The ‘lady’ is still in jail

“THE military regime is very worried that they are facing a Cory Aquino-type of people-power movement, and basically, they’ve panicked,” explained a foreign diplomat in Rangoon shortly after a mob of government-sponsored thugs attacked Aung San Suu Kyi’s motorcade at Dipeyin, north-east of Mandalay, on 30 May.

Around seventy of her supporters were killed, she was beaten up — and she and nineteen members of the National League for Democracy who were travelling with her were taken into temporary protective custody’. A month later, the ‘Lady’ — as everyone in Burma calls her — is still in Insein prison in Rangoon.

She has been under some form of restraint, mostly house arrest, for almost all of the past thirteen years, as her children grew up without her and her husband died without even being allowed a farewell visit to Burma, but it has never been as bad as this. The military regime has realised that all its wealth and power are on the line right now, and the gloves have come off. But alone in her cell, still wearing the same blouse and skirt she was arrested in a month ago, she remains the most influential person in Burma. The generals have the guns and the money, but she has the legitimacy.

She has earned it by her patience and self-sacrifice — but also through the regime’s blunder thirteen years ago in allowing free elections in Burma. The generals calculated that they could bribe or bully a majority of Burma’s 45 million people into voting for their candidates, but when the counting was over in 1990 Suu Kyi and the NLD had won by a landslide: 82 percent of the votes. The army immediately cancelled the results and arrested all of the NLD’s leaders, but it never got over the effects of that mistake. And now it has made the same mistake again.

The confrontation between Suu Kyi and the generals began fifteen years ago, when the original tyrant, the half-crazed Ne Win, precipitated a crisis by resigning after more than two decades in power. His bizarre and isolationist version of socialism had reduced the once-prosperous country to penury, and his aim was to transfer formal power to a more respectable elected government while retaining real control. But Aung San Suu Kyi happened to be in Burma in 1988, home from her quiet life as an academic and mother in England to nurse her dying mother.

She had lived most of her life abroad, the inevitable consequence of being the only daughter of Burma’s great independence hero Aung San, who was assassinated when she was only two. But in 1988 South-East Asia was in political ferment: the example of the non-violent democratic revolution led by Cory Aquino in the Philippines in 1986 had already spread to Thailand and Bangladesh, toppling long-ruling military regimes, and now threatened the control of the Burmese military as well.

Suu Kyi’s name made her invaluable to the pro-democracy campaigners, and she quickly became the symbol of the whole movement.

After three months the generals, realising that events were spinning out of control, took back power and authorised the massacre of thousands of students and other citizens in the streets of Rangoon. Then in 1990 the regime held a carefully stage-managed election’ to gain some international respectability — but the NLD won by a landslide, the regime refused to recognise its victory, and Burma has been in deadlock ever since. So last year a new generation of generals tried to square the circle again: they released Suu Kyi from house arrest in the hope that they could end all the foreign boycotts and rejoin the world without actually giving up power.

It never seemed like a good idea to General Than Shwe, the current head of the junta (who virtually froths at the mouth whenever the Lady’s name is mentioned), but he was talked into it by other senior generals led by Khin Nyunt, the influential head of intelligence. Thirteen months after she was released from house arrest, however, it turns out that Than Shwe was right: neither Suu Kyi nor the Burmese people were satisfied with tokenism, and the regime’s power and privileges really were at risk. — Copyright

Tensions on Afghan border

PAKISTAN has not always had the best of relations with Afghanistan, its western neighbour. On the contrary, even at its birth, when Pakistan was generally welcomed as an important addition to the fraternity of Muslim nations, Kabul made no secret of its hostility to the new country and was the only country to oppose Pakistan’s entry into the United Nations.

With India also not looking upon Pakistan too kindly, the pressure from Kabul, strategically speaking, placed this country in a ‘two-front situation.’ Latest developments make it seem as if that after a lapse of some 30 years when, for reasons of expediency, Kabul and Islamabad had developed a fairly close and interactive relationship, the two countries could well be on way to reverting to what it was like in the bad old days.

While the tripartite meeting between senior military representatives of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the US last Tuesday may prove helpful in defusing some of the tensions over clashes in the border areas and alleged incursions by Pakistan troops in Afghan territory, the crisis between the two appears to be of a more serious nature; there are indications that the Karzai government may even want Pakistan to stop what its sees as meddling in its internal affairs.

