The claim that the May 1998 thermonuclear test failed should not be used to demand further testing. India does not need hydrogen bombs for security
Tag - India
The great capitulation
Indians and Pakistanis have to develop a common, rational understanding of the partition story that is free of nationalist prejudice.
Sinking billions into nuclear weapons
India's nuclear weapons pursuit is leading to a runaway increase in arms spending, in which its adversaries become the decision maker.
Spurring nuclear Bhopals?
U.S. and Indian industry pressure to cap liability for civilian nuclear accidents will create a regime that shields offending corporations and punishes the public.
Welcome resumption
The News International, July 25, 2009
by Praful Bidwai (The writer, a former newspaper editor, is a researcher and peace and human-rights activist based in Delhi)
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh surprised many of his own advisers and supporters by issuing a joint statement at Sharm-al-Shaikh in Egypt with his Pakistani counterpart Yousaf Raza Gilani, which pledged to resume the bilateral dialogue process. It was widely expected that the dialogue, suspended after last November's ghastly Mumbai terrorist attacks, would be re-started only after Pakistan showed a credible commitment and took visible action to bring their perpetrators to justice and decisively fight terrorism directed at India from its soil.
Admittedly, the signs of this happening are still tentative -although Pakistan's 36-page dossier given to India names Lashkar-e-Taiba's Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakshvi as the attacks' mastermind and admits that Ajmal Amir Kasab and other attackers were Pakistani nationals. Islamabad has now brought the case to the prosecution stage. Its charge-sheet in the case contains important evidence gathered domestically, which adds to that provided by India. How the prosecution proceeds, and whether the culprits are punished, is an open question.
So was Singh right to have convinced himself that Pakistan means business now and therefore the stalled dialogue should resume, albeit gradually, at the foreign secretary level? Was the joint statement justified in saying: "Action on terrorism should not be linked to the composite dialogue process and these should not be bracketed"? Was he right to stress that he hadn't diluted India's stand demanding action against terrorism?
In India, the Bharatiya Janata Party and hawkish former diplomats and soldiers have pounced on the "delinking" formulation and accused Singh of "surrender", capitulation to external pressure, and worse. Even the ruling Congress has distanced itself from the phrase. LK Advani has charged Singh with breaching the national consensus against talks with Islamabad unless it acts against jehadi groups. Worse, the statement's reference to Balochistan has been attacked as signifying India's admission that it has clandestinely fomented trouble there.
These criticisms are largely misdirected and based on the misperception that the composite dialogue has already been resumed and will continue full tilt no matter what. In fact, what Singh and Gilani agreed to was limited and laced with caution. As Singh told parliament, and Foreign Secretary Menon clarified, the talks won't restart until Pakistan shows "real progress" in anti-terrorist actions. The "delinking" formulation is inelegant, awkward and ambiguous. It can be interpreted by either side to suit domestic exigencies. Pakistan can claim it has succeeded in resuming the dialogue although the case against LeT operatives isn't completed. India can claim that it has extracted an assurance from Pakistan that it would act firmly against terrorism -as any minimally civilised country should do -irrespective of what happens in the dialogue.
In truth, the two processes -anti-terrorism action and dialogue--have their independent logic and dynamics. They will converge as they gather momentum at their own respective pace. That's what genuine, positive engagement leading to reconciliation is all about. Both sides must recognise and respect this. Neither should act unilaterally. For instance, Pakistan shouldn't stop acting against jehadi groups if, say, talks on Sir Creek or Siachen fail. The two governments must hold firm and persevere with the dialogue. Singh shouldn't be on the defensive about having made a leap of faith by agreeing to re-start the process. Atal Behari Vajpyee did exactly that -in 1999 and in 2004, when he launched the peace process with Gen Pervez Musharraf.
There are two differences, though. The 2004 dialogue began before Pakistan took credible steps to rein in or crack down upon anti-India jehadi groups. Today, it's being resumed after Pakistan has taken more effective action against them than at any time in the last quarter-century. The 2004 launch took place on the basis of Musharraf's verbal assurance that Pakistan would its utmost to prevent its territory from being used to attack India. Vajpayee, who had only a few months earlier ruled out talks, decided to take him seriously. The results aren't perfect. But India and Pakistan are unarguably better off after the dialogue. They even made significant progress on Kashmir in their "back-channel" discussions.
Today's context is in many ways better. Islamabad has admitted, frankly and categorically, that Pakistani nationals and groups planned and executed the Mumbai attacks. This is a departure from the long-practised strategy of "plausible deniability". This is happening when the Pakistan Army is fighting the Al-Qaeda-Taliban at its western border in alliance with and under the watch of the US-led International Security Assistance Force. Pakistan is under domestic and international pressure to erase the stigma of being a state that nurtured terrorism.
