| February 13, 2006 | Monday | Muharram 14, 1427 |
Catch the fish you can
A celebration of killers
THE AMERICAN ambassador in New Delhi has taken umbrage at remarks by a communist leader who described President Bush as the leader of the most organized pack of killers.
Had Ambassador David Mulford not fired off his angry missive to West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya last week he would have found some other cause or provocation to respond to the common invectives flung at imperialism by the state’s communist rulers, not unusual at any given time.
The communists need the United States as a demonic figure. It is to their advantage that America somehow managed to woo India’s ruling Congress party to forge an alliance of sorts in their July 18 declaration last year.
Elections are due in West Bengal later this year and the communist-led Left Front and the Congress-led UPA coalition that it supports in New Delhi are the main rivals in the state. They need an issue to publicly quarrel but without necessarily threatening their alliance which spurs Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government.
The communists, who are deemed to be among the more organized social democratic groups in India today, do not wish to be held responsible if the BJP uses the cleavage between them and the Congress to bounce back to power in New Delhi. Nor do they like to be seen as being too cosy with the Congress. That would upset their cadres in West Bengal and Kerala where the Congress is the main electoral rival.
The American-Iranian standoff has thus become a handy issue for them to spar with each other to galvanise their respective supporters without disturbing the larger arrangement at the national level to keep the Hindu communalist BJP at bay.
All this does not detract from the description by Mr. Bhattacharya of the George Bush administration as a pack of killers. During a visit to New York in the traumatized aftermath of 9/11, in May 2002, I picked up a newly published book by an American war historian that would vindicate Mr Bhattacharya’s description of the Bush administration.
Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power by Victor Davis Hanson should be read by Mr Mulford to ascertain the truth of Mr Bhattacharya’s disparaging remarks.
One of the important claims in the book is that the only civilization or culture that can defeat the West is the West itself. “In the long history of European military practice,” Hanson writes, “it is almost a truism that the chief military worry of a western army for the past 2,500 years was another western army.”
In battles against non-Western powers, European armies have not only been victorious on most occasions but have inflicted horrendous casualties on their enemies while suffering relatively few of their own. In contrast, battles and wars fought among westerners (the Peloponnesian War, the Thirty Years’ War, the American War Between the States, World Wars I and II) have been bloodbaths, often with harmful demographic, political, and cultural consequences.
Hanson’s book analyses why, for 2,500 years, Western armies and navies have achieved and maintained military and naval superiority over those of the East. He argues that European invincibility has resulted not from favourable geography, climate, resources, luck, or even genes, but from the unique Western military tradition — which is itself a natural product of the uniqueness and superiority of Western culture, including democracy. Mr. Bhatta-charya would probably disagree with Hanson’s thesis that emphasizes the advantages of democracy and egalitarianism, while ignoring the social strength of free but aristocratic polities in fostering military guile and muscle.
For instance, in praising Athenian democracy, Hanson suggests that the more egalitarian and democratic a regime, the more formidable its military power. Yet, it was aristocratic Sparta, not democratic Athens that finally prevailed in the Peloponnesian War. Great Britain was a stronger military power and smarter in choosing its wars under a mixed government (democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy) in the 18th and 19th centuries than it was under its democratic parliamentary regimes of the 20th.
It is arguably true that British democracy bankrupted the country, lost the empire, and shed the best blood of the nation in ruinous and unnecessary wars.
On the other hand, despite being outgunned and outnumbered, the aristocratic American South almost won its independence from the more democratic North. Man for man, Confederate soldiers fought better just as Southern society proved far more cohesive and resilient than that of the North. Nazi Germany routed the armies of democratic France and Britain on the western front in World War II, and it was the totalitarian Soviet Union that grounded the German Wehrmacht, not the democratic Anglo-American forces.
In an interview after the release of his book, Hanson was asked whether the western tradition of destroying the enemy was the whole point of war for them.
“Well, it is in the broadest and most general sense, but throughout antiquity to the present, other military traditions have not had the same emphasis on shock warfare,” he replied. “The west’s idea was to get to the enemy and to destroy it and to get home and get back because it’s not a militaristic culture.” The quest for superior weaponry is another western hallmark, according to Hanson. “It goes back to a greater reliance on what I would call reason or rationalism, the idea that knowledge and inquiry can be divorced from philosophical or religious impediment to a greater degree.
And that allows even the west to steal and borrow because there’s no monopoly on human genius.” In other words, even if China had invented gunpowder and the people of the Persian steppes the stirrup, these products would be re-exported to the Chinese and the Persians as improved versions or innovations on the original.
To come back to Mr Bhattacharya’s barb. Victor Hanson would say the CPM leader is justified. Mr Mulford should not be so sensitive.
