Behind the Burqa

The French President Sarkozy says “In our country, we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity. The burqa is not a religious sign; it’s a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement. It will not be welcome on the territory of the French republic.”

Is the burqa a sign of subservience as Sarkozy says or this is a typical Western cliche which derides the understanding of other religions, without understanding their cultural subtleties? The burqa has become a symbol of oppression (rightly or wrongly) and we are appalled at the Burqa culture being carried out by the Taliban and the rest of extremist Islam, in the name of safeguarding their religion. But the very presence of a burqa does not make a nation backward or its women subservient.

The very principle of freedom of expression that Sarkozy and the West invokes while outlawing the burqa is violated by this ban. If the burqa is a forced wear, as in some nations, it definitely needs to be condemned but when people wear it out of their own accord as in many parts of the world, including the liberal West, it is undemocratic for the State to step in and ban it. For every woman who has the right not to wear a burqa, every woman also has the right to wear the burqa.

There is a difference between a secular state and an irreligious one and what Sarkozy is doing is moving away from the principle of equal respect to all religions and enforcing the might of the State. The threat of radical Islam and terrorism is scaring Europe leading to such “popular” actions as seen in France and Turkey. The melting pot culture of US provides freedom to religions to practice freely without getting into the debate of State Vs Religion while what Europe is trying to do is essentially force a spirit of Europeanism on its people, fearing an invasion of its culture (assuming that something called homogeneous European culture actually exists).

While Sarkozy has gone public with his remarks and set up a Commission to look into the burqa laws, France’s reaction is not an isolated one. For the past 80 years, Turks have lived in a secular state founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who rejected headscarves as backward-looking in his campaign to secularise Turkish society. (Even so, it is estimated that as many as 65% of Turkish women cover their heads with a scarf).

The city council in Maaseik, Belgium on December 27, 2004 criminalized the wearing of the burqa and the niqab in its public places. The Dutch Government has been debating a law to say ‘no’ to the burqa in public spaces, claiming that it disturbed public order, citizens and safety. In July 05 the Italian parliament approved anti-terrorist laws which make hiding one's features from the public - including through wearing the burqa - an offence.

There are cultural differences among various nationalities and religions, which Sarkozy has not attempted to understand. What exhibits itself as subservience to one culture probably reflects the urge of the other to assert oneself using one’s religious identity, here clearly, a frontal expression of Islamic identity. When the State tries to crush such symbolism, it invites trouble for itself and makes it difficult for it to reach out to its own people. Coercing someone not to wear something in the name of freedom does not make you very different from the perpetrators of the original threat.

As Amit Varma also points out, wearing a burqa may be a rational decision taken by an individual to handle societal and family cultures to adhere one’s traditions. While this may not be a perfect situation, it does not give the State the freedom to impose its ideas of mistaken freedom on people, who are happy with their freedom.

Also, Sarkozy needs to realize that irrespective of the symbolic nature of the burqa in the Western Eye, not every woman wears it out a sense of coercion and that there are many who like to wear it either due to a personal liking or because it presents them with an opportunity to associate themselves with their identity of being a Muslim.

Thomas Jefferson said we can use our laws to coerce the acts of the body, but not the operations of the mind. People should be free to worship their god freely, so long as other laws, neutral laws of general applicability, are not violated. Coercive attitudes towards any direction can be counter-productive and banning the burqa may only push the liberal Muslim more towards radicalism as he fears his culture being trampled by a majoritarian culture.

In the same vein, if burqa represents an ugly side of Islam, what stops Governments from looking at Sikhs with turbans and bearded Muslims as militants ? Who determines what constitutes the dress of a fundamentalist vis-a-vis that of a liberal. Should the State get involved in personal matters and dilute its rule in administration by bringing in regulations in areas where it has no business to be in?

Nothing symbolizes the rift between Islam and the West so non-violently but pungently as the burqa, which Westerners find especially offensive when located on their own streets. The real issue of security and religious freedom is being drowned by focusing attention on symbols which are merely periphery items on the war on global terrorism. But then banning a headscarf is so much easier to do than trying to make an effort to dig and sort out the larger brewing problem of religious fundamentalism.

Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures)

Blame the authors of this brilliant book for giving it such a cheesy title that readers may dismiss as some wannabe silly book written by a set of junkies or at best, a medical book. Emergency Sex is anything but that; it is a brilliant thrilling narrative told through the eyes of three UN Officials as they navigate through some of the world’s most horrendous war zones and see violence which is shocking even when read on print.

Heidi Postlewait joins the UN after leaving her husband, in search of adventure and a meaning in life. Kenneth Cain is a Harvard Law School graduate who decides to chuck a corporate career and make a difference by being a human rights lawyer for the UN. Dr. Andrew Thomson is a New Zealand-born doctor who goes to work at a Red Cross hospital in Phnom Penh and then moves into the UN.

The trio meet in Cambodia in the early '90s, as part of a team that is monitoring the elections there. Their task is to ensure a free and fair poll and export democracy (in Ken’s language) to the country, which is slowly recovering from the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. The experience of running a successful election emboldens them on the path of changing the world wherever they go. (It is later revealed that the elections do not make much of a difference and it takes five more years to bring a semblance of peace to the country).

Heidi and Ken are then assigned to Somalia while Andrew goes to Haiti. After the Cold War, the Somalian government collapses and the US, in concert with the UN, steps in to impose a full-scale ‘humanitarian intervention’ to impose peace and rebuild the nation; something not accepted by one of the warlords Mohammed Aidid, leading to a prolonged conflict. In Haiti, Jean Bertrand Aristide, a former priest, wins the first elections but is overthrown in a bloody coup. The UN then steps in to deploy an ambitious civilian human rights observer mission to document the torture and violence, hoping to pressurize the return of the Aristide Government.

But unlike the peaceful Cambodian peninsula, Somalia and Haiti present violent conflicts which expose the soft stance of the UN in these areas. After a bout of violence, the troops slowly withdraw and the same Aidid who is a war criminal before the conflict is treated as a tribal leader to do negotiations. Aidid’s success against the UN leads to a similar counter-attack in Haiti, forcing the US and subsequently, the UN to withdraw its personnel from there.

