were Medha Patkar, Arundhati Roy and BD Sharma from India, Asma Jahangir and IA Rehman from Pakistan, Kamal Hussain and editor of The Star Mahfuz Anam, from Bangladesh, Devender Raj Pandey from Nepal and Deepika Udagama from Sri Lanka. Former Prime Minister I.K. Gujral, was also one of the participants. UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson inaugurated the formal formation of SAHR.

In her speech, she drew attention to the war in Afghanistan and shared the belief of the South Asian activists that the world should not turn a blind eye to the issue of human rights in its fixation with the events of September 11 and after. She said: “What must never be forgotten is that human rights are no hindrance to the promotion of peace and security. Rather they are an essential element in any strategy to defeat terrorism.”

Fixation is also the word which came to my mind when a participant from Pakistan asked me: “What is the use of such gatherings when I find that the enmity between your and my countries has not lessened in any way?” I did not say anything beyond repeating a cliche that “time is the greatest healer.” But she was right. I think both the countries have painted themselves into a corner. Non- officials should take the initiative in placing before the two governments a solution of Kashmir which is not based on religion.

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf made a useful presentation in Washington on the nuclear issue. New Delhi should pick up the thread where he left off, particularly when Pakistan is willing to separate the issue of nuclear weapons from that of Kashmir.

A Bangladeshi participant was probably putting his finger on the nub of the problem when he said that the South Asians were “hypocrites” because they continued to carry the old baggage of history and knew no forgiveness.

But he was mistaken because Rehman apologized on behalf of Pakistan for all that its armed forces had done in Bangladesh. Perhaps the South Asians are not making enough efforts to wipe out the past. It seems that the new challenges in South Asia are merely the transformation of old challenges we failed to tackle.

As a result, we continue to stagnate and, at times, fail to act as a human community. South Asians are ideally suited to play a positive role in the circumstances and to suggest a way to the West which has forgotten the ethical and spiritual aspects of life which are basic to culture and civilisation and which have given some meaning to life. Great religions are represented in this part of the world. There is a confluence of many civilizations. People have fought wars of liberation and they have liberal and democratic ideas. Even where dictatorship has taken over, there are stirrings of democracy.

But what it all boils down to is sincerity and commitment. Mere words and pious wishes alone will not do. Are we genuinely committed to the uplift of the poor? Will we really try to include the excluded?

Who remembers chads?

THE headline results from the Florida ballot recount conducted by The Washington Post and other news organizations were best summarized by Sen. Joe Lieberman: “These recounts are fascinating. They don’t change anything.”

Indeed, they don’t even change the historical sense of who was right or wrong in last year’s argument. Vice President Al Gore would have won if all spoiled ballots statewide had been counted. On the other hand, President Bush’s victory would have been affirmed if the limited recount that the Gore people had requested had been allowed to go ahead.

That said, the recount did deliver one clear message: Poor and minority voters were disenfranchised more than others. In predominantly black precincts of Florida, 136 out of every 1,000 ballots went uncounted, a rate three times higher than in predominantly white jurisdictions.

The discrepancy reflected factors ranging from the quality of advice given to voters as they entered the polling station to the type of voting machinery used. But one particular mechanism might have done much to mitigate this problem. Polling booths equipped with machines that immediately check whether a ballot is marked properly give voters a chance to fix errors. The news organizations’ study showed that this second-chance technology reduced the racial gap in spoilage rates by more than half.

This finding should accelerate efforts to fix the weaknesses in the voting system identified by a succession of studies. Second-chance technology should become standard. Chronically faulty machines should be retired. Staff at polling stations should be trained better and expanded, so that voters are not deterred by long lines. Voter registers need to be updated and computerized, so that incomplete lists do not result in eligible voters being turned away. People not on registers should be allowed to cast “provisional ballots” that can be counted later if their eligibility is confirmed.

Although there is consensus on these questions, reform remains hard. On the state level, only Florida and a handful of others have acted.—The Washington Post

Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease: The algebra of infinite justice-II

IN 1979, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI launched the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA. Their purpose was to harness the energy of Afghan resistance to the Soviets and expand it into a holy war, an Islamic jihad, which would turn Muslim countries within the Soviet Union against the communist regime and eventually destabilize it.

When it began, it was meant to be the Soviet Union’s Vietnam. It turned out to be much more than that.

Over the years, through the ISI, the CIA funded and recruited almost 100,000 radical Mujahideen from 40 Islamic countries as soldiers for America’s proxy war. The rank and file of the Mujahideen were unaware that their jihad was actually being fought on behalf of Uncle Sam. (The irony is that America was equally unaware that it was financing a future war against itself.)

In 1989, after being bloodied by 10 years of relentless conflict, the Russians withdrew, leaving behind a civilization reduced to rubble. Civil war in Afghanistan raged on. The jihad spread to Chechnya, Kosovo and eventually to Kashmir. The CIA continued to pour in money and military equipment, but the overheads had become immense, and more money was needed.

The Mujahideen ordered farmers to plant opium as a “revolutionary tax”. The ISI set up hundreds of heroin laboratories across Afghanistan. Within two years of the CIA’s arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland had become the biggest producer of heroin in the world, and the single biggest source of the heroin on American streets. The annual profits, said to be between $100bn and $200bn, were ploughed back into training and arming militants.

