Kashmir: sub-regional trade

WITH this article, I conclude the series on Kashmir that I began several weeks ago. I am writing this last piece as the western press begins to speculate that the momentum built up since April 2003 to develop new relations between India and Pakistan on the basis of mutual trust rather than an all-consuming hostility may have begun to slow down. The momentum began to build up when Atal Behari Vajpayee, the then prime minister of India, famously offered the hand of friendship to Pakistan which the latter warmly reciprocated. That was more than two years ago.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh continued with the beginnings made by his predecessor. Recently, however, he has struck a harsher tone in his public pronouncements about Pakistan. For instance, he said in a television interview while on a state visit to Washington in July that he was apprehensive that Pakistan may not be able to protect its nuclear assets and prevent them from falling into the hands of Islamic extremists if there was a breakdown in law and order. This statement understandably irritated President Musharraf who saw it as extreme opportunism on the part of the Indian leader while the world was focused on the curse of extremism following the bloody attacks on London’s transport system.

There have been other setbacks. India’s senior leaders have begun to express less than full enthusiasm about the proposed gas pipeline linking Iran with Pakistan and ultimately with India. There is an impression that this may have happened because of pressure from Washington. Also, Islamabad probably believes that India may have been emboldened by the agreement concluded with America during Prime Minister Singh’s visit, allowing New Delhi access to nuclear technology denied to those who have not joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Could it be that having virtually gained the near-superpower status and virtual entry into the nuclear club of five states as its sixth member, India feels less compelled to accommodate Pakistan?

Nobody should have expected that the warming of relations between India and Pakistan would proceed on an upwardly sloping curve; that each act of benevolence by one side would be reciprocated by the other. Years of ill-feelings and suspicions cannot be washed away for good and within a short period of time Pakistan cannot become Canada to India’s United States. It will take time before the two countries begin to live in peace and harmony, and start to concentrate their attention on bettering the lives of their people rather than spending untold resources on a military face-off.

The process of change could not have been a smooth one especially when the environment in which it was taking place was constantly changing, most of the time to Pakistan’s disadvantage. India continued to gain respect as a responsible player in the international system. It has a buoyant economy, a working political system, and a growing pool of talented people who were being put at the service of the global economy.

Pakistan, on the other hand, had to deal once again with the perception that it was at the front line of the jihadi campaign being fought by stateless and mostly faceless people against the West and in particular against the United States. When a face was acquired by this set of people to Pakistan’s great consternation it turned out to be a Pakistani one — of the four men who killed 52 people in London on July 7, three were of Pakistani origin. All three had visited Pakistan and at least one of them had spent some time at a madressah. These events have seriously affected the environment in which Pakistan is operating.

It is clear that the window of opportunity available to Pakistan to rebuild its relations with India on a different foundation and to get a different strategy to work for itself on Kashmir is getting narrower. As the “perception gap” between the way the world perceives India and Pakistan widens, it will weaken Islamabad’s bargaining position. The compulsion for India to accommodate Pakistan will be reduced if this trend continues. That has already happened. It is important that this time Islamabad moves with intelligence and alacrity. How should it proceed especially with respect to Kashmir?

I should perhaps summarize the main points I have made todate before going on to deal with the issue of the day — how a sub-regional trading arrangement involving India, Pakistan and both parts of Kashmir could help the move towards a settlement of the Kashmir dispute.

I have reached this point in my argument by building my case on four pillars. The first was the recognition that the dispute over Kashmir was the result of the messy way the British partitioned their Indian domain. Had the principle on which the British Indian empire was divided been applied to the states governed by the princes, Kashmir, being a predominantly Muslim area, would have automatically become part of Pakistan. By granting choice to the princes the British, perhaps quite deliberately, sowed the seeds of what became an all consuming passion for both India and Pakistan.

Second, having been frustrated by Delhi’s unwillingness to abide by the resolutions of the United Nations that called for a plebiscite in the state to settle its future, Pakistan tried to use force to move Kashmir to its side. That did not work and as India became stronger economically and militarily, Pakistan turned to jihad as a way of forcing the Indian hand. In using this tactic, it was encouraged by the way the jihadis had humbled a superpower in Afghanistan in the bitterly fought war of the 1980s.

There was considerable temptation for Islamabad to encourage the same tactics in Kashmir especially after the draconian measures adopted by the Indians in the state to suppress the growing opposition to their presence. The Indian tactics alienated most of the population and fairly large segments of the population were prepared to take up arms against the Indians to assert their rights. This presented Pakistan with an opportunity by encouraging the insurgency.