Andrew wonders how a group of tiny personnel with allegiance to a local gang in a small country like Haiti can force the mighty Clinton administration to withdraw its forces. He realises that the effort taken in documenting the rights violations is a waste and that they have let down all the people who have come forward to help them, against all odds.

While Heidi is later on sent to Haiti once peace returns, Andrew and Ken are assigned to Rwanda where more than 800,000 members of the Tutsi tribe are massacred by the Hutus in retaliation to the assassination of the Hutu President. The Tutsis, led by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) defeat the rebels and take over the country but by that time, the massacre is already done. Though the news of the massacre is known, the UN officials step back, allowing the country to explode in flames. Having failed to intervene in the genocide, the UN steps in later to setup an International Tribunal to prosecute the perpetrators of the horrific crimes- another case of too little, too late.

Andrew and Ken wonder at the almost inanity of their operations. When the massacres in Haiti, Bosnia and Rwanda could have been stopped, the UN bureaucracy holds back and once the vultures have wiped out all the carcasses, they step in trying to count the dead and use the courts and judiciary to bring the criminals to justice.

In Bosnia, the UN enables genocide by declaring Srebrenica a "safe zone" for Bosnian Muslims and then refusing to defend the city. Andrew is sent as a forensic expert to Bosnia to excavate bodies and bring in forensic evidence of a massacre that the Serbs, under Milosevic, refused to acknowledge. In what is probably the most openly damning indictment of the UN, Andrew says:

One day someone at UNHQ will commission an official report about this disaster, replete with mea culpas and lessons learned. But for me there's only one lesson and it's staring right at me every day as I eat lunch: If blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers show up in your town or village and offer to protect you, run. Or else get weapons. Your lives are worth so much less than theirs. I learned that the day we were evacuated from Haiti.

The UN and the West’s double standards in addressing conflicts is reflected by Ken when he says - One hundred and fifty thousand humans died from war crimes in Yugoslavia, in the middle of Europe, and 150,000 died from exactly the same war crimes here, in West Africa. For Yugoslavia, the UN created the first formal war crimes tribunal since Nuremberg and is deploying batteries of human rights officers, forensic pathologists, lawyers, and investigator. For war crimes in Liberia, the UN sent, well me…Liberia has no oil, no strategic relevance, and the airport, hotels and beaches offer neither rest nor recreation. No one comes, no one cares. During the Liberian conflict, the UN and West are reluctant to send forces and so they send unarmed observers to monitor the Nigerian forces who act as peacekeepers but who probably are worse than the fighters of the place.

But the book is not just a political journey and takes us through the everyday lives of the UN and its administration. For a global organisation like UN, it is difficult to isolate itself from politics and play a truly non-partisan role in all conflicts. There are young men and women who have been led on the path of idealism, which forces them to embrace a life of hardships in areas far away from their daily existence.

Witnessing such extreme acts of violence (the book narrates gut wrenching stories of mutilations, rapes and extreme tortures) is tough for anyone and one wonders whether these youngsters are ready to face such crises in their lives which threaten their very foundations. I guess I could not find a more apt sense of distress which caught my attention than when Ken says - If there is a God, Doctor, I want him prosecuted for crimes against humanity – after the Rwanda Genocide.

In the end, all three return to private life, all with mixed emotions about how they spent their youths. Andrew gets married, returns to Cambodia and builds a home on the Mekong River; Heidi takes an office job at the UN headquarters; and Cain is now a writer / scholar. All of them take a more pragmatic view towards life and realize that good intentions are not enough to change the world; this is a sign of maturity but also a mild sense of defeat after living (rather surviving) through horrific times.

While the indictment of the UN is primarily for its role or rather lack of it in conflict resolution in these places, the book also highlights many other things. Peacekeeping troops" sent by Bulgaria to Cambodia were not military personnel but prison inmates and the patients of psychiatric wards--even though they arrived in military uniform to become UN Blue Helmets!!! There was mass booth capturing and ballot burning in Haiti elections held under the aegis of the UN, but the UN remains silent and it allows the government to conjure an imaginary winning percentage. The UNs total incompetency in safeguarding its personnel in several war zones (In Somalia, one of its men is killed by carelessness and an inquiry hushes it up) is exposed, so is its complicity in worsening the crises through corruption and mismanagement.

It seems that the grumpy old men and holier-than-thous running the UN, who have made their diplomatic careers on saving the wicked world, were really scared of this book and so Kofi Annan and Co, actually tried to have the book suppressed. But anyone, who reads this book, will realize that it does not tell anything more about the UN than is known but then the powers-to-be are always jittery, aren’t they? As you read the book, you tend to agree with this assessment by an editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald - The United Nations does some good but too often it is just a lie or a fig leaf or even a cause of evil itself. Over a long period it's proved incapable of significant reform. Maybe it's time to abolish it and start again.

The story is told in first person and the authors take turns telling the narrative, but the different story lines which run parallel never put you off the track. Emergency Sex is a funny, sincere, and devastatingly honest account of life in the War Zones from an insider’s perspective, which forces you to gallop through the pages, despite the discomfort of its many tragedies.

P.S. I’d like to confess that I am fascinated by the thought of young men and women giving up the idea of a comfortable life and heading into the unknown in search of life – the idea never ceases to amaze me and the banker within me wants to rebel against this artificial life…

Right to Reincarnate????

Reincarnation was always considered to be something left to the faith of people and a religious issue. But now, the overzealous Chinese Government has pitched in to stop and regulate reincarnations.

We always knew that the Chinese government was scared of the Tibetan monks but isn't this stretching it a bit too far? In a new rule, Tibet’s living Buddhas have been banned from reincarnation without permission from China’s atheist leaders.

Beats me how the Government is going to identify reincarnations. Can you imagine a set of monks sitting for a reincarnation test and then an interview? Maybe the monks would have to submit an application claiming their reincarnation with required proof, duly attested by a gazetted officer (scope for easy money).

