GEN Ashfaq Parvez Kiyani has declared that 2008 is the year of the soldier. According to the new army chief, a military has to be backed by its people. The general clearly wants to change the image of the armed forces.

It is true that a military cannot fight without the moral, psychological, emotional and material support of its people. This army even survived the war of 1971 when, despite losing the war against India, the people in the western wing respected the armed forces much more than what they do today. The stories of the military operation against the people of East Pakistan had not reached the common man. Moreover, the military was still not overly conscious of its power and was generally gentler towards the population. The ordinary military drivers or officers were politer and thus got greater respect.

As a child I remember, while travelling on the main GT road, how I used to compete with my cousins to wave to the passing military trucks and jeeps. Today, when we see people sloganeering against the military it becomes obvious that the relationship between the armed forces and society has changed fundamentally.

Hopefully, General Kiyani realises that it is not just the eight years of General Musharraf which has resulted in a problematic image. The larger society’s attitude towards the military is a carry-over and a synthesis of the power equation between the armed forces and other institutions since 1958. Every eight to ten years of military rule strengthened the military institution and altered the psychology of its personnel. Even the younger officer or the ordinary soldier today is far more confident of their institutional power and constantly make the civilians around them conscious of the imbalance. It would be worthwhile for the army chief to consider the anecdotal evidence of how ordinary civilians can get insulted and humiliated by military personnel. Such incidents then form part of the psyche of civil society.

The military’s publicists argue that the difference between the military and the rest of the society is based on the greater capability of the former. Since the institution teaches better discipline and nationalism, the uniformed people are better quality human beings and Pakistanis. Over the years, the right to define, argue and analyse national issues, politics and economy has only been given to the military and the establishment at large. It must be noted that Mushahid Hussain Sayed defined the establishment as comprising about 1,500 people.

All other perspectives are rejected as anti-military or anti-state. The division between the people and the military is not just the work of the generals but the organisation’s publicists including the ISPR which in its earnestness to defend the organisation tends to create greater chasms. Interestingly, the organisation’s publicists now adopt discreet methods such as using fictitious or less-known names to attack the other view.

The general must also realise that he must be careful about getting into the internal security game. It will be extremely tricky to involve the armed forces in performing a role which will just add to the tension between the military and the society. Other forces such as the police and paramilitary should be trained instead to deal with the internal threat. This might mean downsizing or right-sizing the army. But then would he rather not command a smaller but more potent force which has the support of its people as well?We hope that he does not confine the issue of improving the force’s image to the urban centres of Punjab. Other regions must be considered equally seriously. For example, what about Balochistan where the Baloch feel sick due to what has happened to their people? There are hundreds of Baloch missing and then there is the coercion done in the name of saving the state. Dividing the Pukhtoon, Urdu-speaking and Punjabi settlers, and the indigenous Baloch is one option. The other is to start genuinely mending the psychological and emotional fences which were further destroyed due to the killing of Baloch leaders.

Improving the military’s image is not a simple task. A question which the army chief certainly must clarify is how he defines the year of the soldier. Is 2008 to be the year of the soldiers who died fighting in the war of 1947-48, operation Gibraltar, the 1965 and 1971 wars, and the Kargil crisis? Is the new year to commemorate the jawans who died defending the country with their lives and who suffered for the follies of their seniors? Or is the year of the soldier about those personnel who run the various corporate organisations?

Coming up with the right definition is truly difficult in the current socio-economic conditions where the overall elite of the country does not have the time for the common people. Departing from the issue of defining which soldier we are talking about, just look at what is happening in the country. The huge construction mega projects, especially real estate projects, are either for investment purposes or for the upper-middle-class and the burgeoning population of consultants who earn in US dollars. Not to forget the rich Pakistani expatriates who feel uncomfortable abroad and are now investing in Pakistan.

Nothing much is being done to eradicate the problems of the poor people who are not only short of housing but now find it difficult to afford flour, oil and sugar.

General Kiyani clearly has two options. First, to genuinely change the relationship between the military and the civilian society by restructuring the armed forces, bringing transparency and accountability and increasing society’s ownership of the institution. Although commanders of large standing militaries look down upon conscription, he might just look at the concept carefully and find ways of altering the character of his army.

Second, he could simply take a tactical approach by entering into a partnership of a different kind with civil society and political players and using the relationship to the military’s advantage. What is meant by this option is to first alter the civilian players and then use them to improve the organisation’s image. This option is quite complex. This means that the army chief will first have to dump all the present political players and replace them with new stakeholders. This is not an impossibility considering that a lot of people are predicting major changes after the elections.

