Outlook International

A Lasting Tug Of Peace

Mon, 27 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Heat, Deep Freeze And Thaw

Apr 15: Chinese soldiers encamp at Depsang valley in Ladakh. Indian soldiers match it; face-off begins
May4: Hectc parleys between two sides resolve the impasse. Soldiers countries return to original positions.
Indian foreign minister Salman Khurshid leaves for Beijing for talks with Chinese leaders
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang arrives in Delhi for talks with Indian leadership

***

In today’s world of diplomacy where leaders are more used to whistle-stop tours and attending working lunches, it is a rarity for two heads of governments to visit each other’s country in the same year. Yet, India and China are scheduled to do that. Chinese Premier Li Keqiang arrives on a three-day official visit this Sunday, while Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will visit China later in the year—the dates are yet to be finalised. It took China and India nearly 60 years to repeat the feat—in 1954 Jawaharlal Nehru visited China within months of a visit to India by Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai.

But questions are being raised: what is the urgency behind these visits and what do they signify? There are two slightly divergent views on this—one comes from the Indian establishment, with a predictably positive spin to it. The other, which is expressed from outside the establishment, raises doubts and is sceptical about the future of Sino-Indian relations.

Going strictly by protocol, it was the Indian PM’s turn to visit China. But when this was conveyed to the Chinese, they said Premier Li had clearly expressed his wish to visit India before that. By making India the first country of Premier Li’s maiden foreign visit, China was trying to convey that Beijing considers New Delhi to be an important ally and is keen to forge a close partnership with it. This spirit was conveyed when Chinese President Xi Jinping and Manmohan met briefly on the sidelines of the brics Summit in South Africa in March.

However, before preparations between the two sides on Li’s visit could proceed, a 20-day faceoff between Chinese and Indian soldiers in the western sector of their disputed boundary in Ladakh managed to put everything on hold. Hectic parleys and regular border meetings finally broke the deadlock when the Chinese soldiers withdrew, dismantling their makeshift camps in Depsang valley. Indian soldiers who had put up similar camps facing the Chinese also withdrew to their original position.

But a restoration of calm has brought no clear explanation from the Chinese. Other than describing it as an ‘isolated’ incident, the Chinese leadership has not been able to explain why the Chinese soldiers did what they did.

“We need to know from Premier Li what happened in Ladakh. At least he should clarify the Chinese position that is bothering a large number of Indians,” Alka Acharya, of the Centre for East Asian Studies in Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, told Outlook.

This silence on an unsavoury episode notwithstanding, South Block doesn’t want to create an awkward situation for the Chinese premier and his delegation. “What is the point of rubbing it in? We have made our displeasure known and also conveyed to the Chinese how the media and others in India viewed the Ladakh episode,” says a senior MEA official.

For the establishment, that attitude is indicative of a bit of necessary pragmatism. Though officials in the Indian foreign ministry and security establishment took the developments in Ladakh ‘very seriously’, they argue that it is best to focus on how it ended, rather than on why it happened. They point out that India could have faced a far worse situation if Chinese and Indian soldiers continued to face each other, refusing to withdraw. “Should we then have used force to throw them out and risked going to war with China?” asks the official. Instead, the MEA would now like to stress on how the existing mechanisms between the two sides worked. “It may have taken three weeks, but they still worked and helped us in resolving it without resorting to violence,” says another Indian diplomat. One reason why it worked could also be India’s quick response in meeting the Chinese soldiers’ alleged incursion. “Our soldiers were there within six hours and this may have surprised the Chinese a lot,” says a senior official. Others say the whole affair was an attempt by the Chinese military establishment to push the envelope on the Sino-India border issue, before the new political leadership in Beijing could settle down and consolidate its position. But South Block wants to concentrate only on the positives and how the two sides can take their relations forward.

Likewise, India will roll out the red carpet to receive the Chinese premier and his entourage. The usual ceremonies attached with such heads-of-government visits include official banquets, meetings with top Indian leadership and possibly a joint statement marking the success of the visit. But, in a special gesture reserved only for close and valued guests, Manmohan Singh is hosting a private dinner for Premier Li at his official residence—7, Race Course Road—on Sunday evening.

An Indian soldier with a Chinese girl at Bumla, on the India-China border in Arunachal Pradesh. (Photograph by UB Photos)

Interestingly, both Manmohan and Li have a lot in common—both had a humble beginning and spent their formative years in the countryside before going on to earn their PhDs in economics and subsequently rising to head their respective governments. That Premier Li is fluent in English may be an advantage and help the two leaders to build a special rapport.

Indian officials acknowledge the significance of Li’s visit and the fact that India is the first country of his maiden foreign tour as premier. “It clearly shows the importance China attaches to its relations with India,” says a senior official of the Chinese foreign ministry.

Though every attempt is being made to make the visit a success, few agreements of real significance are likely to be signed, mainly because a crucial three-week period was lost in resolving the Ladakh faceoff. There are indications that the Chinese are keen to have a substantive discussion on how the two sides could more effectively manage their borders in future and ensure peace along the Line of Actual Control. Though New Delhi shares Chinese sentiments on peace along the border, there is little likelihood of any agreement being signed on that subject too.

This is because the Indian leadership is not likely to risk providing any more fodder to the Opposition—particularly on the China issue, especially because it does have some resonance among hardliners. Thus, if important agreements on the border issue are discussed at all, an agreement is likely to come up for signature only when Manmohan visits China.

If there’s no advance on the boundary issue, attempts are being made to show progress on the economic side. Li is scheduled to make two public speeches, including one before the captains of Indian business and industry. Apart from highlighting the cooperative, strategic partnership with India to meet regional and global challenges, Li would also stress on enhancing the economics that underpin the ties.

“While economic engagement between India and China has grown very rapidly, the trade balance in China’s favour is a growing concern,” says FICCI secretary-general A. Didar Singh. He hopes the Chinese premier would address these concerns during his address to captains of the Indian industry. Indian officials say that one way of resolving the trade imbalance is by encouraging Chinese investments in India.

But Singh points out that while Indian IT firms have made substantial investments in China and created jobs, they still don’t win government contracts. Indian pharma companies also face huge problems in accessing the Chinese market. Singh sounds encouraging on Chinese investments, though. “We feel there is ample scope for Chinese firms to invest in India in areas like power equipment, auto components, light engineering, etc. We hope to see enhanced investments by Chinese companies.”

But even if Li makes an encouraging statement on enhancing business, will it be enough to gloss over the Ladakh faceoff that ended barely a week back?

A former prime ministerial aide explains that by withdrawing its soldiers the Chinese have acknowledged their mistake. “This is the closest they can come towards saying they’re sorry. I think it’s best we leave it at that.”

One reason why this seems to be a growing view in New Delhi is because the unilateral decision of the Chinese soldiers in Ladakh to encamp at the Depsang valley is understood to have been taken not as part of a ‘grand Chinese design’, but at a local commander level. Beijing’s keenness to send in their premier, a few days before the Indian prime minister is scheduled to leave for Japan, is a significant gesture not lost on South Block. Given the strains in Sino-Japanese relations in the South China Sea, it makes sense for China to have a neutral India rather than stand by and watch it rush headlong into Tokyo’s embrace.

The negatives notwithstanding, this gives India a measure of prestige. While it lasts, India seems to be enjoying being wooed by both the East Asian rivals—China and Japan.

This Way To Chindia

Mon, 27 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Chinese prime minister Li Keqiang’s visit to India is significant for three unique and outstanding reasons. First, it takes place soon after the recent 20-day faceoff in the western sections of the disputed border between the two sides. The fact that the visit is on shows that the top leaders of both countries are determined not to allow any dispute or difference to come in the way of their attempts to build a strategic partnership. It also demonstrates that Sino-Indian ties are of strategic and global significance and go far beyond a bilateral relationship.

Given the lack of mutual acceptance or unified recognition of each other’s Line of Actual Control, there are scores of overlapping and grey areas with the potential for such faceoffs. It is also reasonable to assume, given the ground situation, that this kind of “incursion” must be occurring on both sides. The only difference could be that the Chinese media does not have easy access to reporting such “incursions” by the Indian forces, whereas the Indian media is very vocal on the issue. But till the lac is finally identified and is mutually accepted by both parties, such instances will remain all too frequent.

In the interim, however, there are several existing mechanisms which can help the two countries establish ‘guiding principles’ to settle border disputes. The manner in which they were used recently are a measure of the maturity the Sino-Indian ties have achieved.

Second, if it’s any encouragement, only once before have the heads of the Indian and Chinese governments visited each other’s country in the same year. (Manmohan Singh is scheduled to visit China later this year.) This was in 1954 when Chinese premier Zhou Enlai came to India in June and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru returned the visit in October. Yet again, in the context of changing power equations in the global and regional arena, there is a strong demand from both sides to further upgrade the top-level interaction between the two countries.

The simultaneous rise of India and China, the global financial crisis and the economic recession as well as America’s ‘Asia-Rebalance’ strategy have infused a new dynamic into the Asia-Pacific region—where both China and India are located—and engendered uncertainty not only in the economic but also in the security domain.

It’s a scenario in which India and China can work jointly and constructively towards a much brighter future rather than wait for others to create a favourable external environment. In fact, the faster their rise, the greater the strategic squeeze and restrictions they are likely to face from the neighbourhood and developed economies. Both countries have the resources and the capacity to build a more inclusive, open, balanced and diversified framework in the Asia-Pacific region, both in terms of security and development, ensuring a win-win situation for both.

Leaders of China and India have often reiterated that there is enough space for the development of their countries. Both have had a long and rich civilisation to derive wisdom and philosophy from. The two nations also have a number of areas they can collaborate in. But without strategic cooperation, such development and space could become restricted and congested. It could also lead to the competition becoming more vicious, and the more vicious it becomes, the less room there will be to develop. A collaborative approach, on the other hand, will help both countries grow.

Moreover, only by expanding their areas of cooperation and cultivating more common ground can the two countries reduce their differences—if not in absolute terms, then in relative terms. It could provide the constructive atmosphere in which both countries can step out of their straitjacketed thinking and come up with fresh solutions to disputes.

Third, his trip to India will be Premier Li’s maiden foreign visit after he became prime minister in March. Given that President Xi Jinping’s first visit was to Russia—another big neighbour—it’s clear that the new leadership in China is giving neighbourhood diplomacy top priority. Or at least that it regards relations with the neighbours to be as important as those with the US, for China’s peaceful development, especially as it faces troubled waters in the West Pacific region. Building a cooperative and harmonious neighbourhood is a must for China to be accepted as a benign rising global power. The Chinese dream cannot materialise if both the country and its neighbours spend sleepless nights. In fact, China needs to take initiative to promote relations not just between China and its neighbours but among the neighbours themselves. It can only bode well for Sino-Indian ties.

(The author is director, South Asia and Southeast Asian Studies, Chinese Institute for Contemporary International Relations, Beijing.)

A White Tiger Tale

Mon, 27 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

At The Crossing

Nawaz Sharif wins near majority, set to form a ‘strong government’
Pakistan economy in deep trouble, inflation in double digits, major power shortages, a looming balance of payments crisis
Sharif to broach an agriculture tax, but will a landed political lobby agree to it?
PML(N) has been soft on jehadis in Punjab, can it rein them in now?
Sharif finally a busineessman, wants better ties with India

***

It was a scene that caught everyone in Pakistan by surprise. Prime minister-elect Mian Nawaz Sharif walking into Shaukat Khanum Cancer Hospital with a bouquet of roses for the ailing Imran Khan, now formally leader of the Opposition. “We don’t have any personal rivalry. Pakistan is in trouble and we should work together to give a better Pakistan to the next generations. I have told him that we will play a friendly match once he recovers,” Sharif told the waiting media on his overture. Ties between the two leaders have been quite amenable—days before the polls, Sharif had cancelled canvassing for a day as a seriously injured Imran was rushed to hospital.

As Sharif himself admitted, Pakistan is indeed in deep trouble. Growth had stunted at a modest four per cent during the PPP government, with runaway inflation flailing in double figures. Electricity and gas shortages have closed down dozens of industrial units and Pakistan’s export figures (not counting trade with India) appear dismal. Indeed, US senator Robert Menendez, chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, has already warned Nawaz Sharif that “Pakistan may face a balance of payments crisis unless its new leaders take decisive action”.

The new prime minister, with his conciliatory comments, realises that he has to keep Washington on his side if he hopes for quick bailout packages from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where nothing moves without a nod from Uncle Sam. Already, through a congratulatory telephone call, US president Barack Obama has indicated an early meeting. Author and political analyst Ahmed Rashid says Sharif is on the right tack, “He’ll have to deal with the Americans more adroitly, particularly if he wants their support to gain the loans from the IMF and the World Bank that Pakistan desperately needs.”

As he readies for hard ‘reforms’ (a prerequisite for IMF handouts), Sharif has been making noises about an ‘agriculture tax’, something every government, bloated with landed agriculturists, has avoided. Businessman versus landlords, who will give in? With election numbers backing him, Sharif and his experienced team look ready to form a strong government, so is all this “gloom and doom” about to change?

One indicator of the high hopes involved was the Karachi stock market breaking all previous records and breaching the 20,000 barrier. There was good news on the Indo-Pak trade front as well, with fresh figures indicating that Pakistan’s exports had crossed the $500 million mark.

Sharif has indicated that the army will be on board as he awards the stalled MFN status to India. As a businessman himself, he sees improved trade ties with his neighbour softening the way towards other contentious issues. Of course, this is nothing new. In February 1, 1997, a night before he won elections to become prime minister for the second time, he had spoken passionately about opening up of trade ties with India. When questioned further, he had told Outlook then, “I am not being soft on India, just realistic.”

Noting the excitement in New Delhi, especially with the two Punjabi prime ministers shunning protocol and committing in undue haste to meet up, it is noteworthy that nothing really has changed from the time Manmohan Singh declared that “it cannot be business as usual (with Pakistan)”.

The issues that bedevilled relations were not caused by the outgoing PPP government, which had taken several progressive measures, but because of non-state actors and the security establishment. It is too early to predict how Sharif will overcome these predicaments, and—as he has promised—“rein in” the jehadis. Former president Asif Ali Zardari had handed over foreign relations to General HQ on a silver platter as part of a “compromise”. Sharif, with a “heavy mandate”, has no such compulsions as of now.

Luck is also on Sharif’s side for ghq is no longer the sole power centre. An independent media, together with a free judiciary, motivated civil society, and the weight of the legislative and executive has to some extent helped restrain the army. It’s helped that the generals are busy putting out fires that they themselves lit and have little time to indulge in politics. Sharif will also be watching closely for any attempts by the defence establishment to tweak foreign policy. A most important factor here— with “hot western borders”, the army would like to see some stability on the east.

Indeed, in the initial days itself, Sharif has not been averse to mixing it up with the defence biggies. While army chief General Pervez Kayani has said nothing about the subject directly or indirectly, the PM-elect has come out and stated that Kayani would not be interested in a third term and that the next army chief would be chosen by him.

Low ballast Imran Khan leaving after a rally in Charsadda, NWFP, May 4

As the ambassadors of Saudi Arabia and the US made a beeline to Sharif’s Raiwind palace in Jati Umra on the outskirts of Lahore, what no one in his camp was committing to was whether the PML(N) would withstand the pressure to abandon the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline (which both the US and Saudi had failed to convince Zardari to give up).

Tariq Fatimi, foreign policy advisor to Sharif, puts in a word of caution. “A failure to recognise that foreign policy by itself cannot confront external challenges, unless reinforced by an effective and credible domestic policy, would result in continuing the drift that has already damaged us badly. Moreover, the concessions accorded to foreign actors—both state and non-state—till now have left us exposed and subject to external pressure and internal blackmail,” he says.

Also worrying for many is how Sharif and Imran, both Lahorites, might tread gently while dealing with the Pakistani Taliban. Unlike the army, which is in no mood to solve militancy though talks, Sharif has compromised several times with the Punjabi jehadis (who are today the footsoldiers for the Taliban and Al Qaeda) and even awarded party tickets to some of them.

The Dawn daily has already asked searching questions on these “very grey areas” and how Sharif intends to deal with it. Nawaz’s brother Shahbaz Sharif was lording over Punjab for five years while these jehadis were left free to operate. It was from here that Ajmal Kasab’s group planned and executed the ghastly Mumbai attacks.

At election rallies—between the caged tiger shows and other tamashas—Shahbaz had publicly pleaded with the Taliban, asking them to spare Punjab saying they too were against US policies, (they had even stopped all USAID projects). Indeed, it was one province where the Taliban did not carry out its bloody strikes during electioneering.

The PML(N)’s links with Islamist organisations and their militant wings has set up a potentially explosive problem. As the Dawn asks: will these groups, who have so far avoided training their violent attentions on the PML(N), expect more space for themselves in Punjab and the country’s troubled spots?

Imran’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf too has advocated talks rather than military strikes to tackle the militants. It will be interesting to see how the three Punjabi leaders (including General Pervez Kayani) now deal with militancy and terrorism. Will Imran, who is expected to form the government in Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa, and Sharif be able to convince Kayani to go for a non-military strategy?

The year 2014 will see not only a new PM, but also have new occupants in the offices of the president, chief justice of the supreme court and the army chief. It is anyone’s guess how the country will fare in the coming year, if the dream of a ‘Naya Pakistan’ will come true.

Dress For Disaster

Fri, 17 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

ANN ARBOR

Globalisation has turned every shopping trip into an encounter fraught with moral dilemmas. In April, more than 1,100 Bangladeshi garment workers lost their lives in a building collapse, reminding global consumers that low-priced t-shirts can come at a great human cost. Most consumers do not see the direct connection, assuming that distance eliminates any moral stains by the time goods reach the store shelves. But the information technologies that have allowed supply chains to extend around the globe also enable consumers to better understand the consequences of their choices— if they choose to do so. The prospects for workplace reform aimed at avoiding tragedies like the one in Dhaka hinge on this choice.

Garment manufacturing is traditionally the first step toward industrialization, and the garment industry has long been a vanguard of globalization. Successful global firms typically resemble Nike, which concentrates on the design and marketing of its sneakers and clothing while contracting out production to vendors in Asia and elsewhere.

