| 12 February 2005 | Saturday | 02 Muharram 1426 |
Signals from North Korea
Small minds, big chairs
Tony Blair's poll prospects
The last-minute decision by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh not to attend the 13th Saarc summit that was scheduled for February 6-7 in Dhaka out of security considerations, has caused shock in Bangladesh, and deep disappointment in other Saarc member countries.
Pakistan, that is current Saarc chair, has special reason to feel aggrieved as the role and activity of the organization had been revitalized at the 12th summit held in Islamabad in January 2004. The Dhaka summit was set to endorse numerous decisions taken since then to promote cooperation in various areas.
The reasons advanced for India's decision relate to developments in two Saarc member states: Nepalese King Gyanendra's dismissal of his government, and the alleged lack of adequate security in the host country, Bangladesh.
India had itself suggested the summit dates of February 6-7 in response to a proposal from Dhaka for February 7-8, after earlier dates in January were dropped owing to the destructive tsunami that had caused heavy loss of life in Sri Lanka and India.
Tension had been building up in Nepal, and though the decision by the king was seen as a blow to democracy, it was a domestic concern of a member state. What is more, Nepal had announced that the king would attend the summit in Dhaka.
The dismissed government enjoyed the backing of New Delhi, but then, the charter of Saarc excluded political matters from the purview of the organization, a provision introduced at the insistence of India when the charter was adopted. As for security conditions in Dhaka, India had already sent its officials to participate in the preparatory meetings at the working level.
Though Saarc had been established with India's full participation in the preliminary consultations among member states that had gone on for four years, New Delhi is directly responsible for most of the eight postponements of earlier summits.
The postponement of the 6th summit in Colombo in 1991 was sought on the basis of the apparent illness of the king of Bhutan. However, it was obvious that the real reason was that New Delhi wanted to register its disapproval of Sri Lanka's attitude to the prolonged presence of Indian forces in the country.
Being more than three times larger than the rest of the members put together, India never accepted obligations, accruing from its position as a Saarc member, that affected its paramount status in South Asia.
Indeed, Mrs Indira Gandhi, who was the founding prime minister of Saarc from India in 1985, had formulated the Indira Doctrine that foreign countries needed India's approval before they entered into relations with countries of South Asia.
Pakistan was the only country in the region that dared to question this doctrine, and had refused to abide by it. The sad reality is that India showed scant concern for the effectiveness of Saarc whenever it wanted to assert its paramount status in South Asia.
When India under the BJP embarked on the path of trying to isolate Pakistan, in 1999, after General Musharraf assumed power following an attempted coup against him, one tactic employed was to prevent all political organs of Saarc from functioning.
The rationale given was that Indian representatives did not wish to rub shoulders with a military ruler. It was conveniently forgotten that General Ziaul Haq was president of Pakistan when Saarc was founded, and the person who proposed its establishment was another military ruler, General Ziaur Rahman, president of Bangladesh.
Despite having existed for nearly two decades, Saarc has not been permitted by India's hegemonic stance to take off in a meaningful way. India prefers to deal with its neighbours on a bilateral basis so that it can dictate conditions that would not be attainable in a multilateral setting.
At certain times, New Delhi made a show of consideration for the weaker neighbours, when for instance, the Gujral Doctrine was proclaimed, during the prime ministerial tenure of I.K. Gujral.
This doctrine stated that India would not insist on reciprocity in its agreements with its smaller neighbours that were too weak to fulfil the condition of reciprocity normally enforced in bilateral economic accords. However, Pakistan was specifically excluded, for its alleged support to the anti-Indian freedom struggle of the Kashmiris.
India's attitude towards multilateral bodies is riddled with contradictions. As a part of its "look east" policy to develop links with the economically vibrant nations of Southeast Asia, India has accorded high priority to establishing institutional links with members of Asean.
This is a regional grouping that has not only achieved success in economic cooperation but has also set up an Asian Regional Forum to take up security issues that India has specifically excluded from the ambit of Saarc. While building up close links with this grouping India has not attempted to actively promote cooperation with its South Asian neighbours.
On the eve of the forthcoming 13th Saarc summit in Dhaka, the outlook appeared bright, following the impetus given to the regional grouping at its 12th summit in Islamabad, held in January 2004, in which India's then prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, participated and extended full support to measures designed to promote regional cooperation.
Pakistan, in the chair till the next summit, actively participated in follow-up meetings designed to promote increased cooperation in trade, poverty alleviation, and social action programmes. The 13th summit was expected to give approval to numerous recommendations worked out in meetings at the expert level.
