SOME serious-minded secular persons are heatedly arguing that the sting operation showing Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s foot soldiers boasting about carrying out the killings with state support should not have been publicised.

The point made is that all this would polarise society and help consolidate the Hindu vote in his favour. It is not understandable how gloating over the killing of innocent Muslims will increase Modi’s votes.

Assuming this is true, should the crime be suppressed? It would be like a cover-up of murders on the ground that the perpetrator would be lionised. The issue is not whether the sting operation benefits Modi but whether the confession of murder is something to be made public when it is reconfirmed.

It is a coincidence that the admission by the killers came after the announcement of elections. Would the publicity have been justified if the killers had spoken earlier?

We have seen on TV screens, the perpetrators of crime telling “how execution squads were formed, composed of the dedicated cadre of Hindu organisations — the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Bajrang Dal, the Kisan Sangh, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad and the Bharatiya Janata Party” and “how the idea was to harm as many Muslims as possible, burn them, kill them”.

A pogrom does not lessen in brutality if it is hidden from the nation. The exposure of crime is not linked to the strategy of election but to a value system. The day a person sees an act of injustice and keeps quiet is the day when he begins to die. The Congress is not coming out openly because its approach is political.

It is not sure how the Gujarati Hindus would react. The party would have reacted differently if it had realised that murder was murder, whatever the fallout of its exposure.

The BJP is only hoodwinking the people because it knows that both Modi and the party have been thoroughly exposed. The complicity of the Congress in the killing of 3,000 Sikhs in Delhi does not condone the Gujarat killings. In both cases, those who committed the crime should have been punished.

The Gujaratis are facing a test. I do not think that the state’s economic growth, which is due to their own enterprise and hard work, will make them soft towards Modi’s crimes which are now being viewed in black and white. The Gujaratis cannot afford state peace to be built on the skulls of the innocent. Hitler, too, gave peace for 15 years.

But we know at what price and how the state of Germany crumbled when the truth was known. No citizen can forget or forgive killing on the ground that the status quo may be disturbed.

Gujarat is a fractured society today and it is divided vertically. This must be bothering people in the state, and I have no doubt that they will assert themselves to see that the guilty are brought to book. Till today the Germans have not forgiven themselves for not having seen through what Hitler did in the name of purity of the German race. Some time, if not today, the Gujaratis will also realise that Modi misled them by converting his communal approach into the Gujaratis’ self-respect. Those killed were also Gujaratis.

When Modi is accused of planning and executing all that happened in the wake of the Godhra train burning, he plays on the sentiments of the Gujaratis and argues that in reality they are being run down. This is how he has got away with the murders.

The Gujaratis do not deserve a chief minister who builds up his reputation at their cost and polarises society to escape its wrath.

Modi even makes a mockery of Mahatma Gandhi’s ideals of pluralism. Modi’s style of functioning is authoritarian and parochial. So much so that a revered state leader like Keshubhai Patel has felt so humiliated that he has kept his distance from the BJP, the party he served for decades, because it has put up Modi as the next chief minister.

Had the Nanavati-Shah commission, which was set up to ascertain the truth, submitted its report, Modi would have probably been exposed by this time. But its inquiry has been going on and on for the last five years. It looks as if the judges are extending their job after retirement.

The commission is turning out to be another Liberhan inquiry committee which was set up in the wake of the Babri mosque demolition in 1992. The committee has had as many as 84 extensions, costing nearly Rs80m. It has not yet submitted even an interim report in the last 15 years.

The chief justice of India should look into the working of such inquiry committees because the ways in which some extend their tenure bring a bad name to the judiciary. There should be a timeframe and no inquiry committee should last beyond three years.

Modi’s defence by the BJP spokesman is not surprising. The party, because of L.K. Advani’s increasing influence and Vajpayee’s waning say, is most vociferously communal when it projects Modi. The BJP’s thinking is that if it loses the assembly election in Gujarat, it would lose in the general election. It might even otherwise do so if it continues to back Modi.

True, the process of election has begun in the state and it cannot be stopped until the polls. But surely, Modi can be hauled up for his crime. The centre lacks that kind of courage, not because it cannot muster enough of it to take action but because it is afraid of the BJP’s hostile reaction.

To say that we are all to blame is to rationalise the crime. No doubt, the nation is not as secular as it should have been after 60 years of independence.

But this is because we have not really worked for a pluralistic society. The belief that communal bias would go away with the departure of the British who divided us in order to rule, has not turned out to be correct.

The communalism which took root in almost two centuries of British rule needs to be fought relentlessly. The Congress, which ruled the country for the first 45 years, did very little to change the parochial attitude of society.

It did not even punish those whose names were mentioned in the inquiry committees set up after riots.School and colleges were allowed to breed communalism. Books written were either too superficial or too sophisticated and went over the heads of the children.

Then there was the growth of some political parties which thrived in misleading the people in the name of religion and caste. The situation is deteriorating, not improving.

The writer is a senior columnist based in New Delhi.

