| 08 January 2005 | Saturday | 26 Ziqa'ad 1425 |
Ugly truths about Guantanamo
Restoring trust in democracy
The future is bright
The renewed composite dialogue between Pakistan and India is one year old now. It all began with the Musharraf- Vajpayee joint statement of January 6 and ended with the foreign secretaries' joint statement of December 29, 2004, after their two-day talks on Kashmir, peace and security.
The net achievement of about 16 meetings held during 2004 at different levels between the two countries is not very reassuring as there have been too many words but hardly any action.
There were at least 16 joint statements by India and Pakistan during the year that has just come to an end. It was the regularity, the monotony and the repeated use of hackneyed phrases like "joint pledge to carry the peace process forward" that distinguished Indo-Pakistan diplomacy from previous years.
However, it is gratifying that the two neighbours at least did not release separate statements, blaming the other for failure, as in previous years, and this fact alone shows the desire on both sides to exercise restraint and keep the dialogue going.
The prevailing situation was appropriately summed up by foreign minister Natwar Singh that " diplomacy provides hope, not salvation." Let alone Kashmir, no tangible progress was made during the year even on the less complicated subjects under the composite dialogue concerning Siachen, the Wullar Tulbul navigation project, Sir Creek, terrorism and drug trafficking, economic and commercial cooperation and promotion of friendly exchanges in various fields.
The talks on nuclear and conventional CBMs have ended without achieving any breakthrough. Negotiations for a Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus service are stuck over the issue of documentation. There has been an understanding on opening the Khokrapar-Monabao rail link, but no date has been announced for the start of rail operation.
After Kashmir, the nuclear issue is perhaps the most complex question facing the decision makers in Islamabad and New Delhi. They have to realize that if they want to be accepted by the rest of the world as part of the official nuclear club, they have to first demonstrate their ability to responsibly manage their nuclear relationship.
An understanding on the nuclear issue between the two neighbours is all the more necessary because the Bush administration seems to have decided to recast the rules of the global nuclear game.
In keeping with the fate of negotiations on other bilateral issues, India-Pakistan talks on nuclear and conventional CBMs, held in mid-December in Islamabad failed to achieve a breakthrough. India wanted the agreement to be confined to surface-to-surface missiles, while Pakistan wanted it to be extended to all types of missiles.
While an agreement on nuclear CBMs should be finalized at the earliest, it is even more urgent to consider mechanisms that reduce the prospects for conventional military tensions between the two countries which have taken a dangerous turn at times.
It is obvious that the nuclear threat in South Asia cannot be addressed by nuclear-specific measures alone. What India and Pakistan need is a broader agenda of CBMs that will reduce the risk of conventional military confrontation which could ultimately escalate into a nuclear threat.
The initial round of renewed composite dialogue began on a promising note but failed to achieve a breakthrough in any direction. After a long period of indecision, particularly on the Indian side, there now seems to be a glimmer of hope that the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project may after all take off.
It is the only economic project that Pakistan is willing to de link from the Kashmir issue, and for that reason alone India should have pursued it more enthusiastically.
After all it has been the Indian argument that economic and political issues between the two neighbours should not be inter linked. However, many hurdles still remain, one of them being the impact of US financial sanctions on Iran.
The all-important question is: will 2005 witness better results of the composite dialogue between India and Pakistan? There can be breakthrough in negotiations on almost all issues provided New Delhi and Islamabad are prepared to match their words with visible gestures and concrete actions that indicate they are really serious in resolving their disputes.
While both Pakistan and India are entitled to try to achieve as much of their original goals as possible, they have to recognize that give-and-take is an essential part of diplomatic negotiations and a final settlement must be politically acceptable in both the countries and in Kashmir itself.
They say where there is a will, there is a way. However complicated the Kashmir issue may have become over the years, it can be resolved if the parties concerned really wish to resolve it.
Since the dispute has the potential to lead not only to armed confrontation between India and Pakistan, but to possible nuclear holocaust, it should not be left to poison relations between the two neighbours.
It will be tragic if the rapprochement between India and Pakistan that began with the Musharraf-Vajpayee joint statement of January 6, 2004, is not fully utilized in resolving the core issue between the two countries.
Perhaps it now seems possible that after two wars and more than 50 years of confrontation and wasted opportunity, a solution of the Kashmir issue, acceptable to all the concerned parties, may one day be in sight.
