| 26 February 2005 | Saturday | 16 Muharram 1426 |
IB and RAW too play politics
A public killing for private benefit
If the first term of President George W. Bush was dominated by the war against terrorism, the second will be preoccupied with the effort to stem the spread of nuclear weapons. This challenge is more ambiguous and complex than the first.
Do we oppose proliferation of nuclear weapons because of the rogue quality of the two regimes furthest advanced on the road toward acquiring nuclear weapons - Iran and North Korea? Or is our opposition generic - does it extend even to fully democratic countries? How far are we prepared to go in resisting proliferation? And is it possible for one country alone, no matter how powerful, to become the sole custodian of the task of preventing the spread of nuclear weapons? And, if not alone, with what combination of powers should the United States act?
Iran brings home the complexity of these issues with particular urgency. North Korea is an isolated country that makes no significant contribution to the economy of any other; it is, if anything, a drain on any associate seeking to sustain its fragile and oppressive economy. North Korea's neighbours - with the possible exception of South Korea - agree that a nuclear North Korea presents a major, and perhaps unacceptable, security risk.
By contrast, Iran is a large oil producer, with a growing, diverse and capable population and a serious industrial potential. By 2050, its population is projected to exceed that of Russia.
Several major states have an interest in good relations with Iran for economic reasons; some are afraid of its terrorist potential and demonstrated ruthlessness. Its immediate neighbourhood contains some countries that welcome the enhanced risk a nuclear Iran poses for other countries, especially for the United States.
Optimism for progress on eliminating the military nuclear capacity of North Korea can be based on possible pressures of neighbouring countries on which it depends economically.
The case of Iran is more complex. As the tangled issue moves to the centre of international diplomacy, it is important to clarify the strategy on which policy is to be based.
During the Cold War, all of the principals who might have to decide on the issue of nuclear war faced the awful dilemma that such a decision could involve tens of millions of casualties and yet that a demonstrated willingness to run this risk - at least up to a point - was necessary if the world was not to be turned over to ruthless totalitarians.
All Cold War administrations navigated between these shoals. Deterrence worked because there were only two major players in the world. Each made comparable assessments of the perils to them of the use of nuclear weapons. But as nuclear weapons spread into more and more hands, the calculus of deterrence grows increasingly ephemeral and deterrence less and less reliable.
It becomes ever more difficult to decide who is deterring whom and by what calculations. Even if it is assumed that aspirant nuclear countries make the same calculus of survival as the established ones with respect to initiating hostilities - an extremely dubious judgment - new nuclear weapons establishments may be used as a shield to deter resistance, especially by the United States, to terrorist assaults on the international order.
Finally, the experience with the "private" proliferation network of friendly Pakistan with North Korea, Libya and Iran demonstrates the vast consequences to the international order of the spread of nuclear weapons even when the proliferating country does not meet the formal criteria of a rogue state.
For all these reasons, it is the fact, not the provenance, of further proliferation that needs to be resisted. The "loathsomeness" of a regime that undertakes proliferation compounds the problem and provides a sense of urgency, but in this analysis, it is not the decisive factor. We should oppose nuclear proliferation even to a democratic Iran.
This reality is often obscured by two essentially peripheral considerations: Proliferating countries invariably present their efforts as goals to which they have every right to aspire, such as participation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy or enhancing electricity generation. In Iran's case, this is clearly a pretext. For a major oil producer like Iran, nuclear energy is a wasteful use of resources.
What Iran really seeks is a shield to discourage intervention by outsiders in its ideologically based foreign policy. This is the main reason why it will be difficult to fashion a package of material incentives to spur de nuclearization of Iran.
For most foreseeable incentives, in one way or another, increase Iran's dependence on the states against which the proliferation is really directed and probably increase Iran's capacity to threaten them by other means.
At the same time, several European allies treat Iran's nuclear ambitions as at least partially, perhaps largely, defensive. In their view, they spring from Iran's geographic position, wedged as it is between nuclear neighbours or near-neighbours - India, Pakistan, Russia and Israel.