The support that Pakistan has provided to Afghanistan since the US war on the Taliban regime and Al Qaeda and the induction of the Karzai government is undeniable. Yet Kabul may also suspect that Pakistan is playing an intrusive role, aiming at establishing its hegemonic hold on Afghanistan. Kabul has inherited this fear from the uneasy relationship that existed between British India and Afghanistan before the Raj left the subcontinent and Pakistan emerged as an independent state.

Prof S.M. Burke, former ambassador and writer, is of the view that Pakistan’s problems with Afghanistan date back to the time of Ahmad Shah Abdali, the first native-born king of Afghanistan who reigned from 1747 to 1773, and to the demarcation of the Durand Line as the border between British India and Afghanistan which the Afghans never quite accepted.

A sequence of events have contributed to the present tensions. A mob of Afghans ransacked the Pakistan embassy in Kabul a few days ago. There have also been almost daily clashes between the Afghan militia and the Pakistani forces along the border over the past three weeks. The Afghan authorities also allege that Pakistani troops have infiltrated into Afghan territory in Nangarhar province up to about 40 kilometers. This is the first time that any such allegations have been made against this country since the ouster of the Taliban regime.

Afghans have also complained that some remnants of the Taliban regime are being provided military training in a camp ostensibly for attacks on Afghan and American positions within Afghanistan. Earlier, there was the report of a number of bodies of armed militants killed by Afghan security forces having been dumped by Afghans on the Pakistan side of the common border. All this has gone into creating tensions between Pakistan and its neighbour in recent weeks.

Pakistan army authorities have confirmed that a team of Survey of Pakistan has begun the demarcation of Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan in the Yaqubi and Anargi Kandao areas in the Mohmand tribal region where some skirmishes have taken place recently between the Pakistani forces and the Afghan militia. Reports reaching Peshawar have confirmed that the situation on the border is tense. It is not clear whether the Pakistani officials have sought or are receiving the cooperation of the Afghan authorities in the demarcation of the border.

After a long period of mutual suspicion and estrangement Pakistan found its opportunity to adopt a forward policy vis-a-vis Kabul and play a crucial role in forcing an end to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and in the context of the civil war that followed.

In the late 1970s when Moscow failed to heal the rift between two factions of the pro-communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, which was in power in Kabul then, it decided to order a force of some 80,000 men into Afghanistan. The Soviet military invasion came as a surprise to the whole world. In Pakistan Gen. Ziaul Haq, who had ousted Zulfikar Ali Bhutto from power in 1977, found this an ideal opportunity to fortify his position as well as to secure support for his own version of Islamic ideology. He decided to provide full military and logistic backing to the various groups of Mujahideen who had organized themselves to put up resistance to Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

In 1980, when Ronald Reagan succeeded Jimmy Carter as the president of the US, Ziaul Haq managed to secure his full support in the form of arms as well as funds. As Lawrence Ziring, well-known American specialist of South Asian affairs, has said, “Zia agreed to place his country in the middle of the Afghan struggle (and) this agreement proved to be a turning point in US-Pakistan relations.”

As a result, Pakistan was the recipient of a huge amount of financial aid from the US. Ultimately, although Zia was killed in August 1988 in an air crash, the Soviets withdrew their forces from Afghanistan. This did not, however, mean return of peace to the country, as the various factions of the Mujahideen who had fought the Soviets now started fighting among themselves for power. The long and ravaging civil war gave the newly formed Taliban the chance to gain a strong foothold in Afghanistan, defeat many of the warring groups and eventually capture Kabul and establish their regime there.

Many in Afghanistan believe that Pakistan was behind the founding and success of the Taliban movement which ultimately forced an oppressive obscurantist system on the Afghan people, especially in the form of denial of basic freedoms and human rights, specially to women. It is not unlikely that the Afghan hostility towards Pakistan is partly rooted in the experience of that period.

To a great extent, the present tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan are related to the extensive search operations launched by the Americans in and around Afghanistan to locate the remnants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives. The fact that Pakistan is working in close cooperation with the Americans in this campaign may well be a source of resentment among large sections of the people of Afghanistan.

The Afghans carry the bitter memories of the American attack on their country to oust the Taliban regime and the excesses which were committed in the process. Particularly devastating was the relentless aerial bombardment of the Tora Bora hills by the US air force. There is no estimate available of the number of people, including women and children, who lost their lives in these raids.