As Michael Binyon, diplomatic editor of The Times, London, has rightly pointed out, the first hurdle in the way of resolving the dispute is that for too long both Pakistan and India have used Kashmir for domestic politics.
Pakistan has made the cause of Kashmir almost a justification for its existence and has "sometimes tried to mask internal strife by invoking the spectre of a hostile India to divert attention from other problems - the economy, corruption, regional tensions - and rally the nation together."
India has also cited the "activities of Pakistani agents and subversives to justify questionable policies and to hold fissiparous states in line." The hopeful sign is that both India and Pakistan have now found that there are more votes to be won from peace than from war.
First of all, there must be a willingness on the part of India and Pakistan to look for a solution before any meaningful move can be made. Happily the key step, the establishment of a framework in the form of composite dialogue, has already been taken.
A final settlement of the Kashmir issue is included as one of the agenda items of the composite dialogue. Pakistan has already shown flexibility by admitting that other issues apart from Kashmir may also be included in the composite dialogue - bilateral relations, people to people contacts, trade etc.
As Binyon has observed, India has to make it clear that this is "not simply a consolidation of the status quo but a dynamic process that will indeed lead to a changed military, political and constitutional arrangement in Kashmir... That means giving up entrenched political attitudes and sometimes taking unilateral steps".
Pakistan has already taken the initiative by admitting, in effect, that its longstanding demand for a UN supervised plebiscite is now no longer practical. It is now up to India to make a gesture in response.
Whether India will be able to look beyond entrenched attitudes and established policies during 2005 will largely depend on how much political latitude Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is given within his own party and outside to make credible concessions to Pakistan.
The role of BJP, particularly of Mr Vajpayee, will be crucial in creating an across-the-board political consensus in India on the need for a positive gesture to Pakistan.
As a first step, the two sides should try to formulate a rough agreement on the principles that could guide towards a final settlement. The goal should be a solution that is acceptable to all the stakeholders - India, Pakistan and the Kashmiris.
Islamabad has already taken the initiative and demonstrated its willingness to go beyond entrenched attitudes. The ball is now in India's court and the next move has to come from New Delhi.
The writer is a former ambassador.
Ugly truths about Guantanamo
Somewhere in the US government is the person who came up with the idea of fusing the wail of an infant with an incessant meow from a cat food commercial to torment detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Detainees were also subjected to popular songs by the likes of Eminem and Rage Against the Machine. What Liberace would have done to an observant Muslim, I can only imagine, but it is a mad genius who realized that ordinary American culture can, with repeated exposure, be nearly lethal. God help us all.
In George Orwell's novel "1984," it was rats, as I recall, that were used to torture Winston Smith. It was not that the rats could do real physical damage; rather it was that Smith was phobic about them - "his greatest fear, his worst nightmare" - and so he succumbed, denounced his beliefs and even his girlfriend, and went back to his pub where he wasted his days drinking gin. This was Orwell's future, our present.
The term "Orwellian" is much abused, and back in the actual year 1984 I thought Orwell himself overrated. The essential novelist of the 20th century, I thought then, was Kafka, who realized that there is no more efficient murder weapon than what the critic George Steiner called "the lunatic logic of the bureaucracy."
Orwell, however, was off by only 20 years. With immense satisfaction, he would have noted the constant abuse of language by the Bush administration - calling suicidal terrorists "cowards," naming a constriction of civil liberties the Patriot Act and, of course, wringing all meaning from the word "torture."
Until just recently when the interpretation of torture was amended, it applied only to the pain like that of "organ failure, impairment of body function, or even death."
Anything less, such as, say, shackling detainees to a low chair for hours and hours so that one prisoner pulled out tufts of hair, is something else. We have no word for it, but it is - or was until recently - considered perfectly legal.
The administration's original interpretation of torture was promulgated by the Justice Department, under John Ashcroft, and the White House, under its counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales. The result has deeply embarrassed the United States.
Among other things, it produced the abuses of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which we were assured were an unaccountable exception. My God, if only higher authorities had known.
Now we all know. The International Committee of the Red Cross has complained that some of what has been done at Guantanamo - Guantanamo, not Abu Ghraib - was "tantamount to torture."
