INDIAN prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee wants an extraordinary increase in cooperation among the South Asian countries particularly in the economic sector. He suggests political disputes in the region, which hold up its progress, be consigned to the back seat to enable its 1.5 billion people benefit from extensive economic cooperation. And he wants that cooperation in many new areas of a positive and productive kind.

His suggestion is that the region should move from a Preferential Trade Agreement Area to a Free Trade Area, and finally become a region with a common currency, like the Euro. He admitted before an international audience on peace in New Delhi that peace with Pakistan was a key condition for the progress of South Asia.

Although what he envisages seems to be more like a fight of fancy, he reminded his audience that no one had expected the Berlin Wall to collapse or the cold war to end in the manner it did. Nor did they expect apartheid in South Africa to give way bloodlessly to Nelson Mandela’s rainbow country.

The idea of a common currency for South Asia eventually has been suggested by several other thinkers in the West and the East. But the birth of Euro took almost 50 years after the World War II and the setting up of Marshall Plan. Britain is still not a member of the Euro bloc, although a member of the European Union. Several European states are not regarded fully qualified to be a member of the Euro bloc. Turkey, too, is not regarded qualified for membership of the European Union because of its treatment of the Kurds. But eventually European Union is to have 25 members.

But Saarc has only seven members, beginning with the largest India and ending with the smallest Bhutan and Maldives. And their economic development is diverse. Politically they are not uniform and consist of democracies, kingdoms and militarily rule. Nevertheless if they can be developed properly, with the small states being helped by the big and more resourceful, they can have eventually a common currency some 15 to 20 years from now by moving gradually.

But as Mr Vajpayee too has indicated the future of South Asia collectively depends on the extent of understanding and cooperation between India and Pakistan to begin with. In that area there is a large gap now, which defies being bridged. India wants Pakistan to accord to it the Most Favoured Nation Treatment in the area of trade so that they can trade freely by enjoying the concessions given by Pakistan to other countries.

Pakistan had earlier said the MFN status would be given to India after a political settlement between the two countries is reached. Now following the Indian insistence Pakistan has agreed to accord that status after India enters into serious discussions on the Kashmir issue. But the fact is this status given by Pakistan to all the countries with which it trades regularly can be delayed but not denied to India as under the World Trade Organization rules granting of such a status by one member to another becomes obligatory.

But what is even more striking is that Mr Vajpayee has floated the proposal of a common currency for South Asia at a time when he, as the leader of the largest country in the region, is still reluctant to hold a dialogue with the leaders of Pakistan to settle the core issues between them. Such being the state of bilateral relationship, the idea of having a common currency for the region appears to be too illusive.

The options for India and Pakistan are however clear. Either they trade openly under agreed rules beneficial to both or they let smugglers on both sides take over the trade and flourish at the cost of the state revenues on both sides. There has been no stopping of the smuggling even when the armies of both the countries have been facing each other eye ball-to-eye-ball. Like smugglers elsewhere, smugglers in the region have proved to be too crafty and very enterprising.

In the 1990s the volume of smuggling on both sides was said to be one billion dollars. And now it is stated to be two to three billion dollars, resulting in loss of revenues for about a third of that amount, if not a half. Should this smuggling continue and get larger and larger?

Mr Vajpayee says that small countries need not fear the large ones in the area of trade in the region. Each country can choose its own area of specialization or competence and get the better of the bigger countries in those products. Belgium, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries co-existing with the larger France and Germany is an example.

What matters now is what will happen when the 12th SAARC summit takes place in Islamabad next month along with meetings of its various committees? Will Mr Vajpayee and the Pakistan leaders enter into serious discussions of core issues that divide India and Pakistan, Or will they agree to defer the more contentious issues for discussion at a later date and get on with the rest of the agenda?

