| 26 April 2004 | Monday | 05 Rabi-ul-Awwal 1425 |
People's right to know
Who is the greatest Bengali?
In the course of a week during which he met President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, and then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel, President George Bush has again shown total identification with the policies of the Jewish state in a manner that does not augur well for peace in the region.
At a joint press conference with Sharon on April 14, he not only reiterated US support for the security of Israel but virtually changed the roadmap for a settlement he had launched last year with the support of the European Union, Russia and the United Nations.
How far this gesture to the Jewish state will help with his election campaign in the US is open to question, but it will seriously affect the superpower's credibility in the Middle East as well as in the Islamic world.
He could have been more cautious in reacting to the "Sharon Plan" which consists of withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, and a part of the West Bank, minus several Jewish settlements deep inside Palestinian territory.
Israel will keep the fence it has built, mostly on Palestinian land, though a pious hope has been expressed that it will be dismantled eventually. Palestinian refugees will be resettled in the reduced Palestinian state. Earlier, during his meeting with President Mubarak, he had adopted a more balanced position.
As the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan stated in his reactions, the stance taken by Bush is neither in conformity with UN resolutions, nor with the roadmap that was endorsed by the UN.
The European Commission has pointed out that President Bush had no right to pronounce on the issues of borders or refugees, which could only be settled with the consent of both parties.
The roadmap had envisioned that major issues, such as the borders, the status of Jerusalem and the problem of refugees would be discussed by the Israelis and Palestinians in the final phase in 2005.
The immediate response of the Palestinians was one of outrage and protest, accompanied by both concern and anxiety that the lone superpower could adopt such a partisan stance.
Veteran Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, whom the US and Sharon have been trying to sideline, declared that the Palestinian people would continue their struggle for an independent Palestinian state, with its capital at Al Quds, which "could only be achieved through a final deliverance from the Israeli occupation and settlement activity."
This goal will continue to receive the backing of the Arab and Islamic countries, and indeed of all those desirous of peace and stability in the region.
There was dismay even among thinking circles within the US, that at a time when opposition to the US-led attacks on Iraq and even Afghanistan has been mounting, and becoming more militant, President Bush had virtually torn up the roadmap agreed with the Quartet, by accepting all Israeli demands.
Apart from the uprising that is in progress in Iraq, there is growing resentment in Arab and Islamic countries over the war on terror being used primarily to target them.
The decision by Bush to endorse the "Sharon Plan" is likely to complicate the task of experts and think tanks pondering ways to assuage anti-US feeling in the region. He has virtually done something no earlier US administration had done: recognizing the acquisitions made by Israel through its policies of aggression and state terrorism against the Palestinians.
His references to UN resolution 242 and 338 are empty rhetoric in the context of this stance. The credibility of the US goal of spreading democracy and development in the Greater Middle East has suffered irreparable damage.
Sharon's practical approach, ever since he came out with his unilateral plan to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians, has been based on imposing Israel's ever increasing demands through the use of force, with total disregard for Arab sensitivities.
Though Gaza is to be evacuated, Israel has stepped up military intervention there, and civilian casualties have mounted as Israel targets localities allegedly inhabited by members of the Hamas and the Islamic Jihad.
One would have expected Bush, as the leader of the sole superpower, to use his influence to compel Sharon to show greater consideration for Palestinian rights and sensitivities. Instead, he has chosen to fully endorse his aggressive policies, by legitimizing the acquisition of territory by force.
The US is finding itself obliged to increase its military forces in the region, in the short term, in order to deal with the insurgency in Iraq. The goal of transferring sovereignty to the Iraqis by July 1, 2004, is being retained, though this is predicated on getting a multinational force under the UN umbrella to take over peacekeeping responsibilities.
The reluctance of the UN to revive its role quickly is related to the security situation, but the latest Bush decision on Palestine is likely to fuel popular resistance, and make other countries think seriously about becoming identified with Washington's objectives.
The governments of Arab and Islamic countries are likely to come under strong public pressure to refrain from sending their forces either for peacekeeping or reconstruction.
The Bush decision marks a major departure from the superpower's recent record, following its early role in the creation of Israel, of maintaining some balance in its policies in this sensitive region.
Despite its commitment to the security of Israel, the US won a measure of acceptance as a factor for international justice and peace in coming to the rescue of Muslim communities threatened with aggression and genocide.
Washington extended principled support to Muslims in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupation and to Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo against Serb oppression, in the final two decades of the 20th century.
There was some validity to the claim by Madeleine Albright, Clinton's secretary of state in 2000, that the US was the "indispensable state" for resolving any international crisis.