In the past generation, "Nikefication" has spread to nearly every industry, particularly in the US. From consumer electronics to pet food to pharmaceuticals, the companies that manage consumer brands are often merely the central node in a global production and distribution network. Products are routinely produced, distributed and sold having never been touched by an employee of the company named on the label. Due to pervasive Nikefication, corporations are often many steps removed from objectionable practices such as the fatal sweatshop conditions in Dhaka.

In its effort to root out so-called conflict minerals in its products, Hewlett-Packard found that the critical point of leverage was the smelters processing minerals whose sales have helped finance the seemingly interminable armed conflicts in the Congo. The smelters were four steps back in the supply chain, among the suppliers to suppliers of HP's suppliers. HP did make extra effort to locate these smelters so that suppliers could pressure them to eliminate unverified Congolese suppliers, but this is the exception, not the rule.

Nikefication is made possible by information technologies, particularly the internet. Anyone with a product design, web connection and credit card can put Chinese assembly lines in motion using Alibaba.com. Some of the bestselling products in the United States are made by tiny enterprises that contract out essentially every aspect of physical labour and production. These firms, often producing short-lived products like the Flip camera, are the next stage of Nikefication.

The same technologies that birthed Nikefication and associated moral dilemmas may offer a solution. Technologies exist now to tag products with a "chain of custody," allowing consumers to track the provenance of their purchases. In the art world this is routine: Those spending millions on precious objects demand to know the path of ownership. But the costs of such transparency are dropping by the minute. Anyone who’s tracked FedEx shipments on their phone can envision the possibilities. Smartphone apps are already available that allow consumers to scan product barcodes to check ratings on sustainability or ethical production— for example, GoodGuide— the same technology that allows consumers to check competitors’ prices on Amazon before buying.

These third-party ratings provide proof of concept. It’s not so difficult to imagine a forward-looking brand posting QR codes— the matrix barcodes that can be scanned by cellphones— on its labels allowing potential purchasers to view a video of the factory, locate it on Google maps or check the carbon footprint of shipping methods. Imagine the slogan: "Our clothes are not transparent, but our production process is." This technology, possible now, soon will be affordable enough to be feasible. If consumer sentiment comes to favour ethically-produced goods, then brands will compete on provenance, not just style and quality.

Consider the Prius, which for a hefty premium conveys an owner’s environmental street cred. Notably, every major car company now offers a hybrid to compete with the Prius. It’s inevitable that sustainable clothing brands will emerge, distinguished by transparent supply chains.

Changing the behaviour of brands is not enough, however. Just as brands compete on the store shelves, countries compete to attract manufacturers and jobs. In the garment industry, competition is fierce, including a who's who of low-income countries such as Cambodia, Honduras, Pakistan and Indonesia. Historically, the nature of this competition did not favour scrupulous enforcement of labour standards or the right to organize. Bangladesh is not alone. As long as price competition favours a race to the bottom, producer countries are unlikely to distinguish themselves by labour friendliness.

On the other hand, if brands compete on provenance, then space would open for country of origin to be a distinguishing feature. Cambodia sought to follow such a sweatshop-free strategy, with factories monitored by the International Labour Organization and minimum wages generous by admittedly miserable industry standards. No evidence suggests that consumers flocked to the "Made in Cambodia" label, and Cambodia's approach may not have been widely known to consumers. The country is not without problems, with reports of a ceiling collapse in mid May at a small shoe factory near Phnom Penh. The spotlight is on emerging-economy factories after the Bangladesh tragedy.

There is a surprising precedent in the financial markets for reversing the race to the bottom. Equity investment by foreigners in so-called emerging markets was effectively nonexistent in the early 1980s. After the Mexican debt crisis of 1982, bank loans dried up and low-income countries were forced to seek other sources of capital. Prodded in part by the International Monetary Fund, a large number of these countries pursued reforms aimed at persuading rich-world investors to provide capital to local companies by opening stock markets, reducing capital controls and enacting investor protections.

The challenge was not trivial: Why would US investors buy shares of companies in distant countries? Unlike a polo shirt, the quality of which can be readily evaluated by consumers without knowing a backstory, shares of stock require vetting— in other words, some trust in their provenance. But the potential returns were large, provided that the markets had built-in safeguards and local economic policies adapted. By the late 1990s, emerging-market funds were a staple in the portfolio of most sophisticated investors, and after a generation of reforms these markets are at least as transparent as American stock markets and investor-friendly corporate governance practices are standard.

For consumer products, provenance does not yet matter. For brands and countries to avoid a race to the bottom, a significant proportion of consumers must care. Lack of consumer awareness is perhaps the greatest barrier to reform. Brands and countries might enforce higher labour standards if consumers routinely prefer fair-trade goods or Cambodian-made shirts to those from Bangladesh. There’s certainly reason for scepticism here. Customers shopping at stores selling clothing brands traced to the Bangladesh factory collapse seemed both unaware and largely indifferent when the connection was brought to their attention.

A cultural shift is needed to make consumers cognizant of the impact of their choices. Perhaps as our information environment becomes richer and the provenance of goods becomes as essential to consumers as the corporate governance behind equities is to investors, this will encourage beneficial races to the top.

Gerald F. Davis is the Wilbur K. Pierpont Professor of Management at the Ross School of Business and Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. He has published widely in management, sociology, and finance. His most recent book is Managed by the Markets: How Finance Reshaped America (Oxford U Press 2009), which won the Terry Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Advancement of Management Knowledge in 2010. Rights:Copyright © 2013 Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. YaleGlobal Online

A New Chapter

Mon, 13 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The Pakistan Muslim League(N)’s emergence as the single largest party in the just-concluded National Assembly elections in Pakistan, and its leader Nawaz Sharif’s likely return as the country’s new Prime Minister, should be good news for India. But it also comes with some serious concerns.

Sharif has been Pakistan’s Prime Minister twice before and during his campaign for this election; he had been talking about building strong and friendly relations with India. His likely emergence as Pakistan’s new Prime Minister should be comforting news for India. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has already congratulated him and invited him to come to India. But the PML (N) does not have a simple majority on its own and, therefore, will have to bring in other parties in a coalition to form the government. This means that on key policies, particularly those pertaining to India, Sharif will have to build a consensus, at least among his coalition partners, before he can pursue them in any meaningful manner.

During his last stint as Pakistan’s Prime Minister, there was a serious attempt at building peace between the two sides. Atal Behari Vajpayee’s “peace bus” initiative to Lahore in February 1999 was matched by Sharif’s enthusiasm. The upbeat mood of the two sides to build strong, friendly ties was reflected in the Lahore Declaration that Sharif and Vajpayee signed. But within a few months the peace initiative was derailed by the Pakistani army’s intrusion in Kargil and soon after Sharif himself was ousted from power in a military coup.

The mastermind of both Kargil and the coup, General Pervez Musharraf, is now facing trial for a couple of murder charges, including the assassination of the country’s former Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto. It may be too soon to predict how the trial will end. But putting a former military dictator on trial in itself is a significant development in Pakistan. There have been some other significant developments in the country as well. Most notably, it was the previous PPP-led coalition government’s historical achievement of completing a full five-year term in office. Sharif, who was thrown out of the Prime Minister’s chair twice before he could complete his term, would be hopeful that this time around he might get the chance to enjoy being the Prime Minister of his country for five years.

But Sharif’s main electoral plank has been his promise to build a “New Pakistan.” As he assumes the Prime Ministership and heads the new government in Pakistan, he faces a serious challenge in realizing that electoral promise. The country’s economy has been static at 2 per cent or thereabouts for some years now. With a crippling power crisis that shows no signs of improving, Pakistani industry is in a moribund condition. Many Pakistani factory owners have been forced to either shut down their factories or relocate them in other neighbouring countries. This has led to a serious unemployment problem, compounded by the fact that Pakistan also has a huge “youth bulge” with over 65 per cent of its population below the age of 25 years. Many of these youth who join the labour pool each year, have little or no education, are frustrated and often fall easy prey to several religious extremist groups and terrorist organizations that have flourished in the country over the past years.

Sharif is widely seen as a pro-business leader and there are high expectations of him to rejuvenate the country’s economy and its moribund industry. For this, he needs huge doses of investments from outside into Pakistan. But most foreign investors have put their money on hold given the political and terrorist violence that Pakistan has been going through for the past few years.

India can be a natural partner as a source of foreign investment into Pakistan and also as a ready market for Pakistani goods. It can also play a significant role in mitigating the power problem in Pakistan. In the last few years, trade between the two sides had improved significantly. But the numbers are far below their potential because a lot of trade barriers still exist and more importantly, the strains in Indo-Pak relations stand in the way of improving trade and economic ties between the two sides.

Sharif will naturally look at India and would like to give trade and economic ties a fillip to help rejuvenate the Pakistani economy. But for this, his coalition partners will have to be on the same page with him. There could be some among them who might support him enthusiastically in this. However, there could be others, particularly those who have links with religious extremist outfits, who might stand in the way of improving ties with India. More importantly, Pakistan’s policy towards India falls within the domain of security where the Pakistani army establishment has a veto power. A coalition government leaves enough room for the army establishment to use the junior partners to undermine the Prime Minister’s authority and scuttle those policies which do not meet their approval.

Sharif’s relations with the army, particularly when Musharraf was in charge, was testy, which finally led to the coup that toppled his government. A lot would depend, therefore, on how he manages his relations with the GHQ in Rawalpindi in future. The army top brass might not have mediated so far on Musharraf’s behalf. But they would certainly not like to see a former army chief being humiliated by either the Supreme Court or the civilian government. In addition, a lot would depend on how Sharif and the army generals cooperate with each other in dealing with terrorist outfits within the country. A lot would also depend on their cooperation to deal with the emerging scenario in Pakistan’s western front, particularly the Af-Pak border, in view of the 2014 drawdown of US and NATO forces from Afghanistan.

In Sharif’s third term as Pakistan’s Prime Minister, India could play a key role not only becoming a major trade and economic partner for Pakistan. But also to try and use that to bring in the trust deficit that has plagued their bilateral relations. For that to happen all the other players, particularly the Pak army, will have to give Sharif a free hand. Going by Pakistan’s past history that seems like wishful thinking. However, its current trend, also gives room for hope. Pakistan has embarked on a lot of firsts—putting a former military dictator on trial, allowing a democratically elected government to complete its full term in office, opening up more space for an independent judiciary and vibrant media to flourish—things that were unthinkable till a few years back. It could well be that the time has also come for opening a new chapter in Pakistan’s relations with India.

A Dhaka Dilemma

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The unfinished business of the 1971 liberation struggle has come back to haunt Bangladesh 40 years after it was created with the blood, sweat and tears of martyrs. The fact that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh’s iconic and much-loved first prime minister, was gunned down before he could carry forward the legacy of the struggle has resulted in a deeply divisive society. Today, the fight is for the soul of a nation: between those who want a modern democracy and those who believe religion is at the heart of Bangla nationhood and that its existence needs to be defined under a strict, orthodox, Wahabi code.

Those who have brought this fight to the streets and challenged the government are not the usual conservative alliance of the Jamaat-e-Islami and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. They are the supporters of Hifazat-e-Islam, popularly known as the Hifazatis, who are backed by the Jamaat and the BNP. (The BNP’s support comes not so much for ideological reasons but for political gains and to add to the discomfiture of its bete noire, the Awami League, ahead of the elections due by year-end.)

The Hifazatis—looming up as a regressive counter-force eager to stymie the spirit of Shahbag—are a frightening throwback to the Taliban of the late ’90s. The prototype was reared in the madrassas of Pakistan and brainwashed into believing they were the custodians of Islam who could restore the glory of an Islamic Caliphate. The copy, a shadowy coalition of a dozen or so groups of radicalised students, has been incubating in Bangladesh’s seminaries before striking out to intervene in the polity in a manner identical to that of the Taliban. One figure to whom the trail goes back is Maulana Ahmed Shafi, rector of one of Bangladesh’s most established Deobandi madrassas, Al-Jamiatul Ahlia Darul Ulum Moinul Islam of Chittagong, popularly known as the Hathazari Madrassa. He is also linked to mainstream fronts like the Islamic Oikya Jote, which has fought elections in alliance with the BNP on typical planks, like the opposition to a secular education model.

Like with the Deoband seminary, the Hathazari evinces a tension between what can be a plain school of orthodoxy and suspected links with extremist factions. The parallels with the Taliban should come as no surprise. For what the Hifazatis are trying in Bangladesh is not very different. It’s the same blend of madrassa students engaged in religious scholarship and those who can bring them out en masse to participate in street rallies and marches.

Half a million of them held a rally in Dhaka on April 6, with loud chants of “Hang the atheist bloggers”, accusing the ilk of insulting Islam and the Prophet. The Hifazat was a little-known outfit till their attack on a young blogger, Rajiv Haider, in February this year. Its base is in the 25,000 or so madrassas dotted across Bangladesh. The madrassa students are its stormtroopers, as it became evident on Sunday, May 4.

The demands in their 13-point charter are outrageous. They would go against the grain of any modern society, especially the one that the founding fathers of Bangladesh had envisaged in its Constitution. Their demands—tougher anti-blasphemy laws with death sentences for offenders, strict punishment for bloggers who ‘insult Islam’ and a move to prevent sculptures being erected in public places are an echo of the Taliban. Like the fanatic student militia of Afghanistan, they too want a ban on men and women mixing in public, scrapping of the government’s women development policy, stopping the “shameless behaviour and dresses” of young women and declaring Ahmadiyas as “non-Muslims”.

On Sunday, May 5, and in the early hours of Monday, this army of fanatics laid siege to Dhaka demanding that the Sheikh Hasina government give assurances that their 13-point charter would be accepted. After treating the Hifazatis with kid gloves for three months and trying to engage them in dialogue, the government had no option but to crack down when the mobs went berserk. The Hifazatis attacked the police, pelted stones, set fire to shops and set ablaze nearly a hundred government and private vehicles. When the authorities moved in, there were pitched battles between the Islamist student mobs and the police. The final toll: 27 deaths, including three policemen, and injuries to scores of people. The entire area around the Shapla Chattar, which houses one of the city’s main mosques, had turned into a battleground.

The media, at least some sections of it, showed some earnestness in their denunciations. An editorial in the influential English newspaper, The Daily Star, said “We are constrained to say that instead of showing respect to Islam and upholding its image, which the group claims is its intention, its gratuitous exploitation of religion has not only denigrated it but has also cast the group as one that adheres to violence rather than peace which is the very fundamental tenet of Islam.”

The important point is that the ethos of Bangladesh is strikingly different from orthodox Muslim countries. Even on the formal plane, it’s not an Islamic republic. The majority, while proud of their religion, are attuned to a moderate Islam and have till now resisted attempts to impose an extreme strain of the religion. Of course, at the heart of the present ideological battle is the Awami League regime’s attempt to punish those who worked against the freedom movement. The collaborators, guilty of heinous crimes during that period, have over the decades gone unpunished, mainly because the army that ruled intermittently in Dhaka protected these elements and sections of the society remained sympathetic to that strand.

As the wife of a slain general who had seized power in a coup, Begum Khaleda Zia has traditionally had support of large sections of the army. Today, much of that support base has dwindled, yet she still steadfastly criticises the Awami League’s attempts to bring closure to the victims of the excesses committed by pro-Pakistan razakars in 1971. The deep schism within the political establishment in Bangladesh was sparked off in January after the war crimes tribunal sentenced some Jamaat leaders to death for their role in the 1971 war. Since then, an angry Jamaat has staged several protests. The inspirational movement against this, steered by young students, sparked the scenes in Shahbag that called for “death to the collaborators”. The Hifazat has essentially come as a reactionary counter to that: what was called Bangladesh’s own reformist Arab Spring moment.

The Sheikh Hasina government now has the unenviable task of managing an existential crisis, in which it is a partisan, as the country goes into election mode. Many in Delhi believe it is not prudent for India to put all its eggs in one basket. Indeed, in recent years, India has reached out to the BNP too. In the coming months, the whole region will be keeping an eye on the developments in Dhaka. For an unstable Bangladesh could become a major headache for all concerned, including India.

Biraal Bole Hindi!

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Aretort in Hindi from her six-year-old daughter was quite the last thing Dhaka-based Nusrat Jahan expected while reprimanding her. But that’s just how it turned out to be. “Tumko sabak sikhaoonga,” she shot back at her, just like one of her favourite characters in Doraemon, leaving her mother seriously worried about the impact the cartoon show, beamed into Bangladesh in Hindi on an Indian channel, was having on her behaviour and Bengali language skills. “I am more concerned about the cartoon’s content and what it has done to her behaviour, but there is also the language problem,” says Nusrat on phone from Dhaka. “Whatever kids watch more, they learn more of it.”

Her daughter Paloma clearly never had enough of the adorable (or pesky!) Hindi-speaking cross between a cat and robot until the government decided to pull the plug on Doraemon. Nusrat was not the only harried one. While many parents, not just in Bangladesh but also elsewhere, are indeed concerned about its content (some say it encourages lying and cheating), what really propelled the Japanese manga character into becoming a national crisis for our eastern neighbour was how it led many children to adulterate their Bangla with Hindi. The media noted with dismay how Bangladeshi children hooked to Doraemon were mouthing gibberish like “Amake ekta chocolate khila do” or “Ma, tumi amake ekta baat bolo”, and talk shows deliberated on this dilution of national identity to no end. In a country founded on the cause of Bengali nationalism, watching the future generation grow with chinks in their Bengali armour is both sacrilege and betrayal for many. “For the same reason, we did not accept Urdu, even though that was a golden opportunity to learn a foreign language. For the same reason, I call on all to resist the imperialism of Hindi language. Joi Bangla!” wrote blogger Bratya Raisu.

Reacting to the outcry, which peaked around February 21 (the day Bangladesh commemorates the 1952 killing of students in police firing as they protested the imposition of Urdu, and celebrates as the International Mother Language Day), the government asked cable operators to block the channels showing Doraemon and other Japanese cartoons like Ninja Hattori-kun and Hagemaru as also Chhota Bheem, all telecast in Hindi.