Third, while encouraging jihad in Kashmir was tempting for Pakistan, there was a tremendous cost attached to the pursuit of this strategy. There were two elements to the cost. One was the growing diversion of scarce resources into military expenditure, especially when gross mismanagement by a series of politicians in the 1990s weakened the economy. The other was the prestige acquired by the extremists in Pakistan as their sacrifices in Kashmir against heavy odds were greatly appreciated by large segments of the Pakistani population.

Fourth, after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, alerted the international community to the extreme dangers involved in allowing weak states to use dedicated religo-nationalists to press for their demands, Islamabad came under pressure to curb the groups it had supported. The involvement of young men of Pakistani origin in the bombings in London on July 7, 2005, has put greater focus on the operation of these groups.

For these reasons — and there are several more — it is now time for Islamabad to focus on an entirely different approach. This should involve Pakistan working with India to develop, help finance, and implement a programme of economic development that has three distinct objectives. One, to increase employment opportunities for the Kashmiri youth and thus begin to address the problem of poverty. Two, to closely tie the economies of both parts of Kashmir with those of India and Pakistan., Three, to involve the international community in developing, financing and watching over the implementation of such a plan.

An integral component of this approach is to agree with India on the launching of a sub-regional trade arrangement that provides free and easy access, including transit rights, to the goods and commodities produced by Kashmir as well as the people of the state. This could be done within the agreed framework for the South Asia Free Trade Area (Safta) which the seven countries of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) agreed to launch on January 1, 2006. That decision was taken in Islamabad at the Saarc’s 12th summit.

An India-Pakistan-Kashmir regional trade pact could go beyond that envisaged within the context of the Safta. It could focus not just on allowing tariff free access among the participants for the goods they produce. It could also include the sectors excluded for the time being from Safta. Of particular relevance for such an arrangement would be services and movement of people. As discussed in a previous article, tourism is of special significance for the state. Including it within a sub-regional trade arrangement would allow free access to potential tourists from Pakistan to Kashmir and India, and Indians and Kashmiris to Pakistan. The Chinese should also be able to use the already established land links between their country and Pakistan to gain access to the attractions Kashmir has to offer.

The free movement of people between Kashmir and Pakistan would reverse the constraints on travel that resulted from decades of conflict involving the state. Such a movement could integrate the sizable handicraft industry that exists on both sides of the current divide in Kashmir. Before the partition of British India and the conflict over Kashmir, the Kashmiri handicraft industry, including wool weaving and wood working, had strong links with similar activities in the border cities of Rawalpindi and Sialkot. Those links could be re-established.

Would such an arrangement be practical? Would India and Pakistan be prepared to work on it as a way of finding a lasting solution for the long festering problem? At this time, India seems inclined to move towards such an option. In a wide ranging discussion with the press following the visit to New Delhi by Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, in late November 2004, Natwar Singh, India’s foreign minister, said that “the two countries could settle the Kashmir dispute only if they strengthened ties, increased trade and brought people on the two sides closer to prepare them to accept a compromise.” A similar hope was expressed by the Indian prime minister and the Pakistani president after their April summit in New Delhi.

A sub-regional trade arrangement involving India, Pakistan and Kashmir can only be concluded if New Delhi is prepared to grant the occupied state economic and political powers that go beyond those given to the other states in the Union. This would imply much greater autonomy than given to Jammu and Kashmir in Article 370 of the Indian constitution. India seems willing to do that. “We have made it clear... as far as regional autonomy is concerned, the sky is the limit,” Natwar Singh told a news conference in November 2004 after holding discussions with his Pakistani counterpart.

Pakistan seems to be moving in the same direction. In an interview with The Economist, in May 2005, “General Musharraf talked of offering the people of Kashmir. . . ‘Something between autonomy and independence, like self-governance.’ This could be ‘over-watched’ by all three parties.”

Some cooling off in the relations notwithstanding the two countries seem committed to using economics and trade to create a new reality. This could be created by putting into place tripartite trade relations involving India, Pakistan and the two parts of Kashmir. This could be done within the framework of the Safta.

Judicial cliches on terrorism

LAST WEEK US District Judge John C. Coughenour sentenced a defendant to prison for plotting to bomb the Los Angeles airport. In the course of the sentencing, the judge criticized the Bush administration’s post-September 11 policies, such as the use of military tribunals and the detention of enemy combatants.