They believe that Iran's nuclear impulse can be softened, perhaps even ended, by conciliatory diplomacy. Many of them see in talks with Iran a replay of the issue that they believe underlay the debate over Iraq: the European approach to international relations via law and multilateral institutions vs. the alleged American propensity for pressure.
In fact, the alleged conflict between conciliation and pressure is as unreal as it is standard. Diplomacy is about demonstrating to the other side both the consequences of its actions and the benefits of the alternatives.
No matter how elegantly phrased, diplomacy by its very nature implies an element of and a capacity for pressure. One reason why European negotiators have made the limited progress they have on the nuclear issue with Iran is the implied threat of actions America might take in case of deadlock.
The key issue between the United States and Europe should not be over the necessity of pressure if diplomacy fails but the definition of it, the timing, and precisely by what process that pressure is designed to lead to a non-nuclear Iran.
It is in that context that the proposition that regime change is the most reliable, perhaps the only, guarantee for Iran's de nuclearization - and the relevance of the goal to de nuclearizing Iran - must be evaluated.
The possibility of pursuing regime change as a solution to nuclear proliferation in Iran requires an answer to questions such as these: What precise process of change does one envision? What is the best estimate of the time scale for such an effort? If it is longer than the time by which Iran acquires nuclear weapons, it may not be relevant to the solution of the issue. In short, is the timeframe for regime change compatible with the imperatives of bringing about the de nuclearization of Iran?
The answers to these questions should not be left to impressionistic accounts but to formal and systematic analysis organized as a presentation of opposing views so that top policymakers are able to judge the full dialectic of available evidence.
If the administration continues to pursue its declared policy of encouraging the European initiative, it will be driven to recognize that process cannot go beyond a certain point without some kind of American participation.
Progress will require a commitment by the European allies to a range of pressures if negotiations fail and to the elaboration of criteria linked to a schedule by which progress can be measured.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has rightly pointed out aspects of Iranian policy that impede negotiations with the United States, especially the support of groups relying on terror like Hamas and Hezbollah and actions in Iraq designed to prevent the consolidation of a political structure.
Tehran will have to show some readiness to modify these dangerous ventures before America can participate meaningfully in the negotiating process now conducted by three European nations.
Such an opening need not - indeed, it should not at this stage - take the form of a bilateral Washington-Tehran dialogue. A framework similar to the Beijing six-party forum for dealing with the North Korean nuclear problem would serve to make clear to Tehran, London, Paris and Berlin the range of options the United States can support or must insist on and to strive for a coordinated policy on that basis.
The American objective of the desirability of regime change in Iran is not affected by such a tactical decision; it must, in any event, be pursued in the first instance for Iranian purposes.
During the Cold War, it was the settled policy of several administrations to use negotiations to explore the prospects for diplomatic progress but at the same time to lay down markers to explain the stage at which confrontation became inevitable and the reason for it - all this while supporting dissidents and the forces of reform.
Almost simultaneously with calling the Soviet Union the evil empire, President Ronald Reagan wrote a letter to its president, Leonid Brezhnev, inviting him to a dialogue.
In the case of Iran, the chances for progress of the European diplomacy are slight. But they need to be explored. Such a course will also leave us in the best position to draw the consequences from failure of negotiations. In the end, we cannot grant a veto to other nations on matters affecting national security. But we can ensure that it is a last resort.
It is possible - even likely - that Iran views its negotiations with the European countries as a way to gain time, perhaps through the second Bush administration.
Iran may well manoeuvre for a position from which there is only a short final step to a nuclear weapons programme, in the meantime encouraging as many incentives of long-term usefulness to the Iranian economy and nuclear programme as it can induce the western negotiators to offer.
The western purpose should be to use the process to achieve the effective and verifiable de nuclearization of Iran but, failing that, to mobilize a full range of pressures.
Our European allies should understand that America's sceptical position is perhaps the principal incentive for what little flexibility Iran has shown on the nuclear issue to date. But skepticism should be tested by events, not by a priori assumptions.
A non proliferation policy must therefore achieve clarity on the following issues: How much time is available before Iran has a nuclear weapons capability, and what strategy can best stop an Iranian nuclear weapons programme? How do we prevent the diplomatic process from turning into a means to legitimize proliferation rather than avert it? We must never forget that failure will usher in a new set of nuclear perils dwarfing those which we have just surmounted.