The SAARC Committee on trade has come up with another list of over 500 items which the regional states can trade on a preferential basis. It has also proposed a preferential trade arrangement which would eventually pave the way for a Free Trade Agreement between SAARC states. Will all that lead to proper agreements and adequate follow-up?

Mr Vajpayee has also noted that following the failure of WTO negotiations for enlarging world trade the US is seeking regional free trade agreements. Such arrangements are being made in Latin America, Middle East and East Asia. In such a context South Asia cannot remain a solitary exception with its states being at odds with one another or suspicious of each other.

But whether it is Europe or South East Asia economic cooperation thrives where there are no serious political disputes. So after floating the vision of a common currency for South Asia, Mr Vajpayee should take initiative in breaking the political impasse and create a fair understanding between India and Pakistan on a durable basis. Now that the old ceasefire line in Kashmir, which became Line of Control, has again become ceasefire line, and to add to that India is building a barbed wire fence there despite Pakistani protests he need not talk of cross-border infiltration any more.

While the governments of the two countries are slow in moving towards cooperation, their people are reaching out to each other warmly. Trade delegations have been visiting each other’s countries. About 30 businessmen of Pakistan have participated in the International Exhibition held at New Delhi with good results. Cultural groups are also making visits and performing before large crowds. India is promoting such people-to-people exchanges but will it welcome its logical conclusion as well — a political settlement that includes Kashmir as well?

If economic ties are restored, Pakistan can import textile machinery from India as well as its spare parts instead of getting them from third countries at a far higher cost. It can import textile and other chemicals cheaper than it does from other countries. The All Pakistan Textile Mills Association has been agitating for such imports for long to make its textile exports more economic and local sales cheaper.

Hence, a common currency for South Asia is unthinkable without a friendly political climate. Citizens of Saarc should not need passports to travel to other countries of the region. Instead, there should be a Saarc identity card for travel. There has to be free movement of people within the region and the people be free to seek employment in any country.

If the rich countries of the West are forming regional blocs it is all the more necessary for the people of the poor countries of the world to join hands in every economic area possible and try to benefit by that. Forty per cent of the 1.5 billion people of South Asia are living below the poverty line and face a variety of other privations. Hence the urgency to unite and work together is great in South Asia.

The UN Millennium goal is to reduce poverty and hunger by a half by the year 2015. Experts now believe that, judging by the current trends in the world and the pre-occupation of the rich countries too much with themselves, that may not be possible. That means the South Asian countries will have to make concerted efforts to improve their economies and reduce the poverty.

The peace dividend, which is being talked about, can come only if there is real and enduring peace and less is spent on arms and the armed forces, and far more on the people. And more has to be spent not only to reduce hunger or poverty but also to educate the people and import to them adequate technical training.

THERE was a time in history when the British monarch, imprisoned by tradition within Buckingham Palace, was known to have envied the comparative freedom enjoyed in the White House by an American president. Reciprocally, America’s elected but transient royalty looked for excuses when they could savour the colourful pomp and dignified ritual perfected at the Court of St. James’s.

State visits provided a perfect opportunity for presidents to be pampered as royalty, and for kings or queens to condescend to the simple level of uncrowned democrats.

The highlight of any such official state visit was invariably the public procession, when the host and the guest could be shown riding side by side, if in Washington DC, then it in a motorcade or if in New York, then in that street cleaner’s nightmare — the famous ticker-tape parade down Fifth Avenue. In Britain, the journey would invariably be in a horse-drawn carriage (weather permitting), usually an official point of entry such as Victoria Station, up Whitehall, down the Mall and finally through the gates of Buckingham Palace.

One can just imagine the gratification the White House planning staff must have felt when they were finalizing the minutae of their president’s programme over a year ago, at the prospect of their President George Bush the Second sharing an open royal landau with the British monarch, Queen Elizabeth the Second, in what they had hoped would be a triumphal procession to celebrate the allied conquest of Iraq.