None, however, came close to Doraemon’s popularity, indeed influence, compounded by an appetite for show-related merchandise. It even provoked research last year that claimed that of the 500 children between the ages of five and eight interviewed in Dhaka, 466 could speak Hindi more fluently than English because of Doraemon, and were mixing Hindi and Bangla. Nujhat Nuari Islam and Tuhin Biswas, authors of the paper, pushed Bangladeshi investors to have Doraemon dubbed into Bangla. “If Indian TV channels can broadcast Doraemon in the Hindi language, Bangladeshi investors too should invest in this animation sector. Thus, the language will not be mixed with Hindi. Bangladeshi cartoon companies may dub Doraemon and telecast it through Bangla channels,” they wrote.

The controversy also took on political undertones given the widespread resentment against India and a Hindi “cultural invasion”, even if there are many who delightedly acquiesce in the latter, making Indian soap operas, not just those in Bangla but also in Hindi, extremely popular. Pirated copies of Indian movies are widely sold despite a ban on Bollywood that has been in place since 1972. Bangladeshi weddings too now feature bhangra tracks. “I don’t think there was anything anti-India as the same parents who opposed Doraemon continue to watch many Hindi channels,” says Ershad Kamol, the cultural affairs editor for English daily New Age. But some like Nondini Monwar, whose father Mustafa Monwar created Moner Kotha, a popular cartoon series that runs on national television, believe there wouldn’t have been a similar outcry had Doraemon been telecast in, say, either English or Arabic. “There is a certain anti-India sentiment at play here, but I feel there’s nothing wrong in our kids learning another language naturally, even if it’s Hindi.”

What rankles many is not that Indian channels (or culture) have such an appeal but the fact that Bangladeshi channels are completely inaccessible in India. “There is no balance of power here. Why can’t I access Bangladeshi channels in Calcutta the way Indians access their channels in Dhaka?” asks Faruq Hasan, editor of Dhaka Weekend Tribune and who supported the ban on Doraemon for this reason. Writing a column on this issue last month, he argued, “The move got my support not because of its pedagogical claims or patriotic fervour, but simply because of the political response—however negligible or slight—it sends to our Big Brother Neighbour across the other side. What vexes is the utter unilateral nature of flow; not once have I seen anything from Bangladesh telecast in any part of India.” That Bangladeshis are forced to watch many of their favourite English programmes dubbed in Hindi for the benefit of Indian audiences doesn’t help either. “We don’t hold Hindi and English at the same level. There is a feeling that Hindi is shoved down our throats, that we are not given a choice,” he adds.

Just as it teaches India to be more open to Bangladeshi cultural exports, the uproar over Doraemon has lessons for Bangladesh too, especially the need to augment its meagre offering of children-specific programming. Sisimpur, a Bengali adaptation of the American Sesame Street, and Meena, a UNICEF-sponsored series that revolves around an eponymous girl and social issues, are often cited there as an ideal way forward for children’s television entertainment. “But there is a lack of proper assessment and, certainly, there isn’t any specific policy related to children’s programming,” says S.M. Shameem Reza, associate professor of mass communication and journalism at University of Dhaka.

Evoking Hindi “cultural and linguistic hegemony” to put a lid on Doraemon also ought to make the Bangladeshis reflect on the Bengali hegemony its indigenous peoples in the Chittagong Hill Tracts are subjected to. While there is some radio programming in a few indigenous languages, says Reza, there is hardly any on television. “Certainly, there is very little for indigenous children.” Some point out that domination takes less subtle forms: like an aggressively promoted settlement of mainlanders in cht and discrimination against non-Bengalis.

One of the rallying cries of the Shahbag movement—“Tumi ke, Aami ke? Bangali, Bangali! (Who are you? Who am I? Bengali, Bengali)—was contested by the indigenous Bangladeshis who argued that Bengali ought to be replaced with ‘Bangladeshi’ or at least make space for ‘Adivasi’. Says Hasan, “Unfortunately, in public discourse popular nationalism goes back to being Bengali and being Muslim.” Must being Bangladeshi be synonymous with being Bengali? Few would have thought a manga character could lead to such introspection on both sides of the border.

***

Cartoon Unchannelled

The series is about a know-it-all robotic cat called Doraemon, who travels back in time from the 22nd century to aid a small boy, Nobita
It debuted in 1969 in Japan as a comic and was adapted for TV. It appeared in India in 2005 and is presently shown on Disney.
Immensely popular, it’s spawned a range of off-screen merchandise like stationery and Dorayaki, special pancakes Doraemon likes
Parents have complained of provocative content such as characters talking back at their parents or lying
India too banned a Japanese anime—Shin Chan—in 2008 for inappropriate content. It has since reappeared post-modifications.

***

The Frenzy Mongers

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Ajmal Kasab was hanged in November last year, and Afzal Guru in February this year. Identifying Kasab as a Pakistani national, India offered his remains to Pakistan. Kasab’s family might have been inclined to accept them for funerary rites. But Pakistan turned down what was definitely a civilised gesture on part of India. In dealing with Guru’s family, however, India hasn’t behaved in as civilised a manner as it did after Kasab’s execution. His family members wanted to have the body, but it turns out they didn’t get to hear of his execution before it was over. He was buried right in Tihar jail, where he had been hanged. Have you wondered what the reasons might be?

Incidentally, although both the hangings were related to Pakistan in one way or the other, they did not attract much attention in Pakistan, whether at the government or at the public level. (Even the attack on Sanaullah, a Pakistani prisoner in a Jammu jail, did not attract much notice, although the Foreign Office, of course, was forced to comment on it.) Newspapers only single-columned the hangings on their back pages. But the response to the hangings in India was in complete contrast: leaders and workers of some political parties cheered on hearing of the executions; some TV clips showed them thrusting sweets into each other’s mouths in celebration. Another event which is resulting in much hyperventilation in India is the death of Sarabjit Singh in a Pakistani prison: he was done to death by fellow inmates on death row, hardly the sort to worry about being brought to justice, as the Indian prime minister has demanded. Of course, there’s no excuse for any prisoner being killed by fellow prisoners. Sarabjit’s jailors are as responsible for his death as are Sanaullah’s for the attack on him. But such laxity is part of life in both India and Pakistan, which cannot and should not go to war over such slackness. I can also understand and appreciate the reactions of Sarabjit’s family, for his wife lived virtually like a widow for more than two decades and his daughters hardly saw him. And it’s the Indian government’s job to protest, as an Indian inmate has been killed in cold blood in a Pakistani jail. But what’s the Indian media getting so much into a tizzy about? For Sarabjit was convicted for being involved in terrorism, just like Kasab. His case was reviewed twice by the Supreme Court of Pakistan. The brave lawyer who was following his case wept like a child when he met Sarabjit’s sister, who was allowed into Pakistan when he was critical. I wonder if any Indian lawyer would have been so bold in Kasab’s defence. Leave alone Kasab’s case, even Guru was convicted chiefly due to bad legal representation.

People regarding Sarabjit as a hero fail to consider certain essential points. Sarabjit was an Indian, but involved in terrorism in Pakistan. I thus do not see any difference between him and Kasab. The similarity ends in that one was killed unofficially and the other officially.

I can understand that India is angry about the 26/11 attack on Mumbai. It goes to the UPA government’s credit that it acted in a mature fashion, unlike the NDA government, which, following the 2001 Parliament attack, piled troops upon the border. I cannot say relations have progressed a great deal since then, but at least we communicate with each other and the borders remain open.

In February 2007, the Samjauta Express was bombed by Hindu fundamentalists near Panipat and 68 Pakistanis were killed. There are still no convictions. Pakistan did not line up troops on the border despite having a general at the helm of affairs in the country and the media and the public did not go berserk talking about teaching India a lesson.

Terrorism is a universal problem today; Pakistan is one of the worst sufferers. The terrorists who bombed the underground trains in London were Pakistanis. The UK government did not hold Pakistan responsible. The terrorists of 9/11 were Saudi nationals. The US did not behave with Saudi Arabia the way some Indians would like India to behave with Pakistan.

We are neighbours and there’s no reason we shouldn’t also communicate about these issues. Not in five star hotels, where retired bureaucrats are deployed in largely meaningless ‘Track II’ diplomacy but between officials with the power to make decisions. As for the Indian media, particularly the electronic media, it’s useless to request it to refrain from fanning hatred. However, I’m glad there are sane voices—like that of Arundhati Roy—to courageously see sanity and balance in the face of this tsunami of hatred. The itch to “teach Pakistan a lesson” may get some TRPs, but won’t take the two nations anywhere ahead.

(Jillani is an advocate in the Pakistan Supreme Court)

Blight Of The Borders

Mon, 13 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Crossing Borders

August 1990: Sarabjit Singh, arrested for illegally entering Pakistan, subsequently charged with the death of 14 people in the Lahore-Faisalabad serial bomb blasts
October 1991: Charged with being an Indian spy and sentenced to death. The sentence is upheld by a higher court.
March 2006: Pakistan SC rejects his mercy petition and upholds the death sentence
March 2008: Sarabjit’s fresh mercy plea turned down by Pak President Pervez Musharraf, but execution delayed following appeal from his family
December 2009: Jas Uppal, a British lawyer, launches an international campaign to get Sarabjit released
May 2012: Sarabjit files his fifth appea for clemency before Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari.
June 2012: Zardari commutes his death sentence to life and some news reports suggest he may be released as part of an Indo-Pak prisoner swap. An Indian prisoner is released, but Sarabjit remains in jail.
August 2012: Sarabjit files another appeal for mercy before Zardari.
April 10, 2013: Through his lawyer, Sarabjit tells Pakistani authorities that his life is in danger from fellow prisoners.
April 26, 2013: He is severely injured after being attacked with bricks and rods by jail inmates, admitted to intensive care in a Lahore hospital.
April 27: His family pleads for his transfer to India for treatment but the Pakistan authorities refuse to move him.
May 2, 2013: Sarabjit succumbs, sparks off strong protests against Pak authorities for not providing him enough security

***

In the movies, spies like 007 almost never get caught. The reality, though, is quite different. And the universal rule, if you get caught or your cover is blown, is that you are on your own from that point on. Your intelligence outfit will never own up to sending you or claim you as one of their own.

However, in civilised societies, the manner in which alleged Indian spy and death row prisoner Sarabjit Singh met his untimely death also does not pass for normal. Hospitalised after a brutal attack in Lahore’s Kot Lakhpat jail, he was pronounced dead of a massive heart attack by doctors early on Thursday morning.

It was touch and go for many years on his sentence being carried out, though the Asif Ali Zardari government had for the past five years been commuting death-by-hanging sentences to life. Indeed, there had been much diplomatic-level exchanges on even a possible release. The last time rumours circulated that Sarabjit was going to be set free, some high-profile prisoners in India’s Tihar jail were hanged, setting the hawks here screeching and weakening the hands of President Zardari.

Go back to June 2012 at the Wagah border where on his way home was Surjeet Singh, an Indian death row prisoner who had served 27 years for spying and related charges in Pakistani jails. Sentenced to death, Zardari had in 2012 in a “goodwill gesture” released him. But Surjeet, highlighting the fate of the several Indian spies languishing in prisons here, shouted out in chaste Punjabi as soon as he crossed over to India, “I went to Pakistan to spy and I am going to sue RAW for abandoning me. Sarabjit is well and in good health and he roams freely inside jail.” The hawks in Pakistan were soon baying for the blood of other jailed Indian ‘spies’ including Sarabjit, 49, charged formally in the 1990 Lahore-Faisalabad blasts case which had killed 14 Pakistanis.

Sarabjit’s body leaving a Lahore mortuary

Now, less than a year later, in a rare case of extreme negligence and brutality, solitary prisoner Sarabjit, out in the jail grounds for some fresh air, is attacked with iron rods and bricks, skull smashed beyond repair, resulting in him sinking into a deep coma till his heart gave in six days later.

That this happened in a high-security prison to an extremely high-profile inmate and the fact that his Pakistani attackers—also on death row—were ‘allowed’ to get away with the crime is unbelievable. Usual excuses of an overcrowded jail and dangerous inmates have been put out, but there were ample warnings both by Sarabjit (in letters to his family) and by his lawyer Owais Sheikh to jail authorities that after the hanging of Indian Parliament attack accused Afzal Guru in Delhi, his life was in danger. It was almost as if the authorities wanted this to happen and were too scared of the ‘forces’ at play who had planned the attack. What else can explain this apathy?

And what about the concerns expressed by the Indian high commission? In typical bureaucratic mode, there is no record of any demarche being made. High commissioner Sharat Sabharwal had apparently decided to “swing by” the hospital to see Sarabjit on the morning he passed away. He had been invited by the Staff College to address them.

On Tuesday, the Indian high commissioner had met with Pakistan foreign secretary Jalil A. Jillani, in a meeting which had already been requested before the Sarabjit attack. This in itself shows the high commission’s apathy— that all these days it had not asked for an exclusive meeting on Sarabjit or for a demand of the post-mortem report of Chamel Singh, who it has suddenly again remembered. (Chamel Singh, a J&K native in Pakistani jail since 2008, had died under mysterious circumstances in late January. There were allegations that he had been beaten up by the jail staff and, amid much outrage, a post-mortem report was ordered.)

Meanwhile, speaking to Outlook, ex-foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar said she was outraged at the caretaker government for dragging its feet. “If it was the PPP government, we would have moved very quickly and even before a request could come forth we would have made arrangements to fly Sarabjit out to a place of the family’s choosing simply on humanitarian grounds. Sarabjit was a human being...it does not matter that he is an Indian. I would have put all legalities aside and ordered my foreign secretary to release and fly him out. Though the Pakistan state is not responsible for what happened to him...we could have helped under the circumstances,” said Khar, who was briefly in Islamabad.

To its credit, after the attack, Pakistan had moved quickly on the diplomatic front. After the security establishment’s initial dragging of feet on giving consular access, it granted visas to Sarabjit’s immediate family and, later, in an “unprecedented” move, gave full consular access to Indian diplomats and allowed the Joint Judicial Committee of Prisoners to visit Sarabjit.

Meanwhile, the Punjab government in Pakistan has ordered a judicial enquiry into the incident. Initially, a case of attempt to murder had been registered against two prisoners, Amer Aftab and Mudassar, after a complaint by Kot Lakhpath assistant jail superintendent Ishtiaq Ahmed Gill. But that charge has since been bumped up to murder.

In the midst of electioneering, the attack did not go unnoticed, with newspapers commenting of the “condition of prisons in South Asia” and the need to provide maximum security to prisoners like Sarabjit. One of the politicians who spoke out strongly was JUI(F) leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman. “It is a matter of regret that Sarabjit was attacked. He was due to be hanged but someone subjected him to another punishment. Jail inmates are the government’s responsibility so I hope the government will inquire and punish those responsible for this lapse,” he told Reuters.

With relations between the two nuclear-armed neighbours already at a low after the LoC skirmishes, diplomatic sources say Pakistan should have been on its toes—in fact, anticipating that a high- profile case such as Sarabjit’s or any other negative move would darken the mood further in Delhi. Which is why the Pakistan Human Rights Commission took it upon itself to send a warning to both the governments, in Islamabad and Lahore, on how such incidents can have an adverse effect on bilateral relations.

It doesn’t help that in cases like Sarabjit’s, a human approach is lacking on both sides of the border. Not that there is much respect for their own citizens, but the ‘enemy’ prisoner especially has a hard time. Again, it’s like both countries have simply forgotten their own. For the future, in Pakistan at least, all eyes are on a report from the Joint Judicial Committee who have met with Indian prisoners here, and its recommendations.

By Mariana Baabar in Islamabad

The Fame Vortex

Mon, 13 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

When he was alive, Sarabjit Singh had become a rallying point for disparate Indian groups to come together seeking his release. With his death last Thursday, however, he’s become a wedge widening the fissures and divisions in India, sparking off a series of blame games among the political parties and intelligentsia. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh expressed sadness at his death and Pakistan’s refusal to release him on humanitarian grounds despite several appeals. Foreign ministry spokesman Syed Akbaruddin, though, was in a more belligerent mood. “Sarabjit’s death is, put simply, the killing of our citizen while in the custody of Pakistan jail authorities,” he said. Few in India or even in Pakistan would disagree with that.

The Opposition, as expected in a pre-poll season, missed no opportunity to highlight the failures of the government’s foreign policy. “Centre is unable to give a strong answer to Pakistan’s inhuman acts. Beheading our soldiers and now Sarabjit’s death are two recent examples,” Gujarat CM Narendra Modi ratcheted it up in a tweet.

While many more like Modi came out in criticism of the government, the question remains: could the foreign policy establishment have done anything more to ensure Sarabjit’s release or his safety? Though most would argue that Pakistan could have, and should have, prevented the fatal assault, the truth is few Indians had hoped they would see the day when Sarabjit walked out of Pakistan as a free man.

This is mainly because of the constant media glare on Sarabjit—though it turned him into a high-profile Indian prisoner, it also lessened the chances of his release. Perhaps his fate was doomed from the day he became a high-decibel rallying point. For, in the process, it became so much more difficult for Pakistan to take a decision to oblige Indian wishes. The Sarabjit story is far from over and his death will continue to cast its shadow on India-Pak relations for many more days to come.

Thin Ice Quaking

Mon, 13 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

A Stalemate On The Top Of The World

April 15 Chinese army patrol enters Daulat Beg Oldi in the western sector in Ladakh, set up camp. India protests and sets up its own camp opposite the Chinese.
April 16 India demands withdrawal of Chinese troops from DBO to maintain status quo ante. China asks India to dismantle constructions in disputed land.
April 18 India and China activate joint mechanism, leading to a flag meeting to break the impasse, but it fails. Two more flag meetings also end in failure.
April 20 China announces Premier Li Keqiang’s visit to Delhi on May 20. India says foreign
minister Salman Khurshid to visit Beijing to prepare for Li’s visit.
April 22 India and China both try to play down the issue at Ladakh by describing it as a localised problem and insist on strong bilateral ties
May 2 Indian army chief, Gen Bikram Singh briefs CCS on ground situation. India, China maintain that both Li’s visit and that of Khurshid are on schedule.