Pakistan is a divided, heterogeneous entity. Its civilian government has seriously signalled that it wants better relations with India. It has so far succeeded in keeping the hawks in check and pushed a moderate agenda in alliance with political and civil society forces genuinely opposed to violent extremism. Yet, the hawks and India-baiters in the ISI and other agencies haven't been marginalised. That can only happen when the moderates get more support.
It's in India's own interest to stop treating Pakistan as a homogenous entity and to build a strategic alliance with the moderate forces which combine an anti-extremist, anti-military outlook with a pro-democratisation agenda. It would be unwise to leave such alliance-building to governments alone. India and Pakistan must open up the process to scholars, artists, writers, cultural activists and civil society groups by facilitating their movement across the borders. Their interaction can produce dramatic results.
India should also do all it can to allay fears over its activities in Balochistan, -although there's no moral-political parity between India's suspect behaviour in Balochistan and Pakistan's own long-standing and large-scale support to violent separatism in Kashmir. Singh's hysterical critics fail to understand any of this. Indeed, they don't even pause to ask why Pakistan's moderates are so keen to resume a dialogue with India and remain invested in that agenda. Hawks in both countries have a single refrain: Pakistan and India are destined to be enemies given the history of three-and-a-half wars, the military's dominance in Pakistan, and the festering of numerous disputes.
This is a totally a-historical judgement. It erases or trivialises many instances of reconciliation and fruitful friendship developing between long-standing rivals. Take Germany and France, which were in a centuries-long state of intermittent war, in which they sacrificed millions of their people. Yet, after the Second World War, they reached reconciliation and laid the foundations of the Common Market, which later grew into the European Community and today's 27-member European Union.
The two European rivals achieved this through persistent, hard negotiations, which rejected pessimism, confronted issues head-on, and adopted a hard-nosed but positive approach. The process established a relationship called co-bonding in international relations theory.
Put simply, co-bonding involves former adversaries tying each other down through cooperative agreements, mutual interaction, and greater exposure of their citizens and officials to each other's cultures -so that there is no backsliding into mutual suspicion and rivalry. It's as if two wrestlers who balance each other had gradually moved from a posture exerting unbearable pressure to a friendly embrace. Co-bonding is precisely what India and Pakistan need. But for that to happen, both governments will have to try hard, earnestly, in good faith, not once but repeatedly. They have made a tentative but welcome beginning. -end-
A caring State
www.hardnewsmedia.com, 25 June 2009
by Praful Bidwai
Unless Left parties acknowledge their blunders and rebuild their links with progressive intellectuals and civil society activists, and involve them as well in changing course, they will face marginalisation and a historic decline.
The 15th Lok Sabha election, widely forecast as a contest without major ideological-political issues, has turned out to be a potential watershed. Five stories are intertwined within the emerging big narrative, which signifies positive change, with some setbacks: the Congress's rejuvenation on a Left-of-Centre platform; defeat and isolation of the BJP; the crisis of caste-based identity politics in the north; a reorientation of Muslim voting preferences; and a big setback to the Left, now reduced to just 24 seats, its lowest-ever Lok Sabha tally.
These changes are tentative and reversible. If the Congress drifts into conservatism, it could forfeit many gains. The Left could again become a vibrant force if it reads the writing on the wall and rethinks its policies and strategies. But the overall trend favours inclusion, pluralist-secularism and redistributive justice.
The Congress has crossed the 200-seat mark for the first time since 1991, with a 28.55 per cent national vote, about 10 percentage-points higher than the BJP's score. With a 90-seat lead over the BJP, this is a hefty margin. The real story lies in the Congress's dramatic performance in UP - as the second largest party with 21 seats and a 18.3 per cent vote - its ability to maintain supremacy in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Delhi and Haryana, and make gains in Rajasthan and NDA strongholds like Madhya Pradesh and Punjab. No less important were its gains in West Bengal and Kerala. In Gujarat, where Narendra Modi had boasted the BJP would win 20-22 of 26 seats, the Congress held on to 11 of the 12 seats and the BJP gained only one.
The Congress's ascendancy, then, was widely distributed. It's only in Bihar, Karnataka and Jharkhand that it didn't make an impact. The Congress overcame its long decline in 2002-04. Now it has recharged itself.
The key to this lies in the Congress's embrace of an inclusive agenda based on the recognition that market-driven economic processes cannot deliver social opportunity or minimum needs to the poor. Imperative is public action through a 'Caring State' and initiatives like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), loan-waiver for farmers, and other social programmes.
Opinion polls and ground-level reports suggest that NREGA pivotally changed the Congress's image. For instance, many poor Dalits and Brahmins in UP shifted from the BSP to the Congress because of NREGA and disillusionment with Mayawati. She has done little for the people, including Dalits, in public service provision, but spent Rs 6,000-10,000 crore on memorials and statues.