One can gauge the extent of their chagrin when Bush’s state visit did take place in November this year, to see that procession cancelled ‘on security grounds’, and then to watch him enter Buckingham Palace almost furtively to avoid the hostile crowds that had threatened to disrupt his visit. The commander-in-chief of the US forces — Britain’s durable ally in two and a half world wars — was reduced to reviewing the welcoming military guard of honour within the safety of the palace forecourt.

Such a humiliation must have been difficult to endure for two reasons. The first was that less than five months earlier, President Vladimir Putin of Russia (once the implacable enemy of both the US and UK) had without opposition enjoyed the very sort of welcome President George W. Bush should ordinarily have received, had these been ordinary times.

The second reason was that the perceived threat to the visiting American president in London did not come from suicide-prone terrorists or bearded Islamic militants. It came from an irate British public drawn from the skeins of British suburbia, who thought that the war on Iraq was unjustified, was morally indefensible, and who wanted to express its opposition as forcefully as its government would allow.

The British government, caught between the rock of its special relationship with the United States and the hard place of local public opinion, chose to appease both. It allowed rallies to be organized in Trafalgar Square where an effigy of Bush was toppled symbolically in retaliation for one of Saddam Hussein that had been pulled down with overt US assistance before a sparse crowd in Baghdad.

It even permitted a woman protester like some modern suffragette to climb the railings of Buckingham Palace, and to stay aloft there for almost two hours, her banner hanging like some domestic laundry left out in a drizzle.

Both Prime Minister Blair and President Bush, understandably in the circumstances, chose to reduce these voices of dissent to tolerable decibels of insignificance. They preferred instead to emphasize the special relationship this visit symbolized, one that in their belief continues to subsist between their two countries. In moments of private candour, though, they must have realized that this ‘special relationship’ was less between two equal partner-nations than between two unequal individuals — the personae of a strong US president and a weaker British prime minister.

Winston Churchill coined the phrase because it described the relationship he enjoyed with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. But then, Churchill shared something special with Roosevelt that no other British prime minister has been able to emulate since — they were both born of American mothers.

Harold Macmillan, during the years of his premiership in the 1960s, sought to revive the relationship with John F. Kennedy, but Macmillan knew that however partial Kennedy might have been towards Britain (his father Joe Kennedy had served as the US ambassador to Britain before the Second World War), the only ancestry Kennedy acknowledged publicly was either with the East Coast or with the Irish.

In their time, Mrs Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan did not feel the need to disinter this worn-out camaraderie because each recognized that the true commonality between them was a mutual accommodation of their separate interests — Mrs Thatcher’s in the Falkland Islands and President Reagan’s in Grenada.

Today, the United States and Great Britain are more than simply two countries divided by the Atlantic or as Churchill once said by a common language; they are two allies that stand divided by their common policy over Iraq. During the Second World War, an American president — Franklin D. Roosevelt — had to persuade a reluctant electorate to join the British in the war against Germany and to declare itself an ally of the British. During the Second Iraq war, almost sixty years later, a British prime minister — Tony Blair — is battling to keep his obdurate electorate on the side of the Americans.

In a way, both Presidents Roosevelt and Bush had their tasks made easier for them by their enemies — Roosevelt had Pearl Harbour and Bush the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre. Great Britain has yet to suffer a Pearl Harbour or witness a 9/11 on its own emerald soil. The attacks in Istanbul on the British consulate and a British-connected bank were timed to coincide with Bush’s state visit to Britain but they occurred too far away, on the other side of Europe, to have had any impact other than provide the two leaders at their press conference with yet another reason for not quitting Iraq.

The United States, Great Britain and their smaller allies will soon be commemorating the first anniversary of their occupation of Iraq. It shall also be yet another doleful anniversary of the demise of the United Nations. Few expect the moribund United Nations ever to be restored to life. Many more, both within the United States and outside it (particularly the future victims in Iraq), hope that planners in the Bush administration have identified an exit strategy from Iraq before a second anniversary.