***

A fresh, fortnight-long dispute on a contested landscape along the Sino-Indian boundary in Ladakh where Indian and Chinese soldiers find themselves eyeball to eyeball in makeshift camps is hardly the ideal setting for the maiden visit of Chinese Premier Li Keqiang to India. If all goes according to the schedule agreed by the two sides, Li will be in India on May 20. Before that, Indian foreign minister Salman Khurshid is scheduled to visit Beijing on May 9, in what ostensibly is as a precursor to prepare the agenda for talks during the Chinese prime minister’s visit.

However, questions are now being raised in India whether either of the visits should go through. The rising mood reflects the ongoing impasse at Daulat Beg Oldi in the western sector of the disputed boundary in Ladakh, which has shown no signs of ending—despite three flag meetings between the forces—since April 15.

“Certainly, Khurshid should not go to China,” former Indian foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal told Outlook. He is opposed to it on two counts. One, since it is an incoming visit by the Chinese premier it is the Chinese foreign minister and not his Indian counterpart who should travel to the other country to prepare for the visit. Secondly, by repeatedly stating that he is going ahead with his visit to Beijing, Khurshid is putting himself in a spot. “If the rising mood in India forces him to cancel the visit, then what is being described as a local issue in Ladakh will be regarded as a full-blown crisis between India and China,” says Sibal. He argues that if, on the other hand, he goes ahead with his visit then, Khurshid will be seen as condoning the Chinese action.

The present impasse in Ladakh is part of the boundary dispute between India and China that led the two sides to war in 1962. The entire Sino-Indian boundary—divided into eastern, middle and western sectors—is yet to be demarcated. Thus, no formal boundary exists. Unlike with Pakistan, where the two sides signed the Simla Agreement and agreed on a Line of Control—a formal recognition of the divided Jammu and Kashmir under the respective control of India and Pakistan—no such agreement exists between India and China. Not only that, the two sides do not even agree where the Line of Actual Control—indicating the area under the effective control of the two sides—lies. In 1962, Chinese troops broke through Indian defence lines and penetrated deep inside Indian territory, before unilaterally withdrawing to their original position. Subsequently, where the two troops stand is known as the LAC, but there is no agreement on it.

In the last five decades, though neither India nor China have been able to formalise a boundary agreement, they have signed a number of documents and protocols agreeing on how their respective troops should behave till they reach a final settlement. As a result, Indian and Chinese soldiers patrol large tracts of land along the disputed boundary on a regular basis to ensure that what they claim as their territory does not get diluted and describe the presence of troops from the other side as ‘intrusions’.

Though there have been a few stand-offs in the past, by and large the Sino-Indian boundary has remained peaceful. Over the years, a system has also evolved by which the patrolling troops of the two countries, despite coming close, have avoided any confrontation or attempts to stay on. The current impasse at Daulat Beg Oldi appears to have stemmed from the Chinese troops’ attempt to break that pattern.

“China is trying to change the status quo that the two sides have maintained so far,” says a senior MEA official. “There is no way we can accept it because it has huge implications. We have made it clear that they should go back to status quo ante,” he added to emphasise that no meaningful discussion with China on ‘concerns’ that the two sides may have can be conducted unless their troops decisively withdrew from Daulat Beg Oldi.

But so far there has been no convincing answer explaining the Chinese stand. It’s also puzzling, since the new leadership in Beijing has made a conscious effort to reach out to India to ensure the continuation of the outward form of a cordial and cooperative relationship of the past decade or so. This was reflected when Chinese president Xi Jingping met PM Manmohan Singh on the sidelines of the BRICS Summit in South Africa in March and stressed on strengthening ties.

This was followed soon afterwards by Beijing’s announcement that India would be the first foreign country Li would visit after taking charge. Indeed, that is significant because according to protocol, it is the turn of the Indian PM to visit China. Even after being informed that Manmohan would visit China in June, Beijing insisted on Li’s Indian visit on May 20. China’s attempts to host representatives of Indian army and navy in recent months, including allowing them to visit Tibet, indicate its keenness to develop ties. In addition, China recently hosted Indian officials to discuss the emerging scenario in Afghanistan and how both sides can cooperate to deal with challenges there.

How then should we see the Chinese action in Ladakh?

Though the Centre tries its best to ensure that the situation in Ladakh remains a ‘local’ problem and does not infect bilateral ties, several sceptics in the Indian establishment are suspicious of China’s current stand.

On this, there are two schools of thought in New Delhi. Some see it as part of China’s aggressive approach towards all territorial disputes with neighbours, including its spat with Japan, Vietnam and Philippines in the South China Sea. Others interpret it as China’s attempt to prevent India from strengthening its fortifications—to match similar Chinese activities—along the border. During the past few days’ interactions, the Chinese reveal that they want India to dismantle the constructions, including some helipads, it has erected in the disputed areas. So far, India has refused to oblige, claiming such constructions have been done well within Indian territory and not on disputed land.

“The longer the impasse continues in Ladakh, the more difficult it will be for us to contain it and treat it as a localised issue,” says a senior Indian diplomat. He pointed out that since it’s increasingly being viewed in India as an aggressive posture it might even cast a shadow on Khurshid’s China visit and, more importantly, on prime minister Li’s visit to India.

But historian and author Srinath Raghavan waves aside the pessimistic view. “I don’t think the incident reflects a new, aggressive posture on China’s part. If China did want to adopt such a strategy, why does it also want India to be the first overseas destination for its new Premier?” he argues.

India and China were faced with a similar situation in 1986, after a stand-off at Sundorong Chu Valley in Sikkim. But this did not prevent then foreign minister N.D. Tiwari’s China visit that paved the way for prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s visit to Beijing in 1988—seen by most diplomats and scholars as a turning point in Sino-Indian ties.

Is the frosty standoff that shows no immediate sign of abatement just another inevitable snag along a border swaddled in ambiguity? If so, it’s possible that there would be a satisfactory resolution when Khurshid travels to China next week and paves the way for Premier Li’s visit to India later in the month.

Lone Wolf Terrorists

Thu, 02 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

WASHINGTON

The terrible attack on the Boston Marathon is the most vivid and violent demonstration of terrorism confronting the United States and its allies today. Instead of large, complex plots hatched by organized jihadist terror gangs abroad, the new challenge is homegrown Muslim extremists who use the internet to self-radicalize and learn how to build bombs and create chaos by studying Al Qaeda texts online.

Much remains unknown about the two brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who allegedly built the bombs that exploded near the finish line of the marathon and killed three and wounded more than 200 on April 15. Experience shows that it’s dangerous to draw too many conclusions about a terror plot until the investigation is finished, but a preliminary judgment or two can be made about the Boston case.

The surviving terrorist, Dzhokhar, has reportedly told investigators that he and his brother were not part of an organized terror group like Al Qaeda or a broader conspiracy in the United States and that they decided to attack the marathon only a week or so before the event. They then decided to drive to New York City and carry out another attack in Times Square as a follow-up. The police stopped them before they got out of Boston, killing Tamerlan and capturing Dzhokhar.

The two reportedly learned how to build their bombs from an internet magazine produced by Al Qaeda called Inspire, the brainchild of an American citizen of Yemeni origin, Anwar al Awlaki, killed in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen. They also listened to tapes of Awlaki’s sermons on jihad, available on the internet. The older brother, Tamerlan, travelled to Russia last year, and his activities there remain largely a mystery. He may have had contact with the Chechen jihadist movement which has longstanding ties to Al Qaeda and especially its leader, Ayman al Zawahiri, who travelled there in the 1990s.

Enough is not known so far, but the plot appears to involve radicalized, angry, young Muslim men who found ideological and practical advice on the internet from Al Qaeda, but don’t belong to the organization. Al Qaeda will likely adopt them as “heroes” of the global jihad. They and their evil deed fit perfectly with Al Qaeda’s narrative— urging Muslims around the world to kill Americans, men, women and children since 1998 and glorifying any who do so as a “knight of the prophet,” fighting holy war.

In the last several years Al Qaeda has publicly urged Muslims in America and other western countries to act spontaneously like the Tsarnaev brothers. The Palestinian American Army Major Nidal Malik Hassan who killed 13 of his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009 has since been lauded by Al Qaeda for his actions and has been listed in Inspire as a role model for others. A Pakistani American, Faisal Shahzad, who put a car bomb in Times Square in May 2010 has become an Al Qaeda knight. The French Algerian Mohammed Merah who killed seven in Toulouse, France, in 2012 has also been lauded since as a jihadist star. Hassan and Shahzad have said they were inspired by Awlaki’s sermons and articles to carry out their attacks.

Other homegrown plots have been less successful, but also roughly fit the pattern. An Afghan American Najibullah Zazi and two other Muslim Americans plotted to attack the New York City subway system on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, but were arrested before they could strike. They wanted to replicate in New York what other jihadists with Al Qaeda sympathies had done in Madrid in 2003 and London in 2005.

Some of these other plots had more interaction with the Al Qaeda core leadership in Pakistan than what’s been reported so far in the Boston case. Shahzad, Zazi and the European metro bombers all spent some time in Pakistan and received training in explosives.

Small plots like the Boston operation are extremely difficult to uncover and penetrate by the counterterrorism security and intelligence community. The number of plotters is small, and the gestation period from target selection to attack can be very short, probably only a week or so in Boston and maybe only a few hours at Fort Hood. The short window of opportunity makes such conspiracies near impossible to detect.

The radicalization process may take much longer, perhaps in the Boston case more than a year. Russian authorities asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation to check on Tamerlan before he visited Russia in 2012, suggesting they had already detected his anger over the Russian occupation of his ancestral homeland.

But reading jihadist literature is not a crime nor is being angry at the brutal Russian wars against Chechnya. Moscow has a history of atrocious human rights violations in Chechnya under the tsars, commissars and Vladimir Putin. It’s not abnormal for young Chechens studying their history to be radical.

So for the counterterrorist community, the issue is not whether an individual is “radical” or “extremist,” but whether they are violent and breaking the law. It’s likely that the prospective terrorist will hide the transition from radical to violent from all around him. The younger brother in Boston kept attending university classes after the marathon attacks precisely to avoid attracting attention.

Larger foreign-directed plots are much more susceptible to penetration and discovery. The 9/11 plot gestated over at least two years and involved 19 terrorists entering the United States from abroad and living in several locations for months, travelling inside the country and even outside to meet with other conspirators in Spain. The plot was supported by cells in Hamburg, Abu Dhabi, Karachi and the Al Qaeda core leadership in Kandahar. The attacks in 2001 should have been detected, and the failure to do so is rightly an intelligence failure greater than Pearl Harbor.

The largest Al Qaeda plot since 9/11, a plot to simultaneously blow up eight or more jumbo jets en route from London to cities in the United States and Canada to mark the fifth anniversary of 9/11 in 2006, was detected because of its complexity and size. Phil Mudd, then deputy director of the CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center, has said that it was the most dangerous plot against the West ever, more dangerous than 9/11, but built around a simple explosive device that could be smuggled on airplanes in soft drinks. The CIA and MI6 got wind of the plot involving more than a dozen British citizens of Pakistani origin led by a Manchester-born man named Rashid Rauf, the plot’s Al Qaeda mastermind. Like 9/11, there were many places to penetrate the plot and a gestation period of months. It was an intelligence success.

Homegrown terrorism is nothing new in the United States. It goes back to at least John Brown, a bitter opponent to slavery who died in a raid on a federal armoury in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, in 1859.Such insurrection is a challenge in a democracy that values civil liberty— and even harder in a country awash in guns. There is no reason for panic, but also no place for complacency. An alert community can be the first line of defense, as happened this spring in Canada when a Muslim cleric alerted the police about a plot to derail trains. The difficult job of counterterrorism has a long future.

Bruce Riedel is the Director of the Intelligence Project at the Brookings Institution His most recent books is Avoiding Armageddon: America, India and Pakistan to the Brink and Back. His Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America and the Future of the Global Jihad, was released in paperback this year. Rights:Copyright © 2013 Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. YaleGlobal Online

Swing In Reverse

Mon, 06 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

What The Polls Are Saying

At least three polls are predicting a win for Nawaz Sharif

Heinrich Boll Foundation (Mar): Majority for PPP
Gallup Pakistan (Feb): PML(N) to secure more votes than others
Herald-SDPI (Feb): PPP 29%, PML(N) 25%, PTI 20%, MQM 4.2%
Public Judgement Online Poll (Jan): PTI 225 seats
IRI (Nov 2012): PML(N) 32%, PTI 18%, PPP 14%

***

How Pakistan Votes

The electoral system: Like India, Pakistan has a parliamentary system of democracy where members are elected through the first-past-the-post system. A Pakistani national who has attianed 18 years of age is eligible to vote.
Total number of voters: 90 million, of which 40 million will be voting for the first time.
Voter break-up: Punjab with 49,229,334 has the highest number of registered voters, followed by Sindh: 18,963,375, Khyber-Pakhtoonkwala: 12,266, 157, Balochistan: 3,336,659, and FATA: 1,738,313 voters.
Clean-up: A fresh, computerised database by the EC has eliminated 35 million bogus voters. Voters have been issued biometric ID cards.
The political system: Pakistan has been through various political systems in the past— parliamentary, presidential, semi-presidential and also under direct military rule. Currently, it has a parliamentary system where the President is the head of state but largely has a ceremonial role. The prime minister is the head of the government and exercises executive power, while legislative power is largely with parliament.
The Prime Minister is elected by members of the largest party or coalition in the House.

***

If anything has caught the very nub of the election in Pakistan so far, it was the sight of a former military dictator running out of court when he had returned to run for office. The judiciary had spoken, a democratically elected government had just completed a full term in office for the first time ever, and perhaps there is a flicker of hope in Pakistani hearts that democracy is here to stay.

Democracy cuts a dashing figure too, in the political persona of former cricketer Imran Khan, whose Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf Party (PTI) has emerged as a serious contender, threatening to upset the status quo, especially in Punjab, which with its 182 seats in the 342-member national assembly can make or break governments.

Imran is in the middle of a gruelling campaign trail, addressing massive rallies across the country, attracting crowds even in areas which have traditionally been ‘no-go’ areas for most. “God, I am getting 120 texts an hour. Going mad!” he says in an SMS to me. “You must cover Zari Gul in DG Khan.” There are 36 women contesting on a general ticket, and Imran’s party has given the largest number of tickets to women.

Cricket may have been his past, but Imran intends to carry the game’s metaphor well into the future. What better can symbolise his party than the cricket bat and what analogies can work better than those from the field?

“You do not know how to play cricket,” he taunts Nawaz Sharif in Okara, “so come and see how professionals play. You should come on TV to have a debate with me because I know you cannot beat me in cricket. I know why Nawaz Sharif is in a state of fear to face me on a live TV debate. He knows I will strike his stumps on the very first ball.” The roar from the crowds, on cue, is deafening.

Punjab has traditionally been split between the PML(N) and the PPP, the northern and central areas being the former’s stronghold, and the southern ones throwing their lot with the PPP. With Imran gaining a huge cachet among the disaffected youth here, promising them a break from the past and giving them a ‘Naya Pakistan’, and PPP battling anti-incumbency, Nawaz Sharif could well find himself in a face-to-face contest with the cricketer-turned-politician. He is battling for every seat where Imran has put up a candidate when he should have had an easy run for Takht-e-Lahore, emerging as the natural choice in the face of the PPP’s dismal performance.

But is the groundswell of support for Imran enough to get him the top job? Will the man once identified with his cricketing gear now step into a black sherwani and occupy the most important building on Constitution Avenue? Or will he be clean-bowled by those who have traditionally won by bending every rule in the book and have had two terms years in office?

As a famous psephologist told Outlook when Imran held his first rally in Lahore in 2011, “Third party forces have never made it to the prime minister’s house in Pakistan. Since 1970, there has been no third force. Unless there is a wave, and Imran Khan starts sweeping provinces, it’ll be difficult for him to become prime minister.”

As it happens, the Imran ‘tsunami’ is yet to register in opinion polls too. The latest opinion poll conducted in March showed that the first choice of 39 per cent of the respondents in the May 11 election would be the PML(N), followed by 18 per cent for the PPP, another 7 per cent for PTI, and 5 per cent for the PML(Q).

Sampling error? Maybe not. Gallup Pakistan chief Dr Ijaz Shafi Gilani told The News that these results were not too different from the poll his own organisation had released earlier. “The frontrunner remains the same, as are the runners-up,” he says. “Thus, there’ll be no major impact on the number of seats political parties would bag.”

Which way the wind? PML(N) leader Nawaz Sharif in Muzaffarabad; Zardari on Benazir’s fourth death anniversary. (Photograph by AFP, From Outlook 06 May 2013)

Political guru Nusrat Javeed agrees. “The PML(N) appears set to emerge as the single-largest party with a clear majority. But it will no doubt be a hung parliament as in the past. Nawaz Sharif should sail home with 115 to 120 seats in the national assembly. PPP might at the most get between 40-45 seats.” PTI, he says, could swing anything between 20 and 120 seats. “It’s like Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in the past, expecting people to come on their own to cast votes. It’s unlikely this will work.”

Not only does Pakistan’s eighth general election since 1985 promise to be the most unpredictable but also its bloodiest. Even now, two weeks short of polling day, people are still asking if elections will take place at all. Friday Times calls it a “blood-soaked election”. To sample just one of the daily recordings of the Free and Fair Election Network (FAFEN): “Thirteen incidents of electoral violence claimed 23 lives—mostly of workers of the Awami National Party (ANP)—while 54 others were injured between April 13 and 19. Ten incidents of political violence left 24 people dead and 28 injured during the week, compared with the preceding week’s 170 killed and 42 injured in 20 incidents.”

The ‘secular’ MQM, PPP and ANP have been the hardest hit; PML(N) and PTI seem to have been spared for the time being. “All secular parties were on the Tehreek hit list,” says Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan. “The killing is part of our war against secular parties, including the MQM, PPP and ANP, which committed genocide of our tribal people and Muslims while remaining in power for five years.”