Clinton had strengthened the UN, and joined in international action to tackle such issues as the environment, by signing the Kyoto Protocol and international law by backing the establishment of an International Criminal Court.
The Bush presidency began with the adoption of a unilateral stance to capitalize on the unrivalled military and technical superiority of the US. The administration showed little regard for international disapproval resulting from its repudiation of such globally popular initiatives as the Kyoto Protocol on the environment, and of the International Criminal Court, set up after protracted negotiations to punish crimes against humanity. The Ballistic Missile Defence initiative, designed to ensure US hegemony, was launched on May 1, 2001, without advance consultation with other powers.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US required the establishment of a global coalition to deal with both the manifestations and roots of terrorism in the world. Basing itself on the losses suffered and the provocation caused, the US also claimed the right of preemption, to hit at terror before it could do damage.
While the attack on Afghanistan could be justified on the ground that it was the seat of Al Qaeda, and its leadership, the war on Iraq was waged on grounds that remain unproved, since no weapons of mass destruction or Iraqi links with terrorism have been found.
The attack on Iraq was clearly motivated by the twin objectives of ensuring Israel's security, and of controlling the region's energy resources. The younger Bush launched a roadmap on Palestine in 2003, just as the older Bush had initiated the Madrid process in 1992, that continued under the Oslo Accord, to demonstrate American even-handedness in the Middle East.
That has now been abandoned by Bush. The Arab and Islamic countries are bound to re-assess their stance, and to activate their groups, the Arab League and the OIC, to hold in-depth consultations.
Tony Blair's effort to revive the roadmap on Palestine represents a desperate move to salvage western influence in the Middle East. However, the decision by Bush to fully support Sharon's plan is likely to produce such strong reactions in the region, that violence and instability may prevail, rather than peace and stability that the US claims it is seeking.
One wonders how Bush will rebuild his standing in the Arab and Islamic countries, after such a rash and inconsiderate decision that condemns millions of Palestinians to servitude and subordination.
For Pakistan, which has received repeated requests from the US to send troops to Iraq, the contempt shown by Bush to the Palestinian cause is going to generate powerful opposition to a move that will have the effect of turning Pakistanis into targets of Iraqi nationalists.
The UN, on whose Security Council Pakistan is represented, needs to assert itself on a just Palestine settlement. The need to call a special summit of the OIC has become more urgent, and a preparatory meeting of foreign ministers should be held as early as possible.
People's right to know
Fredom of information and the people's right to know is again in the news. Last week, Prime Minister Jamali formed a committee under Sharifuddin Pirzada to finalize the Freedom of Information law.
Good governance rests on the tripod of transparency, accountability and public participation. Each leg of this tripod rests on the foundations of the right to information. The United Nations recognized the right to information as "a fundamental human right and the touchstone of all freedoms" as early as 1946.
Judiciaries in many countries have upheld the citizen's right to information. In Pakistan, the Supreme Court recognized it in the Nawaz Sharif vs. Federation of Pakistan case in 1993 thus: "The right of citizens to receive information can be spelt out from the freedom of expression guaranteed in Article 19 (Constitution of Pakistan)."
Several NGOs like the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, the Consumers Rights Protection and others have been fighting for a freedom of information law. Some international donor organizations particularly the Asian Development Bank link aid to transparency in governance and the right of the people to know.
As a result, governments in Pakistan have made some half-hearted attempts at legislation. An ordinance was promulgated in 1997 by the then caretaker government but was quietly allowed to lapse subsequently.
In October 2002, when international donors insisted on legislation on the people's right to know, an ordinance called the Freedom of Information Ordinance was hurriedly promulgated. The fact that the parliament that had come into being at that time was deliberately bypassed in making the law throws some light on the negative attitude of the government of the day on the issue.
It seems that the real purpose was less to ensure a citizen's right to know and more to deflect pressure from international donors. From the serious flaws in the ordinance it is clear that it has been designed to give protection to the privileged ruling elite from being questioned by civil society.
Parliament was bypassed for reasons perhaps of fear that the elected representatives might not agree to the blanket protection of the privileged few under cover of national security and classified records.
Furthermore, the fact that rules have still to be framed for the implementation of the ordinance shows that it was not the intention of the government to implement even this faulty law.
This Freedom of Information Ordinance, like so many other laws, orders and ordinances made by the military government of General Musharraf, was also validated by the MMA-government negotiations over the Legal Framework Order (LFO) that led to the 17th Constitutional Amendment.
Democratic political opposition parties, which had rejected the LFO, pleaded with the MMA not to agree to this validation of all acts of the military government. The religious parties claimed to have tried but failed.
Clearly, the outgoing military rulers were not ready to open for public discussion the privileges and protection they had created for themselves through contrived mechanisms of law.