If they have not done so yet, they should do it quickly. If they already have one, President Bush should be informed of it, preferably by someone other than his Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Mr Rumsfeld has been given an award recently for making a speech that is almost inspired in its obscurity. He has graded his knowledge into three categories: known knowns, things he knows he knows; known unknowns, things he knows he does not know; and unknown unknowns, things he does not know he does not know.

What is chilling is not what he knows or does not know; it is that a man in his position should make such a statement at all. It has a frightening, Dr Strangelove touch to it.

Applying for a moment Rumsfeld’s definition to Iraq, a known known might be that the allies are in Iraq to stay. A known unknown would be the number of innocent Iraqi children slaughtered before they could reach voting age in the democracy promised to them by the allies. An unknown unknown would be why an unshaven Saddam Hussein, like the recluse Howard Hughes, allowed himself to be discovered in a concrete grave six feet deep, with two rifles and $750,000 in cash. What to the other $999,250,000 he had removed from the Iraqi treasury before interring himself alive ?

IF the only reason that some Iraqis have been resisting the American occupation was that they wanted Saddam Hussein back in power, then presumably they will now lose all hope. But that is as blinkered a view of what is really going on in Iraq as the notion that Saddam was personally directing the resistance from his basement hideout near Tikrit.

Even among dedicated Baathists who retained the movement’s original socialist and Arab nationalist ideas, there were few who actually wanted Saddam back in power. Nobody has killed as many Baathists as Saddam, or so comprehensively perverted the movement’s values: he was the Stalin of Baathism. But Stalin’s death did not make devout Communists abandon their faith. On the contrary, it gave them new hope.

By the same token, a Baathism freed of Saddam’s malign influence is likely to be stronger, not weaker: as the only mass political movement in the Arab world that has never knelt before American power, it retains some credibility in Iraq even now. But while the stalwarts of the Baath party are doubtless a key factor in organising the attacks on American and other foreign troops, they are not the main reason that the US occupation faces such strong opposition in Iraq.

The basic problem facing US viceroy Paul Bremer and his collaborators is mistrust: a profound belief among almost all Iraqis that the Bush administration’s motives in invading Iraq were not altruistic. This is not just anti-Americanism. It comes from a perfectly rational conviction that great powers never act out of pure altruism. Indeed, Americans themselves would be outraged if they thought that their soldiers were dying in Iraq for reasons having nothing to do with US national interest, which is why Mr Bush has to keep saying that it is also part of the ‘war on terror’.

Iraqis, however, know that there were no terrorists in their country before the US invasion, and if they weren’t sure before that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, they know it now. So they are left to puzzle out what Washington’s true purposes in their country are — and none of the answers they come up with are reassuring.

The simplest answer, of course, is ‘oil’ — and while that is generally too simplistic an answer, Iraqis are not wrong to believe that they would not have been ‘liberated’ by American troops if they grew carrots for a living instead of pumping oil. They are also aware that the United States had to get its troops out of next-door Saudi Arabia, their main base in the region for the past decade, and that it has now transferred that base to Iraq. So it is assumed in Iraq that any new government created by the Americans will have to defer to US interests on both these issues.

If what Iraq gets in return is a stable and prosperous democracy, many Iraqis would be inclined to pay the price anyway, but as they watch plans unfold for the mass privatisation of the Iraqi economy and see Iraqi contractors frozen out of the reconstruction bonanza in favour of American corporations, their suspicions mount. They also know (because various members of the Bush administration have said so in speeches to American audiences, forgetting that everybody else can hear them too) that Washington intends the new Iraqi democracy to make peace with Israel.

An Iraqi government that does America’s bidding on oil, gives the US military bases, opens the country to American business domination and cozies up to Israel is not one that will enjoy much popular support in Iraq, so Iraqis assume that their new democracy is going to be of the ‘guided’ variety. That is why most Iraqis are sitting on their hands, neither fighting nor welcoming the American occupation. Those who have already taken up arms against the occupation forces, paradoxically, are those who fear that there might really be a genuine democracy in Iraq: the Sunni Arabs.