When matters of faith start being regulated and framed by governments, you know where this is all headed. Now you’d appreciate the complex responsibilities that bureaucrats have to deal with across the world, especially in such regulated democracies...

For further reading, check this space - China tells living Buddhas to obtain permission before they reincarnate...

The French Presidential Roulette

In a few hours from now, French electors will be voting in the second round of their presidential election. In the first round, the field was narrowed to two candidates, the Right Wing Nicolas Sarkozy and the socialist Ségolène Royal. The remarkable thing about that round was the huge turnout — 83 percent; quite a contrast with the 2002 election, when there was a high proportion of abstentions.

The media spin doctors have of course gone on an overdrive, billing it as the battle between the glamorous, intelligent and articulate Royal and the hard nosed, no-nonsense Sarkozy. The glamour angle (after the rather boring faces of Chirac and Mitterand) provides a good copy for all readers. Both the leaders are born in the post-World War era and do not carry the baggage that the previous generation carries. Both were disliked in their parties as being overambitious and under-qualified upstarts but they have managed to capture the imagination of the French public.

This has been one of the most widely discussed elections that France has seen; probably a lot to do with the fact that it has never elected a woman as its head of state. The fact that Ms. Royal is not only relatively young (53 yrs) but also quite attractive has added colour to the elections. Sarkozy is also young (52 yrs), ambitious and a pragmatist and has a sharply divided opinion in France.

A few months back, photos of Royal frolicking in a beach in a bikini were widely circulated in the press. The French press is quite finicky about publishing such photos of leaders but it still found its way into the papers. But the visuals have not impeded her chances in any way. Stories have also been circulated about Sarkozy’s wife missing during his campaign. All this gossip has managed to bring about life in the rather boring world of politics.

However, what I find the most interesting aspects of this French election are the voter turnout and the woman/mother angle of Royal.

France has the fifth largest population in Europe at 63 million. Its citizens enjoy free healthcare and education. Those in work enjoy a relatively high standard of living and five weeks' statutory paid holiday. It is the most popular country in the world among tourists, receiving about 75 million visitors a year and has the third largest income in the world from tourism.

But France's economy has grown more slowly than any other developed country in the world. In 2006, its 2% growth was the worst in Europe. It also has one of the highest unemployment rates - 9.8% - of any European country. Public finances are coming under strain from the pension system and rising healthcare costs and the tax burden is one of the highest in Europe, at nearly 50% of GDP in 2005.

France has long had a high level of immigration. There are now 4.9m immigrants in France and the French Muslim population is estimated to be the largest in western Europe. Many live in the suburbs in low-standard social housing; unemployment is high among these communities and crime is a serious problem here. In France, the Presidency of Jacques Chirac has lasted many years, and in the past three or four years there have been increasing signs of discontent with the political state of the country.

France has suffered from serious economic problems, and high unemployment, particularly among young people. This has led to racial tensions in cities, where citizens from ethnic minorities have become ghettos of the unemployed and deprived. The high turnout of voters is a clear reflection of a widespread wish for change.

Royal is an unwed mother of four kids and the father is a prominent leader in the Socialist Party. This would in many places not go down well with the public but this is probably more acceptable in France and maybe Europe. It’s a point worth considering if US would be willing to accept such a leader. A country where abortion is an election issue may not necessarily appreciate an unwed mother as a Head of State - a “moral” Bush or an “immoral” Royal???

In India, Royal would stand no chance at all. The conservatives would scoff at her unwed mother status while the liberals may fume at the idea of four kids. If Richard Gere can attract imprisonment for kissing Shilpa Shetty, wonder what would happen if an unwed mother (not even of the Gandhi family) stands for elections?

The idea of a woman Head of state is not new to Asia, with the likes of Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, Bandarnaike, Gloria Arroyo and Shiekh Hasina covering a great deal of the political spectrum in their respective countries. Ofcourse, the fact that they belonged to prominent political families was an important point in their favour.

Ms Royal has had to do a tremendous fight to emerge as a leader within her party itself, especially with repeated sexist attacks on her personal life. She’s, however, fought against many of the odds and emerged as the leading contender for the role. Politically, she’s been accused of being naïve, with little understanding of foreign policy.

She has also been projected as a bit of a lightweight when compared to Sarkozy. While Sarkozy has won points for his assertive style, his demeanour has not exactly gone down too well with the minorities and immigrants. But as all media stories say, France seems all set to elect a president it admires but does not widely like (Latest opinion polls indicate a nine poll lead for Sarkozy).

All the rhetoric dished out in the last few months will finally culminate in that final knockout blow to one of the candidates; however, whatever the result, the high voter turnout is an abject lesson for all democracies – something that the Labour party in UK may have to keep in mind, considering the rather poor opinion that the British public now holds of Blair and Co.

I have not done any analysis on the two candidates to suggest who is better for us in India. The experts in CNN and NDTV would probably have brought about this story. Often wondered whether all this analysis even matters; after all, it is the bureaucracy that runs democracies and not the political class, especially when the leadership has no great vision. Nevertheless, you can read more on the policy differences between the two candidates here, which, eventually may not make too much of a difference.

As per the French constitution, there cannot be any media coverage in the last 48 hours of a poll. So, all analysis in France has come to a standstill and the public is keeping its fingers crossed to witness what could probably one of the closest fights to the hot seat in France. Will it be the hard-nosed Sarky or the softie Sego?

Ofcourse, some things never change. So, there are constant media references to Royal's sex, physical attributes, wardrobe, marital status etc. While Royal has managed to use the looks and gender factor to her advantage, there is always a lurking suggestion from the media hinting at the idea of a "woman president". Does a female Head of State necessarily mean a country turning progressive? Can we judge women politicians by their policies alone, keeping aside gender politics?

P.S. Incidentally, India also has a role to play in the elections. There are 5,534 registered French voters of Pondicherry who would be casting their ballot in this poll. Talk about globalization!!!