Be that as it may, civil society must now see to it that the freedom of information law is brought before parliament for a thorough debate. It is an affront to the elected representatives that a three-member committee, two of whom are civil servants, should make the "right to know law" which is the foundation of transparency in governance.
There are serious shortcomings in the FOI Act 2002 that can be removed only through an open discussion in parliament. As a matter of fact, the draft law should be thrown open for a public debate for a month or so before being presented in parliament so that all stakeholders and members of civil society can contribute to the making of such a fundamental law.
Some of the serious flaws in the Freedom of Information Law stand out. First, the ordinance is in addition to, and not in derogation of, anything contained in any other law for the time being in force. It means that if there is any law that militates against the right to know, that will take precedence over the ordinance and nullify its effect.
For instance under the Official Secrets Act, which was promulgated in 1923, any official document marked as "secret" or "classified" cannot be made public. There are no rules and guidelines as to who orders such classification of official documents and the criterion for doing so. Thus a section officer will just have to scribble "classified" on a document to deny anyone access to it.
The opposition has already submitted a resolution in the Senate calling for a review of the Official Secrets Act. Indeed thought should be given to encourage what may be called a Whistle Blowers Act that protects a civil servant from prosecution if he discloses wrongdoing or malpractice.
Secondly, the ordinance prohibits making public several important documents which throw light on the decision-making process in government departments. These include noting on files, minutes of meetings, any interim orders, records of banking companies relating to the accounts of their customers and the record of private documents furnished to public offices among others.
Denying access to these important documents means shielding the government against charges of misgovernance and corruption in hatching schemes and making purchases that might be utterly useless or downright harmful.
For instance, in all high-value contracts and purchases one would like to know where the money comes from and on what terms, who drafts and who approves the specifications which suit a particular beneficiary to the exclusion of others?
One should like to know the minutes of the meeting at which the awards were finally made. What were the objections raised by some officers and what happened to them? Who overruled their objections and what reasons were given for such a stand? One also wants to know the circumstances under which the lowest tender was rejected.
Or how the lowest bid, which ultimately proved not to be the lowest, was manipulated by secretly understating the quantity of a high-value item. How were the objections of the others dealt with?
The same principle should also apply to the massive purchase in defence deals that have already been reported in international papers and are known to all except the people of Pakistan. The reports of the Public Accounts Committee of parliament on questionable deals and irregularities are regularly published. There can be no justifiable restrictions on documents relating to such deals on the unconvincing plea of national security and secrecy.
The procedure of appointment of judges has been laid down in the Constitution. The public should know whether and how the procedure is followed. The ordinance fails to achieve the vital purpose of the right to know and must be placed before parliament and the public at large for a detailed discussion and evaluation.
The writer is a member of the Senate.
Who is the greatest Bengali?
The bbc seems to be at it again. Fresh from their excursion in determining the greatest Englishman, where science eventually triumphed over politics, they have now turned their attention to a people who have always had an embarrassment of riches. But this time their efforts have hit a hidden reef and resulted in a storm of protest.
The BBC Bangla Service recently conducted an opinion survey of its listeners to determine the "Greatest Bengali of All Time". The survey, spread across 12 million listeners in Bangladesh, West Bengal and the Bengali diaspora, took 20 days to compile, and concluded on April 14, the Bengali New Year's Day, after a thousand listeners had responded through email and the post.
The result of the survey showed Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as topping the list. This was not unexpected, for politics inevitably dominates over culture in this part of the world. The urban middle class in Bangladesh is, however, sharply divided over the survey which the opposition Awami League regards as "the verdict of history".
The survey has nevertheless been roundly condemned by opponents of the Awami League who see the BBC as a partisan villain. And the Jatiyatabadi Chhatra Dal, which is the student wing of the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party, has rejected the survey outright.
What has astonished a number of critics in Kolkata as well as Dhaka, is that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman has edged out people like Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel Prize winner, Kazi Nazrul Islam, the rebel poet, Subhas Chandra Bose, who led an army of Indian nationalists against the British Raj, Jagadish Chandra Basu, the great scientist, Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, who was always a thorn in the side of the West Pakistan establishment, and Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, the brilliant lawyer, who went on to become prime minister of Pakistan.
However, for a non-Bengali like myself, who was weaned on the romantic fatalism of Marcel Carne and nurtured on the exuberant surrealism of Luis Bunuel, I was truly astounded to learn that in the survey, one of Calcutta's greatest sons, who happens to be one of the world's greatest film directors, did not even figure as an "also ran".