For many centuries the Arabic-speaking Sunnis who live in central Iraq have been the politically dominant elite of the country, even after the growth of Shia Islam in the south of the country turned them into a relatively small minority (now not much more than 20 percent) of the population. The Turks confirmed them in their position, Iraq’s British rulers took them over wholesale, and their domination of the Baath party kept them in power right down to early this year. But they would lose that role in a genuinely democratic Iraq, where Shias would dominate and Sunni Arabs would be even less influential than the Kurds.

Whether Baathist or not, the Sunni Arabs who comprise the great majority of the current Iraqi resistance fighters are not fighting for Saddam. For those who feared that a successful resistance movement would merely pave the way for Saddam’s return, his capture is as likely to galvanise them into open resistance as to reconcile them to the American occupation.

What we are likely to see in the short term, therefore, is a spike in the violence as the resistance leaders try to show they are still in business, followed perhaps by a lull as they try to exploit Saddam’s capture to broaden their popular base, and then a resumption in the steady rise of attacks on occupation troops. The likeliest long-term outcome, once the US has given up and gone home, is still a civil war and the partition of the country.—Copyright

LAST week a specially appointed French commission recommended that all conspicuous signs of religious belief — specifically including large Christian crosses, Jewish skullcaps and Muslim headscarves — be banned from public schools. While the supporters of the ban see it as a necessary defence of France’s republican principles, the opponents see it as the denial of those very principles. All agree on the importance of the issue.

The commission was appointed several months ago after a number of school authorities objected to their Muslim pupils wearing scarves in class, but the girls refused to take them off. The very high profile cases created demand, especially among teachers, for defining legislation (or at least guidelines) on the scarf issue. By recommending a ban, the commission has vindicated the school authorities.

Why would a country which reveres the principles of liberty and freedom impose such restrictions on the way its pupils dress? The reason given by the commission was ‘defence of secularism’. France’s constitution makes a pronounced and vigorous separation of church and state: there is no room for religion in French public life. The same principle extends to the state education system: religion has no place in the French classroom.

By justifying a headscarf ban in schools as ‘defence of secularism’, the commission is effectively saying that wearing head scarves undermines state secularism — undermines the separation of state and religion laid down in the French constitution. Is this really the case? Is banning school head scarves really a defence of secularism? Yes, if one defines secularism as the total rejection of religion. But no, if secularism is taken as just the separation of church and state — the definition used in the French constitution. This second, limited form of secularism would be undermined by acts of collective, organized worship in French schools, or by the teaching of religion in a proselytising manner.

But it is not and should not feel threatened by people choosing to dress modestly.

It is important to stress this point: for in all the hype about ‘the headscarf’ it is easy to lose sight of what this debate is actually about — dressing modestly. It is about Muslim girls and women choosing to dress in a manner that does not make them overtly attractive to men; the scarf is simply one means of doing that.

The commission is concerned about the defence of secularism. But what about defence of human rights? Being able to wear a headscarf is a basic human right. Afghanistan under the Taliban, Saudi Arabia and Iran (among others) are condemned by human rights activists because they force women to cover themselves. But forcing women not to is just as bad.

There is absolutely no difference between the government that imposes scarves and the government that pulls them off. Both are making choices for women that should be made by women themselves.

Both are imposing themselves in an area in which they have absolutely no right to be. Both are violating women’s human rights.

There is also a worrying patronizing attitude underlying the anti-scarf argument. The standard response by its proponents to girls who say they want to wear a scarf, is either that their parents force them to or that they don’t know what’s good for them. The wording used in Elle magazine epitomized this patronising attitude: it called the scarf a ‘visible submission of women’.