Some of the key players in the present civil society movement could be given a chance after the present leadership has collapsed as a result of the post-election violence which many are predicting. The former information and railways minister, Sheikh Rasheed Ahmed, has on several occasions talked about the elections being ‘bloody’. In case of violence, the army might like to get rid of the old leadership because their irresponsible behaviour costs the military immensely in terms of its image. The new leadership could then be picked up from the ongoing civil society movement. The benefit of this political restructuring is that society might be appeased temporarily.

Unfortunately, this is a fairly short-termed approach. It is necessary to overhaul the socio-economic and socio-political systems to bridge the vast divide between different classes and institutions, including the military and civil society.

The writer is an independent analyst and author of the book “Military Inc: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy”.
ayesha.ibd@gmail.com

DO not be downhearted about the outcome of the Bali talks. They did not deliver the binding commitments to cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions that are desperately needed, and as a result millions may die who might have lived.

But they did show us something remarkable. They showed us the human race trying to grow up and take responsibility for its common future.

It doesn’t feel like that, of course. It feels like 15,000 politicians, diplomats, journalists and activists flew across continents in order to sit in Bali for two weeks and achieve very little. Disappointment and even anger are not out of order, for the commitment to early and deep emission cuts (25 to 40 per cent by 2020) that most developed countries wanted to see in the draft treaty had to be dropped in order to keep the United States involved at all.

The Bush administration no longer denies that climate change is a problem, but it is still determined to kill any international deal that involves concrete and legally binding targets. The United States produces about a quarter of the world’s emissions, so no deal that excludes it would work. Moreover, the developing countries where emissions are growing fastest, particularly China and India, will never accept obligations of their own while the United States accepts none. So the American delegation had to be kept on board no matter how obstructive it was.

It was amazingly obstructive. There must be no targets, there must be no timetables, there must be no numbers at all in the ‘roadmap’ that the conference was drawing up for the next two years of negotiations on a successor to the Kyoto treaty, insisted chief US negotiator Harlan Watson. Why not? Because “once numbers appear in the text, it prejudges the outcome and will tend to drive the negotiations in one direction.” Yes, and if everybody’s shared goal is cut emissions and avoid catastrophic climate change, what’s wrong with that?

The United States was almost completely isolated at the Bali talks. Its only two allies among the developed countries were Canada and Japan, both of which promised modest emission cuts under the Kyoto accord ten years ago but then allowed their emissions to soar. And the danger was that the frustration and fury of all the other delegations, in the hothouse atmosphere of a two-week conference, would lure them into a pointless and destructive confrontation with the United States.

It was Al Gore who saved the day with a speech in which he urged the conference to be patient. “My own country, the United States, is mainly responsible for obstructing progress at Bali,” he admitted, “but over the next two years the United States is going to be somewhere it is not now. If you decide to continue the progress on all the items other than the targets and timetables for mandatory reductions, on the hope and with the expectation that, before this process is concluded … you will be able to fill in that blank [with the help of a different position from the United States], then you can make great progress here.”

Bush will soon be gone. Even though time is short, you have to wait him out.

The conference took Gore’s advice and removed the numbers from the text. Even then, astonishingly, the US delegation declared that it could not support the revised text — and a chorus of boos rang out in the crowded conference hall. A delegate from Papua New Guinea stood up and told the US delegation: “If you’re not willing to lead, please get out of the way.” After a short huddle, the US delegation announced that it would support the revised text after all.

So don’t believe the cynics who say that public opinion does not matter. A large majority of Americans are far ahead of their government in their desire to see effective action on climate change. With both world opinion and American public opinion solidly against it, it suddenly became clear to the US delegation that this line of trenches had to be abandoned fast.

So there is a ‘roadmap’ for the next two years of negotiations, although it has no hard numbers in it. Low-level meetings will continue over the next year but the next big conference, scheduled for Poland next December, will probably be allowed to slip by a couple of months so that the new US administration is in office.

There is no guarantee that the emissions cuts they finally agree to in 2009 will be big enough, or that everybody will meet their commitments. Runaway global warming is a serious possibility, in which case we may be facing mega-deaths by mid-century. But Bali was not a futile or a shameful exercise. It was actually quite inspiring, and even fifty years ago it would have been inconceivable.

The writer is a London-based independent journalist.

COULD a college film festival in a small town of India possibly be a success given the saturation of entertainment space by Bollywood and cable TV channels? Would there be a positive student response, especially as most of the films in the festival were documentaries?