The sudden and unexpected second postponement throws cold water on all these expectations, and though the meeting will be rescheduled, the momentum of the past year has been lost.
The spirit of cordiality that had been built up after the Islamabad summit has been shattered as India has shown total disregard for the sensitivities of two of its neighbours, namely Nepal and Bangladesh, since their governments are not approved of by New Delhi.
The setback has not only caused deep disappointment to member states of Saarc. Informed foreign observers have also taken note of the obvious damage to cooperation in South Asia, a region that has suffered from the lack of it.
Writing in the International Herald Tribune Philip Bowring, former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, has given the title "India the bully" to his comments on the Indian decision.
He says that the time was particularly propitious for regional cooperation, following the progress made in Indo-Pakistan rapprochement which might have been further advanced by a meeting between their prime ministers in Dhaka.
Further progress was also expected in establishing a South Asian Free Trade Area. Bowring regrets that India has not learnt from the progress achieved by Asean member states, by putting regional cooperation ahead of bilateral disputes.
His conclusion is that regional cooperation can only happen if India takes the lead, ignores bilateral frictions and is prepared to offer economic opportunities that entice poorer and smaller countries into seeing the benefits of freer trade. "India can only lead if it does not engage in the kind of bullying evident in its withdrawal from the Saarc summit meeting," he concludes.
The writer is a former ambassador.
Signals from North Korea
Inside the hermit kingdom, things are rarely what they seem. Reports last autumn of defecting generals, anti-regime graffiti, and disappearing portraits of the Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il, provoked excited speculation about insurrection in North Korea. But like previous flurries concerning the world's most isolated country, the rumours came to nothing.
Earlier this month, state radio said Mr Kim, far from being overthrown, was planning to extend the family dynasty begun by his father. "He stressed that if he falls short of completing the revolution it will be continued by his son and grandson," the radio quoted Mr Kim as saying.
None of this may matter in any case. Many countries have a president-for-life. But Kim Il-sung, North Korea's "Great Leader" and communist founder, who died in 1994, is officially president-for-ever. On this basis, his Elvis-suited son could also prove immortal.
North Korea's statement recently that it possesses nuclear weapons and will not resume disarmament talks emanates from this same mysterious palace of smoke and mirrors.
Pyongyang has previously claimed to have atomic weapons capability. It now says that it still wanted the six-party negotiations to succeed and remained committed to a nuclear-free Korean peninsula.
The significance of its demarche lay in the wording. What was needed now, the statement said, was "justification for us to attend the talks" with an expectation of "positive results".
In short, Mr Kim was upping the ante. He wants more carrots and fewer sticks, less US rhetoric about democracy and "outposts of tyranny", fewer Japanese threats of sanctions, and more tangible security and economic incentives.
This need is very real. For even as he poked President George Bush in the eye, just as the US was softening its tone in confident expectation of resumed dialogue, Mr Kim faced a hidden emergency of enormous proportions.
According to UN agencies, North Korea "will post another substantial food deficit in 2005 and require external aid to support more than a quarter of its 24 million people.
"Insufficient production, a deficient diet, lower incomes and rising prices mean that 6.4 million North Koreans - most of them children, women and the elderly - will need food assistance," the UN said.
While the regime has tentatively embarked on market-oriented reforms, allowing private businesses and individually run farms, the country remains crushingly poor. It is a constant source of refugees seeking sanctuary in China and South Korea. Unknown thousands are held in gulag-style labour camps largely concealed from view.
In contrast to his recent bombast, Mr Kim's new year message afforded an unintended insight into the regime's difficulties. "The whole nation should exert all its efforts for agriculture in 2005, which marks the Workers' Party's 60th anniversary," he urged. "Rice is our gun." Much hope also rests on a national potato drive.
The gap between perceptions and realities in North Korea has an external dimension, too. Nobody knows exactly what weapons it has - or how best to proceed.
The UN's nuclear chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, has insisted that the main threat arises from North Korea's conversion of spent plutonium rods into fuel for possibly four to six nuclear bombs. But in 2002 the Bush administration said it had detected a second, secret programme for weapons-grade uranium enrichment.
North Korea rejected that claim, expelled UN inspectors and quit the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Korea expert Selig Harrison said last month that Mr Bush's tactics had wrecked the Clinton administration's agreed framework that had halted North Korea's plutonium reprocessing since 1994.