He said that “the message to the world from today’s sentencing is that our courts have not abandoned our commitment to the ideals that set our nation apart.” Some people, the judge said, believe that the terrorist threat “renders our Constitution obsolete ... If that view is allowed to prevail, the terrorists will have won.”

That’s a little hard to follow. That courts can handle terrorists who are caught with explosives in their possession doesn’t mean they are capable of handling the terrorists who manage to evade detection until the moment they immolate themselves with their victims. But worse than the judge’s logic is the underlying sentiment that yesterday’s law enforcement procedures are adequate for today’s security threats — and that any deviation from them is a betrayal of the Constitution.

It recalls the now notorious statement by Lord Hoffman, a British law lord who said, “The real threat to the life of the nation ... comes not from terrorism but from laws,” such as a statute authorizing detention of foreign-born suspected terrorists, which the law lords invalidated under the European human rights charter in December 2004.

It also echoes Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s quotation, in the case of Yaser Esam Hamdi, of a precedent stating that it “would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defence, we would sanction the subversion of one of those liberties ... which makes the defence of the nation worthwhile.”

All of these have become judicial cliches to be invoked in arguments about how the global struggle against terrorism is to be prosecuted. Many cliches are, of course, true, but these are absurdities.

For example, consider the statement that the terrorists will “win” if legal rules and policies are changed in ways that restrict the package of civil liberties in place before the terrorist threat emerged. Whether such restrictions count as a victory for terrorists depends on what terrorists are trying to achieve. Although Al Qaeda’s ultimate goals are to drive American troops from the Middle East and, more broadly, to establish a Muslim caliphate in the region, its proximate goal is to kill ordinary people to bring pressure to bear on democratic governments.

A change in policy that reduces the chance that more people will be killed does not hand the terrorists a victory; it frustrates their plans. A failure to alter any policies in response to a successful terrorist attack is, by contrast, a sign of weakness and paralysis; that would be a victory for the terrorists. Osama bin Laden was right to say that people will back the strong horse. But he was wrong about which horse will prove stronger.

Some theorize that terrorists hope to provoke the target government into cracking down on civil liberties, in the further hope that the crackdown will, in the long run, increase disaffection among the population from which terrorists recruit. This is a remote and uncertain effect that has to be balanced against the immediate security benefits of adjusting civil liberties. A policy of static defence might increase terrorist recruitment as well, by suggesting that the target government lacks the will or capacity to take the fight to the enemy. The best course is to ignore such speculative long-term considerations in favour of choosing policies that make sense in the short run.

A second cliche is this: that a nation that permits incremental reductions in its civil liberties in response to threats to its citizens is not worth defending. The truth is that few people have accepted Patrick Henry’s call to “give me liberty or give me death” — this was a rallying cry, not a policy paper — and in any event nations are rarely faced with such a stark choice. An incremental reduction in civil liberties is not equivalent to their elimination.

British and American traditions are two-sided: They acknowledge that governments have an obligation to protect people’s lives as well as their liberties. No nation preserves liberty atop a stack of its own citizens’ corpses, but if one did, it would not be worth defending.

The spurious assumption behind both cliches is that whatever package of civil liberties happens to exist at the time a terrorist threat arises must be maintained at all costs; adjustments that reduce liberty are bad even if they produce greater gains in security, potentially saving people’s lives. This is a virulent form of the fallacy of the status quo — that whatever exists must be good. In fact, the balance between security and liberty is constantly readjusted as circumstances change. A well-functioning government will contract civil liberties as threats increase. A government that refuses to adjust its policies has simply frozen in the face of the threat. It is pathologically rigid, not enlightened.

The two cliches about terrorism are familiar from debates among commentators and politicians. What is new and surprising is their citation by judges as self-evident truths. Judges do badly when they appeal to speculative causal theories about terrorism or to the romantic ideals of civil libertarianism. Both are incompatible with the kind of balancing that is so much a part of the judicial function.

That ideals have a tendency to explode on the rock of fact was spectacularly demonstrated in Britain, where terrorist carnage occurred just a few months after the detainees in Lord Hoffman’s case were released under legal compulsion. It is too soon to tell whether there was a causal connection between the two events, but Lord Hoffman’s casual dismissal of the threat to citizens’ lives now appears grotesque.