Latin America Marches Left

As somebody who takes active interest in world politics, it is impossible not to notice the sweeping change in the world of Latin American politics – the Left is making its strongest ever showing in recent times. Veteran leader Fidel Castro has been replaced by the charismatic Hugo Chavez as the poster boy of this anti-Americanism and this could have interesting implications for the world, especially considering the diminishing stature of the American democracy.

An attempt for an alternate economic and political vision is emerging in the fields of Latin America. A vision which has contempt for American policies, IMF and World Bank strategies is gaining ground and it’s an exciting movement, fostered by the grassroots and people’s movements rather than corporate lobbying. The definition of Leftism, of course, varies from country to country. It probably makes sense to look at this trend not as a Left vs Right issue but as a shift away from a more capitalistic stand, characterized by elitist policies, to an economics dipped in socialism, driven by pro-poor concerns.

Fidel Castro, the old friend of the Yankees, has been its torch bearer for several decades now and has survived more than 50 odd assassination attempts, sponsored by the CIA. But as he grows old, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has taken over his role as the flag bearer of an alternate economic order, which is different from those dreamt at the corridors of global financial powerhouses. But what has caused this to happen?

The US pumps in a lot of effort and time in promoting US-friendly “democracies” by doling out funds liberally or through coercion (as in Iraq). But the last few years have seen it putting a lot of its energies into tackling Middle East issues. Osama, Saddam and Islamic states, being in the US radar, has meant that Latin America has not been prioritized by them (except for its paranoia towards Chavez). This has resulted in the creation of many groups in Latin America, formed by small farmers, human rights activists, and trade unionists etc. who have a fundamentally different agenda as compared to the industrialized nations - an agenda dictated by local people rather than MNCs.

Moreover, the failure of the US administration policies in fighting drugs and expanding free market reforms have provided further impetus to this. The US administration’s controversial coca eradication strategy, to eliminate the cultivation of coca, as part of its “War on Drugs” policy has alienated people in coca growing areas like Peru, Bolivia and Columbia and the rise of Evo Morales in Bolivia (its first democratically elected indigenous head of state), who is essentially a coca farmer, is testimony to this.

There’s a general disillusionment with the way US has gone about using institutions like World Bank and IMF to further its economic and political interests. More than 30 years back, General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the elected President of Chile, Marxist Salvador Allende, in a bloody coup, covertly backed by the CIA because it would be a blow to Washington's international prestige if an avowed Marxist won a fair presidential election in South America. He held power for the next 17 years, relinquishing control in 1990 only after arranging immunity for himself and his top generals.

The Bush administration’s animosity towards Hugo Chavez (and the other way around) is quite well known. While US uses all opportunities to paint him as “anti-democratic” (despite winning 2 democratic elections) and uses this as an excuse to foment hatred for him, the world sees it clearly as a combustible conflict being fuelled by America’s vulnerability over Venezuela’s massive oil reserves. It's an open secret that there have been behind the screen attempts by US to rock the Chavez boat, though denied repeatedly by the administration.



The World Bank and IMF are not exactly the most popular institutions in the minds of developing nations. Rather than being seen as welfare financial institutions, they are increasingly being perceived as Shylock styled-creditors out to extract their pound of flesh. Nobel Laureate and former Chief Economist at the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, says one of the main problems with IMF is that it believes in a one-stop shop treatment for all economic problems facing the world and blasts it for being every bit as secretive, undemocratic and indifferent to the poor as its critics claimed.

All that the IMF seems to be bothered is fiscal deficit management through decreased govt. spending on social programmes, greater privatization and facilitation of international trade, irrespective of the problem. They conveniently forget that any such kind of reduced government spending affects the poor the most. UN estimates say that Latin America has the most unequal wealth distribution of any region in the world, despite religiously sticking to the prescriptions given by the IMF and World Bank. This kind of increased intolerance to the local needs has led to countries veering away from these institutions.

Argentina, under Nestor Kirchner, has recovered remarkably after its economic collapse in 2001 by greater public investment, hard bargaining with private creditors and has gone to the extent of prepaying its entire debt to the IMF by borrowing from Venezuela, to free itself from the IMFs clutches.

Under pressure from the World Bank, the Bolivian government in 2000 sold off Cochabamba's (its third largest city) public water system to Bechtel subsidiary Aguas Del Tunari. Within weeks of taking control of the city's water, Bechtel hit poor families with huge increases in their water bills, enough to spark a popular rebellion and chase Bechtel out of the country. This was followed by another controversial deal in 2003 where the country’s natural gas was sold off to California through a private consortium, Pacific LNG, at a pittance. The great civil conflict that arose because of this led to the resigntion of two Presidents and eventually the nationalization of all gas reserves in Bolivia in May 2006.

All these changes have seen a dramatic shift in world politics, currently dwarfed by the events in Middle East and parts of Asia. Countries like Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela and others are working together to foster a spirit of Latin American unity to fight the might of US and other global financial powerhouses. The focus is moving to the state and people determining the economic policies being framed rather than being dictated by colonial powers and private lobby houses which have their own vested interests.

There will always be conflicts when corporations try to use their clout and lobbying power to bag contracts heavily skewed in their favour and neglect the needs of the local population. The resultant exploitation of local conditions for greater profit making will eventually lead to a backlash against the company. Closer back home, Coca-Cola signed a deal with the Kerala Government to extract water at very low prices. The result was depletion and contamination of ground water in Plachimada in Palakkad District; so while agriculture suffered due to paucity of water, Coke was making heavy profits by selling at about 10 Rs per bottle. Hopefully, we would learn from the Latin American countries and standing up for the rights of our people.

Will this movement change the way the world moves? Can problems of poverty and malnourishment be solved by these countries by giving a human face to economic reforms or is this an aberration driven by a few leaders? Only time will tell but this is a transition we must observe carefully and it has wide repercussions in the global balance of power. As Atila Roque, Executive Director of ActionAid USA, says, “Democracy must go beyond elections of the President and Parliament. Democracy is the freedom to make innovative economic decisions that will improve people’s lives”.

As I began writing this article, news came in that Ecuador has also elected a Leftist Government led by economist Rafel Correa. One more state down.......