The US claim of cheating was contentious, Mr Harrison said. Yet because of Washington's increasing hostility, North Korea had resumed reprocessing activity.
"Relying on sketchy data, the Bush administration presented a worst-case scenario as an incontrovertible truth and distorted its intelligence much as it did on Iraq," said Mr Harrison. In an Orwellian land of shadowy illusion, US policy also has its share of ambiguity. -Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
Small minds, big chairs
Laloo Prasad Yadav's body language is different this time. He does not have about him that air of certainty which he exuded in the last three elections in Bihar from 1990 onwards.
What worries him is that he does not know whether the Muslim vote bank, commanding nearly 16.5 per cent of the electorate, would honour the cheque his Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) has liberally drawn on in the past.
The impression is that the Muslims have begun moving towards the Congress which is not opposing Laloo, a minister at the centre, but which is not supporting him either. The Congress is also posturing as if it is on the side of his rival, Ram Vilas Paswan of the Lok Janshakti Party, again a minister at the centre.
As if this were not bad enough, the Congress, while flirting with the two, is trying to retrieve its old Muslim-Dalit base. It appears that it will win more than the 27 seats that was its last tally in the 243-member assembly.
To the embarrassment of Laloo, Congress president Sonia Gandhi said during her election campaign that law and order in Bihar required "great improvement". (There are some 20,000 non-bailable warrants pending execution in the state and the number of recorded kidnappings in the state since Laloo's reign is 32,600.)
Still, Laloo believes he has played his trump card by releasing the interim report of the Banerjee commission which has said that the fire that burnt down the train compartment at Godhra, sparking the Gujrat riots, was "accidental".
Laloo feels he has helped the Muslim community that has been blamed for setting the compartment on fire. Yet the community is worked up since the state minority commission has said in a report that the Muslims in Bihar continue to remain at the lowest rung and get neither employment nor other benefits in proportion to their population.
However, Laloo's plus point is that Bihar has had no communal riots since the advent of his party's rule. But the argument for a change is heard persistently as you move from one end of the state to the other.
The criticism by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) - the entire leadership in the state - is making very little effect except to saffronize the atmosphere in certain urban areas.
The upper caste, the Bhumihars, is still sticking to the Congress as it has done in the past. The BJP's support comes from the Kurmis, the flock of Nitish Kumar of the Janata Dal (United), who was the railway minister in the Atal Behari Vajpayee government.
The Bihar assembly may turn out to be a hung one, giving Laloo a chance to manipulate a majority and getting the Congress force Paswan to support him. Paswan says it will be the other way round with Laloo supporting him.
Jharkhand, a state that was part of Bihar in the last assembly election, may also see that no party has a majority. Shibu Soren, a tribal leader, has made a poll alliance with the Congress and the combination may form the government. But what pulls down Soren is the taint of corruption.
A big defeat stares the BJP in the face in Jharkhand where it is in power at present. Tribals who are in a majority in the state have come to see through the party which they associate with the rich. A substantial Christian community is also solidly against the BJP.
Haryana's problem is different. The Congress is appropriating the anti-incumbency vote against Chief Minister Om Prakash Chautala. The BJP is nowhere in the picture although Chautala tried his best to woo the party. The Congress may suffer a bit because of internal wrangling but should otherwise make it comfortably.
Whatever the three assembly results may or may not prove, they reflect once again India's fractured political scene: no party has a countrywide base. The Congress had it once, but now, it has practically no showing in more than half the country. The BJP has been primarily confined to the Hindi-speaking states where it has been able to play the religious card to the detriment of a pluralistic polity.
The left, which began with its own government in Kerala as far back as in 1951, has not gone beyond two other states - West Bengal and Tripura. It is obvious that it has not been able to comprehend how the minds of Hindi-speaking states tick. But the new phenomenon that is emerging is that regional parties also cannot do without the support of all-India players. It is a strange mishmash, making politics dependent on convenience, caste or combination, not on principles, values or ideological considerations.
Take the Congress, the all-India party, in Bihar. It has an understanding with the RJD on the one hand and the Lok Janshakti on the other. The Congress is hardly bothered over the election mani festoes of the two. Still, the Congress has to have an alliance with them to reach the backward classes through Laloo and the dalits through Paswan.
In Jharkhand again, the Congress has joined hands with the regional party, Jharkhand Mukti Morcha. It is the same story with the BJP in Bihar. It has aligned itself with the regional party, the Janata Dal (United) led by state leader Nitish Kumar.
