Choice before the US

ISRAEL and its western backers have already wrecked the Hamas government which assumed power after a landslide electoral victory in January last year. Now there is a Palestinian national unity government, which includes Fatah and non-Hamas ministers. Will this government too suffer the fate that the Hamas government did? True to form, Israel has refused to deal with this set-up as well. It triggered the boycott of the Hamas government last year by freezing the Palestinian Authority’s share of revenue; the US and the European Union followed suit by cutting off all non-humanitarian assistance to the PA. The result was exactly the chaos they wanted. Denied money, the Hamas government led by Mr Ismail Haniye was paralysed, because it could not even pay salaries to the civil servants, leading to street protests. Worse followed in the form of battles between Hamas and Fatah, because the latter had not reconciled to the loss of power which it had traditionally enjoyed in Palestinian affairs. The resulting clashes, in which Palestinians shed Palestinian blood, added to the people’s misery in occupied West Bank and Gaza.

The establishment of a unity government is a test of the West’s commitment to democracy in the Middle East, because it is an elected government. Sabotaging the new government will mean destroying Palestine’s fledgling democracy. Israel’s reaction should surprise no one. It looks at every development from only one angle: how to delay, dither and vacillate, the aim being to avoid a resumption of talks or — if talks are going on — to sabotage them. This time too Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has made it clear his government will not talk to the Palestinian government, though he said he would be in contact with President Mahmoud Abbas but only on humanitarian matters. The crucial issue is whether the US and Europe will adopt a correct approach, engage with the unity government in a meaningful way and help kick-start peace talks; or will they go along with Tel Aviv and help it in its relentless drive to strengthen its hold over the occupied territories with a view ultimately to annex them, as it did in the case of the Golan heights?

There are some hopeful signs though. Norway has accepted the new government, the Palestinian foreign minister is to visit Paris, and even Washington has indicated that it will deal with the PA’s non-Islamist ministers. However, dealing with non-Hamas ministers will be useless unless the US focuses on reviving the peace process. It has been dormant since Mr Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Islamic holy sites in Al Quds in September 2000. When he came to power, he reoccupied Gaza and parts of the West Bank earlier vacated by Israel, carried out another massacre — this time in Jenin — and sabotaged the 2003 roadmap to peace, which had visualised the emergence of an independent Palestinian state by 2005. Later, President George Bush surrendered to Mr Sharon’s demand that even after withdrawing from the West Bank, Israel would keep “some” occupied territory. The formation of the unity government gives the US another chance to pressure Israel into resuming the peace process. Hamas has indirectly recognised Israel by accepting the two-state solution. It is time Israel too accepted the reality that it cannot keep the occupied territories indefinitely and that sooner or later a sovereign Palestinian state with Al Quds as its capital has to come into being.

The World Cup disaster

AFTER hitting rock bottom, the choice is clear: Pakistan cricket can continue to wallow in the depths, where it will ultimately perish, or summon every ounce of reserve and rise to the surface. For anything to be salvaged from the unmitigated disaster that was the World Cup, the post-mortem must be thorough and unsparing. Real accountability, however, will not be possible if the scope of the inquiry is limited to the players. Inzamamul Haq, for one, has already announced his retirement from one-day cricket and relinquished the captaincy of the Test side. The decision’s timing could have been better though, coming as it did when the focus should have been on the tragic death of coach Bob Woolmer. Inzamam should have known better than to divert attention to his personal trauma at a time of collective mourning. Still, he did the honourable thing in resigning.

Some other heads should also roll, but the first to be frogmarched to the tumbril must be PCB chief Nasim Ashraf. A doctor by profession who until recently lived in America, he has no business heading the board in a country with no shortage of lifelong cricket administrators and former players who know the game inside out. Nasim Ashraf is the chairman of the PCB for one reason and one reason alone: he is a personal favourite of President Musharraf. The fabulously wealthy PCB is not dependent on government handouts, and as such there is no reason why the president should appoint the chairman of the board. The position is a magnet for cronies and junket-seekers, and the state of the game will not improve until the current system is abolished and the long-overdue constitution implemented. The ad hoc basis on which the board has been run since July 1999 must give way to an elected executive council comprising the representatives of regional associations. The chairman of selectors, Wasim Bari, has failed miserably at his job and it is time he too was shown the door. Lastly, the skills of our batsmen will never improve if the first-class game continues to be played on featherbed tracks and in front of empty stands.