Riding the Chinese Dragon

A few days back I watched Karan Thapar’s show “India Tonight” on CNBC-TV 18 which discussed Indo-China relations and the presence of Tibet in our “cold” relationship. It set me thinking as to why despite all this hype about our catching up with China’s economic growth, we act like a “banana republic” ( that maybe harsh but that's a more emotional statement) in our foreign and political affairs. The two most crowded countries in the world cannot sit across the table as equals because we act in such a subservient fashion with the Chinese.

China’s supreme dictator. Hu Jintao, recently stepped on the Indian shores and a few days before that, we heard not-so subtle statements, emanating from Beijing, on Arunachal Pradesh and Tibet. And what is our response? We issue a press statement reiterating that Arunachal is an integral part of India but do not even reprimand the Chinese ambassador, Sun Yuxi, who told Indian television last week: "The whole of what you call the state of Arunachal Pradesh is Chinese territory, and Tawang is only one place in it, and we are claiming all of that." How diplomatic can an ambassador get and how pacifist can we be?

The position of Tawang, on the flanks of the Tibetan plateau, and its cultural affinity to Lhasa are at the root of a decades-old dispute between India and China. Historically, China says, the region was part of outer Tibet. Today it is part of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh - but China lays claim to it in its entirety.

India's Foreign Minister tersely responded by reiterating that Arunachal Pradesh was an "integral part of India". The Chinese say that Tawang is a part of Tibet and since Tibet belongs to them, by extension of that logic, they have control over the place. Thousands of monks stay there as they try to sustain its unique culture from being marauded by imperialistic designs of Mainland China.

One of the primary tenets of democracy is the right to dissent peacefully but democratic India decided, last week, that this is dispensable. First, the police ordered Friends of Tibet activist, Tenzin Tsundue, to stay put in Dharamsala until Hu Jintao returned to Beijing. Then, the police asked Tibetan exiles to stay away from the city centre, fearing them to be a security threat - “Atithi Satkar” of the highest level that will surely make the Chinese happy.

Not only has the Indian Govt. accepted the Chinese claim of recognizing Tibet as a part of China, but it is also bending backwards to make them feel at home. Should a democracy like ours stoop to such levels to curb the rights of civil society, from protesting against Chinese aggression? Just imagine - I can protest against Manmohan Singh and Co. in New Delhi but not against Hu and his mandarins.

Our foreign policy follows a simple policy of status quo. Therefore, we neither do anything remotely out of the box nor stand up for anything (WTO was an exception) for fear of ruffling feathers. This does not bode well for a country standing on the threshold of world leadership and desiring to stand up for developing nations.

When ex-Defence minister, George Fernandes, proclaimed China as India’s “Enemy No. 1” a few years back, he was echoing the truth. But he was pilloried for raising the China bogey unnecessarily (India Today’s headline was “George in the China Shop”). While Beijing goes about wooing Africa and the rest of the world, building rail links with Tibet, supplying arms to Pakistan and fanning anti-India sentiments in Burma and Bangladesh, the Indian polity rests in peace, unaware of the changing geo-political realities that are dictating various foreign policies world-wide. We have no policy on Kashmir even after all these years, no idea how to tackle Bangladesh population infiltration and a total ignorance on the problems in the North-East.

Our home grown communists’ romance with China, however, continues despite all these “friendly overtures” by China. They are quick to pounce upon any human right violations of the rest of the world but silent when it comes to the Chinese. Our comrades refuse to break from the umbilical cord joining them to China, though there has not been any reciprocation of such interests from the other side. Wonder what Comrade VS and Comrade Hu have in common? Beijing has shed all pretensions of Marxism and gone capitalistic in a big way but messers Raja and Yechury continue to go gung-ho about communism.

Despite all their evident economic progress, China has a morally bankrupt leadership. It has built its wealth on the altar of thousands of coffins, without shedding tears for any of them. It is among the fastest growing economies but is also the world leader in death penalties with a conviction record of about 99%.A country that is so heartless that it steamrolls tanks to mow down thousands of its students, when they protest, cannot bring peace in the world.

I found this article in the Amnesty International Site (dated May 2003) which mentions that in an effort to improve cost-efficiency, Chinese provincial authorities have introduced mobile execution vans and the article goes on to give the advantages of this system over general execution systems!!! Economies of scale in mass murder!!! It would have been funny if it were just not so tragic and perverse.

It’s not just India but the entire world that stops shy of dictating terms to them. In business circles, Walmart, the world’s largest company, had to bow down to official dictates in China and allow the creation of trade unions there (their only trade union in the world). Google, the champion of free information, had to submit itself to censorship and remodel itself to survive in China.

Despite the Dalai Lama’s popularity and the entry of celebrities espousing the cause of Tibet, the movement is losing its steam and His Holiness has himself toned down his demand from “independence” to “autonomy” for the region. Its human rights violations may hog headlines occasionally but it has not stopped the Chinese juggernaut from rolling and crushing all its detractors on its way to capitalistic freedom.

Hu’s next stop is Pakistan where he’s expected to further the nuclear relations between the two countries by announcing the sale of nuclear reactors to them. The West knows this but remains a passive spectator while continuing to urge India to maintain restraint (as if we needed someone to say that). The American electorate did to Bush what the Iraqis could not but who will stop the Communist Party of China's hegemonistic plans???

Wonder if I am a bit too paranoid about the entire thing. The Chinese have a strong leadership unlike us and so I fear they may succeed. God forbids that this will be emulated else where as a workable administration model....

Pyongyang Joins the Party

Imagine an exclusive executive club where a select group of powerful influential persons are members. These members enjoy rights denied to ordinary denizens and have a constitution which seeks to ensure that the club remains as elitist as possible. Their actions are highly questionable but they shroud it in morally hypocritical arguments of the greater good and preach the same to non-members. Persons who try to intrude are penalized and given stiff punishments so that the club maintains its status quo position. But there are always crazy plebeians who still manage to gatecrash bypassing the laws, something that represents North Korea’s entry into the World Nuclear Club.