However, even a cursory reading of the manifestos of all political parties shows that none of them is taking up the issue as a matter of serious concern, barely mentioning what is the single largest threat to Pakistan’s stability. “This widening division across Pakistan’s major political forces on how to deal with the country’s most crucial threat does not augur well for the future,” says author Zahid Hussain. “Instead of offering solutions in their manifestos for a problem so critical for the stability of the country and for the future of democracy, they appear to be in a state of denial. The cracks appear to be growing visibly and frighteningly larger.”

Viva democracy Pervez Musharraf in court, before he was put under house arrest

Meanwhile, Amir Mir, a senior journalist from Lahore, says that 55 charged terrorists from 10 sectarian groups have been allowed to contest polls. With their cases still in court, the Election Commission has been unable to disqualify them. Even Nawaz Sharif has issued a ticket to Sardar Ebad Dogar, a supporter of the banned Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan. He will be contesting elections from Khangarh, a tehsil in Muzaffargarh, Punjab. Khangarh is considered the second-most violent area when it comes to sectarian violence or Shia-Sunni conflict.

Ask him how he plans to tackle the Taliban factions once he comes to power, and Imran Khan tells Outlook, “There is no one Taliban group, it’s an assortment whose motivations stem from different reasons. To win this war, we have to deal with them in a way where we isolate the barbarous ones and the criminals and fanatics from those who are fighting simply because we are perceived as a hired American gun. The way we are going, this could go on and on, and not only can we collapse under the financial burden of the war, but we will also have an army of fanatics to deal with.”

And what of the Pakistan military establishment? Bogged down by problems of its own making, it’s keeping its hands off, allowing Pakistan a second free and fair election, with results acceptable to all. “You can’t switch off the army’s propensity to become involved in the civilian domain overnight,” executive editor M. Ziauddin writes in Express Tribune. “It will take time for the institution calling the shots all these years to learn to live within its constitutional limits.”

However, army chief General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani has created a stir when he said this week that “Pakistan was created in the name of Islam and Islam could never be taken out of Pakistan” and that “Islam should always remain a unifying force”. Towards whom was this remark directed at a crucial stage in this election?

Viva democracy Badam Zari the first woman ever to fight elections in FATA

Responding with an editorial, financial daily Business Recorder noted: “One would like to remind General Kayani that the Pakistan army is fighting with Taliban because the nation does not accept the latter’s highly flawed and controversial way of life. His speech aimed at exhorting his officers and soldiers to remain steadfast and also encourage the young to join the army in the name of Islam may not be the best sales pitch. There is a profound disagreement on...whether Pakistan was created in the name of Islam or for the Muslims of the subcontinent to have the freedom to practise their religion.”

Washington, another former player in Pakistan’s elections, is also keeping away. The American ambassador has reiterated at least four times in public that the US has no favourite ‘candidate’ or political party.

In another first, Badam Zari, who has studied only up to eighth grade, became the first woman ever to contest elections in FATA (she has filed her nomination papers from Bajaur Agency) where women do not even go out and vote. Not just that, Article 247 of the Pakistan Constitution prevents MNAS from creating laws for tribal areas. Following Zari’s example, Nusrat Begum, a 28-year-old mother of seven, too filed her nomination papers from Lower Dir.

A huge chunk of minority votes is also up for grabs. The last five years have been the worst for non-Muslims as also for the Shia community. There’s no saying who they’ll go with. Lost too will be the thousands of votes of those internally displaced in Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa because of military operations.

Missing in all this action is the PPP, whose co-chairperson Zardari has been prohibited by the courts from electioneering. Hopes had been high that Bilawal Bhutto, too young to contest, could lead the party’s campaign. Security risks, however, confined him to addressing voters via video links. The more interesting battle will be in Benazir Bhutto’s constituency NA-207 or Larkana, where Zardari’s powerful sister Faryal Talpur will be engaged in a battle royale with Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s daughter-in-law, Ghinwa Bhutto.

The prospects don’t look too bright for PPP, which garnered the sympathy vote last election in the wake of Benazir’s assassination. Today, PPP is a dirty word, never mind the distinction of its government being the first ever to complete a full term in office.

By Mariana Baabar in Islamabad

An Agreeable Doubt

Mon, 06 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Elections 2013 will remain the most unpredictable polls in decades for Pakistan. This is largely because of several ‘imponderables’ that have cropped up. It’s a totally new situation. Around 40 million new voters—over 45 per cent of the total registered vote—have been added to the electoral rolls. Another 35 million voters have been wiped off as they were found ‘bogus’ during the digitisation of the rolls. We have no idea who used the bogus votes in early elections and how the new voters will act. However, it is safe to assume the younger voters are likelier to favour the ‘youthful’ Imran Khan, who is all of 60 but smartly focuses his campaign on the youth bulge (perhaps the biggest in the world, with 65 per cent of Pakistan’s population aged between 18-35).

Another factor is that the ruling party former president Gen Pervez Musharraf tailored before the 2008 elections, PML(Q), has been reduced to a few electable individuals, disowning its mentor. The vacuum has been largely filled by Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI), which has emerged as a mainstream player after 17 years of gestation. It boycotted the last elections in 2008 and was a non-entity in 2002. Imran has generated immense hype around his party by bringing forth 90 per cent new, mostly young candidates but we have no statistical means to predict how his party will fare in the coming elections.

The biggest jolt is the obvious downslide of the ruling PPP, which had the country’s politics divided into a for-or-against Bhutto vote for decades. The PPP now runs a virtually faceless campaign. President Asif Zardari was restricted by the courts from participating in partisan politics, as per the requirement of his office. The PPP’s first prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, stands disqualified from contesting as a result of contempt of court for failing to write a letter to the Swiss courts to recover money allegedly laundered by the earlier PPP government. The PPP’s second prime minister, Raja Pervaiz Ashraf, was allowed to contest elections only this week and may still be disqualified as he faces many cases of corruption. A second tier of PPP luminaries, like Aitizaz Ahsan and Raza Rabbani, are handicapped in leading the campaign, cut to size as they were by an insecure Asif Zardari in the last five years. In desperation, Benazir’s son, Master Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, was brought in right after his graduation from Oxford to lead the campaign. But the 24-year-old is seriously constrained by his political inexperience, age, language barrier and threats to his life. Till now, the most he has been able to do is release a video message in accented Oxford Urdu, invoking the dead horse of socialist ideology and the tragedy of his mother’s assassination. This has not clicked too well and the general reaction, at least in the talk shows, was that it was “too little, too late”.

Faced with charges of corruption and misgovernance, pundits predict that the PPP might be looking at a replica of the 1997 polls, when its frustrated workers failed to come out. The PPP could manage only 18 national assembly seats—and not a single one from Punjab—out of the then general category total of 207. This time, the PPP might also lose its Sindh citadel as it confronts a tough 10-party, first-of-its-kind alliance of nationalists, religious parties, feudals and pirs.

Most surveys see twice-prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s PML(N) leading the race at this stage. Nawaz is definitely better placed if one goes by the old-style analysis of counting the worth of political heavyweights in a clan, tribe and biradari-based elections. This is especially true in the bustling, demographically thick GT Road belt of central Punjab that’s home to 107 seats—after the 2002 revision, the national assembly now has a total of 272 general seats, plus 70 reserved ones (60 for women, 10 for the minorities). Nawaz, to his credit, has gathered the bulk of heavyweight turncoats from all sides of the political aisle. This has invited huge criticism but it looks like his best bet against what Imran Khan calls his “tsunami”, the popular politics with which the former skipper hopes to sway the public mood.

The Imran phenomenon may have started off more because of a vacuum (call it non-performance) left by the others—largely the big two, PPP and PML(N)—but now it has gained a momentum on its own. Imran is relying on women (many of whom perhaps still see him as a handsome divorcee heart-throb), urban youth, Shias and disenchanted PPP voters, who he hopes will prefer him than their traditional rival, Nawaz.

The crucial battleground remains Punjab with 148 electoral seats as Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa (former NWFP), Sindh and Balochistan remain divisive in a four- or five-way fight among the PPP, PML(N), PTI, religious parties (Maulana Fazlur Rehman’s JuI and Jamaat-e-Islami) and nationalist parties—the Awami National Party (ANP), PMAP, NP, BNP(M), MQM, STP. In sum, Elections 2013 is all about whether Imran can sway the public mood away from the ‘electables’ in central Punjab. Let’s just say, it’s not over until it’s over.

The polls are being held in, literally, explosive conditions. Not a single day passes when a bomb or two do not go off, targeting the liberal, democratic parties and in provinces other than Punjab. The local Taliban has named the PPP, MQM and the ANP—of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s grandson Asfandyar Wali Khan—as its prime targets. The brunt of the bomb explosions have been borne by ANP, which has seen many of its top leaders dying in dozens of attacks in recent weeks. For a change, politicians across the board have shown a near-unanimity in carrying on with the electoral process. Perhaps they have learnt their lessons from successive martial regimes. The ANP may, in fact, have received some sympathy for showing such bravery in the face of brutal attacks. Yet the political parties remain ambivalent about the issue of terrorism. Earlier, it was only Imran who supported a dialogue with the Taliban. Now, he is joined by most parties.

The safest prediction that can be made about the elections is that it will be a coalition government at the centre and in at least three of the four provinces. This has been the case since 1988, except for 1997, when Sharif swept with a two-thirds majority. No party seems to win a simple majority and whichever party crosses the 70-80 seats mark is likely to make it to the government in the centre and in the provinces in weak coalitions. This means no government is generally in a position to undertake the harsh reforms required to deal with the crises in energy, inflation, fiscal and administrative sectors. No to speak of the most urgent crisis of all, terrorism.

Interestingly, foreign policy has been discussed much more in media debates than earlier. Most mainstream political parties were found to be on the same page on the issues of giving Gwadar to China, initiating a gas pipeline to Iran, peace in Afghanistan and assertion of sovereignty against the US and its drone attacks were concerned.

Most interestingly, traditional rival India has hardly been mentioned in the election campaign. One can safely say that any major breakthrough on Pakistan-India relations can take some time. It will take a while before a new Pakistani government stabilises enough to take decisions on India and by the time it does, the polls in India might delay things further. The only silver lining: it’s the first time in Pakistan’s history that a civilian government has completed its five-year tenure with elections being held as part of a “normal” transition. And Musharraf stands jailed in his own house.

(Amir Mateen is a well-known political commentator)

High Pennants

Mon, 06 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

A Pak Of Cards

What is at stake in the May 11 elections

The Issues Before Voters

Stagnation For the past several years, Pakistan’s growth has been stuck at 2 per cent or thereabouts
Security Law and order has slipped rapidly as Islamists have taken root and struck repeatedly in main towns and cities
Basic facilities Water shortage and power outages have become the order of the day, especially in Punjab
Drone attacks American aerial strikes inside Pakistan have become a hugely contentious and emotive issue
Youth Like India, over 65 per cent of Pakistan is below 25 years, but illiteracy and lack of opportunities abound
Unemployment A large number of youth are poorly educated and are easy target for the religious radical outfits
Corruption Rampant corruption among all major political players, members of bureaucracy and a culture of graft has disillusioned voters

Why This Election Is Important

This is the very first time that a democratically elected government has completed its full five-year term in Pakistan. Will this be the new trend or was it just an aberration?
Other than the executive and legislature, other institutions that make a democracy work—judiciary, election commission, a free media—all are asserting to find their sovereign space.
Former military dictator Pervez Musharraf has been disqualified from contesting the elections, and is now under house arrest. He may soon be put on trial for some of the
serious charges he faces.
An anti-Indian plank, the hallmark of past Pakistan elections, is absent in these elections. While negative campaign is on about the US-led drone attacks, most political parties stress on strong ties with India.
Pakistan, accused by India and others for sponsoring terrorism, is today a victim of regular terrorist strikes. The new government may play a key role for stability both in Pakistan and in Afghanistan, with the US due to pull out in 2014.

***

The hype and excitement that generally engulfs the Indian media during elections in Pakistan may have been missing so far. It could well be that a conjuncture of crucial domestic developments, social convulsions and ‘breaking news’ have fixed the gaze of Indian TV channels and newspapers inwards rather than towards India’s trouble-prone western neighbour. But policy planners in New Delhi have been watching with keen interest the fast-paced sequence of events in Pakistan that ranges from former military dictator Gen Pervez Musharraf’s return and his subsequent house arrest to the tussle between Nawaz Sharif’s PML(N) and Asif Ali Zardari’s PPP to corner a majority, as well as pretender Imran Khan’s bid to outsmart both and emerge as the ultimate winner.

A series of political changes can be expected in India’s neighbourhood—elections are slated in the war-ravaged Tamil areas in northern Sri Lanka for September; Bangladesh and Myanmar too are poll-bound. Nepal also is in transition. In the process, many new political groupings and individuals are likely to stake claim to power, posing new challenges for India. But the significance of the changes in Pakistan—both leading up to and following May 11, when it holds parliamentary and assembly elections in four provinces—cannot be overstated.

Recent years, particularly the period since 2008 when the PPP-led coalition government came to power in the aftermath of an assassination, has been one of great tumult for Pakistan. Though the PPP has made history by becoming the first elected government in Pakistan to complete its full-term, its five-year ride in power has mostly been a rough journey. The fight between the judiciary and the executive, and by extension, the national assembly, had often led to prolonged periods of chaos and instability. A stagnating economy, coupled with regular bloodshed targeting innocent civilians in routine ethnic and terrorist violence only added to that disquiet.

26/11 India still awaits action on Mumbai terror attack suspects. (Photograph by Reuters, From Outlook 06 May 2013)

But peace constituencies in the two countries yearning for normal, neighbourly relations between India and Pakistan could see positives through the dirty confusion and tangle of it all. Despite the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks and occasional bouts of tension along the Line of Control, the two sides did manage to keep much of their inherent differences in check during this period. On the trade front, though Pakistan failed to grant India the ‘Most Favoured Nation’ status to accelerate trade relations, significant progress was made. Additionally, democrats would argue that an assertive judiciary, a vibrant media and an independent election commission trying to find a sovereign space for itself are all good signs for a country like Pakistan.

So what do they all add up to as far as India is concerned?

“We have worked in the past with all segments of Pakistani society. But on India, it is not only the elected government but the establishment in Pakistan that plays a key role,” says a senior MEA official. He makes it clear, perhaps with some cynicism, that no “dramatic changes” are expected, even after the elections, in Pakistan’s policy towards India.

True, Pakistan’s security policy, especially vis-a-vis India, is the exclusve domain of the Pakistani military establishment. Irrespective of the changes that have taken place in Pakistan—often encouraging liberal sections in India and elsewhere to hope serious attempts are being made at last to strengthen democratic institutions—the role of the Pakistani army has not diminished, especially on key foreign policy and security issues.

“The judiciary’s assertion, a little rumbling in the civil society and many such developments all betoken Pakistan’s domestic evolution,” says Vivek Katju, former secretary in the MEA. But he argues that it will be wrong to deduce from these that the military establishment has been weakened.

“If the Pakistani army is allowing the democratic process to continue, it’s simply because they have too many irons in the fire right now,” explains Katju. His referrence is to the army’s involvement in pacifying the Af-Pak border and freeing areas from groups like the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) that has been engaged in a long-drawn fight against the Pakistani military. “If and when the army wants, it can step in to pick up the reins of power in Pakistan,” Katju warns.

The domineering role that the Pakistan army continues to play in the country is not made light of by western observers either. Though in public much of their statements pertain to strengthening Pakistan’s democratic credentials and encouraging the election process, the US and its western allies know well that in the ultimate analysis it is the bosses in Rawalpindi rather than the ones in Islamabad that they would have to reckon with. What role the army would play becomes more significant as the deadline for the US and the western troops’ withdrawal from Afghanistan—slated for end 2014—draws closer.

Given the recent American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the history of their sticky past forays in these regions, Western experts concede that in much of the Muslim world, including Pakistan, American policies tend to get unpopular, and any elected government that is seen to collaborate with the US starts losing popularity on the streets. The anti-US political rhetoric that one is seeing in Pakistan’s present election campaigns is a reflection of the unpopularity of the US-led drone attacks on the Af-Pak border, which has led to deaths of many innocent civilians. And that is just one reason. Experts also point to the perceived disconnect between the American rhetoric on ‘democracy and freedom’ on the one hand, and its evident comfort in dealing with dictatorships and military rulers rather than elected civilian governments on the other.

But rampant anti-US rhetoric from soapbox orators in the campaign may not be too much of a bother for western policymakers as Antol Lieven, professor of war studies in King’s College, London, and author of Pakistan: A Hard Country, has argued. “If it is not as acute an issue as it might be, this is partly due to deep pragmatism (thoroughly soaked in cynical self-interest) on part of the Pakistani civilian-political elite, and partly due to the fact that in the end, it is the army that decides the key issues of foreign and security policy, or at least exercises a veto over them.”

Anti-US protests might be a rallying cry for the heaving streets of Karachi, Lahore and Peshawar, but for western governments it is the sectarian violence within Pakistan and the increasing presence of its home-grown terror outfits that continue to be an area of concern. As Daniel Twining, a South Asia expert of the Washington-based German Marshall Fund, says, “The US expects to see Pakistan’s post-election leadership take serious steps to crack down on the terrorism and sectarian violence that is increasingly penetrating Pakistan’s urban core.”

Twining also points out that if Nawaz Sharif’s PML(N) ends up becoming the largest party and forms the government, it could also raise serious questions on what kind of relations he has with the army establishment. Will he retain a compulsive wariness from having been a coup victim once? Will he be aggressive, or complaisant? However, to Twining, more than the future of Afghanistan, it is the ground situation in the terror-ridden cauldron that is Pakistan that should concern its own leadership and the outside world. “Should there be a change in political power from the PPP to the PML(N), all eyes will be on Rawalpindi, given Nawaz Sharif’s history with the generals.” But Twining added that “from a strategic perspective, the greater concern is whether the new civilian leadership and the army leadership can together enact a programme to prevent Pakistan’s destabilisation from internal militancy, which is the greatest danger than Afghanistan’s future dispensation.”