The American Civil Liberties Union has complained, but that you would expect. So, though, have the FBI and military lawyers, former and current. Just about across the board, the Bush administration has raised itself above the law.
It pronounced itself virtuous, but facing a threat so dire, so unique, that Gonzales found the Geneva Conventions themselves "obsolete." Such legal brilliance does not long go un rewarded. He has been nominated to become attorney general.
The elevation of Gonzales is supposed to be a singular American success story. This son of Mexican immigrants bootstrapped his way to Harvard Law School and from there to Bush's inner circle, first in Austin, then in Washington. There he came up with a brilliant definition of torture, one so legally clever that only the dead could complain and they, of course, could not.
Everyone was off the hook. Is it any wonder the Senate will probably soon confirm him? By next year, he will undoubtedly receive a cherished Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded to those who successfully serve the president but dismally fail the nation. In the audience, unseen but nonetheless present, Orwell and Kafka look on.
The revelations coming out of Guantanamo are hideous. The ordinary abuse of prisoners, the madness instilled by gruesome incarcerations, the incessant lying of the authorities - all this soils us as a nation. -Dawn/Washington Post Service
Restoring trust in democracy
It is perhaps curious that at his first press conference of an election year Prime Minister Tony Blair should have mused about the extent to which voters feel dis empowered by the electoral process. Yet one of the most critical questions of the forthcoming election may be not which party will win, but how many electors will turn out to give it a mandate.
Tony Blair was justified in challenging his assembled press audience with their responsibility for public disenchantment with the political process. The media is too focused on failure and too bored with success.
One study of two weeks in 1974 discovered that the ratio of negative to positive stories in the press was three to one, but by 2001, in the same two weeks, the gap had widened to a staggering 18 to one.
This appears all the more bizarre to those of us who were there in 1974 and can still remember just how much there was about which to be negative that year. It is hard to nurture trust in the parliamentary process when the public are unremittingly fed a news agenda that demonstrates failure.
The increasing obsession of the media with individual personalities also makes it hard to convey democracy as a collective process. The presentation of politics as some kind of a branch of the celebrity industry reduces the electorate to spectators rather than owners of the process.
What matters to the press is who is on the way up, who is on the way down, and who is on the way out, rather than what practical difference this may all make in the lives of their readers.
Yet much of the responsibility for public disengagement from the political process lies at the door of politicians themselves. The problem is not public apathy. The awkward truth is that the public no longer like the way the major parties do business.
During the same period in which fewer of the public bother to vote for a party platform, more of them than ever are active in expressing their own views. The overwhelming public response to the tsunami disaster is not the reaction of a public that has lost interest in the world, or abandoned its responsibility to help.
Mass demonstrations keep setting new records for turnout. The numbers who marched for peace on the eve of the invasion of Iraq were two to four times larger, depending on whose estimate you accept, than the highest turnouts of either suffragettes or Chartists.
One explanation for the dis empowerment that the prime minister now detects could be that he ignored the biggest protest movement in history and went to war anyway. In the days of Clement Attlee, nine out of 10 voters strongly identified with one or other major party.
As recently as the Thatcher era, the proportion was still half the electorate. Now is it only a third and still sinking. The ideology-free politics of New Labour has speeded up this decay in party identity.
The irony is that no party in British history has ever put so much effort into tracking what the public thinks by letting a thousand focus groups bloom and then faithfully playing back the results as their programme.
The net result, though, is confusion and incoherence over what New Labour's own distinctive values are. The problem is then compounded by the ruthless pursuit of triangulation to steal from our rivals any of their distinctive issues. It is hard to maximise voter identification with the party when its leadership appears determined to minimise differences from our opponents.
Then there is the dis empowerment caused by an electoral system that makes it entirely rational for the major parties to ignore the views of most of the electorate. The only voters who are genuinely empowered under our system are the niche market of floating voters in the key marginal seats, which is why campaign strategists spend so much time pursuing Mondeo Man, Worcester Woman and all the rest of the Pebbledash People.
The result is an increasingly sterile political debate in which bold or colourful ideas are suppressed lest they frighten the centre ground occupied by electors of no fixed opinion.
It is odd that the left has preserved a romantic attachment to the present electoral system despite the repeated demonstration that it results in election contests dominated by centrist opinion.