The day before Coughenour’s soliloquy, Prime Minister Tony Blair said that he doubted whether statements such as Lord Hoffman’s “would be uttered now.” Perhaps that’s true in England, but it seems that American judges have yet to learn the lesson. — Dawn/Washington Post Service

The writers are law professors at the University of Chicago.

Changing face of America

THE phrase ‘What sort of American is a Cablinasian?’ was coined by Tiger Woods, the US golf phenomenon, to describe his parentage — born as he was of an African-American father and a Thai mother. Tracing his roots, he defined himself innovatively as a Cablinasian — that is, a mixture of Caucasian, black, Indian and Thai blood.

Only in the United States would such a prominent figure take pride in his composite parentage, rather than attempting to disguise it. Among all the countries of the world that have welcomed immigrants, the United States stands out as the one where immigrants are most likely to succeed and the one where they are least likely to assimilate into an identity known as an American WASP — the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Once, the Anglo-Protestant culture was, according to the controversial social-scientist, Samuel Huntington, central to the American national identity. No more.

Today, while the United States continues to be a ‘melting pot’ of disparate communities, it is an ethnic crucible from which flows not one recognizably identifiable stream of new Americans but droplets of ethnically different citizens. Before 1965, the average number of immigrants permitted into the United States each year was about 300,000.

The figure ballooned from 3.3 million during the 1960s, to seven million during the 1970s and hit more than nine million in the 1990s. Every border point and airport became an Ellis Island as immigrants poured in from Mexico, China, the Philippines and India, outstripping the previous sources of Italy, Germany, Canada and the UK.

In 1970, non-Hispanic whites constituted 83 per cent of the majority of Americans. By 2040, it is predicted (and feared by WASPs like Huntington) that Spanish-speaking Hispanics alone will constitute up to 25 per cent of America’s population. Cities, particularly in the southwest of America, and states such as Florida and California, have such a strong Hispanic presence that bilingualism is not simply a convenience, it is almost an imperative. “I very much hope,” President Bill Clinton once said, “that I’m the last president in America who can’t speak Spanish.”

The emergence of these hyphenated Americans — the Hispanic-, Asian- and African- Americans — has highlighted the essential difference between settlers who came to found a new society from immigrants who have simply moved from one country to another in search of a better life and a more acceptable passport, rather than to adopt a new ethnic identity. In a way, immigration into the United Kingdom from the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent and the Far East is the revenge of its former colonies. Immigration into the United States — itself once a colony — is rapidly being seen as the revenge of the Third World on America.

No one succeeds like a successful American, as the IT industry in Silicon Valley has shown. It has thrown up more Indian dollar millionaires in the last decade than the Indian tax system produced, albeit unwittingly, since 1947. One can succeed in America, regardless of ethnic origin, creed or colour. The colour of one’s skin is not a matter of pigmentation; it is a matter of perception. As an American general and former Secretary of State Colin Powell once said: “In America, which I love from the depth of my heart and soul, when they look like me, you’re black.” As is his successor, the formidable Ms Condoleezza Rice.

Washington society has come a long way since 1967, when their predecessor Dean Rusk (secretary of state under President Lyndon B. Johnson) wanted to resign his post because his daughter planned to marry a black fellow-student at Stanford University. As a southerner working for a southerner president, he felt this would bring immense criticism on himself and his Texan president, even though Johnson reassured him otherwise.

The black community accepted its oppression with fortitude, and occasional good humour. The dusky singer Lena Horne, for example, was once mistaken by a Parisian shop assistant for the actress-singer Doris Day. “No, my dear,” Lena Horne corrected her. “I’m Doris Night.”

African-Americans are rapidly moving both forwards and upwards, like American Jews did during the last century, into the higher, more affluent levels of American society. One has only to see the plethora of television sitcoms, magazines and beauty products targeting an Afro-American clientele to know that they have arrived. None of them is likely ever to heed the advice given by President Abraham Lincoln in 1862 to the first delegation of freed blacks to visit the White House. Having fought the Civil War to liberate them from slavery, Lincoln told them “that they should immigrate to Africa.”

Moving forward though has caused them also to cast backward glances, first with nostalgia and now with vengeance. In an unexpected historical parallel, the African-American community is asking for atonement for its own Black Holocaust at the hands of its white counterpart. The atrocities of the Klu Klux Klan are not being relegated to history books; they are being revived in the current statute books.