This is an area which is also of serious concern to the Indian establishment. For, despite the initial positive response, the civilian leadership in Pakistan failed to make any meaningful progress against those involved in Mumbai terror attacks. Every demand for action was stonewalled by requests for ‘conclusive evidence’. But as long as the army establishment in Pakistan is not on the same page as the civilian government, probable terror strikes against India will continue to remain a major worry for New Delhi. Therefore, irrespective of whether it is Nawaz Sharif, Asif Ali Zardari or Imran Khan who comes to rule Pakistan, a fundamental change in Pakistan’s approach in dealing with India would need more than a public commitment from a democratically elected civilian government.

The Woman Who Turned Heads

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

She was the toast of the foreign capitals. Hillary Clinton , a presidential ‘nominee’, called her ‘elected’ Pakistani counterpart a ‘tough cookie’. SM Krishna, while stepping down from office, recalled how he had ‘good chemistry and understanding’ with her.

She was the first foreign minister of Pakistan whose annual reception at the United Nations was attended by her Indian counterpart. Again, she was the first who gave clear instructions to the Foreign Office that she did not want to hear any ‘rhetoric’ against India, despite provocation.

“We engaged in three wars, so we said let’s give creating peace a chance. We decided that it was time to start changing the environment, the narrative and the mindset and to start investing in friendship, trust-building and serious mature relations with each other rather than investing in hostility and animosity,” she responded to critics who saw her too ‘soft’ on the ‘enemy’.

Not only was she Pakistan’s first and youngest foreign minister but also the first woman to present the budget speech in the National Assembly in 2009.

Hina Rabbani Khar in her signatory dopatta (“that never kept still”) , and string of pearls, had literally turned heads as she jetted around the world trying to defend the indefensible. “I have been to Kabul five times on official trips and only once to Washington. For us Kabul is the most important capital in the world as it is really the ‘heart of Asia’. I have been greatly influenced by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and Benazir Bhutto’s vision for strengthening relations in the region”, she told Outlook.

In fact, at times, President Hamid Karzai saw her as a threat, as she headed delegations to meet with the Afghan opposition , in an attempt to gather them in the reconciliation process. Many were non-Pashtuns , like Dr Abdullah Abdullah, who refused to break bread with Karzai.

It was in her official residence that a crucial midnight meeting was held last summer, attended amongst others by Army chief, General Ishfaq Pervez Kiyani. The establishment had finally ‘cowed’ down in the face of continuing US pressure and decided to open land routes into Afghanistan for NATO containers after a mild US ‘regret’, for killing Pakistani soldiers.

Two years ago as she stepped by ‘default’ into the ministry of foreign affairs, a popular joke echoing in the corridors of power went: “Pakistan’s foreign policy is now in the hands of South Punjab”. Prime Minister Yusuf Reza Gillani, foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar and foreign secretary Jalil Abbas Jillani all belonged to South Punjab. Today only Jillani remains.

“If given a chance , yes, I will want to come back to the foreign minister’s office. The office has moved me and I am passionately involved with the foreign policy something I was not so keen on as junior minister of Finance”, she tells Outlook.

On her last day in office, as the lower halls of the Foreign Office were filled with pink gladiolas, as bureaucrats prepared to dine her out, Khar joked about how much she hated ‘pink’ gladiolas, but smiled when told that it will be a long time before the foreign office bureaucracy can think in terms of ‘pink’ again.

“HRK was gifted with a rare combination of intellect and charm making her a highly successful foreign minister. She had a major role in foreign policy formulation and effectively projected Pakistan’s point of view at all international forums. She brought about a fresh perspective to our dealings with regional countries and was willing to take initiatives in developing congenial relations. She was a team leader an absolute delight to work with,” recalls Foreign Secretary, Jillani while speaking to Outlook.

Many are writing the PPP off in Elections 2013, and Khar agrees that there have been highs and lows of her government. “Plus point of the PPP has been the 18th amendment where we managed to correct the fault lines. But we could not deliver an energy policy. On the issue of tackling militancy it was the opposition that did not cooperate even post Malala, when we wanted to bring in anti-terror policies. It is terrible for Pakistan that PML(N) maintain links with jihadis”, she says.

Khar received a standing ovation at home, when at an international forum. she raised the issue of the PPP- led government passing a law in Parliament which guaranteed stiff punishment for acid throwers. This despite the fact that it was the foreign minister's first cousin, Bilal Khar, who was behind defacing his wife, who eventually committed suicide in Italy. This and other similar crimes speeded framing the law.

Today on the eve of Pakistan’s historic elections, Khar is literally ‘toast’— politically. Her entry into politics was quite ‘accidental’ five years ago. Her father Ghulam Noor Rabbani Khar had been hit by the graduation clause to contest in 2008 from Village ‘Khar Gharbi’ located in Tehsil Kot Addu, in Muzaffargarh. With the condition no longer required, Khar says she has returned the ‘trust’ reposed in her by her father. “He is so proud of me and said even a son would not have brought so much honour to his constituency. I am his covering candidate and canvassing for him in what has been a very peaceful area with no violence,” Khar says.

The PPP has also not given Khar the reserved seat for women, though the former foreign minister says that she would, if given a chance, have preferred to fight it out on a general rather than a ‘safe’ seat.

For someone who rants endlessly on foreign policy, Khar maintains a frosty silence when asked about her future plans. “ I am really not in a decisive position to talk about my future plans”, she tells Outlook as political analysts push her out of the PPP political frame altogether.

“Days of her lucky charm are over. She was in politics by default but I do not see her around in future. But she is still very, very young so who knows?”, says political analyst Amir Mateen.

However, though the future looks hazy, if the PPP manages to return, chances of bringing back Khar through the Senate or as an Advisor are always there, after all Zardari still remains President.

“President Zardari has a 20 -20 vision on the future, is able to grab a situation and is spot on foreign policy. I have confidence in him. God has been exceptionally kind to me as I never had to jostle or fight for a position. I will not lose strength now”, she recalls of the time she spent in government.

In the meantime she has all the time in the world for trekking, horse- riding, climbing Nanga Parbat and K2 and managing her hotel business.

Lessons From Boston

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The horrific bombings of the Boston Marathon produced inspiring images of a spirited, brave Boston refusing to be cowed. Some spectators surged forward toward the danger to apply tourniquets, offer first aid, share blankets, and later to give blood, for the victims.

President Obama followed the crisis from its first moments and came out promptly to caution against fruitless speculation as to the perpetrators as well as solemnly to vow that they will be held accountable. (He has a certain track record in that regard.)

The idea of three dead, several more critically wounded, and over a 100 injured, merely for running in a marathon (often running for charities or victims of other tragedies) is terrible to contemplate. Our hearts are broken for the victims and their family and friends, for the runners who will not run again.

There is negative energy implicit in such a violent event, and there is potential positive energy to be had from the way that we respond to it. To fight our contemporary pathologies, the tragedy has to be turned to empathy and universal compassion rather than to anger and racial profiling. Whatever sick mind dreamed up this act did not manifest the essence of any large group of people. Terrorists and supremacists represent only themselves, and always harm their own ethnic or religious group along with everyone else.

The negative energies were palpable. Fox News contributor Erik Rush tweeted, “Everybody do the National Security Ankle Grab! Let’s bring more Saudis in without screening them! C’mon!” When asked if he was already scapegoating Muslims, he replied, ““Yes, they’re evil. Let’s kill them all.” Challenged on that, he replied, “Sarcasm, idiot!” What would happen, I wonder, if someone sarcastically asked on Twitter why, whenever there is a bombing in the US, one of the suspects everyone has to consider is white people? I did, mischievously and with Mr. Rush in mind, and was told repeatedly that it wasn’t right to tar all members of a group with the brush of a few. They were so unselfconscious that they didn’t seem to realize that this was what was being done to Muslims!

It was easy for jingoists to find Chinese or Arabs on twitter gloating. But I saw much more of this kind of message:

#إنفجار_بوسطن Our religion doesn't teach us to be happy on people's' miseries.
— Zaynab AlAlawi (@ZaynabDAlAlawi) April 16, 2013

or there was this:

#إنفجار_بوسطنTerrorism has no religion whether it is in Boston or in Syria
— Osama Alharthi (@osamahr) April 16, 2013

But there were positive energies as well. The Egyptian woman activist Asma’ Mahfouz, who was important in calling for the Tahrir demonstrations that kicked off the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, said that she admired the American sense of deep concern for the welfare of citizens, and the way authorities came out promptly to speak to the incident. She contrasted this situation to that in Egypt, where, she alleged, the authorities have less respect for the value of citizens’ lives. For a young Egyptian revolutionary, America is still an exemplary nation in some regards, and many in the world admire it even in the way it deals with adversity.

Similar sentiments were voiced by the journalist Fatima Naout, who said that when dozens of Egyptians died in a train accident, it took President Morsi 12 hours to come on television, and then he made only a brief statement of less than a minute. She also complained of innocents being arrested for sabotage and ultimately released, while what she called Muslim Brotherhood gangs attacked demonstrators with impunity. She said that the US is a nation of laws and upright judicial procedure, and Egypt still is not.

On the other side of the aisle in Egypt, Muslim Brotherhood members of the Senate (Majlis al-Shura) unhesitatingly condemned the bombings. MP Izz al-Din al-Kumi condemned all violence that harmed individuals of any nationality. He discounted a return to the ‘war on terror’ atmosphere of 9/11, saying that al-Qaeda had suffered too many blows any longer to be a viable organization. Dr. Farid al-Bayyad, another parliamentarian said, “Regardless of our differences with American policy, we roundly condemn these attacks.”

Some Syrians and Iraqis pointed out that many more people died from bombings and other violence in their countries on Monday than did Americans, and that they felt slighted because the major news networks in the West (which are actually global media) more or less ignored their carnage but gave wall to wall coverage of Boston.

Aljazeera English reported on the Iraq bombings, which killed some 46 in several cities, and were likely intended to disrupt next week’s provincial election.

Over the weekend, Syrian regime fighter jets bombed Syrian cities, killing two dozen people, including non-combatants:

What happened in Boston is undeniably important and newsworthy. But so is what happened in Iraq and Syria. It is not the American people’s fault that they have a capitalist news model, where news is often carried on television to sell advertising. The corporations have decided that for the most part, Iraq and Syria aren’t what will attract Nielsen viewers and therefore advertising dollars. Given the global dominance by US news corporations, this decision has an impact on coverage in much of the world.

Here is a video by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) on the dilemma of the over one million displaced Syrians, half of them children:

So I’d like to turn the complaint on its head. Having experienced the shock and grief of the Boston bombings, cannot we in the US empathise more with Iraqi victims and Syrian victims? Compassion for all is the only way to turn such tragedies toward positive energy.

Perhaps some Americans, in this moment of distress, will be willing to be also distressed over the dreadful conditions in which Syrian refugees are living, and will be willing to go to the aid of Oxfam’s Syria appeal. Some of those Syrians living in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey were also hit by shrapnel or lost limbs. Perhaps some of us will donate to them in the name of our own Boston Marathon victims of senseless violence.

Terrorism has no nation or religion. But likewise its victims are human beings, precious human beings, who must be the objects of compassion for us all.

Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History and the director of the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan. He runs the Informed Comment website where this piece first appeared

Boston Blasts

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The facts: As reported by the BBC and the CNN:

Three persons, including an 8-year-old child, were killed in two explosions near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on the afternoon of April 15, 2013.
Hospitals reported at least 144 people are being treated for injuries, with at least 17 of them in critical condition and 25 in serious condition. At least eight of them are children. At least 10 people injured had limbs amputated. Several of the patients treated at Massachusetts General Hospital suffered injuries to lower limbs.
The two blasts were about 50 to 100 yards apart with a few minutes one after the other. A federal law enforcement official told CNN that both bombs were small, and initial tests showed no C-4 or other high-grade explosive material, suggesting that the packages used in the attack were crude explosive devices.
Authorities in Boston found at least one other explosive device , Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis said. Rep. Bill Keating of Massachusetts said two more were found. One unexploded device was found at a hotel on Boylston Street near the bomb site and another unexploded device was found at an undisclosed location.
There were no credible threats before the Marathon, a state government official said. There is no suspect in custody, but many people are being questioned, Davis said. Investigators warned police to be on the lookout for a "darker-skinned or black male" with a possible foreign accent in connection with the attack, according to a law enforcement advisory obtained by CNN. The man was seen with a black backpack and sweatshirt and was trying to get into a restricted area about five minutes before the first explosion, the lookout notice states. Also, a Saudi national with a leg wound was under guard at a Boston hospital in connection with the bombings, but investigators cannot say he is involved at this time and he is not in custody, a law enforcement official said.
In addition to scrutinizing images of surveillance cameras in the area, the FBI likely was issuing subpoenas for records from cell towers in the area to isolate and trace calls from around Copley Square at the time of the blasts, according to a former federal law enforcement official who now works in the intelligence community.
Mayor (Thomas) Menino said: “Our focus is on making sure that the area around Copley Square is safe and secured. I am asking everyone to stay away from Copley Square and let the first responders do their jobs."
The Federal Aviation Administration placed a flight restriction over the site of the blasts. Other cities, including New York and Washington, tightened security as a result. Following standard protocol, the White House cleared out an area in front of the West Wing.
Troops from the Massachusetts National Guard, already at the site as part of the marathon's security and crowd-management plan, were assisting police as well.
The FBI has taken over co-ordination of what it described as a "potential terrorist inquiry". Although President Obama, in his initial statement, did not use the word "terrorism", a White House official later said: "Any event with multiple explosive devices - as this appears to be - is clearly an act of terror and will be approached as an act of terror."
Officials in Washington said no group or individual had so far said they carried out the attack.

Since the 9/11 acts of catastrophic terrorism in the US Homeland carried out by Al Qaeda, using hijacked aircraft, there have been two attempted acts of catastrophic terrorism by Al Qaeda by causing explosions on US passenger aircraft flying from Europe to the US.

On 22 December 2001, Richard Reid, a British citizen, boarded American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami, wearing shoes packed with explosives, which he unsuccessfully tried to detonate. Passengers overpowered him on the plane, which quickly landed at Logan International Airport in Boston, , the closest US airport. He was arrested and indicted. He was reported to have been motivated by Al Qaeda elements in Pakistan.

On December 26, 2009, Abdul Mutallab, 23, a Nigerian, tried to detonate an explosive device, apparently a mix of powder and liquid, on a North-West Airlines flight, coming from Nigeria via Amsterdam, and approaching Detroit. An alert passenger noticed him and he was overpowered. He was believed to have been motivated by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

The Boston Marathon blasts have coincided with a fast reportedly undertaken since March 19,2013, by 24 of the Al Qaeda suspects still held in the Guantanamo Bay detention centre to protest against the alleged inhuman conditions in the Centre. Activists of a Muslim group called Witness Against Torture (WAT) began a hunger strike in solidarity with the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The group said in its web site: “We will gather for action in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities domestically and internationally to denounce the barbaric practice of torture and indefinite detention and to demand justice for the men at Guantanamo.” The solidarity fast by WAT was scheduled to last till March 30. A handful of activists plan to continue fasting every Friday until the prison is closed.

There is so far no evidence to indicate that the Boston blasts might have been linked with the fast. No claim of responsibility for the blasts has been made so far and there is till now no evidence to show whether the blasts were carried out by individual rogue elements with personal grievances or ideologically motivated organisations.

While the US Homeland had previously seen acts of catastrophic terrorism and attempts to commit such acts through aircraft, this is the first time a conventional act of terrorism using improvised explosive devices has been committed, if the involvement of rogue individual elements is ruled out.

The perpetrators, whether rogue individuals or members of ideologically motivated organisations, have succeeded in evading physical security for the Boston Marathon in procuring explosive material, detonators and timers and planting the IEDs without being noticed by the extensive CCTV camera network along the Marathon route.

The local security authorities and the FBI do not appear to have received any advance inkling of a possible terrorist strike either through electronic chatter or from human sources.

The explosions show that despite the strengthening of homeland security in the US after 9/11, terrorists have managed to find intelligence and physical security gaps in the security network and exploited them. The Boston blasts also illustrate the difficulties in preventing conventional style attacks as against sophisticated catastrophic attacks.

B. Raman is Additional Secretary (etd),Cabinet Secretariat, Govt of India, New Delhi. Twitter : @SORBONNE75

No Wiser One Year After

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

As Kim Jong-Un of North Korea, who completes one year as First Secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea on April 11, 2013, uses North Korea’s power of escalatory rhetoric to threaten the region with the danger of a nuclear war if its demands are not met, there is increasing nervousness not only among North Korea’s perceived adversaries such as the US, South Korea and Japan, but also in its traditional friend next door, namely, China.

Does Kim realise the implications of the threats which he has been holding out against his adversaries? Does he realise that if he carries out his threats or if he loses control of the situation under the irrational force of his rhetoric, he would be seriously endangering not only the national interests and security of his own country, but also those of North Korea’s traditional friends such as China?

Even Fidel Castro, in a recent column for a Cuban paper for which he writes now and then, has pointed out the likely dangers to North Korea’s traditional friends if the situation in the Korean peninsula gets out of control. He has not named the traditional friends of North Korea, but it is apparent he was having in mind China and Russia.

The government and party-controlled media in China has been increasingly—initially indirectly, now directly— reflecting the concerns in China over the developing situation in the Korean peninsula in the wake of the recent North Korean nuclear and missile tests and the new sanctions sought to be imposed against it under pressure from the US.

The Chinese concerns are reflected very clearly in two commentaries carried by the People’s Daily and the Global Times, both run by the Communist Party of China, on April 11, coinciding with the first anniversary of Kim Jong-Un’s leadership of the party

The People’s Daily commentary, explaining China’s policy of not allowing trouble-making at its doorstep, said:

“ Not allowing troublemaking at the doorsteps of China means to stop the vicious circle of tension on the peninsula, to prevent any party from stirring up trouble, to oppose creating tension on purpose, and to say no to render the use of force to resolve the problem. Words and deeds that intensify the tensions on the Korean Peninsula should be condemned and opposed. Not allowing troublemaking at the doorsteps of China is not China's "Monroe Doctrine". China does not seek spheres of influence. China intends to maintain regional peace and stability on the Peninsula, and determine its own position and actions in accordance with the Peninsula situation on its own merits. At present, it is not without hope to maintain peace and stability on the peninsula.”