One paradox is that the very people who have done best out of this Labour government are least likely to find themselves the target of its campaign material. This week I met a pensioner in Kent who simultaneously told me that as a result of pension credit he had never been better off, but he no longer felt Labour belonged to him.
The other week I met a mother of a large family in the West Midlands who was receiving over #100 in tax credits, but aggressively demanded to know what Labour had ever done for her.
Both were people whose lives had been transformed by Labour policies, but who were alienated from a leadership whom they never saw in the company of people like themselves.
They may have no alternative party for whom to vote, but it would be rash to assume they will turn out to vote Labour if No 10 does not start showing that it is proud of the help we have given to the weak and the vulnerable as well as what we have done for the middle class.
In the immediate future, persuading voters to go to the polls may prove the key to this year's election. Yesterday, Tony Blair predicted it would be a tough fight, but in reality the tough contest will not be between Labour and Tory but between Labour and abstention.
It will not help if we persuade the few who are floating voters to choose us rather than our opponents if, in the meantime, the many who are our core voters stay at home.
In the longer term, New and old Labour have a common interest in reviving participation in the electoral process. It is not a problem but an opportunity to the right if confidence in the democratic process declines. If you believe in unfettered markets, a minimalist state and low taxation, you do not want a strong and assertive democracy.
It was the left that demanded democracy precisely because the equality of the mass franchise could offset the inequality of purchasing power in the marketplace. If you believe in using the power of democracy to deliver social justice, provide free public services, and remedy market failure, then you need the legitimacy of a strong mandate from a high turnout.
The left, therefore, has every reason to make common cause with Tony Blair in sharing his concern over the loss of trust in the electoral process, and encourage him to take the steps that could restore it. -Dawn/Guardian Service
The writer is a former foreign secretary of Britain.
The future is bright
IT'S natural: in the first week of January every right-thinking Indian wants to know what will happen in the coming year. The problem is not uncertain vision, or the inability to predict. The worry is that truth outstrips the wildest imagination or the bravest astrologer.
Take a test. Stand on the edge of a decade and let the options in your mind scream on the brink of impossibility. Truth, you will discover, has been stranger than any fantasy.
Who could have stared at the horizons of Eurasia in 1990 and seen the implosion of the Soviet Union? Who, in the confident America of 2000, could have seen the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre being blown out of the sky? You can start at the top and run down a pretty long list of impossibles that have become contemporary realities.
So it may be a much safer call to check out what will not happen this year. Will not? Sorry, amendment needed. May not. For the one thing you can be certain about in life is uncertainty.
1: The wise in Delhi appreciate that power is both transient and limited, but only the very foolish surrender power senselessly. The coalition in power in Delhi has problems, but folly is not one of them.
Contradictions will spurt through, but they will also be managed. The operating principle will be: a cabinet position in hand is worth two in the bush. Moreover, Dr Manmohan Singh is not vulnerable to the traditional Delhi disease, flattery. So he is not going to slip on the grease with which every politician is massaged every morning.
It will therefore be a year of status quo, at the centre and in most of the states (most, because February will see the departure of Om Prakash Chautala in Haryana and the BJP in Jharkhand).
This is good news for the ruling coalition, but worrying for the Congress because its aspirations are, justifiably, far above its present status. A squeeze in Bihar and a squash in Uttar Pradesh cannot be comfortable, status-wise. But to change things would risk the status in the coalition, so status quo.
2: The military forces of George Nero Bush will not leave Iraq, despite casualty levels at least as high as they were in 2004. A conflagration never frightens Nero, but acts as an aphrodisiac.
The Bush expectation is that an elected government in Baghdad will administer the country, or those parts of it that are willing to accept the rule of Baghdad, while American troops, living in modern Crusader fortresses, protect the oil and retain the right to swoop where they want in search of prey that is considered hostile to American interests.
The Pentagon, in the meantime, will plan for the impossible by stretching the scenario through awkward questions. What happens to the Sunni insurgency in case the Shias form a government in Baghdad? Does it reach an accommodation and spread its net into Saudi Arabia? What are the implications for the House of Saud in that case? What will be the Iranian response to an American-Israeli threat to its nuclear capabilities?
Nuclear power has become synonymous with nationalism in Iran and Pakistan: can America afford to provoke Iranian nationalism? Was, forgive the heresy, the wrong country invaded in 2003? If the shock and awe had to be turned on somewhere for reasons of re-election, should that country have been Iran? Nuclear installations would have been found, there would have been tacit support from Arab governments and Washington could have appointed a viceroy for the Afghan-Iran region.