Advertising of drugs

ACCORDING to a report, the bylaws that the city government of Karachi plans to introduce to regulate private healthcare institutions will also seek to curb the unethical advertising of any product/facility which is not scientifically accepted. This is a welcome move. If one were to believe the claims made by the ads that have been appearing on various television channels, one should never worry about falling ill. The many ‘miracle drugs’ advertised make tall claims about the wonders they perform. After the availability of such easy cures, one is forced to ask why diseases are so rampant in this country. The fact is that the drugs advertised are spurious and many actually harm people’s health. Hence the need for a ban. It is wholly unethical for the media to propagate these so-called magic cures just to earn some easy bucks.

The impending bylaws should prohibit the publicity of any drug in the media, even if it is scientifically accepted. It is time everyone, including the government, were reminded of the importance of the Drug Act of 1976, which is still in force. To protect consumers from the onslaught of advertising by manufacturers, the law bans the advertising of drugs and treatments in the media except in medical journals that are read mainly by health professionals. This is based on the precept that in health matters the consumer is not qualified to decide about the medicines that are suitable for him, this being a decision to be taken by his physician/surgeon. Given the onslaught of the market economy and the preponderance of the advertising business, it would be ethically and morally wrong to allow the pharmaceutical companies to play with the public’s health by encouraging self-medication which is on the rise and which would receive a fillip if drugs are freely advertised.

No trickle-down to the poor

THE standard rate is one word per dead policeman, so Dr Manmohan Singh did his duty when he called the Maoist insurgency across half of India the gravest threat to the nation's internal security since independence.

Fifty-five policemen were surrounded and killed in their forest camp at Chhattisgarh by Naxalites, and agency reports that I read quoted the prime minister's statement at around 55 words, give or take a few for poor mathematics (mine).

We can now expect the powerful Indian state to do one, or more, of three things: hold a conference of chief ministers on the ‘Naxalite menace’ at which there is a lot of back-slapping when old friends meet across party lines; pull out a number of police battalions from a fire and send it to a cemetery, on the valid assumption that Naxalites will not hit the same place twice; agree upon a debate in parliament during which backbenchers are given a chance to speak by party whips.

This is how Delhi dresses up its windows when it wants to protect itself from reality. But why blame Dr Manmohan Singh? He is an honest man. By his own admission, explained during innumerable speeches at favourite forums like the Confederation of Indian Industry, he has said, in so many words, that he became prime minister in order to make the rich richer so that a portion of their wealth could eventually trickle down to the poor.

Unfortunately, after three years of speeches, nothing has yet trickled down to the forests of Chhattisgarh, or even to the slums of its capital, Raipur. The proper thing for the poor to do, of course, is to wait for the momentum of Manmohanomics to reach their hovels. But the Indian poor are a spoilt lot. They have become addicts of democracy, and expect a gush instead of a trickle. Moreover, they want it within the lifetime of the government they have elected.

For the decision-makers within the Indian elite, and its prime minister, Dr Singh, Chhattisgarh is another country, as near or as remote as Vietnam was in their youth, and as Iraq is today. The dead are an accidental number, not real flesh and blood. Even those who protect the elite, the policemen in Chhattisgarh, are not real, since constables are the few lucky ones among the poor to be given a uniform and a salary.

Casualty rates in a battle between constables and Naxalites are an exchange of statistics among the have-nots. How does that affect the quality or abundance of a meal in Delhi?

The prime minister described this as the gravest internal security threat since 1947. Those words were, or should have been, chosen with care. So who has raised the obvious question: what has he been doing about this gravest crisis during the last three years he has been prime minister? The crisis did not erupt between March 13 and 15. Dr Singh will soon be completing (I hope no one uses the ambitious term, ‘celebrating’) a thousand days in office.

A fortnight ago his government presented the annual budget. I cannot recall hearing anything about the gravest internal security threat in 60 years, or a remedy to suggest how it could be met through economic policy.

And if Maoism is not an economic problem, then it is nothing. Did it need 55 police corpses to wake up the prime minister of India? Nor is it very certain what he does achieve when he wakes up. The last time he was woken up was a few months ago when the Sachar report on the plight of Indian Muslims was presented to him. In the first flush of dawn-energy he suggested that a portion of government expenditure should be set aside for projects to help lift Indian Muslims.