The Global Times was even more explicit in cautioning North Korea. It said:

“Since the transition of Pyongyang's leadership, the outside world has been speculating over the future direction of the regime. North Korea is sure to change, because its current situation is unsustainable and is placing huge pressure on the country. Escaping this pressure fits the North's interests and would allow the country to meet external expectations.

“During the past year, the nuclear issue has remained at the centre of the North's domestic and foreign policies. The new leadership has shown its resolve, which is to develop nuclear technologies, rather than solve the nuclear crisis. The regime has taken an extreme path.

“Pyongyang should clearly understand that it does not have the capability to dominate the situation in the Korean Peninsula. Its nuclear capacity to some extent makes it feel secure, but at the same time it worsens its international strategic environment. Pyongyang should drop its illusions that it can make the world stay silent over its desire for nuclear arms through its hard-line stance and deceptions.

“The international community will never permit North Korea to have the legal status of a nuclear country, because it would lead to more devastating consequences. A number of Asian countries have acquired nuclear weapons, but none of them use them in the manner North Korea envisions.

“The North Korean regime has to face up to the difficulties in returning to the international community if it refuses to give up its nuclear ambitions. Even if the US and South Korea make concessions, the North still confronts problems such as sanctions and economic obstacles. Concrete moves are needed to solve the current dilemma that the North faces.

“China respects North Korea, but it also holds the responsibility of preserving peace in Northeast Asia. Pyongyang's nuclear issue concerns China's national interests. We hope that the North Korean regime can stay rational and pay attention to the interests of the whole region as its bottom line. We also hope that its moves will not pose threats to the peace and stability of China's north-eastern area.

“North Korea has more difficulties in opening itself up to the world. The stances of South Korea, Japan and the US are partly the reason. Regardless of the situation, we believe the North still has a chance and we regret that it has become mired in this crisis. We hope the crisis is only temporary.”

A perusal of the recent comments in the Chinese media indicates that Chinese observers feel there is need for fresh thinking on the question of North Korea’s nuclear and missile capability. It seems to be their view that after all that has happened recently the question of a negotiated de-nuclearisation of North Korea is no longer a viable option. A more practical option could be to work for a freezing of North Korea’s capability at the present level in return for a Chinese offer of its nuclear umbrella to North Korea to calm its fears regarding the US nuclear umbrella for South Korea and Japan.

Will such an offer work? The US may not accept any attempt to legitimise North Korea’s present capability as that could create problems in relation to Iran. Moreover, the present North Korean leadership seems determined not to accept any externally imposed constraints on its nuclear and missile capabilities.

How to calm the North Korean leadership and de-escalate the situation? The Chinese do not seem to have an answer. They seem to know so little about the mind-set of Kim Jong-Un and his advisers. He has not visited China since assuming office. He had visited China along with his father, but as the ruler of North Korea after the death of his father Kim Jong-Il, he and his advisers have not maintained the same level of contacts with the party and PLA leadership of China as during the days of his father.

China is no longer an important and reliable window on North Korea as it used to be in the past. It is as confused by the policies and unpredictability of Kim Jong-Un and his advisers as the US and South Korea. As Kim, who had done his schooling in Switzerland, took over as the supreme leader in December 2011 after the death of his father, there was a fond expectation that his exposure to the West as a student might make him amenable to a policy of gradually opening up his country to the outside world.

This has not happened. Is it because he himself is not inclined to pursuing a policy of opening-up or because he is unable to overcome opposition from the old guards in the army and the party to any policy change? One has not so far seen in the party and the army a new generation wanting to experiment with new policies in the economic field.

In the face of a dearth of information regarding the new post-December 2011 leadership in North Korea, China has been finding the recent developments as unnerving as the rest of the international community. Apart from articulating its concerns and caution and expressing its hope that things will not reach a point of no return, China has been finding its ability to influence the developments in a constructive direction limited.

B. Raman is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. Twitter: @SORBONNE75

The Death Of A Class Warrior

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Thatcher is dead. But for years she was a shadow of her former self. After her fall from power in 1990 she slowly faded away from public life and when she did wander back onto the public stage the contrast between her frailty and the formidable figure of collective memory made these occasional spectacles almost surreal.

How we should respond when this elderly, diminished woman finally went to meet her maker has for some time been a minor talking point on the left. It is often said that we should not celebrate her passing. Not just because to do so would be distasteful, but because it is Thatcherism the idea not Thatcher the person that is the real enemy. This is of course true. Thatcher was no intellectual and did not invent what became known as Thatcherism. But neither was Thatcherism just some objectionable set of ideas to which the woman who lent it her name regrettably subscribed. Neoliberalism was, and is, a political project requiring political agency to achieve its hegemony; and in Britain it was Margaret Thatcher more than anyone who was responsible for transforming the neoliberal dreams of men like Hayek and Friedman into a waking political nightmare.

Margaret Hilda Thatcher was born in the Midlands town of Grantham in Lincolnshire on 13 October 1925, the second daughter of Alfred and Beatrice Roberts. Her father, whom she greatly admired, even idealised, was a local politician and lay preacher who owned and ran a grocery store in the town. The young Margaret Roberts was not close to her mother and once when asked about her only remarked, ‘Mother was marvellous – she helped Father.’

Her upbringing, though relatively privileged, was hardly the classic stuff of the British ruling class, and this fact doubtless strengthened her populist instincts and credentials. Both admirers and critics have attributed Thatcher’s politics to her small town, petty bourgeois roots. In 1983 the journalist Peter Riddell wrote that:

Thatcherism is essentially an instinct, a sense of moral values and an approach to leadership rather than ideology. It is an expression of Mrs Thatcher’s upbringing in Grantham, her background of hard work and family responsibility, ambition and postponed satisfaction, duty and patriotism.[1]

This rather romantic view of Thatcher’s politics was no doubt one that she herself shared. In The Path To Power, she wrote: ‘There is no better course for understanding free-market economics than life in a corner shop.’ That the ‘free market’ policies associated with Thatcher in fact led to the domination of small town life by supermarkets and other powerful corporations, is just one of the many ways that the rhetoric and reality of her politics were cruelly out of sync.

In the Grantham of the real world, as opposed to the conservative utopia of Thatcher’s imagination, she will not be fondly remembered. During her premiership several of the town’s manufacturing companies were forced to shut down and the nearby Nottinghamshire coal mines were closed. As Tim Adams has reported, several years ago 85% of the readers of the town’s local paper voted against the erection of a bronze statue of Thatcher in favour of bringing back a fondly remembered disused steamroller, once a feature of the town’s largest public park.

Thatcher left Grantham in 1943 having won a scholarship at Somerville College, Oxford and seldom returned. She studied Chemistry and was appointed President of the University’s Conservative Association. After graduating in 1947 she worked for several years as a Research Chemist, first at British Xylonite (BX) Plastics, where she joined a trade union, the Association for Scientific Workers. She then joined the food company J. Lyons and Co., where it is often said that she was involved in the development of soft scoop ice cream. According to Jon Agar though, there is no firm evidence of this. [2]

In the General Elections of 1950 and 1951, when she was still in her mid-20s, Margaret Roberts, as she was then, stood as the Conservative candidate in the Labour stronghold of Dartford. 1951 was also the year she met, and soon afterwards married, the millionaire businessman Denis Thatcher. Her husband’s financial patronage proved invaluable, allowing her to train as a barrister and eventually to secure a seat in the constituency of Finchley in North London. Yet as Peter Clarke noted in reviewing her Path To Power, the importance of her husband’s considerable wealth was barely acknowledged by Thatcher. She preferred to dwell on her humble roots as a grocer’s daughter and to imagine that her achievements were attributable to drudgery and self-discipline.

Thatcher was first elected to the House of Commons in October 1959. She subsequently held junior posts in the Macmillan Government before becoming shadow spokesperson for education and in 1970 she entered the Cabinet as Education Secretary in Edward Heath’s ill-fated Tory Government. It was in this period that in response to demands for departmental spending cuts she cancelled free school milk, only to be forever taunted with the rhyme ‘Thatcher, Thatcher Milk Snatcher’.

Heath and Thatcher and were not personally well disposed to each other and along with other members of the Tory hard right she would later come to bitterly resent his supposedly conciliatory politics. As far as the Tory radicals were concerned, Heath had started out on the right track. At a January 1970 meeting at the Selsdon Park Hotel in Surrey, his shadow cabinet and policy team developed a set of reactionary policies designed to curtail the waves of radicalism and popular mobilisations which unnerved the British establishment in the 1960s. They proposed a new law on trespass (designed to combat the direct action protests of the student anti-racist movements) as well as new industrial regulations intended to curtail an increasingly intransigent working class. Meanwhile business and finance was to be deregulated and taxes cut. In words that could have been describing Thatcherism, the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson condemned the Selsdon policies as ‘an atavistic desire to reverse the course of 25 years of social revolution’ and ‘a wanton, calculated and deliberate return to greater inequality.’

If the policies were indeed intended to break with the post-war consensus (and it is not at all clear that they were), then Heath failed where Thatcher later succeeded. Attempts to limit the power of the trade unions ended in humiliating defeat at the hands of the National Union of Mineworkers and Heath’s free market policies were abandoned after Britain’s capitalists in fact showed little interest in investing in British industry. Other economic policies proved equally lamentable. The lifting of administrative controls over bank credit in 1971 (which had been lobbied for by the City of London) engineered a short-lived economic boom concentrated largely in property, which collapsed dramatically with the worldwide economic slump and the subsequent hike in oil prices.[3] In 1974 Heath was essentially forced from office by a newly assertive labour movement after he challenged the unions with the campaigning slogan ‘Who Governs Britain?’ – and lost.

Heath stayed on as Conservative Leader after suffering yet another general election defeat to his long term rival Harold Wilson. Meanwhile, Margaret Thatcher and other reactionaries in the Conservative Party, who longed for a spirited counter attack on the labour movement, began to coalesce around the figure of Keith Joseph – Heath’s former Secretary of State for Social Services who shortly after the first 1974 election defeat was apparently converted to the newly ascendant dogma of neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism had been developed for several decades by a group of intellectuals belonging to an elite organisation called the Mount Pelerin Society. Probably the most influential of their number was the Austrian political economist Friedrich Hayek, who famously argued in The Road to Serfdom that any government intervention in the economy would ultimately lead to authoritarianism. Thatcher first read The Road to Serfdom at university and after his Damascus moment Keith Joseph encouraged her to explore Hayek’s other writings. (After being elected leader Thatcher is said to have brandished a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, pronouncing, ‘This is what we believe!’)

In the UK Hayek’s ideas had been championed by the Institute of Economic Affairs, a think-tank funded by a millionaire businessman and run by two committed pamphleteers, Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon. Keith Joseph had been in contact with them both, as well as with other key neoliberal thinkers such as Alan Walters, an economist and a member of the Mount Pelerin Society, and Bill and Shirley Letwin (the parents of the Conservative Minister Oliver Letwin). With the support of these right-wing trailblazers, Thatcher and Joseph together founded a new think-tank called the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), which set out to win over the Conservative Party to neoliberalism. Along with the Institute of Economic Affairs, the CPS became a hub for the New Right, which was now able to operate independently from the official Conservative Party policy machine, which was still aligned to the so called ‘One Nation Conservatism’ associated with Edward Heath and other influential Tories like Chris Patten and James Prior.

Thatcher came to lead the hard right faction of the Conservative Party as a result of a remarkably ill-judged speech given by Keith Joseph in October 1974 on the subject of the family and ‘civilised values’. Joseph spoke of a ‘degeneration’ and ‘moral decline reflected and intensified by economic decline’. The poor, he said, should be helped of course, but – and we hear echoes of this today in the speeches of Iain Duncan Smith – ‘to create more dependence is to destroy them morally’. Keith Joseph’s ultimate undoing was a section of the speech in which he said that the ‘balance of our population, our human stock is threatened’ since ‘a high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers… who were first pregnant in adolescence in social classes 4 and 5.’

Though often portrayed as what political journalists like to call a ‘gaffe’, Joseph had in fact long harboured such class prejudice and been inclined towards eugenics. A former Home Office official later recalled that whilst he was in government, civil servants had ‘been aware that he had inclinations in that direction but had steered him off.’[4]

Joseph was widely condemned for the speech and was discredited as a challenger for the Tory leadership. Thatcher, his closest political ally, stepped forward in his place with his full backing. She later recalled telling Joseph: ‘Look, Keith, if you’re not going to stand, I will because someone who represents our viewpoint has to stand.’[5]

Heath had lost two General Elections in one year, so Thatcher’s initial success was no great surprise. What was more unexpected was that the momentum of her success in the first ballot led her to an outright victory in the second after Heath dropped out. Thus, through some considerable good fortune, Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party in February 1975.

Her media advisor in her leadership campaign was Gordon Reece, a former television producer who had set up a company producing corporate videos and providing media advice to business executives. Thatcher, the supposed ‘conviction politician’, was thoroughly rebranded by Reece, who persuaded her to change her dress sense, posture and even to take elocution lessons. As Germaine Greer has noted, ‘Reece began the long process by which the millionaire's decorative wife with the fake, cut-glass accent was made over into the no-nonsense grocer’s daughter’. Thatcher herself later recalled: ‘Gordon was terrific. He said my hair and my clothes had to be changed and we would have to do something about my voice. It was quite an education because I had not thought about these things before.’[6]

Reece hired the advertising company Saatchi & Saatchi, whose chairman Tim Bell became another key advisor. Together Reece and Bell carefully orchestrated Thatcher’s media appearances and, in a break with the classic Tory strategy, courted the tabloid press, meeting regularly with Larry Lamb of The Sun and David English of the Daily Mail.[7]

The Sun, which had been owned by Rupert Murdoch since 1969, had for a period maintained a broadly left-wing stance, but by that point had switched its support to the Conservatives and despite having previously been highly critical of Thatcher during her time as Education Minister, had lent her its full support. As James Curran and Colin Leys note, this rightward shift reflected changes to the political economy of the media, which from the 1960s onwards became dominated by large corporations, reversing the trend toward journalist autonomy.[8]

Even with innovative campaigning strategies and the support of the majority of the press however, the Tories still lagged behind the Labour Party in the polls as it approached the end of its troubled five year term and Thatcher personally was considerably less popular than the Prime Minister James Callaghan. It was the wave of strikes during the winter of 1978/9 – the so called ‘Winter of Discontent’ – which would hand Thatcher her election victory. Her allies in the reactionary press seized the moment, attacking Callaghan as a complacent leader whose government was ‘held to ransom’ by militant trade unions. By February 1979 the Conservatives enjoyed an 18% lead and they went on to win a strong majority of 43 seats in the May 1979 election.

What was the nature of Thatcher’s electoral constituency? Though there was a notable rightward shift in the electorate in 1979, this trend has been hugely exaggerated by Thatcher’s supporters (who like to imagine her reactionary revolution as a popular uprising against the strictures of the social democratic state, rather than a top-down reassertion of class power). Like all political leaders she certainly enjoyed some cross-class support, but in the long run, working class support for the Conservatives continued its long term decline during her leadership.

The core Thatcherite voters, who were mobilised by the economic crisis and the rise of the ‘New Left’, were the most reactionary sections of the middle classes – the UKIP voters of today – whose antipathy towards trade unions and the left, and anxiety over a perceived moral and economic decline, meant they were receptive to Thatcher’s nationalist, authoritarian and petit bourgeois political rhetoric. Perhaps most importantly, though Thatcher was able to mobilise a significant section of the electorate, her support in no way represented a political mandate for neoliberalism. Indeed Thatcher and her advisors were always careful not to present their political agenda during election campaigns. During the 1979 campaign they chose to portray Thatcher as a rather homely figure and focused on attacking Labour over its lack of ‘economic credibility’. This strategy was to prove as ironic as Thatcher’s infamous promise as she entered 10 Downing Street that she would bring harmony and hope in the place of discord and despair.

The Thatcherite myth, which gradually became political common sense in Britain, is that the Conservatives introduced economic reforms which though painful and unpopular in the short term restored Britain to prosperity after years of Labour mismanagement of the economy. In fact Labour had been fairly successful in stabilising the economy. It brought down the high levels of inflation it had inherited from the Heath Government through a combination of spending cuts and wage restraints – attempting effectively to resolve the economic crisis by driving down the living standards of its own supporters. This policy had relied on the Labour Party’s relationship with the trade unions, which was obviously not an option for Thatcher. Instead her government turned to the newly fashionable theory of monetarism, according to which the ‘money supply’ was the key to controlling economic growth and inflation. The Labour leadership had already shifted somewhat towards ‘monetarist’ thinking in 1976, coerced by the IMF and influenced by James Callaghan’s son-in-law Peter Jay, but the Thatcherites now embraced a rather crude version – later referred to by Thatcher’s second Chancellor Nigel Lawson as ‘unreconstructed parochial monetarism’ – with characteristic zeal.

Thatcher, to be fair, was never able to put into practice the pure monetarism championed by her most dogmatic advisors who (beholden to neoclassical economics and thus misunderstanding the nature of money and credit) favoured controlling the monetary base as a counter-inflationary measure. Such an approach was effectively blocked by the political representatives of the City of London, who favoured instead an increase in interest rates.[9] And under Thatcher, what the City wanted, the City got. This included, most significantly, an end to exchange controls, which were abolished almost immediately, fatally undermining the political capacity for democratic management of the economy.