The BJP could not win over Paswan who had walked out of the Vajpayee government following the Gujrat carnage. Still, the BJP is giving him indirect support in the hope that if he falls short of a majority, it may make up the numbers.
In fact, local problems come to the fore whenever there is any election - state or general. The first few elections after independence had issues which transcended state borders.
The glow of freedom was still there and people were keen to see India on the international firmament. Those considerations have dimmed over the years. It was P.N. Haksar, a leftist secretary to the then prime minister, Mrs Indira Gandhi, who separated the Lok Sabha and assembly polls.
He believed that local issues would dominate the assembly polls and the national ones in the Lok Sabha election. "I have certain dreams and I want them to come here," he told me. What he had in mind was a country that could discuss its national issues as dispassionately as the states could their own problems. They should not mix the two.
Haksar's dream was shattered during his lifetime. He found the voice of national issues lost in the cacophony of local and regional noises. Local leaders, flaunting their castes and the mafia they commanded, spoiled the atmosphere. Criminals and musclemen came in when they saw that the contest had been reduced to one of power, money and caste combinations.
Some of them have attained positions in assembly and parliament. Maybe, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had them in mind when he said the other day that small minds have come to occupy big chairs.
Tony Blair's poll prospects
The perpetual struggle for the "soul" of the British Labour Party was placed on hold in the posh Granita restaurant in 1994 in a legendary deal struck between rivals Tony Blair and Gordon Brown as to the terms of their leadership of Labour's future, an internal struggle viewed as wasting energies better focused on dumping the Tories.
The expedient agreement, which was even dramatized in a British television 2003 drama entitled "The Deal," installed Tony Blair as leader with Gordon Brown as his conditionally loyal sidekick, and paved the way in 1997 for the business-chummy New Labour programme in an election that the party would have won in a breeze no matter who led it.
Brown evidently agreed to back Blair's leadership contingent on Blair stepping aside for him after no more than two full terms as prime minister. Brown always had a bit more sympathy for the so-called old Labour values of social justice than does Blair, who is disdainful of anything that smacks of socialism. But Brown was hardly averse to giving the managerial neo-liberal agenda Blair championed a try to regain office after 18 years.
One big drawback, as Labour Party maverick and former cabinet minister Clare Short observes in her new book An Honourable Deception? is that a ruthless win-at-all-costs New Labour vanguard "has little idea what it wants power for, and because it focused on winning media approval tends to drift steadily in a direction approved by the Murdoch press."
But power the New Labour wing of the party took, and kept through a second term, despite cosying up to big money interests, who are not the bosom buddies of average Labour voters.
Still, for all Blair's starry-eyed belief that "private" is wonderful and "public" is lousy, the party, if under considerable pressure, provided some real domestic improvements, although by no means everything that old line Labour members dream of.
Meanwhile, the Tories are behaving like a pack of reactionary clowns no one wants anywhere near the reins of power and the third party Liberal Democrats - often to the left of Labour on social issues - are not yet a formidable threat.
So, for all the flak Blair deservedly incurred for his obstinate foreign policy decision to follow American President George W. Bush's cruel crusade into Iraq in 2003, he still stands to win a third term handily this May (the likely election date), though at the likely cost of anywhere from a third to a half of his 150-some seat majority.
Tony Blair will survive, but if you are a mere Labour backbencher, especially one who reluctantly authorized the Iraq invasion, you must be growing nervous about your increasingly fragile fate.
Even if ensconced in a "safe" seat, you know many colleagues are being lined up against the electoral wall to suffer the courage of Tony Blair's ill-judged conviction, and you wonder when you are next to be mowed down by a disgruntled electorate.
Labour is stuck with Blair for the moment and Brown, a pragmatist with a mild idealist streak, readily acknowledges it. Changing leaders so close to a national election is just not done (even though a recent poll of Labour supporters put Brown a point ahead of Blair in popularity).
The eager opposition, and the press, would pounce on a leadership switch as a sign of terrible weakness and as a self-indictment of Labour's performance. All bets, however, are off after the election. Hence, a Blair-Brown feud erupted this winter over the party leadership succession.
What infuriated Brown was Blair's reneging on an "understanding" that he would make way for Brown no later than the second year of an imminent third term. Blair defiantly announced that he would serve a full third term.
Brown's bitter sense of betrayal hit the British headlines and journalists combed the corridors of power for all traces of gossip about the feud. Backbenchers, alarmed or just irritated, pleaded with the lads to please tone it down, and they did.