For example, a former Klansman Edgar Ray Killen, who served as a Baptist preacher and during the day ran a saw-mill business and dressed up as a Klansman by night, was recently sentenced to 60 years in prison for complicity in the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964. Killen’s advanced age — he is now 80 years old — did not exempt him from such belated retribution, just as Adolf Eichmann’s attempt to escape and hide in South America could not protect him from the long arm of Zionist justice.

The significance of America’s diversity for countries such as Pakistan lies in the policies this diversity foments. “Conflicts over what we should do abroad,” Huntington writes, “are rooted in who we are at home.” American foreign policy will gradually become the matrix of domestic cultural and ethnic imperatives. This should put into perspective the recent rapprochement between the United States and India, occasioned by the visit of the Indian Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh last month.

By honouring him, the United States is acknowledging the magnetic attraction of over 850 million potential consumers. It is also responding to the pull of its domestic lodestone of resident, affluent and influential Indians who must be smirking at the last-minute cancellation of the Pakistani prime minister’s visit to Washington DC.

There are many Pakistanis who regret privately the decision taken to cancel the visit of Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz to the United States and its forgotten neighbour Canada. The official reasons given were specious: there are more than enough federal and provincial ministers to handle flood relief in Sindh. That his visit would never have been upgraded to the level of a state visit from an official visit was obvious even to the uninitiated.

Dr Manmohan Singh had been invited by Bush, and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz had not. He had requested his visit. That there would have been an inevitable comparison between the decibel levels of the reception given to each by Bush’s administration should equally have been expected. The truth — whether Pakistan accepts it or not — is that US foreign policy has undergone a sea-change, and that sea is now the Indian Ocean.

Domestically, the cancellation of Mr Shaukat Aziz’s visit has shown that President Pervez Musharraf does not in fact need Article 58 (2) B of the Constitution to destabilize an incumbent prime minister. There are other ways of eroding credibility. Could President Musharraf perhaps have been conveying an unsubtle message that if any colleague wishes to visit the United States in future, he should do so, like every immigrant and green-card holder, at his own risk and cost?

Revolt of the 19th century

EVERYTHING has been happening when nothing happens. Good management is not about solving problems; it is about preventing problems. And so when a part of India does not jump at us from the front pages, it is a safe guess that the chief minister has his eye on trouble spots and someone is doing something to lance the boil before the simmering and potentially septic puss erupts.

Haryana’s chief minister, Bhupinder Singh Hooda, is still an infant in office, which is when most mistakes of omission are made. He made every mistake possible in the confrontation between the workers of a Japanese multinational, Honda, and its management at Gurgaon. He ignored the slow-burning anger of the workers for weeks. His first response to the crisis in which policemen were first beaten up, and then took barbaric revenge, was uncertain and irritable.

When the fire, fuelled by stark television images, began to singe him and his leaders in Delhi joined the roast, he went into vocal appeasement mode and forgot the practical, as for instance the need for extra, emergency medical facilities, thereby feeding media with another day’s story. Finally, while he had to hold police officers accountable, since they were obviously and visibly guilty, he forgot to add that the workers were guilty as well, for they began the violence.

The Haryana police, which is going to be around when all the workers have gone back to work, will remember this lapse of memory. A chief minister with an indifferent police force is only a minister, not a chief.

Here is a suggestion for all executives in public life. If you want to manage the troubles of our nation, create a war room. Place a huge map on one of the walls, with lots of lights around it so that you don’t miss anything. Get the chief secretary and the police chief to flag all the places where social tension is likely, has spurted out but been controlled, or where it is growing and could go out of control. Get a status report every morning, and ensure that the officials briefing you are not telling lies, or covering their backs with evasion. Eruptions will still take place, for India is exploding with anger just below surface level. But at least chief ministers — or indeed prime ministers — will not be surprised when the splinters hit them in the face.

The story of the police onslaught on workers at Gurgaon in Haryana is a little deeper than swinging lathis, however dramatic that might have been, or the failure of the Japanese management system, whose paternalism rarely has the breadth to reach industrial colonies in foreign lands.

We are in the summer of 2005. The last time Indian working class anger dominated the news was in the summer of 1974, when George Fernandes led a national railway strike and Mrs Indira Gandhi responded with harsh measures to break it. That is 31 years, or a generation-and-a-half, ago. (I am ignoring Datta Samant’s irresponsible and self-indulgent misrule of textile workers in Mumbai, because that was egotism, not trade unionism, and therefore turned sour and counterproductive. The millowners used the foolishness of Samant to close a meagre-benefit industry and became doubly rich as masters of vacant property in the heart of Mumbai.)