Another source of resentment for the Afghans could be the American search for Osama bin Laden. It is popularly believed that certain intelligence agencies of Pakistan are cooperating with the Americans in this operation. So it is a matter of guilt by association in many Afghan eyes.

Reports appearing in a section of the American media suggest that the Osama bin Laden’s links are wide and strong. It is said that some 70,000 foreign Muslims have passed through the dozens of camps which are being run by Al Qaeda. However, investigators have failed to locate any group responsible for Osama’s back-up and funding. Going by the popular sentiment, there is certainly nobody in Pakistan who would give a clue to Osama’s whereabouts, that is if any such clues actually exist.

Prop & Proposition

THE Indian National Congress took a great leap forward in Shimla and landed in 1967. Since half the country was not born in 1967, and the other half might not remember, this may need a bit of explanation.

1967 was a watershed year in Indian democracy. The Congress had been in power since independence: it was the establishment, the Position; the other political formations were the Opposition. The non-Congress parties came in all hues, sizes and ambitions, from the economic right-liberal (Swatantra) to the economic left-liberal (Socialists) to the minority-bashing Jana Sangh to the Communists (already split). They were national in vision, regional in character and vaulting in ambition.

When you pole-vault you have to make sure that there is a cushion on the other side, otherwise you could break your back. After the tumbles of 1957 and 1962 the opposition parties decided that the only effective cushion was a united front. Such was the conviction that they set aside their often vicious differences of personality (nothing is more vicious than ego) to sit on a common platform against the Congress. The United Fronts were born. They even found space for breakaway groups and minor parties.

One Congress leader who will remember this wistfully is Pranab Mukherjee, because he belonged to the Bangla Congress. The rewards were instantaneous. In 1967, the Congress majority in the Lok Sabha tumbled to a paper thin 21, which was insufficient to keep the fourth Lok Sabha alive for a full term. The Swatantra won 44 seats, the Jana Sangh 35 and the two Socialist parties between them had 46 seats.

The Congress lost every state from Punjab to Bengal, and Orissa and Tamil Nadu as well. Had it not been for Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, Congress would have lost the centre too. Defeat awakened tensions within the Congress leading to a split, which Mrs Indira Gandhi exploited brilliantly to refashion the party into a coin — ideology on one side, herself on the other, and the two interdependent.

This was a defeat but not yet a disaster. The Congress had been punished for bad governance. Though the traditional Congress voter also suffered (the Muslims from continual riots, the Dalits from continued impoverishment), he had not yet lost faith in the Congress commitment to its secular, socialist ideology. That is why Mrs Indira Gandhi was able to recover the Congress constituency in 1971, and send the opposition parties reeling back into single digits.

Even the Emergency did not eradicate the Congress base, although enough voters angrily rejected Mrs Gandhi’s flirtation with dictatorship. But being the intelligent politician she was, she took decisions during the Emergency which reinforced her links with her party’s traditional voters. This is why she could repair the damage of 1975-1977 and return to power with a comfortable majority in 1981.

In other words, the Congress may have lost elections between 1967 and 1977 but it had not become fundamentally vulnerable. Its disconnect with its base was temporary. This is why, whether in power or not, it still remained the party to beat. Whether in power or outside, it remained the party of Position, and the others were the Opposition. This reality was reflected in common parlance, in a paradoxical phrase used whenever the non-Congress parties came together to rule: ‘The opposition is in power.’ No one said that the opposition had come to power when the Congress defeated the Left Front in Bengal in 1972 or the Janata Party at the centre in 1981.

The Congress began to lose its status as the central axis of Indian politics in the eighties, when it betrayed all three of its core voting groups in the north: Brahmins, Muslims and Dalits. It lost the Brahmins and Hindus across the spectrum when it supported hysterical Muslim fundamentalists against the supreme court in the Shah Bano case. This was also a betrayal of common sense, in addition to an insult to the law, because it supported an obvious injustice (which, incidentally, is as unIslamic as you can get, for justice is a basic value of Islam) in a cynical obeisance to ranting Muslim extremists.

Then, astonishingly, it betrayed the vote it had sought to protect — the Muslims. Equally cynically, it opened the locks of the forgotten Ram mandir at the site of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, and then, unbelievably, laid the foundation of a temple at the site. Since these events happened fifteen years ago, it might be forgotten that it was not the BJP or the RSS that laid the foundations of the temple, but the Congress. (This was compounded by terrible mismanagement of riots like the one in Bhagalpur.)