North Korea had always been threatening to go the nuclear way (it withdrew from the NPT in 2003) and it was a more a question of when rather than if and so it did not surprise anybody except for a few news channels who had to feign surprise to give it that breaking news effect. For a number of years, the nuclear world was dominated by five countries who entrusted to themselves the task of protecting their existence and by extension, the world, till one fine day, two countries decided to no longer play ball. Pokharan and Chagai Hills pushed India and Pakistan into this club and now, North Korea has followed suit. Now there are renewed fears that Iran too would test the bomb.

Pyongyang going nuclear reveals a few things. It diminishes China’s assumed ability to leverage its relationship with North Korea and also undermines President Bush’s attempts to threaten it in terms of embargos. For countries to condemn it (including India) saying it threatens regional stability is a classic case of hypocrisy. But then, that’s a naive argument in the world of real politicking.

Even a militarily-passive Japan, which has always used the example of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to convey the sense of loss and destruction that nuclear weapons can bring, is under the US nuclear umbrella and so they can preach peace. Non-proliferation as a tool has not worked for more than half a century and is not expected to bring in any new dividends. What is required is a clear elimination of nuclear weapons and not reduction.

I was amongst the many jubilant voices in India when we went ahead with our Pokharan spectacle. There was this jingoistic feeling of having cocked a snook at the world-the Yankees could not stop us and now we are the super powers etc. But now, as the adrenaline levels have gone down and “Shining India” is almost a dirty word, I wonder what we achieved by going nuclear, except maybe an exaggerated sense of national pride for a few days (Of course, with exceptions like my Andhraite neighbour who was unhappy that the tests would lead to the cancellation of his son’s US visa). Does the theory of nuclear deterrence actually work? I don’t think so. The tests gave us a false sense of pride, a feeling that we are major players in the world and that the world will now listen to us. It probably does listen in many forums but that is due to our market size rather than our arsenals (Poor Shashi Tharoor is a casualty of that belief).

For a country like North Korea that stands almost at the bottom of the bottom of the economic pyramid in the world and has scores of people dying due to natural and state-sponsored schemes of disaster, you would wonder what nuclear weapons could do. Our knowledge about the country is quite limited because North Korea does not publish statistics (their own economists have no idea what their inflation rate is) except that it has the fifth largest military in the world, with the largest percentage of citizens enlisted. Maybe it gives them a sense of pride but since media is not given a proper access to the public domain; we do not even know that.

At a larger level, Kim Jong - II will leave North Korea a poorer country where hunger is fed by patriotic talk and Western phobias. Do the people have a future to look towards? A country that is so poor but believes that nuclearization will help it. Maybe, but from whom?? Let me quote the words of The XIVth Dalai Lama here which conveys all this and so much more:

Peace, in the sense of the absence of war, is of little value to someone who is dying of hunger or cold. It will not remove the pain of torture inflicted on a prisoner of conscience. It does not comfort those who have lost their loved ones in floods caused by senseless deforestation in a neighboring country. Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free.

Such countries will probably perish under the might of their own contradictions and burdens in the long run. As Amartya Sen discusses in his article on Democracy, a democratic state with a free press ushers in a certain amount of administerial responsibility because of the constant focus of the media on it. He successfully argues how a democratic state can ensure that there are no famines and droughts, something that Pyongyang needs to realize.

Nuclearization is a greater political decision than a military one. For starters, we do not even know whether they actually conducted the test successfully, as being alleged in certain quarters. Suddenly, there are talks of South Korea and Japan reconsidering their proliferation options because they feel threatened in the presence of a nuclear neighbour. The nuclear issue has also whipped up a great deal of passion in the forthcoming US Senate polls with the Democrats alleging that the North Korea going nuclear is an example of the failure of Bush’s much vaunted diplomacy.

The Americans have threatened to impose fresh sanctions but will it help? History shows it has never done anyone any good except possibly companies that act as intermediaries (Food for Oil Program types). The recent Iraq experience has shown them to be a total failure but then since constructive diplomacy has never been the most common means of working, the same old strategy will continue. In retrospect, we know that Iraq did not have the alleged nuclear stockpiles but if it had, would history have been different? Did this influence North Korea when it decided to go nuclear?

What drives nations to nuclearization? Maybe a false sense of machismo- the chest beating and fist thumping variety where you cannot offer anything to your people and so camouflage it using false arguments of self-pride, deterrence and defence. Ask the average North Korean the significance of this (assuming one day you can see him expressing his views) and his blank face would convey all that peace activists have been trying to bandy about. Do I sound naive or foolish when I advocate peace? Maybe but I believe that the world can only survive with the philosophy of peace and not the politics of non-deterrence ballistics.

I end my post by quoting the renowned French philosopher Albert Camus’s famous words that rings so true:

Peace is the only battle worth waging

9/11: The Wounded Fraction

Sanjay Dutt is facing trial for the Mumbai blasts case and he may or may not be convicted but he’s done more than anyone else in recent times in making the Mahatma India’s star icon. For a simple man, ironically manifested in all our currency notes, it has been a glorious non-violent comeback (A lesson for our Saurav Dada). “Gandhigiri” is also becoming the most popular political phrase slowly, thanks to Munnabhai. What better occasion to highlight this than while talking about the fraction that has changed the world – 9/11 (It has overtaken 22/7 – the humble pi in the popularity charts). 9/11 is America’s baby out and out but until I watched NDTV/CNN-IBN a few days back, I did not realize that 9/11 was also the centenary of the Satyagraha movement.

The 1st 9/11 in 1906 was used by the apostle of non-violence, Mahatma Gandhi, to launch the Satyagraha movement and it had wide sweeping repercussions not just here but across the globe too. Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela endorsed it later on making it a very powerful metaphor for non-violent retribution. It presented a powerful case for morally legitimate ways to fight for justice.

The last 9/11 also had sweeping global effects but on a greater negative scale. The world has not changed for the better but is more polarized now, echoing Bush’s infamous statement – “Either you are with us or against us”. That does not leave us with much of a choice then but to be against him.