IB and RAW too play politics
Elected governments are the wherewithal of a democratic polity. Their forcible ousting is a fraud committed on the voters. That the intelligence agencies in India have dislodged the state governments at the instance of rulers in New Delhi is something highly disturbing.
What Maloy Krishna Dhar, former joint director of Intelligence Bureau, has told me and published in a book has left me cold. He has claimed that the central government entrusted him with the task of overthrowing the elected governments in Haryana, Manipur and Sikkim, and that he did so even though he disliked the job.
I wonder whether the BJP government in Goa went out in the same way. If so, the outcome in Bihar, Jharkhand and Haryana may depend on whether it is acceptable to the rulers at the centre.
Not only that, if the intelligence agencies have a role, the Mulayam Singh Yadav government in Uttar Pradesh would last so long as the Congress-led government in New Delhi decides not to disturb it. It is a horrible situation where the life of a state government depends not on the support of MLAs but on the whims of the centre.
The charge is too serious to be left at that. The mere denial of Dhar's disclosures, if at all it is forthcoming, will not do. There must be a high-powered inquiry commission, headed by a sitting judge of the Supreme Court, to verify how the three state governments fell because of the machinations of IB and RAW as Dhar has alleged.
Who ordered the two agencies to pull down the governments? The whole thing would have to be bared, every detail of it. What should be done in the future to ensure that it does not happen again because such instances make a mockery of elections?
I know that both the agencies act as the eyes and ears of the central government and keep it informed about what happens in the opposition quarters or in the states where the ruling party at the centre is not in power.
The IB and RAW chiefs have direct access to the prime minister and report to him on a day-to-day basis. What they tell him or her is not known to the cabinet or to the topmost secretary in the government.
The ruling parties are also known to be checking with the intelligence's agencies the credentials of candidates before fielding them in elections. It is another matter that the agencies have turned out to be wrong at times as it happened during the elections after the emergency in 1977.
They predicted Indira Gandhi's victory which was said to be the main reason why she went to the polls despite the opposition of Sanjay Gandhi, who ran the government at that time.
Dhar's revelation that Rashtrapati Bhavan was bugged when Giani Zail Singh was president did not surprise me. Zail Singh knew about it. Whenever I met him, he would take me to the garden, observing that his place was bugged.
Dhar told me that he discovered by accident a modem in the sitting room of the president where he had gone to wire it on the orders of the government. This, in fact, thickens the plot.
It appears that intelligence agencies were competing among themselves to keep an eye on him. It was an open secret that he had fallen out of favour with Mrs Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi.
That the intelligence agencies in foreign countries snoop at the presidents and prime ministers is an open secret. CIA knew all about the escapades of John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton. Whatever Richard Nixon said at the White House was tapped.
Still my impression has been that our intelligence agencies are under the tight control of the government and that they do not have the kind of autonomy the agencies in the UK, the US or Russia enjoy.
Apparently, things are no different in India. The toppling of the three governments, the bugging of the Rashtrapati Bhavan and other disclosures by Dhar have led me to believe that intelligence's agencies can resort to any method in the name of getting what they think is "useful information." They have a carte blanche.
I wonder if there is any rule to stop them from going beyond a point. I do not expect the agencies to follow any code of ethics since Indian society on the whole has ceased to be sensitive about methods. Yet, it should not be a case of the law of the jungle.
All that is guaranteed in the constitution about an individual's liberty has no meaning if intelligence agencies go about it in the manner which Dhar has indicated. Intelligence's agencies have to be accountable. They cannot be a law unto themselves. Nor can they be at the end of telephone lines to obey the call of rulers.
The emergency (1977-79) was bad enough when the intelligence agencies had become the willing tools of tyranny. They concocted information and framed cases against all those whom the government did not like. But this seems to be a normal occurrence at present.
The inquiry commission that I suggest should indicate the guidelines for the operation of intelligence agencies so that they are under check. The commission could also propose how to bring about coordination among the different intelligence agencies. We have a proliferation of them.