I am referring, of course, to the late Satyajit Ray, who is frequently mentioned in the same context as Renoir, Kurosawa and Bergman, and is frequently compared to Pagnol, Cocteau and de Sica. Ray certainly has his admirers in Karachi, and I am sure if the lads from the BBC had, in their quest, ventured to this neck of the woods, they would have acquired a different set of preferences.
In fact, on July 20, 1992, Hameed Haroon, one of the city's cultural giants, ably assisted by Rehana Saigol, paid tribute to the great Satyajit Ray. In a 60-minute illustrated lecture at the PACC, he presented a series of vignettes culled from some of the master's more accessible works, interspersed by crisp, informative and intelligent asides.
Unlike Hameed Haroon, I never had the honour of meeting Satyajit Ray. But I understand from reading Andrew Robinson's excellent biography of the great director (which was more exhaustive than Marie Seton's earlier work) that the latter was an extremely humane person, humble to a fault - a person who was sensitive to the needs of others and who always contrived to suggest a life of unruffled serenity.
What made him different from other directors of the western and eastern persuasion, was that he was equally at home in the West and the East, whether he was chatting with hikers rambling over a pub lunch, or in his native Calcutta where in a matter of seconds a boiling sky could discharge a wilderness of electricity and produce a tropical downpour of such intensity that life was paralysed for hours.
Though he was not averse to operating out of a bed-sitter in Paddington, Ray worked best at home in his study ensconced in his favourite chair - an intermittently functioning telephone within easy reach.
He liked to recline in loose clothes with his bare feet resting on a convenient low table and work at the red cloth-bound shooting notebooks that contained literally every aspect of a film.
There was no air conditioning in the study, and sometimes in the sweltering head of summer he had to close the louvered windows to shut out the outside world.
The walls of his study were fringed by bookcases crammed with books and magazines. In a corner a bust of Beethoven stood on a piano under a photograph of Sergei Eisenstein (director of Battleship Potemkin) and in a full cabinet, almost spilling out its properties, were cassettes, records and tapes of western classical music where Mozart and Bach enjoyed a special position.
Ray often compared the works of Eisenstein to the music of Bach and the films of Pudovkin to the music of Beethoven. Both directors worked with unwavering discipline over a wide range of dynamics and colour.
There was no image of Tagore who had influenced three generations of the Ray family. When Andrew Robinson casually asked Ray why he didn't display a bust of Tagore, the master chuckled and said" "Such a clichi."
Ray, an advertising man, an illustrator, an author, a critic and a filmmaker directed over 30 films since 1955 and always with a telling economy of means. He had an almost dilettante quasi-professional disdain concerning money.
He distilled the urban as well as the rural landscape with equal felicity, whether involved in a pacy drama about a child from a random cross section of metropolitan low life, or while painting a grimly authentic canvas of squalour and destitution in the City of Dreadful Night.
Ray experimented with mood, period and milieu more than any other director and won almost every major prize, sometimes more than once. In 1992, he was awarded an Oscar for a lifetime of achievement in films - a presentation which was made in a Calcutta hospital shortly before his death.
Thirty years earlier, in 1960, the first American homage to Ray was presented at the University of California in Berkeley by Albert Johnson. This Ray programme included the US premiers of The Music Room and The Goddess.
It was also in 1960 that the Apu trilogy was taken up by an American distributor, and the United States was introduced to one of the most prodigious personalities in the history of the cinema.
Akira Kurosawa, director of the Japanese classic Rashomon and The Seven Samurai, described Ray as a giant of the movie industry. And Tim Radford of the Guardian who after seeing The Chess Players, a film about two civilizations, one effete and ineffectual, the other vigorous and malignant, wrote: "Satyajit Ray seems to be able to achieve more and more with less and less".
Some of the other reviewers were not quite so generous. After the screening of Devi one London reviewer wrote: "The story itself is dauntingly alien." Another felt "it was an exquisite bore. The action is as remote as one of those Indian temple friezes depicting the gods about their bloody business."
The reviewer of The Times was a little less patronizing. "The film is more a matter of uncluttered story telling than of atmosphere and the loving accumulation of detail." And Bosley Crowther, doyen of the New York critics, was quite unmoved on the occasion of the US premiere of Pather Panchali (Ballad of the Road), and found the film amateurish in the extreme.
Ray had a lot to say about critics particularly the British and the Americans who insisted on commenting critically on the world of other people without familiarizing themselves with the latter's cultural and historical background.
Once, after reading a particularly unintelligent review of Devi by an English writer, Ray pointed out that in western religious thinking dominated by the Jewish and Christian traditions, God is always represented in male form - whereas in India the female nature of God is also celebrated.
When the citizens of Kolkata and Dhaka read this epistle, one hopes they will give this great human being an honoured place among the other great Bengalis. He certainly deserves every consideration.