These questions dampened my zeal as I discussed plans with college administrators to showcase films by women directors on women’s issues. We had limited financial resources but we were banking on our boundless enthusiasm for holding a first ever women’s film festival in Allahabad, to mark the sixteen days of activism to end violence against women and Human Rights Day on Dec 10.

Allahabad is a mid-sized sleepy town in southern Uttar Pradesh, located at the confluence of the Ganga-Jamuna rivers, well-known for its guavas and melons, its poets and writers, and for the world-famous Khumbh mela every six years. But it isn’t what you would call a happening place.

Despite cautionary advice on the limited attention spans of youth for low-attention value tasks like watching documentaries, we decided to plunge ahead. Cooperation poured in from many institutions. Financial support came from Oxfam India Trust and Allahabad University and infrastructural support from the women’s cell of Jagat Taran College. Directors Paromita Vohra and Kavita Pai agreed to come to Allahabad for the event. Reaching out to a young audience in the heart of the Hindi belt became an exciting prospect for them.

But why did we feel the need for a film festival celebrating women directors who have drawn attention to women’s issues? The reason is because the mainstream media ignores women’s issues and women’s voices on those issues. We hardly hear or read women’s views on how war, ethnic conflicts, religious fundamentalism, and gender-based violence affect women’s lives. It is not as if women envisage no solutions to these problems. Nobody bothers to ask them.

Moreover, the commercial media depicts women in stereotypical images which can hardly be called empowering. The commercial media has two categories for women: good or bad women, depending on whether they submissively acquiesce to victimisation or try to resist it. This stereotypical representation of women does gross injustice to the myriad roles women are playing in sustaining the social and cultural life of societies, and in peace-building globally.

Therefore, we wanted to acquaint the women of Allahabad with an alternative and empowering vision of womanhood — show them vignettes where women exercise agency and make choices. And we chose the medium of cinema to do this.

The films we screened were varied in content and style but all raised questions about the fundamental human rights of women. Many are award-winning films. Paromita Vohra’s Q2P is a film about toilets and the city. She contrasts the glitter and glamour of the rapidly developing Mumbai with the lack of public toilets in the city, especially for poor women. What does this discrimination mean for women’s rights to health, safety, mobility?

In There Was A Queen, young directors Kavita Pai and Hansa Thapliyal focused on remote areas of Kashmir where they asked women the central question: how do you think peace will come to Kashmir? The film goes beyond the binary image newspapers and television channels construct of fundamentalist separatists and helpless victims, and sensitively delineates the lives of ordinary women and men as they struggle to maintain a semblance of normality amidst chaos.

Taza Khabar, directed by Bishakha Dutta, highlighted the struggles involved in the production and distribution of a village newsletter by a group of largely Dalit and Kol community women in rural Uttar Pradesh. It was inspiring for the students to talk to a reporter and an editor of the newsletter. One of them, Meera, became the star that afternoon. A mother of five daughters, she explained the resistance she faced from her family when she stepped out to work, and the challenges from the community when she started work as a reporter with no experience in the field of journalism.

Nobody took her seriously when she approached them for interviews. That has, however, changed in the last five years since Khabar Lahariya, the fortnightly newsletter, commands respect because it reports village news that mainstream newspapers often neglect.

The response from students was overwhelming. The college auditorium was packed to capacity. After each screening, the directors and I were amazed at the candid questions women asked in the discussion sessions. The films focused on uncomfortable issues which are cloaked in silence: we don’t converse informally about domestic violence, sexual harassment, women’s rights to freedom of mobility, their right to make decisions about choosing lifestyles and life partners.

One thing became clear during the discussions: women want change and women are tired of being treated as mindless objects, compelled to follow traditional paths detrimental to their personal development. And they want their male allies to join hands in the change process, not as protectors of the status quo but as partners in ending gender-based inequalities.

The writer is an Oxfam Fellow based in Allahabad.
nighatm2002@yahoo.com

ONCE again it is proved, if any proof were needed, that democracy has struck deep roots in India. The election in Gujarat was free and fair. As happens in a democratic state, the Central Election Commission was supreme and it rightly kept a tight rein on political parties.

For example, the BJP and the Congress were admonished for the intemperate language some of their leaders used during the campaign.

Yet, India failed because state chief minister Narendra Modi defeated its ethos: pluralism. Democracy and secularism are two sides of the same coin. Democracy without pluralism has little meaning because the participation of people, without any distinction of religion and caste, is essential. By creating hatred against a particular community, Modi created an atmosphere of bias and fear. Elections were free but people had been brainwashed.