Apart from IB, RAW, CBI and the military intelligence, the Ministry of Finance, the police and the paramilitary forces have separate set-ups. Every state also has a huge paraphernalia. Sometimes the agencies have the same informer who plays one against another besides making double or treble the money for the same report.
Still, the main source of intelligence agencies remains the press. This was my experience when I was the information officer at the Home Ministry in the late fifties.
The same thing was true when I was India's High Commission in London. Both times I had to make a request to stop the reports that would come to me in sealed envelopes. The explanation I gave was that I had seen the reports in the language press two to three days earlier.
The best job that intelligence's agencies do is the videotaping of incidents that have great significance for the nation. Take the speech by former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee one day before the demolition of the Babri masjid: "I do not know what will happen there (Ayodhya) tomorrow."
His explanation that it was a light hearted remark goes against his body language which was so menacing. The role of the then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao was also that of a conniver. I am sure the intelligence agencies must be having some proof of it. We shall have to wait for a government which will not be finicky about releasing information.
The writer is a New Delhi-based free-lance columnist.
A public killing for private benefit
Just because a government has proved itself inept in running a public enterprise is no justification for selling off a publicly-owned essential service on which both the economy and the well-being of citizens rest.
Being less enamoured by pro-people initiatives than by the glittering global financial system, Mr Hafeez Shaikh and Mr. Shaukat Aziz may have forgotten why public services were created in the first place, and why a fixation on GNP figures is not representative of 'benefits' to the people.
State corporations in most countries are found in all areas that touch on survival or economic operations or both, and are therefore known as public goods or the 'public commons' - mainly water, electricity, gas, oil, steel, telecommunications, airlines, railroads, and public transport.
Municipalities are often corporations responsible for sanitation, drainage, roads, and traffic systems. Rich and poor alike are entitled to a minimum of basic services for which reason a tiered rate exists matched to the ability to pay, while in public spaces are free for the destitute. It is only through public services that there is a semblance of wealth redistribution reaching out to all people.
Private companies understandably invest only where they expect a market and a 'worthwhile' minimum rate of return. They will simply not invest where consumers are few and distant or people cannot pay their price, whereas democracy or culture demands that all be served.
Utilities however entail vast infrastructure spread over an entire city or region or country which requires enormous capital unlikely to be found with any one investor.
Which is why the need for public services in certain sectors is universally recognised. So, public enterprises are set up with taxpayer money or loans taken on citizens' behalf, and repayable with taxpayer money.
Private utility companies are typically involved in out sourced distribution, not generation; they benefit from - without investing in - the infrastructural foundation built by the state, but which nevertheless need continued maintenance and upgrading.
When private companies offer more 'modernized' services, it arises from, or needs, some expensive upgrading in the state's infrastructure which the private firm does not pay for - although the cost is passed on to taxpayers.
When privatization of a widely spread-out utility takes place, it is not merely a transfer of economic activity from government to private hands; it is commodification of a basic need that morally cannot be commercialised.
In so doing, the state violates natural rights in letting privateers appropriate a vast section of the environment for exclusive use - all the physical spaces and resources freely endowed by nature and the common property of all citizens which constitute their unwritten investment in any publicly-owned service. Privateers exclude the majority who cannot pay for services; take over brings no compensation - a second violation of communal rights.
Some argue that even a public company would charge for services, but this is not the same because a public service charges only for actual costs of operation and maintenance to keep running indefinitely, not for ever-increasing profits that exclude most people.
In fact after the Second World War many private firms in Europe were nationalized so that governments could ensure all basic social needs, not just serve those who could pay.
The impression given is that state-run services are inherently corrupt and inefficient. This suggests that private concerns are never so. Both are myths. Given that humans are not perfect beings and the myriad influences they are subject to, there may always be some degree of inefficiency or corruption or both, the likelihood compounded by unrewarding salaries, and opportunities created by non-accountability.
If private companies perform better, it is because profit-oriented management keeps close watch and is intolerant of incompetence and cheating. This does not mean that owners or top management are not in a position to make dishonest deals if they choose. Private or public, corruption at the lower levels will never be eliminated without transparency and accountability at the top.