Nonetheless, dark rumours hint at Blair not just demoting Brown from the chancellor ship to a lesser post but throwing him out of the cabinet altogether. What is to stop him?
So drastic a move would rouse tremendous anger from Brown's strong base within the party, consisting of old Labour's; disenchanted ex-Blairites and not a few opportunists who see the writing on the wall for Blair. Time and circumstance still favour Brown, regardless of Blair's whims.
Unless Iraq magically turns overnight into a democratic paradise, and George W. Bush slinks into the United Nations to beg forgiveness for his unilateralist ways, Blair's backers will fall away.
If the Liberal Democrats, who call for a British withdrawal in Iraq for a UN-mandated Muslim force, should make enormous gains and become the swing party in a coalition government, then Blair will unceremoniously be shown the door.
Yet Blair dispatched 220 more troops last month to Iraq to replace the departing Dutch troops, hardly a good move. If Blair retains office with a shrunken majority, the remaining MPs will do what Conservatives did to Margaret Thatcher in 1990; dump him. Brown remains heir apparent and the best chance to reunite the party.
Unlike 1990, when Michael Heseltine was an obvious successor to Thatcher, and a dark horse John Major galloped away with the leadership instead, no one Blair anoints, such as Alan Milburn, has a prayer of succeeding him inasmuch as they would not suit the trade unions, who are extremely weary of New Labour's old Tory policies. And it is not just the trade unions who are disturbed by Labour's Colonel Blimp tendencies. The law society condemned Blair's anti-terror laws and even the former head of Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist squad said the government's new proposals were "not practical" and threatened to further alienate minority communities.
He told The Guardian: "I have a horrible feeling that we are sinking into a police state, and that's not good for anybody." There seems to be no illiberal measure which Blair is not prepared to back to the hilt.
Blair's arrogance is partly due to Britain's electoral system which exaggerates victories so that a party with an overall minority into a commanding three-figure lead in seats, as is the case at the moment.
Yet even this towering lead is in grave danger of being eaten away. For instance, British Muslims along with other South Asian immigrant voters - alienated by the war in Iraq, rising unemployment (especially among the youth) and anti-immigrant schemes - can change 30 to 40 seats by swinging from Labour to the Liberal Democrats, or else abstaining. (left wing Labour candidates, such as Jeremy Corbyn and John Austin, with anti-sectarian and anti-war stances are exempt.)
The backlash already appeared last year in poor or disastrous by-election performances, especially in Leicester and Birmingham. In Leicester, with its large South Asian community, Muslims helped boost a Sikh Liberal Democrat into what was a secure Labour seat.
In an East End constituency, Labour breakaway candidate George Galloway, who formed a new party called Respect, is poised to combine South Asian immigrant and disaffected white working class votes to take another Labour seat.
In the recent election to the tower hamlet council an ethnic Bangladeshi, Oliur Rahman, got in on the ticket of Respect. The other main parties had also nominated the Bangladeshi candidate for the seat.
Chancellor Brown, apart from keeping the economy stable regarding the balance of payments and domestic spending, raised pensioners' payments, hiked the minimum wage, backed foreign aid, and even went beyond his brief to reaffirm that the national health service must be funded from general taxes.
Many an unhappy Labourite also sees Brown as - if by no means an opponent of the United States (which is unthinkable) then, like Harold Wilson in the 1960s - a more prudent ally.
Wilson refrained from assailing the Vietnam war but politely refused desperate US requests to dispatch UK troops, even a brigade, not for their negligible support but for the legitimacy they might have conferred on the Southeast Asia horrors.
Blair legitimated the US designs in Iraq, which is his own indelible folly. Brown as premier is unlikely to play the same unquestioning role of accomplice. Without British blessings it would be extremely hard to justify, even in the US, the daft neocon agenda.
Blair "is programmed to respect power and not to rebel against it," as Labour's Robin Cook, who resigned his cabinet post over Iraq, observes in his new book The Point of Departure, whereas Gordon Brown's "tragedy is that he is an old believer in redistribution, but stuck within a Blairite ideology which only allows him to do it by stealth."
Yet clearly on the horizon is a real opportunity for Brown to abandon stealth of any kind to promote a reinvigorated brand of social democracy in Britain. What kind of government is that? As Clare Short put it nicely, "The job of a decent government is to assist and civilize the management of change so that people can adopt without getting hurt." Who wants to argue openly with that aim anywhere?