THE replacement on Oct 20 of Iran’s chief negotiator on the nuclear issue, Ali Larijani, by Said Jalili, a man reputedly close to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is confirmation of Tehran’s further hardening of position.

Larijani had taken a tough stand during his negotiations with the European Union foreign policy chief Xavier Solana. But he is also known to be an affable man at home and among his western interlocutors, often sharing jokes with them.

This month will also be crucial because time bought by the Russian-Chinese diplomacy to forestall impending sanctions against Iran, will run out by its end. This is also the period when the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency Mohamed El Baradei will be constrained to submit his final report at the UN.

In a show of deliberate indifference to President Bush’s reference to the Third World War, the IAEA chief told Le Monde in a recent interview that if Iran really was after the nukes, it would need between three to eight years to actually acquire them. In a later interview to CNN, he altogether denied the existence of any proof of this.

It will be useful to recall here that Iran’s quest for uranium enrichment does not owe its origin to the current clerical establishment, nor had the N-word carried the same aura of malevolence half a century ago as it does today. Partly to atone for the sin of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and partly in a sincere bid to share its nuclear know-how with the developing world, the United States, under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, had launched an initiative called Atoms for Peace in 1953.

For the two decades that followed, some 60 countries benefited from this programme, including Iran and Pakistan. While other Western nations such as France and later Germany helped Iran build its reactors at Bushehr and Ahvaz, the Karachi Nuclear Power Project (KANUPP) came about with Canadian cooperation and still caters to three per cent of Pakistan’s electricity needs.

The earliest Iranian to dream up a nuclear Xanadu was not a cleric but the late Shah himself who first spoke of it in an excess of folie des grandeurs during a bash at the ruins of Persepolis to celebrate 2,500 years of the Pahlavi dynasty that was actually founded only half a century earlier by his father. The ceremony was also famously attended by Pakistan’s then President Yahya Khan. But that’s another story. Later, the 1973 world oil crisis quadrupled Iran’s revenues overnight and the Shah’s ambitions to turn his country into the region’s sole nuclear-armed power were no longer a secret.

The title of the book, Iran: a choice of arms, by François Heisbourg who heads the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Geneva-based Centre de Politique de Sécurité, besides being special adviser to the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique in Paris, could be taken to refer to Tehran’s own preference of weapons but also to the possibility of the West’s options to confront the situation. A position already stated less euphemistically by the French President Nicolas Sarkozy when he spoke of Iran ‘either having the bomb or being bombed’.

Heisbourg’s work, a pithy 175-page oeuvre that retraces Iran’s nuclear odyssey, is also a veritable handbook of the race in the past 50 years between a number of nations to acquire nuclear military capacity. Heisbourg, however, rules out the possibility of Iran being an immediate threat.

Recommending tougher action now rather than face a worst case scenario tomorrow, Heisbourg recalls Sir Winston Churchill’s ominous words to the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain on the latter’s return to London after signing the Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler in 1938: “You had the choice between dishonour and war. You chose dishonour, you’ll have war!”

André Glucksman, on the other hand, is a philosopher rather in the old Cartesian mould who loathes to be classified in a Left or Right slot and apparently gets a great kick out of attacking the very group that tries to embrace him. In his recent essay entitled “Did you really say war?” he echoes Heisbourg’s apprehensions: “The idea that the Iranian bomb will have no consequence on the world peace emanates from the most ignorant fantasies. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt will never bow to the nuclear hegemony of Iran.”

There are grim tidings from across the Atlantic as well. According to Seymour Hersh, the US is more or less determined to attack Iran any time now. In an exhaustive piece in The New Yorker, Hersh affirms that the White House has reached a decision on a broad bombing raid with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities. The Americans, who already have three aircraft carriers waiting in the Gulf, intend the attack to be a swift in-and-out air force operation without the involvement of troops.

The Bush administration already gave early signs of this on Oct 25 by levelling tough sanctions on three Iranian banks accused of shady dealings with the Quds division of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards accused by Washington of financing and supplying weapons to terrorists in Iraq.

But the real surprise comes from the least likely quarter, Israel. Martin van Creveld, professor of military history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, remains unimpressed by all the cataclysmic forebodings. Since 1945, he says, none of the prophecies of a world conflict on account of a nuclear threat have come true.

The writer is a journalist based in Paris.

IN a recent article in The Washington Post, American journalist Fareed Zakaria has condemned Washington’s policy of sanctions against Myanmar. His argument is that opening up trade and diplomatic communications would have worked better than imposing sanctions on the authoritarian military state.

Let’s see whether the policy of sanctions should be adopted or abandoned in the case of Myanmar or any other situation where the military junta strangulates the political system and society as well.

Zakaria takes his inspiration from Thant Myint-U, a former senior UN official and grandson of U Thant, the UN’s third secretary-general. According to Thant, opening up trade and removing travel restrictions to countries with military dictatorships is a soft method of having an impact on the behaviour of such regimes. In Myanmar’s case, opening up to the country would have allowed it to become a Vietnam and thus more pliable to the wishes of the US.