The growing distance from the Dalits was not perceived until Kanshi Ram and Mayawati appeared. The ranking leader of the Dalits since independence, Babu Jagjivan Ram, left the Congress in 1977. After him, the Congress thought that it could assuage the Dalits through toadies whose only qualification was a rather pathetic kind of loyalty to the leadership. Ask yourself a simple question: can you recall the name of a single Dalit leader in the Congress after Jagjivan Ram? I can remember one or two, but I would rather not.

There was a time when Kanshi Ram, still attracted by the Congress mystique, could have been absorbed into the Congress. But he was derided as a “CIA agent” and dismissed as a maverick. The Dalits shifted en masse to Kanshi Ram and Mayawati.

There is a rule in political life: you can do enough to lose the vote, but you will not have lost it totally unless there is someone around who can find it. In the decisive decade of the 1980s there were political leaders who knew how to pick up the vote that the Congress was losing. Lal Krishna Advani in the BJP drew a line between majority sentiment and the Congress. In the 1990s regional parties led by former socialists absorbed the Muslims into their fold. Kanshi Ram became the undisputed hero of the Dalits. The accidental phase of Congress rule in Delhi in the 1990s, when P.V. Narasimha Rao became prime minister after Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated, did not staunch the process, because Rao did not use power to change the direction of drifting sentiment.

For a while Sonia Gandhi thought, or perhaps believed, that she could relaunch the Congress from 1971, the year of Indira Gandhi’s finest victory. She copied her mother-in-law’s mannerisms to encourage the notion that an Indira had been reborn. But Indira Gandhi was more than her walk, and certainly more than her sari-style. Indira Gandhi made huge mistakes, for which she paid an equal price, but she protected her party’s relationship with its voters through policy and personal intervention. Indira Gandhi could sit on an elephant in Bihar, go to Belchi and transform the electoral mood — because she had credibility. Such credibility cannot come overnight. Sonia Gandhi has been president of the Congress for five years. Has she led a single street campaign? Is there a single issue with which she can be identified?

Reading repetitive speeches prepared by others in front of seated crowds is passive politics. It has limited value. Sonia Gandhi had an excellent opportunity to identify herself with a core Congress constituency after the Gujarat riots. Instead, the Congress campaign during the Gujarat assembly election was an exercise in me-too Hindutva. The only time Sonia Gandhi wet her feet in public was when she dipped a knee into the Ganga to suggest that she was a quasi-Hindu. The Indian electorate has stopped purchasing cliches that have outlived their sell-by date.

In Shimla the Congress reversed 1967: it decided that it was no longer in a position to win an election alone. It formally declared that the BJP had become the political party to beat. It thereby made a vital psychological concession: the BJP had now become the Position, the new establishment, and other political parties, including those currently with the BJP, should unite to remove it from power. This may not travel easily through the Congress ego, but it is pragmatic. It recognizes that the Congress is a diminished force.

What does the Congress bring to the table in any such coalition? It brings history and presence, which is important. In many states where there is no third party, the Congress is the only receptacle for anger against a government. Andhra Pradesh is a very good instance. The number of such states however is diminishing: Andhra, Kerala, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Uttaranchal, Himachal, Haryana, Punjab, Assam and some parts of the Northeast come to mind. Karnataka and Maharashtra are in transition. In the other states, which generally happen to be far larger, the Congress is now a negligible fact. And in many of the “Congress states” the party is in power, and therefore a negative factor for the next election.

Surely the most important fact is that the Congress has not been able to resurrect its old coalition in the north. The Muslims will vote for the Congress only in those states where there is no alternative to the BJP. This is a compulsion vote. Even with other groups, Congress support is the first to get whittled when a third force enters the fray. In five years, Sonia Gandhi has not been able to change this. She retains some mystic belief in the power of dynasty, and presumes that is sufficient. It is not. Moreover, for a sizable section of the electorate, her origins, and her accent, remain a serious negative. You could lose your place in the Congress for suggesting this, but it is a fact.

For the first time in its history the Congress will be part of a coalition in a general election. If it happens. For further news, wait for the results of five assembly polls due in the autumn. It will be a Happy Diwali — but not for everyone in politics.

The writer is editor-in-chief, Asian Age, based in New Delhi.