State enterprises anywhere are quick to be corrupted when there is no compulsory transparency built in or opened to examination on demand by government ombudsmen and independent authorised bodies representing citizen-consumers. The induction of unqualified political and other non-contributing appointees can hardly bear scrutiny.
UNCTAD's (UN Centre for Trade and Development) recent (Nov 2004) report illustrates how quickly governments are forced to re-think foreign investment deals based on assumptions and wild promises.
Some 50 governments, mostly of developing countries, have been slapped with some 160 known arbitration cases under regional, bilateral or multilateral deals that included investment clauses. Over 90 were filed in the last three years.
In most cases, foreign companies challenged governments for changing or invoking investment rules when countries were hit by financial crisis that threatened or caused intolerable socio-economic damage. For example, Argentina, in dire financial straits since 200, fell victim to ill-conceived deals with predatory investors in electricity, water and telecommunications. When it tried to back off, as many as 28 multinational corporations hit it with lawsuits for 'damages' including unrealised, anticipated profits.
Governments belatedly discover that globalized finance essentially puts the South at the mercy of foreign corporations with little or no benefit to themselves while eroding sovereignty.
After analysing all deals currently under dispute, UNCTAD's Division of Investment, Technology and Development concluded in typical understatement, that "governments have to practise much more caution in negotiating deals." But overshadowed by all the loud WTO hoopla, UNCTAD's press release couldn't make the necessary media headlines.
Governments often look for easy escape routes by selling off failing public enterprises to pay off mounting debts instead of arranging to run them better. They don't take into account the repercussions on their still developing economies when a foreign commercial entity controls a key resource that cannot be done without.
Throughout the world, privatizations of utilities and other essential services have led to great job loss, so-called 'profits' achieved by throwing out thousands from their jobs while cutting down on service outreach.
Ignored are the historical lessons of citizens driven to revolt when they can no longer endure hardships; governments seek too late to salvage the situation - and often get overthrown in the process.
More than ever before, southern governments need to pay closer attention to the 1974 UN Charter on the Economic Rights and Duties of States, making it incumbent on government to regulate foreign investment so that economic, social and environmental priorities are first served.
The UN Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights delineate what governments cannot barter away on spurious claims of 'national interest' or 'modernization'.
But most industrialized country governments, including the self-proclaimed leader of freedom, have structured governance in law so deviously and securely as to supersede southern government priorities as easily as they exclude their masses.
In the same breath southern governments take a very simplistic and self-serving approach to national priorities. An undefined 'modernization' is equated with privatization, deregulation and unregulated trade, while the welfare states are 'backward'. But isn't that why 'democratic government' was created? Scandinavian countries, for example, boast the world's greatest welfare systems and robust economies.
Avoiding unwanted foreign companies is not always possible when they are a front concealing the holding company that wishes to remain unidentified - to avoid public uproar. Later, ownership can change hands to more predatory ones while victims can only helplessly watch.
It is important to bear in mind that the privatization of public goods in the South has its roots in the Washington Consensus that determined World Bank and IMF 'conditionalities' under structural adjustment programmes.
Popularly known as blackmail by activists worldwide because it penalizes the poor masses twice, it forces governments to jack up prices and taxes to repay debts in exchange for a further loan - which defeats the very purpose of a public service, followed by privatization demands that withdraw cheap services for the masses altogether. Not for nothing are utilities high on the popularity list of foreign investors. They provide a guaranteed market, because no one can do without essential services.
As they consolidated their hold over the world through mergers and acquisitions, the North had long anticipated the exhaustion of investment avenues leaving only public enterprises to seize.
It was therefore necessary to convert the non-binding General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) into an iron-clad World Trade Organisation (WTO) in which the priorities of the weak but resource-rich nations were converted to appear to be the right of northern corporations to appropriate through deceitful notions such as the non-existent 'level playing field' and 'intellectual property rights'.
Good or bad, we've had over half a century of expertise in electricity distribution and sales. Given the complaint-free service to the powerful and privileged, if a government cannot look after the public interest through public services, why should taxpayers pay for their existence and lifestyle?