I don’t even think we need to ask ourselves whether the world has been enriched by American follies – Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and the rest are all landscapes which are testimony to the bleeding that has happened in the glorious name of “democracy” and “peace”. 9/11 was unfortunate but what about these countries and many other African republics which are rotting because of liberal America. Incidentally, 9/11 is also the day (in the 70s) when the democratically elected President of Chile was overthrown and General Pinochet took over the country in a bloody coup killing thousands of people, ably supported by US. Anyone ready to shed tears for them?

Most news channels commemorating the fifth anniversary of the WTC bombing have been repeatedly driving home the claim “The world was never the same”. Quite true, since Americans decide how the world should be. We tried coining dates like 13/12 (Parliament attack) and 12/3 (‘93 Mumbai blasts) but who remembers these poor fractions (I had to search through Google to find these dates).The life of an average Indian is probably not worth that of an American and so terrorist attacks in India do not change the face of the world and in some ways, even the country too; after all, Mumbai’s “resilience” hogged more headlines than the actual blasts.

But then, this is not an entirely an international phenomenon. A blast in Delhi which kills two is given more coverage than the death of 30-40 odd in Tripura. Only when something happens close to our home, we come to realize the potential problem in store, but till that time, token coverage and lip service is all that we can afford.

Has the world changed?

General Musharraf is the US poster boy leading the battle in the Global War on Terror. Whoever thought the perpetrator of the Kargil War would be US’s main weapon against terrorism. Even a suave IIM graduate could not have been able to reposition a losing brand like Pakistan with such elan.

After years of Blairism, UK is finally throwing Blair out after acting as Bush’s stooge for long. The law of averages has finally caught up with him and he is leaving the stage just like Ms.Thatcher did.

The Taliban is regrouping (thanks to a bountiful opium harvest also) and President Hamid Karzai’s power does not extend beyond the boundary walls of his castle.

Iran and North Korea are twitching to test their nuclear arsenals.

Iraq is wallowing in the midst of extreme lawlessness and chaos and the US Govt. has admitted that Saddam has nothing to do with AL-Qaeda or Taliban.

Osama makes guest appearances in videos keeping his halo intact and his foes guessing.

The West makes polite noises about development and democracy and continues its own way while the Rest of the World ambles along.

Who has benefited from all this?

Most of the European companies have bagged contracts (rather snatched) for Iraq rehabilitation – telecom, innovative Food for Oil schemes and of course oil.

India’s former Deputy National Security Adviser, Satish Chandra, was heard on TV the other day saying that “US is probably its own worst enemy by pandering to the likes of President Musharraf”. Once the poster boy’s role is completed, US will try to bring democracy back to Pakistan and then it would be curtains for Musharraf but till that time, its happy honeymoon for him.

Global terror has a wonderful economic side to it and who better to utilize all this than multinational companies dealing with arms (one of the most powerful industrial lobbies in US). More terror means more customers for their weapons and how can a Government who cares for its domestic industry ignore this concern?

The day is not far of when George Bush will win the Noble Prize for Peace due to his untiring efforts in bringing “democracy to the world”. And what about us? We’ll probably continue our journey with a blast here and there occasionally testing our democracy and reminding us that “An eye for an eye makes the entire world blind”. Maybe we should revive Gandhigiri then....

A fraction is mathematical representation of representing a quantity based on splitting it into a number of parts – something that 9/11 can make a rightful claim of having done.

Asian Travellers' Mid-Air Blues

A brown skin and a beard are not a felicitous (suitable) combination


– Rohinton Mistry, commenting on racial profiling

In about a month’s time, I would be travelling to Singapore on my first international trip. It’s an exciting prospect to see the world outside India but international travel worries me - I’m an Indian and these are troubled times for South Asians travelling in international flights. There have been quite a few incidents in recent times that have brought to focus racial profiling that Asians are being subjected to, in the name of national security and counter terrorism. The recent experiences of the 12 Mumbaikars who were returning via Netherlands, a Hyderabadi lad holed out in London on his way to US and two British Asians detained in an airport in Spain,after they were overheard conversing in Urdu, is unnerving.

The 12 Mumbaikars were innocuous businessmen who travelled frequently and had never got into any kind of trouble earlier. The Dutch side claims that these people exhibited suspicious behaviour on the flight – using mobiles on the plane, moving around frequently and talking in hushed tones. The Indian Government has asked for a full scale investigation into the incident and has just stopped short of asking for an apology. Maybe we were trying to be diplomatically nice with the Dutch authorities by not asking for an apology.

The public response has, of course, been much more vocal, accusing the Dutch officials of selectively targeting on the basis of race. Why would trained terrorists try to make their presence so evident in the flight? From when has fidgeting with mobiles become an international crime?Agreed that they did not exactly behave in the most gentlemanly fashion, but does that make them suspects who have to be handcuffed?

The West is pretty paranoid about this entire business of terrorists. I’m sure that it is a serious problem and we need to be very careful but when they get overboard as they have been doing in recent times, it gets to one’s nerves. It’s no one’s case that national security is to be treated with soft hands but when in the name of security, Asians who carry the stereotyped perceptions of terrorists, get grounded and often humiliated, it calls for serious concern.

Of course, not many remember that the most of the WTC accused were clean shaven, educated Islamic youth who would not have cleared the International Terrorism Exam, set by the Bush-Blair combine. How dumb would it be if terrorists were to stick to stereotypes and turn up at airports in the most conspicuous of manners? We are dealing with an intelligent group of terrorists who can outsmart the Pentagon and bring down WTC. A strategy which panders to such an ill-conceived notion and breeds on extreme Islamophobia is ridiculous. But then with the IQ of George Bush, should we even be surprised?

This situation is not going to change in the near future. To be fair to the airport authorities, we probably need to accept the fact that no one wants to take any chance and every possible danger is being addressed head on. Even for every 10 such incidents, if the authorities are successful in stopping at least one attempted sabotage, it is worth carrying out this effort.

But the flip side is that obviously, there would be a few people who would be rubbed the wrong way because of this. It has to be handled carefully and sensitively so that no one feels offended or atleast the offending factor is kept to minimum-something the Dutch did not do too well. Gallup poll surveys conducted post 9/11 have found that most people were uncomfortable with this blatant profiling of Middle Eastern or South Asian airline passengers; some sobering consolation for us, I guess.