His finance minister chose that moment to go deaf, and when the budget was presented, treated the suggestion with contempt. Dr Singh responded with silence. Someone must have informed him that Indian Muslims are familiar with betrayal, and in any case they have nowhere else to go apart from the Congress in national elections.

Maybe I could tell the prime minister tomorrow's news today. The minorities of Chhattisgarh are drifting towards the Naxalites.

The biggest disappointment of the last three years has not been Dr Singh, but the Left. The Maoists are today occupying political space either vacated by the Marxists, or which should have been occupied by them. The spread of the Naxalite movement is evidence of how large a national party, and force, the CPI(M) could have become if it had not been trapped by power, first in Bengal, and then, in the last three years, fooled by the honey traps of Delhi.

Three years ago, for the first time, barring the odd exception of unstable experiments, the CPI(M) became the occupant of two significant bastions, one regional and the other national. Power in Bengal is at least real. Their power in Delhi is an illusion. Whenever the Congress does them a favour and tells them that their influence is an illusion, they retreat behind another explanation. Indian Marxists have become ensnared by the oldest Indian metaphor, the ‘mayajaal’. They should now take a few courses in Indian philosophy. Enough of Lenin already, as the theorists of globalisation might put it.

The poor are illiterate because the Indian state has not found the resources for their education. This does not mean that they are stupid. The illiterate may not be able to read the alphabet but they are brilliant at reading a signal.

In the last three years, if the signals from Delhi have been inadequate, then the ones from Kolkata have been appalling, if only because the poor have had higher expectations from Kolkata.

It is hardly a coincidence that the Naxalite attack in Chhattisgarh should occur in the same week that the Marxist government in Kolkata ordered the death of villagers protecting their land in the now well-known village of Nandigram (literally, Village of Nandi) in Bengal. The land is required by the Marxist government in order to sell it to an Indonesian multinational which will use it to create a Special Economic Zone (SEZ), the new mantra of progressive enlightenment.

All the classic elements of "bourgeoisie oppression" were at play: instead of negotiation with the people, force was ordered. An instrument of state that went on a rampage received the official protection of the state government in the Assembly, and the judiciary had to step in to force a CBI enquiry into the incident. The chief minister, who justified the police action, added that if the people did not want the SEZ he would not insist on it. How many more corpses does he need to complete his education?

The party line is known: three decades ago, the CPI(M) consolidated its vote through radical reforms that gave agricultural land to the sharecropper. The children of that sharecropper now need jobs, and industrialisation must be pushed through at any cost. The current cost is not only splashed with blood, but mocks ideologues with its ironies. Land that was given to the sharecroppers by the Marxists is being retaken to take jobs whose profits will go to multinationals.

The party that sold us decades of rhetoric against Indian capitalism (the running dogs of imperialism) is not the flag bearer of international capitalism, willing to kill the poor to enforce the power of this flag. There are other routes to salvation for the poor, apart from killing them.

The bitter story of Nandigram is complicated by the fact that many of the affected are Muslims who trusted the Marxists for thirty years, and now feel abandoned by every political party in the democratic space. Where is their anger heading?

On March 15, a rally of Muslims marched to parliament in Delhi to demand that the Sachar report needed to be translated into economic policies. Among the banners were those of the Students Islamic Organisation of India. They carried a message: ‘Special Exploitation Zone’.

The poor are very good at reading signals from government. Is there anyone in government who knows how to read signals from the poor?

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

Farm subsidies

US CONGRESS is gearing up for one of its twice-a-decade fights over a farm bill. Past battles have not produced a sensible policy, and this year's debate already is off to a troubling start.

President Bush has submitted a farm bill that contains a number of desirable reforms. He proposes to eliminate commodity subsidies for farmers with annual incomes of $200,000 or more. He offers a series of common-sense changes to the way the government calculates and distributes farm payouts, alterations that backers say address international concerns over anti-competitive American subsidies that have held up global trade talks. Commendably, he also would shift money to conservation efforts.

In the House, the Agriculture Committee will battle over the particulars. But first the Budget Committee must set the total amount that the Agriculture Committee can appropriate to particular programmes, and that figure is significant, in two ways. Too much generosity will enable lawmakers to siphon money into all sorts of pet projects while declining to trim subsidies; a smaller total will give Congress less opportunity to expand wasteful programmes and more incentive to consider many of Mr. Bush's proposals.

— The Washington Post