RAJARAM of Gonda district in Uttar Pradesh has sent the administration looking for a lost village. Rajaram spent 35 years in jail and a Varanasi mental hospital after he was arrested in September 1970 on petty theft charge. The charges were never proved and a district court finally ordered his release from Faizabad jail last week. But it now appears that the two constables and Rajaram who went looking for his village Tarabganj are missing. District officials say they have been unable to locate the village and are still searching for it.
jawednaqvi@gmail.com
DEEP-sea fishermen design their nets in a way that permits the small fish to move in and out of the snare so that only the big fish are caught. On the contrary, the police fashion their net to catch only the small fry. If a big fish strays into their trap, all hell breaks loose.
The most recent example of this is of a police campaign aimed at cars with tinted glasses. When the state minister on religious affairs was stopped for travelling in a private car with tinted glasses and fancy number plates, the whole campaign was aborted. The incident has since been much written about and commented upon, but there has been no clarification from the minister concerned or the police of any indication as to when the campaign will be revived, if at all.
Arshad ‘Pappu’ is another big fish who can tear through his way every time a net is cast to capture him. He has been involved in many armed encounters with police, his house has been besieged by police for days on end, but somehow he always manages to slip through. Dozens of his associates have been killed or captured.
Of the many bizarre stories around Arshad Pappu one was enacted last week in a shanty town near the Pakistan Navy’s Shifa Hospital. The media reported that Arshad was spotted travelling in a car on Khayaban-i-Ittehad. The police chased and intercepted him near Shifa. A shootout ensued. An accomplice of Arshad was killed. Arshad himself received a gunshot wound in the upper arm. But his brother accompanying him snatched a motorcycle from a wayfarer, put Arshad on it, broke through the police ring and rode to safety into the narrow lanes.
What the newspapers did not report was what the police were doing when all this was happening. Were they making a movie with a close-up of the ringleader’s ‘upper arm’ that was hit by a bullet and dripped with blood?
In yet another recent adventure, police rounded up 79 men for watching an ‘objectionable’ double programme in a cinema hall. Some newspapers reported it in detail as if it were an event of national importance. They ran pictures of the arrested men, no doubt further adding to their embarrassment.
It is obvious that the arrested men did not have access to the internet or gadgets to watch the movies available even on the footpaths. Otherwise they wouldn’t have gone to the cinema.
The cinema houses screening local productions no longer attract many viewers. Indian movies are not allowed. The only way to keep the cinema business going is to show something that pulls in audiences. Some cinemas have begun holding stage programmes and variety shows to make the cinema business viable.
Anyhow, the 79 hapless people and some of the cinema’s low ranking staff were detained. What happened to the cinema owner, the big fish in this case, is not known.
Beauty and education
TWO things are mushrooming across the city like bug bunnies in Australian prairies. Wherever you go, you cannot miss seeing them. In low-income localities they may be jostling for space and competing with one or more of their kind for clients. The one is beauty parlours and the other private ‘English-medium’ schools.
Whether a woman looks like a film heroine or a vampire when she steps out of a parlour will not have much impact on society. But if we do not have good schools, they will affect the future of our children.
Most such schools lack proper facilities — no laboratories, no libraries, no playgrounds and no trained teachers. Some of them have classrooms partitioned with flimsy cardboard or curtains. When two classes are in session side by side at the same time, pupils do not know who is teaching whom.
These locality schools do not pay their staff well. But when it comes to collecting fees, they have 101 pretexts to demand more money. They do not respect any rules set by the board of education or the provincial education department. In the name of imparting education, some schools seek perks from the government and even encroach upon public land.
Undercover, or not?
RECENTLY when a colleague and her friends hailed a cab near the Karachi Press Club, they encountered a chatty driver who complained a bit too much about the pressures of work. He told them how the traffic police were so horrible to him and how they just didn’t have any respect for him. The colleague gently pointed out sometimes taxi drivers could be harassed for no fault of theirs, but many times they really were at fault.
But the driver said that the traffic constable who usually is on duty near the Arts Council is known to award tickets even to police mobiles and policemen in plainclothes. “I even showed him my card and he didn’t care,” the cab driver let slip. Suddenly it occurred to the passengers that their driver was an undercover policeman. They decided to study him more closely. He definitely looked a little more neatly dressed than the usual cab drivers. But why was he blowing his cover in front of perfect strangers? Perhaps everyone here has a need to feel important.
A few days later, the colleague saw the same taxi driver intently watching a protest in front of the Press Club. His cab was nowhere in sight but he was busily noting something down in his notebook.
— Karachian
email: karachi_notebook@hotmail.com