| February 26, 2002 | Tuesday | Zilhaj 13, 1422 |
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McCarthyism revisited
Lost in Nadra’s maze
AS predicted by exit polls, India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has received a resounding thumbs-down from the electorate in the country’s recently concluded state elections. This despite the fact that the government at the centre had whipped up a wave of war hysteria in the vain hope of a landslide win by exploiting the electorate’s sense of patriotism. The BJP has performed poorly in all the four states where polls were held, with Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Uttaranchal and Manipur all opting, to a greater or lesser degree, for candidates opposed to the BJP. In Punjab and the newly-formed state of Uttaranchal, the Congress Party made a strong comeback and is in a position to form governments of its own. In tiny Manipur, the Congress is running neck and neck with a regional grouping. However, it is in the all-important state of Uttar Pradesh that the BJP has been dealt potentially the most lethal blow. The ruling party was beaten in what is the bastion of India’s ‘Hindi belt’ by the regional and secular Samajwadi Party led by Mulayam Singh Yadav, which has emerged as the single largest party. While the BJP managed to win the second largest number of seats, it was only a handful of seats ahead of another regional party, the Bahujan Samaj Party led by the mercurial Mayawati.
Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state and home to a staggering 160 million people, is politically crucial in terms of its electoral significance. If any party has hopes of clinching power at the Centre, UP must figure prominently in its calculations. In that sense, defeat in the UP elections represents a major setback for the government of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, and could even have serious repercussions on the fate of the BJP-led coalition in New Delhi. The BJP government has long feared that losing UP could trigger off a spate of defections by other members of the restive National Democratic Alliance coalition and even provoke a premature toppling of the Vajpayee government. In UP, where no single party has emerged as the winner, a period of deep instability and political wheeling and dealing is now on the cards. Mulayam Singh Yadav has already signalled that the vote represented a defeat for the forces of communalism and has urged all secular forces to unite.
Once it recovers from its shock defeat, the BJP will have to reflect on the causes of its poor showing. Clearly, the attempt to whip up anti-Pakistan frenzy to distract voters from focusing on the real domestic issues has backfired. In UP, a highly impoverished state with deep-rooted social and caste problems, the real priorities of the electorate were not Pakistan’s alleged misdemeanours but rising prices, a soaring crime rate, unemployment, lack of social justice and other bread and butter issues. The Indian electorate was wise enough to see the massing of troops on the border and the mood of nationalist hysteria for what it was: a diversionary cover for the poor performance of the BJP state government over the last five years. The BJP defeat clearly shows that mixing local politics with grandiose foreign policy rhetoric often makes for poor electoral sense. Local politics is about local issues, and war-mongering and sabre-rattling are not on top of the agenda for a largely impoverished electorate.
AMERICA seems to be in no mood to release early the 327 people of mainly Middle Eastern and South Asian origin detained after the Sept 11 attacks. Despite a passage of over five months none of the prisoners has been charged with anything except minor visa-related offences. Under US law, these people are to be deported, and, realizing that this is perhaps the quickest way out of their misery, most have willingly agreed. However, the FBI has been asked to run background checks before letting them go, and that seems to be taking an inordinate amount of time.
The FBI’s “efficiency” can be gauged from the recent case of Algerian pilot Lotfi Raissi, released earlier this month by a British court for lack of evidence. Mr Raissi was alleged to be the fanatical Muslim who had trained one of the hijackers. US authorities had told the court that there was a “web of circumstantial evidence”, including a video tape and telephone records, to prove that he was a co-conspirator and an Al Qaeda operative. Six hearings were held, but none of this “evidence” was ever placed on record, except the tape, which showed Mr Raissi at his cousin’s apartment. As for being a religious fanatic, Mr Raissi’s wife said that if that were the case she would have known, since she was a Catholic and a cabaret dancer.
The truth is the 327 now in US custody are the victims of dismal standards of investigation and of a paranoia that has taken hold of American law-enforcement agencies since Sept 11. For instance, take the case of an Egyptian taxi driver, whose deportation has been held up for months after the FBI told him that they had a recording of a telephone conversation in which he had made anti-American remarks. No one will debate the need for heightened security in America, but that should not be taken to absurd limits where people from a particular ethnic background or faith are singled out. America could well do without a return to McCarthyism.
THE interior minister pointed out at a meeting the other day that the National Authority for the Registration of Aliens was in the process of setting up “swift” registration offices in Karachi. This was being done to make it easier for an estimated two million aliens residing in Karachi to acquire legal immigrant status and work permits. The decision is a welcome one, and will go a long way towards accounting for foreign nationals in Karachi who have often been subjected to harassment by the police. Initial reports suggest that foreign nationals, mainly the Afghans and Bangladeshis, have responded positively to the new scheme, as they have been turning up in significant numbers to register.
One just wishes that the interior minister also took serious note of the hardships associated with acquiring the computerized national ID cards for bona fide Pakistani citizens. The National Database and Registration Authority’s conduct of affairs in this regard has been less than satisfactory. It is lagging far behind in its goal of delivering the computerized ID cards to the citizens within the prescribed eight weeks, as many people have to wait for a period much longer than that. The registration of children under the age of 18 is another issue which the Nadra staff manning the Karachi office, for instance, are not clear about.
It seems that only the central Nadra office in Islamabad knows the nitty-gritty of the regulations governing the acceptance or non-acceptance of the applications for the computerized cards. For one thing, Nadra does not have enough facilitation offices/counters in the big cities, and even where these exist a general sense of confusion reigns supreme. It is time the ministry intervened to facilitate the citizens, many of whom are still confused about how and where to apply for a computerized ID card. This is the actual state of affairs, while Nadra merely sounds alarm bells by announcing deadlines in the national press — deadlines that it knows it cannot meet.