Indians across have raised a hue and cry over this racial profiling, especially after the Mumbai incident, and quite rightly too. However, let’s step back for a moment and question our “holier than thou” attitude towards “cultural profiling”. We have our own set of prejudices that run deep down. We are a preachy nation who likes to tell others what’s wrong with their culture, while we wallow in a curious mix of self-pride and self-pity.

We also indulge in straitjacketing people here, probably not so much in terms of race but caste and religion (Of course there have been racial incidents here too like bars in Mumbai not allowing blacks on grounds of being suspected drug peddlers). There are so many people I have met who believe that reservations are bad for the simple reason that the backward castes are not good enough for studying and that any such idea will spell doom for us. So, while fretting and fuming is fine, it's also time for some self-introspection.

Maybe I should not be worrying too much. I do not fit the caricature of the terrorist designed by the West. I do not sport a beard (except for an occasional stubble) or wear a skull cap - supposedly, the latest fashion statement of all wannabe terrorists. I do not have a name with any religious connotations and do not speak Arabic/Urdu. Brown skin is the only dangerous sign I carry of being a terrorist.

P.S. I just came across a news item in BBC featuring the latest airport screener which shows passengers naked!!! This is really scary, wonder if this will enter the voyeuristic world of MMS someday. Time to bid goodbye to Right to Privacy???

Going the Israeli Way

A few months back I chanced to watch the Steven Spielberg movie “Munich”, set after the 1972 Munich massacre. It follows a Mossad squad, which is ordered to track down and kill a list of 11 Black September members thought to be responsible for the Israeli athletes’ murders. Though the mission starts in a very spirited fashion, gradually, there’s a sense of disillusionment and helplessness at the turn of events. The movie was a bit liberal with the actual incidents but it points out a very sobering truth:

For every terrorist killed, there is another- possibly a worse one waiting to take place.

As I see the latest (latest is appropriate considering the Israeli penchant for attacks at the drop of a hat) round of massacre being carried out by the Israeli forces in Lebanon, some of those thoughts and images come back haunting my mind. Someone would say wars require sacrifices and no point brooding over lost souls but then who is fighting this war and for whom is all this ? Civilizations thrive on people and cultures and not on coffins.

The latest round of stand-off began (if you leave the troubled past aside) with the Hezbollah rebels attacking and taking two Israeli soldiers hostage as negotiating chips for the release of a few of their prominent leaders. Not a great strategy you would say but they were merely replicating a system of warfare actively nurtured by the Israelis themselves. The capture of the soldiers saw a swift counter attack which surprised both the Hezbollah and the world, in terms of the lightning speed and magnitude involved. In violation of all international norms, Israel carried out large scale bombings of Lebanon, including the usage of the deadly cluster bombs. The highly disproportionate usage of force by Tel Aviv has stunned many but it is still going on with a farcical temporary ceasefire thrown in occasionally. Death has become a very statistical measure nowadays but still the loss of more than 750 people (mostly civilians) in the last 20 days calls for serious concern.

The current situation was created by Hezbollah but Israel cannot wash its hands of its role in the conflict which dates back to more than 25 years. The Israelis invaded Lebanon in 1982 to drive away the Palestinian extremists taking shelter there but post the attack, it continued to stay there until 2000. However, it has not seceded parts of the country entirely; Sheba Farms in South Lebanon is still under their occupation. They were also responsible for planting several detonators and mines but have refused to provide the maps containing this data. It is important for Israel to stop unilaterally all the firing and try to arrive at a political solution to the problem for which the seeds were sown by them.

The most worrying aspect in the entire crisis is not the extent of the Israeli retribution but the silence (they have made some noise but surely the big guns can do better) of the international community in this entire pogrom. It reflects a total lack of empathy for the hundreds of people perishing due to this and this will backfire one day. It reminds me of Martin Niemoller’s famous poem First they came for the communists.

“When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out”

The Americans and Israelis are breeding a sense of hatred which will only increase the ire of the extremists towards them. Tel Aviv’s strategy of shock and awe bombing is similar to the American attack against Iraq and will lead to the same kind of situation as in Iraq. Ironically, the original victims of the Holocaust are now its perpetuators.

There’s a weird school of thought in US (the establishment) who believes that such a military option will send a strong message to the Islamic world and so it has been attempting clandestinely to stall all peace efforts being brokered. One wonders in which utopian world the US policy makers are living in. You would think that the misadventure in Iraq would have made them wiser but then Bush has never given the impression of a man who understands diplomacy. With a war-mongering policy and ruthless stooges like Israel, it is attempting to create a new world order; it will probably do so but the cost of giving huge impetus to the extremist movement across the world.

Initially, the Arab World condemned the Hezbollah for triggering the attacks (due to their Shia-Sunni issues) but the very scale of attacks has forced them to back them or lose the popular support enjoyed by the rebels. By the way, where is the United Nations, the so-called peace keeping body of the world? They lost four dipolmats in the Israeli bombing at the UN office in Beirut but they continue to remain spineless.Maybe Karan Thapar should grill Shashi Tharoor on this matter. Wonder what the man likely to be the next UN Secretary General has to say on the UN's role or rather lack of it in resolving this conflict.

Every time there’s a terrorist attack in India, there’s wide spread condemnation at our inability to stop such incidents. It has been suggested by many that we take the Israeli way- a policy of hot-pursuit. Somehow, there’s a misunderstanding of the ground level situation; we need to understand that we are neither Bush’s chums nor is Pakistan without friends .Do we want to condemn ourselves as Indians to this kind of immoral and power hungry behaviour? This is not to suggest that we need to take all the violence being carried out in our soil lying down but that peace can be brought about only by a policy of give and take.

There’s a requirement of a proper anti-terrorism stance and policy but not the naked show of aggression and power exhibited by Israel. I do not know what our strategy for tackling terrorism should be but I am sure we should not go the Israeli way. Life is precious - diplomacy needs to be given a chance for the world to survive.