Even theoretically, it is argued, sanctions do not work because these increase state control and weaken civil society which then cannot stand up and fight the dictatorial regime. The authoritarian state, which is already powerful, becomes doubly strong in resource distribution because the flow of resources from outside becomes limited and whatever gets in has to pass through the hands of the government.

The US had opened up to Myanmar but then reversed its position during the early 1990s after the military junta refused to accept the elections won by Aung San Suu Kyi. Zakaria believes that the sanctions did more damage than good for two reasons.

First, Myanmar’s civil society weakened due to its reduced capacity in capital formation. For instance, the textile industry buckled under pressure of the sanctions. Hundreds and thousands of people lost their jobs due to the ban on Burmese exports and thus had no capacity to fight the generals.

Second, Chinese companies replaced American companies which, in Zakaria’s view, was tantamount to an authoritarian country building greater influence in Myanmar than a liberal democracy like the US.

Here, the American author has used the neo-liberal perspective according to which better economies generate stronger democracies. This is certainly a favourite line of the Bush administration and all neo-conservatives. This is also a framework preferred by a number of people in other parts of the world as well. The underlying theory links democracy with economic development.

Furthermore, it is not just economic development but also liberalisation that affects democracy. A free-market driven economy strengthens civil society and makes it less dependent on the state. This, in turn, allows civil society to question the state more vociferously. The state has to be replaced by private sector institutions before the problem of authoritarianism is resolved.

Actually, there are two significant issues worth discussing in Zakaria’s article, the first being the linkage between economic and political development in society and the second, the international community’s ability to influence another state through the process of neo-liberal politics. Let’s look at both.

In case of societal reactions and relations, the neo-liberal formula sounds wonderful except that there is no evidence of a direct correlation between economic strengthening and political development. There is also no evidence to suggest that those who have more money are more likely to challenge authority than the poor.

The reaction towards authority and coercion in society depends on the development and maturity of the public discourse. A society where the popular norm is to bow to authority will encourage that particular instinct no matter what the social class.

The two interesting comparative examples relate to Singapore and Chile. In Singapore’s case, economic progress has not necessarily resulted in greater political liberalism. The people have become attuned to their material needs and are less likely to disturb authority. The rulers of this city state, on the other hand, find it beneficial to ensure good governance in order not to disturb the free market economy.

There is then a pact between the state and society in which people do not create a rumpus about disparities which, in any case, get brushed under the carpet. The size of the state is a major help.

Chile’s political development has been different. Although General Pinochet brought in neo-liberal economic reforms, the major shift in state-society relations occurred because civil society asserted itself against the atrocities of the regime. The government was keen to bring economic development at a much faster pace than political reforms. Society, however, challenged the human rights abuses and in the process challenged the regime as well. There is no evidence to suggest that the Chilean people were more assertive because of their enhanced economic capacity.

A society endangered by authoritarian leadership naturally looks at the world outside to give it a helping hand. Economic and other sanctions are one of the ways of influencing governments which, Fareed Zakaria believes, is not an effective method. Sanctions did not stop the South African government from continuing with the Apartheid nor did it influence Saddam Hussein or other dictators.

The policy of sanctions involves two additional issues. First, why aren’t sanctions successful? Second, do greater interaction, trade and other methods have the desirable effect?

The answer to the first question is that sanctions do not work because those imposing them do not monitor policy implementation at their own end. For instance, British companies were involved in smuggling strategic material to Iraq while London had imposed sanctions. Similarly, South Africa always managed to get what it wanted from outside, albeit at greater cost, due to the hypocrisy of governments abroad. So, sanctions don’t work because the capitalist free-market economy never intends to implement the policy effectively.

With regard to the second point of effectiveness of the opening up of trade and interaction, there is no evidence that authoritarian regimes are more likely to listen to their business partners. Actually, the debate enters the realm of a patron-client relationship and what we see is that patrons do not necessarily affect the behaviour of smaller but aggressive client states, especially if the latter are determined to pursue a particular policy. For instance, despite being a client state Pakistan could never be convinced by the US to give up its nuclear programme or surrender Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan.

It would be unfair to say that there is absolutely no impact on the client’s behaviour. In its desire to earn money, the leadership of a client state might decide to alter some of its policies and tone down its authoritarianism. But there is also the possibility that the patron might also decide to overlook the authoritarian behaviour of its client for the sake of its own economic benefits. The effect is always two-way and not one-way.

It is true that sanctions might not always work, but they do symbolise disapproval of a certain kind of political behaviour. Symbolism is essential to influence the attitudes of states and societies. In the case of Myanmar, or other states suffering from authoritarian rule, neo-liberalism might not be the recipe for a change in conditions. Perhaps, if we could create an alternative political ideology and remember stories of resistance, there could be hope of changing regime behaviour anywhere in the world.

ayesha.ibd@gmail.com