In 1995, the Taliban — then a marginal sect of dangerous, hardline fundamentalists — fought its way to power in Afghanistan. It was funded by the ISI, that old cohort of the CIA, and supported by many political parties in Pakistan. The Taliban unleashed a regime of terror. Its first victims were its own people, particularly women. It closed down girls’ schools, dismissed women from government jobs, and enforced sharia laws under which women deemed to be “immoral” are stoned to death, and widows guilty of being adulterous are buried alive. After all that has happened, can there be anything more ironic than Russia and America joining hands to re-destroy Afghanistan? The question is, can you destroy destruction? Dropping more bombs on Afghanistan will only shuffle the rubble, scramble some old graves and disturb the dead. The desolate landscape of Afghanistan was the burial ground of Soviet communism and the springboard of a unipolar world dominated by America. It made the space for neocapitalism and corporate globalization, again dominated by America. And now Afghanistan is poised to become the graveyard for the unlikely soldiers who fought and won this war for America.

And what of America’s trusted ally? Pakistan too has suffered enormously. The US government has not been shy of supporting military dictators who have blocked the idea of democracy from taking root in the country. Before the CIA arrived, there was a small rural market for opium in Pakistan. Between 1979 and 1985, the number of heroin addicts grew from zero to one-and-a-half million.

Now the US government is asking (asking?) Pakistan to garotte the pet it has hand-reared in its backyard for so many years. President Musharraf, having pledged his support to the US, could well find he has something resembling civil war on his hands. India, thanks in part to its geography, and in part to the vision of its former leaders, has so far been fortunate enough to be left out of this Great Game. Had it been drawn in, it’s more than likely that our democracy, such as it is, would not have survived.

Today, as some of us watch in horror, the Indian government is furiously gyrating its hips, begging the US to set up its base in India rather than Pakistan. Having had this ringside view of Pakistan’s sordid fate, it isn’t just odd, it’s unthinkable, that India should want to do this. Any Third World country with a fragile economy and a complex social base should know by now that to invite a superpower such as America in (whether it says it’s staying or just passing through) would be like inviting a brick to drop through your windscreen.

Operation Enduring Freedom is ostensibly being fought to uphold the American Way of Life. It’ll probably end up undermining it completely. It will spawn more anger and more terror across the world. For ordinary people in America, it will mean lives lived in a climate of sickening uncertainty: will my child be safe in school? Will there be nerve gas in the subway? A bomb in the cinema hall? Will my love come home tonight? There have been warnings about the possibility of biological warfare — smallpox, bubonic plague, anthrax — the deadly payload of innocuous crop-duster aircraft.

Being picked off a few at a time may end up being worse than being annihilated all at once by a nuclear bomb. The US government, and no doubt governments all over the world, will use the climate of war as an excuse to curtail civil liberties, deny free speech, lay off workers, harass ethnic and religious minorities, cut back on public spending and divert huge amounts of money to the defence industry. To what purpose? President Bush can no more “rid the world of evil-doers” than he can stock it with saints.

It’s absurd for the US government to even toy with the notion that it can stamp out terrorism with more violence and oppression. Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease. Terrorism has no country. It’s transnational, as global an enterprise as Coke or Pepsi or Nike. At the first sign of trouble, terrorists can pull up stakes and move their “factories” from country to country in search of a better deal. Just like the multinationals.

Terrorism as a phenomenon may never go away. But if it is to be contained, the first step is for America to at least acknowledge that it shares the planet with other nations, with other human beings who, even if they are not on TV, have loves and griefs and stories and songs and sorrows and, for heaven’s sake, rights. Instead, when Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, was asked what he would call a victory in America’s new war, he said that if he could convince the world that Americans must be allowed to continue with their way of life, he would consider it a victory.

The September 11 attacks were a monstrous calling card from a world gone horribly wrong. The message may have been written by bin Laden (who knows?) and delivered by his couriers, but it could well have been signed by the ghosts of the victims of America’s old wars. The millions killed in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, the 17,500 killed when Israel — backed by the US — invaded Lebanon in 1982, the 200,000 Iraqis killed in Operation Desert Storm, the thousands of Palestinians who have died fighting Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. And the millions who died, in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Panama, at the hands of all the terrorists, dictators and genocidists whom the American government supported, trained, bankrolled and supplied with arms. And this is far from being a comprehensive list.

Someone recently said that if Osama bin Laden didn’t exist, America would have had to invent him. But, in a way, America did invent him. He was among the jihadis who moved to Afghanistan in 1979 when the CIA commenced its operations there. Bin Laden has the distinction of being created by the CIA and wanted by the FBI. From all accounts, it will be impossible to produce evidence (of the sort that would stand scrutiny in a court of law) to link Bin Laden to the September 11 attacks. So far, it appears that the most incriminating piece of evidence against him is the fact that he has not condemned them. From what is known about the location of bin Laden and the living conditions in which he operates, it’s entirely possible that he did not personally plan and carry out the attacks — that he is the inspirational figure.

Its marauding multinationals who are taking over the air we breathe, the ground we stand on, the water we drink, the thoughts we think. Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable. Their guns, bombs, money and drugs have been going around in the loop for a while. (The Stinger missiles that will greet US helicopters were supplied by the CIA. The heroin used by America’s drug addicts comes from Afghanistan. The Bush administration recently gave Afghanistan a $43m subsidy for a “war on drugs”.)

Now Bush and Bin Laden have even begun to borrow each other’s rhetoric. Each refers to the other as “the head of the snake”. Both invoke God and use the loose millenarian currency of good and evil as their terms of reference. Both are engaged in unequivocal political crimes. Both are dangerously armed — one with the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely powerful, the other with the incandescent, destructive power of the utterly hopeless. The fireball and the ice pick. The bludgeon and the axe. The important thing to keep in mind is that neither is an acceptable alternative to the other.

President Bush’s ultimatum to the people of the world — “If you’re not with us, you’re against us” — is a piece of presumptuous arrogance. It’s not a choice that people want to, need to, or should have to make. Copyright Arundhati Roy, 2001.—Dawn/Guardian News Service