And now to the most bizarre thought of all: could Osama bin Laden be legitimized and his support base in the Arab world turned into an asset for the West? He was once an ally, after all. Terrorism?
All enemies become terrorists when they declare war. The labels can be taken off if the deal demands it. Mao Zedong was worse than a terrorist; he was a communist. Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta was a Mau-Mau terrorist, the ogre of a million children's nightmares. Yasser Arafat was a poster-boy terrorist. Think.
3: India's biggest private sector industry, cricket, will head in only one direction: the bank. The faded, jaded Sourav Ganguly will remain captain till he is 50 years old and Jagmohan Dalmiya 75, whichever comes first. The dispute between Sharad Pawar and Dalmiya over the elections to the BCCI will remain in the courts till after Pawar's elected term is over, which means Dalmiya wins even if he doesn't. Doordarshan will telecast the Indo-Pak cricket series since Subhash Chandra's offer for telecast rights will be substantially dented by his legal bills.
Lawyers will also be the principal beneficiaries of the war between the Birlas and Lodha for an alleged Rs 5,000 crore bequest. Alleged, because no one has counted. Sachin Tendulkar will make three more centuries until he crosses the SPE (Saturation Point of Exposure) Index: that is, consumers begin to reject products that he advertises. Zahir Khan and Irfan Pathan will alternate in the team because injury problems. Harbhajan Singh will go straight and join the Zee cricket commentary team.
4: The fourth anniversary of India's biggest private sector dispute will be celebrated with prayers at Tirupati, Hardwar and Mathura by Anil Ambani, and six board room resolutions by Mukesh Ambani giving him plenipotentiary powers over all interior design decisions in any Ambani office worldwide, including the international headquarters of Crocodile Investments.
On the advice of astrologers and haute couture consultants from Paris, Anil Ambani will stop wearing black, the colour of Rahu and so yesterday in any case. Special yagnas will be organized to eliminate the impact of Rahu, currently in occupation of Aries, Anil's presiding star.
Simultaneously, other yagnas will be done, on behalf of Mukesh, to persuade Rahu to carry on what he is doing, and not be in such a tearing hurry to move away from Aries. Both brothers will laugh whenever seen in public, either singly or together.
5: The BJP will not accept defeat at a national conclave of the party in the last week of 2005. In a special resolution drafted by Pramod Mahajan and seconded by rising star Satpal Malik the weather will be given its due share of the blame; if it had rained earlier in the summer of 2004 the base vote would have come out and tilted the balance in 36 Lok Sabha constituencies, including Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh.
Uma Bharti will not become chief minister of Madhya Pradesh after seven more attempts, but will check out how she looks with the mantle of prospective prime ministership rests easily on her tender shoulders.
Narendra Modi will continue to ignore her. Atal Behari Vajpayee will bring the house down four times in the budget session, twice with quips on Laloo Yadav and twice with speeches on the future of the nation if the Bihar pattern of voting is repeated nationally.
6: Laloo Yadav and Rabri Devi will not settle outstanding tax claims on income from the milk of their private herd of 270 cows which will, by the end of 2005, cross five crore rupees.
Laloo Yadav will explain that the results of the assembly elections have vindicated his stand on income tax. Laloo Yadav will announce the creation of 200,000 more jobs in the railway budget of 2005, for young persons between the age of 32 and 42, bearing the surname Yadav from the districts of Barh, Chapra, Nalanda and Madhepura, trained in special martial capabilities in order to end crime and terrorism in Indian railways. Dr Manmohan Singh will be sorely tempted to change Laloo's portfolio from railways to fishing but will be restrained by the taciturn hand of Sonia Gandhi.
7: The state of Telangana will not come into existence by November 1, 2005, one year after the deadline for mayhem on the streets and pillage in the villages. However, a subcommittee to examine regional demands in the light of socio-economic conditions in 1954 and agricultural-industrial prospects in 2032 will start gathering evidence on the feasibility of smaller states in the Indian archipelago/subcontinent within the parameters of overall development in the IT sector. The chairman of the subcommittee will be an economist of the World Bank with visiting rights to Hyderabad.
The writer is editor-in-chief, Asian Age, New Delhi.