While the City boomed, British manufacturing suffered severely and unemployment doubled. Neither would recover. Meanwhile growth declined, inflation rose once again and, in the midst of a severe recession, Geoffrey Howe introduced public spending cuts. From a national perspective these policies were as disastrous as they were unpopular. Thatcher, having described Labour as ‘the natural party of unemployment’, and campaigned using the famous Saatchi & Saatchi poster showing a seemingly endless dole queue, now pushed unemployment up to three million. The ‘One Nation’ Tory Ian Gilmour, a member of Thatcher’s first Cabinet, noted that Thatcher and her neoliberal comrades were ‘largely cushioned by a surprising insensitivity to the human cost of their policy and by strong, if diminishing, feelings of dogmatic certainty’.[10] Nevertheless Thatcher (at this stage at least) knew when to back down. Having famously declared in October 1980 that, ‘The lady’s not for turning’, she quietly did just that in 1981.

Controlling the money supply proved far more difficult in practice than ideologues like Milton Friedman had imagined and the early commitments of the Thatcher Government were quietly abandoned. To consider this as a failure for Thatcherism though is to misunderstand the woman and the movement she headed. The Thatcherite interest in monetarism was not academic, but political. Peter Jay once remarked that explaining monetarism to Thatcher was ‘like showing Genghis Khan a map of the world’. Similarly Alan Budd, a founding member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, suggested that ‘the 1980s policies of attacking inflation by squeezing the economy and public spending were a cover to bash the workers.’[11]

What monetarism provided was an intellectual and technocratic rationale for cutting public spending and undermining the labour movement, not to mention providing more favourable conditions for financial capital, which in reality was the power behind Thatcher’s throne. Once the Thatcherites’ early approach to the economy threatened to undermine these strategic goals it was abandoned, or at least revised.

Thatcher’s early macro-economic policies were a significant departure from previous practices, but in many other respects her first few years in office were relatively cautious. This was partly because her Cabinet still included a number of influential, traditionally minded Conservatives (men she dubbed ‘wets’ for their failure to agree with her), but it was also because, despite her belligerent rhetoric, Thatcher was an adept strategist who understood that if she provoked a head on struggle with a united labour movement she would most likely lose. As one of her closest advisors, Charles Powell, remarked: ‘Mrs Thatcher was a radical, but she was a pragmatic radical.’ [12] So it was that when the National Coal Board announced pit closures in February 1981, the plans were quickly abandoned once the National Union of Mineworkers threatened to strike. As Nigel Lawson later commented: ‘Thatcher had very, very quickly backpedalled and she was quite right at that time because no preparation of any kind had been put in place for weathering a strike.’ [13] Indeed Lawson claims that on being appointed Energy Secretary in 1981, Thatcher told him, ‘Nigel, we mustn't have a coal strike.’

Though Thatcher initially shied away from conflict with the miners, secretly she prepared for war. When it came three years later, she was not only well prepared, but was emboldened by her victories in the Falklands conflict and the 1983 General Election. Her success in the latter, despite her risible record in office, is often attributed to the former and no doubt the Falklands conflict did have a significant impact on her confidence and status as a leader. But the truth is that in 1983 she was handed Britain on a plate by a divided opposition. In March 1981, a number of leading figures in the Labour Party broke off to form the Social Democratic Party, which then formed an electoral pact with the Liberals. In the 1983 election the SDP-Liberal Alliance secured 25% of the vote, but due to the first-past-the-post system received little in the way of seats. Meanwhile, the Conservatives’ share of the vote declined slightly, yet they secured the largest majority in the House of Commons since Atlee’s landslide of 1945. Just as the post-war Labour Government had fundamentally changed the governing consensus in Britain, so Thatcher would now do the same.

As Thatcher’s former advisor John Redwood later admitted, the Conservatives had once again been very vague about what policies they would introduce once they came to office.[14] But this did not matter. For Mrs Thatcher sought no mandate on policy, only a mandate to lead. Her Churchillian posturing during the Falklands conflict had given her a taste for war which was to define her. As John Campbell, one of her many biographers, notes:

One of Margaret Thatcher’s defining characteristics as a politician was a need for enemies. To fuel the aggression that drove her career she had to find new antagonists all the time to be successively demonised, confronted and defeated.[15]

At the top of Thatcher’s hit-list was the National Union of Mineworkers. Dubbed ‘the enemy within’, the miners’ crushing defeat after months of bitter struggle was probably Thatcher’s greatest single political achievement. It was not a popularity contest, and won her no new friends, but the battle fundamentally changed the political landscape of Britain. As Seumas Milne has suggested, the NUM represented an alternative vision for British society, one based on community, solidarity and collective action, rather than individualism and greed.[16] Their defeat therefore was not only a significant strategic victory, but it had an historic symbolic resonance. Thatcher’s equally truculent henchman, Norman Tebbit, later wrote that Thatcher had broken ‘not just a strike, but a spell’.

Having harnessed the full coercive powers of the state to defeat Britain’s most potent and politicised trade union, Thatcher moved to consolidate her victory. She passed legislative restrictions on picketing, strike actions and the closed shop. The trade union ‘reforms’ she instituted strengthened the hand of business and severely undermined the power and confidence of the labour movement. The left’s organisational base was further eroded by other policy innovations, now grimly familiar, such as restrictions on local government and the proliferation of quangos, the contracting out of local services and the privatisation of public utilities. In late 1984 Thatcher sold off British Telecom and she went on to sell off huge swathes of the Britain’s public infrastructure, including British Gas in December 1986, British Airways in February 1987, Rolls-Royce in May 1987, BAA in July 1987, British Steel in December 1988 and the regional water companies in December 1989.

These privatisations proved to be hugely profitable for the City of London and represented a massive transfer of wealth from public to private hands. They were carried out with a contempt for public opinion that came increasingly to characterise Thatcher’s reign. She famously described herself as a ‘conviction politician’, which in practice meant that in cabinet she was utterly intolerant of disagreement, and in government was contemptuous of all dissent. This autocratic style was not just a personal idiosyncrasy; it also reflected her underlying political philosophy – or perhaps the former attracted her to the latter. Precisely because of their peculiar notion of freedom, neoliberals have always harboured a deep suspicion of democracy. Looking back on Thatcher’s political legacy, Nigel Lawson remarked that as far as he was concerned democracy is ‘clearly less important than freedom’ and that to preserve the latter ‘strong government’ was necessary. This is precisely what Thatcher provided: a sustained, violent assault on British society launched on behalf of big business in the name of ‘strong government’ and cloaked in the rhetoric of national renewal. Her pugnacious political style would eventually prove her undoing, but there was method in her madness. Her aggression meant she was able to secure some decisive victories which could be consolidated and entrenched. She understood that the British political system afforded enough time to pursue an unpopular vanguardist strategy and betted (correctly) that social democrats would adapt to rather than challenge the profound changes she forced through.

Much has been made of the ideological power of Thatcher’s political vision, but in reality she did not seek to persuade people that ‘there is no alternative’. Rather she forced people to accept as much by attacking the social bases of collective action and ideas, emasculating those institutional forms that could make building any alternative possible or even imaginable. Like the Marxists she despised, Thatcher believed that ultimately it is the material conditions of life that determine political consciousness, and she sought therefore to bring about institutional changes which would carry with them an ideological reorientation. Hence why in an interview for the Sunday Times in May 1981 she made the chilling remark that, ‘Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.’ As Kean Birch has noted, the policy innovations in the Thatcher years represented a profound shift towards a political economy based on rising asset values rather than income. This, it was hoped, would tie people materially and ideologically to the capitalist system and create what Thatcherites, echoing Harold Macmillan, liked to call a ‘property-owning democracy’.

If Thatcher’s true goal was to change the heart and soul of the British public then she failed. It is clear from public opinion data that neoliberal policies remained remarkably unpopular under Thatcher and that the public remained stubbornly committed to the old social democratic consensus. In 1990, the sociologist Stephen Hill noted that the ‘evidence of the 1980s is that subordinate groups still subscribe widely to a radical-egalitarian and oppositional ideology.’[17] Indeed, Ivor Crewe long ago demolished the notion that Thatcher instituted any significant shift in public attitudes,[18] whilst the former Conservative Minister Ian Gilmour concedes that, ‘During the Thatcher years, public opinion remained centrist or, if anything, moved to the left.’

Be that as it may, the failure to win over people’s ‘hearts and souls’ did not derail Thatcher’s political project. Hegemony need not be built on popular consent and whatever Thatcher’s ambitions, it was never necessary to win us over to neoliberal ideas – only to neutralise any effective resistance. As Colin Leys has noted, ‘for an ideology to be hegemonic, it is not necessary that it be loved. It is merely necessary that it have no serious rival.’[19]

Thatcher succeeded in defeating all her serious rivals, but she was never loved, and she knew as much. In March 1990, drained of the confidence to fight another election and facing a national revolt against the poll tax, she told her confidant Woodrow Wyatt, ‘It’s me they don't like. It always has been.’[20] By that time she had a reputation as being impossibly obdurate and was increasingly seen as a political liability by her allies. Edwina Currie later commented: ‘If we wanted the revolution to be consolidated, she had become its main obstacle.’[21]

There is something pitiful about Thatcher's eventual decline and fall; that fearsome and formidable woman finally brought down by her pathetic, cowed comrades. And though she was never moved by the suffering of her many victims, she was nevertheless brought to tears as she contemplated her own misfortune. Her diehard supporters were also heartbroken. Andrew Marr remembers seeing a member of the Tory ‘No Turning Back’ group (which included Liam Fox, Francis Maude, Michael Portillo and Iain Duncan Smith) break down in tears at the news of her resignation. Beneath the pathos however lay a hidden truth about Thatcher and Thatcherism. For behind the revolt against her leadership was a contradiction that had always threatened to undermine the potent political alliance she led. John Campbell writes that: ‘Although in theory she rejected the concept of class… she was in truth an unabashed warrior on behalf of her own class.’ Campbell identifies hers as the ‘lower and middling middle class’, referred to by Thatcher as ‘the sort of people I grew up with.’ [22] In reality though it was not small business owners but multinational corporations, and the financial sector in particular, which benefited most from her reactionary revolution – and it was their interests that she most consistently served.

Thatcher had been able to appeal to a range of reactionary impulses which had developed during the slow burning crisis of the 1970s and had successfully fused them into a vaguely coherent political ideology. It is well understood that (like Rupert Murdoch) she sought to create mass support for big business by championing markets as an empowering, democratising force. More than that though, she also sought to portray markets as a moral force. Following Keith Joseph, she argued that state intervention had not only hampered Britain’s economic effectiveness, it had corrupted its moral character. As a leader of the New Right, she fused neoliberalism with the moralistic, reactionary politics of ‘Middle England’; tying the cold interests of capital to the bigoted preoccupations of the Tory base, who like Thatcher resented the complacent liberalism of the post-war establishment, its softness, permissiveness and acquiescence to the demands of society’s lower orders.

Economic elites and the lower middle class base shared an interest in undermining the power of trade unions, rolling back the welfare state and cutting taxes. But on certain questions their interests diverged and the key issue was Europe. Whilst a majority in the world of big business favoured greater European integration, this was virulently opposed by smaller businesses and the xenophobic Tory base. Thatcher herself, it should be said, was no Powellite nationalist. She had voted in favour of entry to the European Economic Community in 1970 and as Leader of the Opposition supported the ‘Yes Campaign’ in the 1975 referendum. In 1986 she gave her full support to the Single European Act, which opened up European markets to British corporations.[23] However, she strongly opposed the notion of supranational European institutions, perhaps out of authentically nationalist sentiment, or perhaps because she feared that her political victories might be diluted by European states which still retained their social democratic character.

Thatcher’s outspoken opposition to Europe towards the end of her premiership set her against influential members of her Cabinet like Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe – the more authentic representatives of the social forces which, having been unleashed by Thatcher, had come to dominate British society under her leadership. Lawson resigned from the Cabinet in 1989 and Geoffrey Howe followed a year later. The latter delivered an infamous speech to the House of Commons in which, with Lawson sitting alongside him, he condemned Thatcher’s position on Europe saying, ‘What kind of vision is that for our business people, who trade there each day, for our financiers, who seek to make London the money capital of Europe…?’ As Robin Ramsay has detailed, Thatcher personally had no great love for financiers, but she had learned during her early ‘monetarist experiment’ that the City of London was one ‘interest group’ that she could not take on.[24] Years later then, when its political representatives demanded that she make what Nigel Lawson later called ‘the ultimate sacrifice’,[25] she displayed none of the defiance that had defined her time in office.

It is sometimes implied that during her many years in power Thatcher became ‘out of touch’ or drunk with power. But her authorised biographer Charles Moore, who interviewed her shortly before her final downfall, says he found her mood then to one of ‘unhappy fatalism’. Having failed to secure a decisive victory in a leadership challenge from Michael Heseltine, Thatcher lost the backing of her Cabinet and grudgingly agreed to resign. The Conservative Party Chairman Kenneth Baker told the media: ‘Once again Margaret Thatcher has put her country’s and party’s interests before personal considerations.’

Baker’s histrionics notwithstanding, Thatcher showed no grace in defeat. She resented her forced retirement and often criticised the new Tory leadership, particularly over Europe, which she came to believe represented some sort of ‘socialist’ threat. She gathered around her a team of writers to work on her memoirs in which she bitterly attacked her former comrades – Geoffrey Howe most of all, whom she accused of ‘bile and treachery’. Like Tony Blair years later, she embarked on a vanity tour and spent a period travelling around the world delivering highly paid speeches and socialising with the rich and powerful. She also took up a lucrative role working as a lobbyist for the American tobacco giant Philip Morris Inc, which hosted her $1million 70^th birthday party.

Gradually though, as her proximity to power decreased, so did her health and her mental capacity. As Charles Moore writes:

The passage of time, and possibly the delayed effect of so many years of relentless work, blunted the edge of Lady Thatcher’s mind. By the late 1990s it became gradually apparent that her short-term memory was failing. ... By the time the century turned, she had lost her – until then – passionate and detailed interest in current events.

By this point Thatcher’s brand of hard right politics looked as parochial and antiquated as the woman herself. A poignant moment came in 1997 when British Airways unveiled new logos for their aircraft tail fins, replacing the national colours of the Union Jack. In full sight of the television cameras, Thatcher covered a model of the new design with her handkerchief saying: ‘We fly the British flag, not these awful things you are putting on tails.’

Maybe the designs were awful. They were later abandoned by BA. But the spectacle powerfully illustrated how out of step Thatcher had become with the imperatives of a corporate elite whose power and privilege she had worked so tirelessly to defend and to bolster. Capital is a fickle thing and big business had by then already defected en masse to New Labour which looked like a far more viable prospect for consolidating the victories of Thatcher’s cruel war than the fractious party she left in her wake. Her belligerent, divisive politics had long since served its usefulness and so had the woman herself. One of her last political acts was to take a public stand in defence of Augusto Pinochet, the decrepit Chilean dictator thought to have imprisoned and tortured over 40,000 political opponents during his seventeen years in power.

In 2002, having suffered a series of minor strokes, Thatcher was ordered by doctors to refrain from any public speaking and in the years that followed her health further deteriorated. Her loss of physical and mental capacity was made the focus of the curiously apolitical biopic The Iron Lady. The film was criticised by the Tory right, who preferred to remember Thatcher at her most potent and combative. In a sense they are right. That too, I think, is how we should remember her. Not for what she became once her faculties failed her, but for what she was at the height of her power: an advocate of inequality, a friend to dictators and arms dealers, a champion of power and privilege and a scourge of the poor and vulnerable. A true blue class warrior.

Tom Millsis a researcher and PhD candidate at the University of Bath and a co-editor of New Left Project, where this article was first published

1. Cited in Bob Jessop et al, Thatcherism: A Tale of Two Nations (Polity Press, 1988) p.4.

2. Jon Agar, ‘Thatcher, Scientist’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, Vol.65, No.3, 20 September 2011, 215-232. http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/65/3/215.full

3. ‘Back to the future: the 1970s reconsidered’, Lobster, Winter 1998, Issue 34.

4. Cited in John Welshman, From transmitted deprivation to social exclusion: policy, poverty and parenting (The Policy Press, 2007) p.62.

5. Cited in John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher Volume Two: The Iron Lady (Random House, 2011) p.72.

6. Thatcher: The Path to Power—and Beyond, BBC1, 12 June 1995.

7. Mark Hollingsworth, The Ultimate Spin Doctor: the Life and Fast Times of Tim Bell (1997) p.70

8. James Curran and Colin Leys, ‘Media and the Decline of Liberal Corporatism in Britain’, in James Curran and Myung-Jin Park (eds.), De-Westernizing Media Studies (London: Routledge, 2000) pp. 221-36.

9. Robin Ramsay, ‘Mrs Thatcher, North Sea oil and the hegemony of the City’, Lobster, Issue 27: 1994.

10. Ian Gilmour, Dancing with Dogma (Simon & Schuster, 1992) p.60.

11. Quoted in David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism p.59.

12. Tory! Tory! Tory! The Exercise of Power, Broadcast on BBC 4 on 11 August 2007, 01:40.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher Volume Two: The Iron Lady (Random House, 2011) p.351.

16. Seumas Milne, The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners (London: Verso, 1994) p.ix.

17. Stephen Hill, ‘Britain: The Dominant Ideology Thesis after a decade’, In Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill and Bryan S. Turner (eds.), Dominant Ideologies (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990) p.6.

18. Ivor Crewe, ‘Values: The Crusade that Failed’, in Dennis Kavanagh and Anthony Seldon (eds.), The Thatcher Effect (Oxford University Press, 1989) pp. 239-50.

19. Colin Leys, ‘Still a question of hegemony’, New Left Review, 181, p.127.

20. John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher Volume Two: The Iron Lady (Random House, 2011) p.674.

21. Tory! Tory! Tory! The Exercise of Power, Broadcast on BBC 4 on 11 August 2007, 01:40.

22. John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher Volume Two: The Iron Lady (Random House, 2011) p.352.

23. Andrew Gamble, ‘Europe and America’, in Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders (eds.), Making Thatcher’s Britain (Oxford University Press, 2012) p.219.

24. Robin Ramsay, ‘Mrs Thatcher, North Sea oil and the hegemony of the City’, Lobster, Issue 27: 1994.

25. Tory! Tory! Tory! The Exercise of Power, Broadcast on BBC 4 on 11 August 2007, 01:40.