The scarf might appear oppressive to some, but it is seen by many others as a liberator — something that frees women from the pressures and stress of having to look attractive. These are both quite legitimate, quite rational points of view. What right do the former have to tell the latter that their thinking is wrong and misguided?

The underlying message in such assertions is that Islam as a religion is wrong. Little wonder that many people, especially Muslims, have interpreted the headscarf ban as an attack on Islam — part of the wider onslaught on Islam and the Muslim world under way since 9/11.

As evidence they point to the relative insignificance of the ban on Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses. Those bans do not impact their followers to anything like the same extent that banning headscarves impacts Muslim girls.

France has the largest Muslim population in Europe — roughly five million people, many of North African descent. Comments by members of the commission indicate that the real purpose of the ban is to address the growing radicalization of Islam among this (itself growing) Muslim population. Head of the commission, Bernard Stasi, described the proposed law as a counter to ‘forces trying to destabilize the republic’ — a clear reference to Islamic fundamentalism.

Islamic extremism and militancy is a reality in many countries — even in the Muslim world. It breeds hate and distrust and, in its most violent manifestations (suicide bombs), takes hundreds of innocent lives. It has to be tackled — but is banning headscarves really the way to do it?

The root causes of Islamic extremism, as identified by innumerable studies of different Muslim societies, are generally very straightforward: denial of political freedom, economic hardship, attacks on their religio-cultural identity, oppression and injustice (be it against themselves or fellow Muslims elsewhere). In recent times US policies in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East have been the main catalysts for Muslim militancy. In the case of France, the two big factors are socio-economic frustration and international sore-points like Iraq and Palestine.

Banning headscarves in French schools will not relieve these factors. It will not ease the frustrations of young, unemployed Algerians in Marseilles; it will not ease the anger of the Muslims in Paris and Lyons on the foreign occupation of Iraq and Palestine. How then will it curb the spread of radical ideology among French Muslims? What banning headscarves will do, in fact, is instil in French Muslims a sense of themselves being under attack, of facing injustice. For the scarf ban is a denial not of the practice of fundamentalist Islam but of mainstream moderate Islam. The very predictable effect of this will be increased not diminished — radicalization (seen, not least, in more rather than less girls opting for the headscarf).

This brings us to the real crux of the headscarf issue in France: not secularism or even militant Islam, but how to deal with the five million (mostly immigrant) Muslims living in France?

Neighbouring Britain, with a comparable Muslim population of immigrant origin, has taken the approach of encouraging multi-culturalism and diversity. Not only can girls in England wear headscarves to school, in many cases they are allocated a prayer room, and served halal meat in the school canteen. The British are promoting a society in which heterogeneity is tolerated and encouraged.

But France seems to be heading for the completely opposite approach: stifling diversity and promoting homogeneity. In order to be accepted in France immigrants must conform to the French way of life: they cannot and should not expect French society to accommodate their culture and values. The headscarf ban is part of this ‘homogenization’ drive.

This approach to its immigrant-Muslim population that France seems to be taking is bound to end in disaster. No previous attempt to forcibly remove religion from people’s personal lives has ever worked: look at the resurgence of religion in Russia and Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism: look at the election of a Muslim party to government in Turkey decades after Kemal Ataturk implemented his westernization-secularisation programme. Homogenisation by the state does not work. If France is seeking to integrate its North African Muslim population by stripping them of their religio-cultural identity, it will fail.

Not only that, it will create a much bigger problem than it is facing at the moment. For by signalling to French Muslims that they are a threat, that their religion and way of life is wrong — or even that it cannot be tolerated — France is pushing them towards extremism and ensuring that they never integrate with wider French society. There are innumerable precedents of what happens when states foster disgruntled minorities — sooner or later their frustrations and grievances manifest as violence.

The final decision on whether the headscarf ban becomes law rests with President Jacques Chirac. If he wants to truly defend the principles of the French republic — equality, liberty, freedom, secularism, human rights — he will not pass it into law.