The result was that the BJP, led by Modi, secured 117 seats in the 182-member house, five less than in the 2002 election held after the Gujarat carnage. Like the last time, he successfully played the anti-Muslim card and equated terrorism with Muslims. A poor second was the Congress with 62 seats. However, it increased its tally by 11 seats by winning in the riot-affected areas of central Gujarat. The party bungled over selecting candidates, fielding many who in the eyes of voters are BJP men.

The Congress never presented a clear-cut alternative to Hindutva because it was too much on the defensive and too ready to compromise. On the other hand, the BJP or Modi did not hide their philosophy of saffronising India. What the party and Modi did was an antithesis of the freedom struggle which was waged, not only to oust the British, but also to establish a democratic, secular polity. These principles were ensconced in the constitution.

Hindutva was never envisaged and Mahatma Gandhi declared after Partition in the midst of communal riots that Hindus and Muslims were his two eyes. Even when it was clear that Pakistan would be an Islamic republic, the resolve in India was to convert it into a secular state. If the nation wanted to have a Hindu rashtra, nobody could have stopped it from doing so because 80 per cent of the population in divided India was Hindu. Still the proposition was not even discussed because the ethos of the freedom struggle was secularism. All communities had participated in the movement and they wanted to sustain a multicultural and multi-religious society.

The tragedy about Gujarat is that it wants to pursue a parochial agenda which is not acceptable to the rest of India. Diversity is the country’s strength and it can even break up if it is weakened. The reason why a big country like the Soviet Union disintegrated was the suppression of diverse communities in the name of communism. Modi is busy destroying India’s integration and the BJP is trying to implement Hindutva, whatever it costs in terms of unity.

Still, the BJP is impaled on the horns of a dilemma. It cannot win India unless it sheds its anti-Muslim bias. At the same time, it does not want to give up the Hindutva plank because its parochial line has given it dividends in some parts. It has its governments in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Uttrakhand, Jharkhnd and coalitions in Punjab and Bihar. Since the party was nowhere near the independence movement, it never understood, much less appreciated, the ethos of pluralism that inspired the freedom struggle.

L.K. Advani, a top BJP leader, got rapped on his knuckles by the RSS, the party’s mentor, when he praised Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah for having reflected a secular outlook in his speech after Partition; Pakistan and India were two nations, Muslims and Hindus can go freely to their mosque or temple and should not mix religion with politics. The RSS never forgave him and he, on his part, was on the defensive and practically withdrew his remark. When it comes to Hindutva, the RSS brooks no dissent.

In fact, the re-election of Modi, with the margin he has secured, is going to influence the BJP’s strategy of tomorrow. The party’s position on Kashmir may become more intractable because it would not like compromising on such an issue, particularly when even the comparatively liberal Atal Behari Vajpayee has withdrawn to the shadows. The main casualty of Modi’s victory may be the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), the platform on which different regional parties have come together to command a majority in the Lok Sabha. Vajpayee ruled the country for six years through this alliance. Now Advani is looking forward to it.

Regional parties may not like to sup with Modi who spews hate because they have their Muslim supporters to reckon with. BJP president Rajnath Singh may go on repeating that the party has won in Gujarat and Modi may also be saying so. But the fact remains that Modi kept even the party leadership out. Like a camel, he has entered the tent. He is going to ask for space which the central leadership will have to concede.Advani’s remark that Modi’s election is a turning point in national politics may well be true. But the turning point is going to be the rethinking on the part of the BJP’s allies. Except the Shiv Sena from Maharashtra, there does not seem to be any party siding with the BJP. They have secular credentials. They cannot go to the voters with Modi as the BJP mascot.

Muslims command 15 to 18 per cent of the electorate and this is crucial in about 150 Lok Sabha seats. Modi’s advantage begins and ends in Gujarat, because the Muslim vote in the state is only eight per cent. That is the reason why allies of the BJP appealed to the party not to send Modi when they were fighting their election for the assembly.

The Congress is still learning its lesson from Gujarat. Party president Sonia Gandhi is a crowd-puller but not the vote-catcher. No use re-emphasising that Rahul Gandhi is not making any impact. Younger leaders in the Congress and persons like Lalu Prasad Yadav, who is on the side of the Congress, might have done better if they had campaigned.Yet the biggest drawback of the Congress is that — this is not in Gujarat alone — it does not come out as the unequivocal exponent of pluralism as it should. The party gives the impression of being Hindutva’s soft version. Considered to be carrying the ethos of the freedom struggle, the Congress cannot afford to compromise on the ideals. The BJP is understandably against secularism but a diluted, half-hearted Congress can do only harm. It is sad that the party is not conscious of that.

The writer is a leading columnist based in New Delhi.