In a developed country three decades of peace would be good news. It is bad news in a country that lives across centuries: those below the poverty line are in the worst phase of the 19th century; the urban poor live in the early part of the 20th century; the middle class lives in the middle of the 20th century; a minuscule few have entered the 21st century. There is too much anger at base volcanic level, waiting for a chance to turn into lava.

One reason is that the dialectic of India’s democratic politics shifted, in the 1980s, from economics to communalism. Then, in the 1990s, both organized labour and the middle class were pacified with sops - aspirations, consumerism and rising incomes, thanks to fresh foreign capital, innovation and competition. Aspirations are a problem in an uneven economy, for while they comfort 20 per cent at the top (the creamy layer, to use a quaintly Indian economic formulation), they create great resentments in the thick slabs below. The slabs may not be even, nor the resentment uniform, but resentment exists.

Moreover, in 1975 television was not around, except as a droning black and white propaganda box that dished out half an hour of utterly boring news that viewers watched only to look at glamorous news readers. No one actually heard anything on television. Today, independent channels bring you news. But they are not half as potent as the entertainment channels that take the world of the rich and the beautiful into the homes of the impoverished and the plain.

The poor now know what they are being denied. Television also promotes a greater sense of reality than cinema, which is always closer to fantasy. At one level this angst creates a market for products that promise to make young, or even old women look beautiful within 28 days. (Since in our unhappy self-image, beautiful is synonymous with fair, these globs of acid sold as cream have to make you fair as well. It would be interesting to find out how much of television ad revenue comes out of false promises.) At another level, this creates a sense of injustice that the political or the economic system has long stopped trying to assuage.

If this was all the news, it might still leave some room for comfort. The worry is, or should be, not the violence that we have seen but the violence that we could see. Those Indians left behind in the 19th century are beginning to mobilize, and Indians cocooned in the 21st century have no idea what to do about the spreading people’s armies. The plural is accurate, for there is more than one army. But they have a single motivation: to create a parallel state until they can destroy the state that has left them behind. We use a loose term for them. We call them Naxalites.

The Naxalites do not sit outside the gates of multinational factories for a month waiting to be heard. They collect taxes, they have funds, they buy sophisticated weapons, and they shoot.

When the Naxalites feel threatened by the state machinery, or when they want to take revenge, they do not use the lathis that the workers at Gurgaon wielded. They plant powerful bombs in the way of a Chandrababu Naidu’s convoy in Andhra Pradesh; or they attack banks and police stations at Madhubani in Bihar.

The Naxalites do not depend on leftist members of parliament for publicity or a trade union movement for solidarity. They keep their wounds hidden, their secrets to themselves, and work through a network that crawls through village and jungle between Andhra Pradesh and Nepal, extending to Orissa and Bihar in the east and Maharashtra in the west. According to one report, more than 7,000 villages are already under their control, and two villages at the very least are joining this parallel state every week.

Underneath a thin sheen, we Indians remain casteist and sectarian. The two groups that have suffered the worst humiliation, through centuries, are the Dalits (formerly the Untouchables) and the tribals. The process of the politicization of Dalits started with the venerable Dr B.R. Ambedkar and is in the aggressive hands of Ms Mayawati at the moment. They are beginning to find their niche in our democracy, even though their impoverishment has not ended.

The human and economic exploitation of tribals has been a shocking story, and one that is not told very often because the tribals do not have a voice. Their women suffer rape in silence; the men have no answer to sophisticated and crude economic exploitation. (The church, incidentally, is one of the few groups doing exemplary work in tribal areas of Jharkhand, and is therefore targeted by the establishment.) At long last the tribals are mobilizing politically and doing so under the banner of the Naxalites. Tribals are brought out by Delhi to dance at the Republic Day festival. They are now getting ready to make Delhi dance to their tune. It will be a danse macabre.

I did not use the image of a war room lightly. There is a social war going on, but since government survives behind the screen surrounding Delhi, or any capital city, it is blind to that war. Sometimes defeated candidates in a parliament election return shell-shocked at the power of Naxalites; but winners of course never see anything, for they live under the illusion that their party or their charisma has got them victory.

The masses of the 19th century are at war with the elitists of the 21st in India. The latter are armed. The former are angry. Don’t take the outcome for granted.

The writer is editor-in-chief, Asian Age, New Delhi.