The Congress's decision to go solo in UP was a gamble which paid off because Rahul Gandhi invested considerable energy into party-building, candidate selection and canvassing. This doesn't speak less of Rahul's leadership or charisma than of his tenacity and stamina for unglamorous grassroots work - which most Congressmen haven't done for decades. The Congress's spurning of an alliance with the Samajwadi Party (SP) helped avert the stigma of association with that deeply criminalised and discredited party whose support-base is eroding. The Congress won back some lost Muslim support.
The Congress's general performance is partly explained by organisational revival and a new crop of young leaders. Also helpful was the perception of the absence of major scandals during the UPA's tenure (except telecom and highways) and Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh's image of having behaved with decorum -- barring on the India-US nuclear deal.
The Congress didn't win on a centrist platform of stability, but on a Left-leaning platform of positive social change. The 'aam aadmi' slogan is yet to be translated into programmes. But unless the Congress succumbs to industry and media lobbies and plumps for neo-liberal policies like privatisation and increased foreign investment in pension funds, insurance and retail, it should be able to sustain this momentum. Even more definitive than the Congress's victory is the BJP's defeat, the second since 2004, despite the absence of an obvious big mistake like 'India Shining'. With a 3.4 per cent drop in national vote-share since 2004 and seven per cent since its 1998 peak (26.5 percent), the BJP is in steady decline. It lost votes in most states and failed to attract first-time voters and many past sympathisers. It was rejected because of its communalism and because it ran a negative, strident and confrontationist campaign bereft of policy issues.
The BJP probably erred in regarding the Lok Sabha election as an aggregate of state-level contests to be fought on local issues. But it also projected LK Advani as a "decisive", strong national leader. It even appealed to crass Hindutva through Varun Gandhi's hate-speeches and fielded Narendra Milosevic Modi as its star campaigner.
This strategy boomeranged. Advani's rhetoric about terrorism, "weakest-ever-Prime-Minister" (Manmohan Singh) and Swiss bank money didn't work. The ugly Arun Jaitley-Rajnath Singh spat dented the Advani-as -"decisive"-leader myth. Varun Gandhi probably cost the BJP a dozen seats in UP.
The BJP's offered no imaginative ideas/agendas. Its canvassing was contrived. Advani's claims about the NDA's superior counter-terrorism record didn't gel with the Kandahar hijack or incidence of terrorism during NDA rule. When Singh retaliated against Advani, he sounded more dignified and convincing.
Yet, none of this explains the BJP's performance as tellingly as its failure to consolidate the "Hindu vote" through communal polarisation. The conditions which allowed the BJP to do so in the 1980s and 1990s no longer exist - the Shah Bano case, which made the "pseudo-secularism" charge stick; the Ramjanambhoomi movement; the Congress's steep decline, which made the BJP an attractive ally; the rise of a small insecure middle class ready to buy its narrative of "Hindu grievance" against "history's wrongs" and of recreating India's past glory desecrated by "invaders".
Social conditions have considerably changed. The burgeoning middle class has come into its own and lost some of its inferiority complex. It isn't swayed by the "getting-even-with-history" narrative or the idea of demolishing mosques to recover Hindu "self-respect". Most Indians look to the future, not the past. Even the marginalised are aware of their rights and believe their lives will improve through struggles for participatory democracy.
A good hypothesis is that the BJP was a product of a very special conjuncture, which has probably passed. It cannot simultaneously continue to be both a social movement and a political party, combine Mandal and Kamandal, and espouse Hindutva and good governance.
The BJP must choose. It can be a hardcore Hindutva party. But that means retreating into a ghetto, and morphing into a version of the Jana Sangh, which had a modest place in India's social life and politics. The Sangh's vote fluctuated between four and eight per cent and its Lok Sabha strength never exceeded 35 -far lower than the Left's.
If the BJP wants to be a normal Rightwing party free of the burden of religious fundamentalism, it must accept India's essentially multi-cultural, multi-religious identity. This can give it a place in politics, much like the long-defunct Swatantra Party.
The election highlights the crisis of caste - or "self-respect" - based identity politics without a progressive agenda of governance and service delivery. The biggest example is Laloo Prasad's RJD, which only had empty rhetoric to offer to the Bihari people - coupled with a law-and-order breakdown, public services collapse and end of culture and community life. Laloo has been humiliated. So has Ram Vilas Paswan, who has carried opportunism to new heights in the name of defending social justice.
Only slightly less severe is the dressing-down of Mayawati, with a six percentage-point vote loss. Many Dalits loyal to her have moved away. The BSP won only two of the 17 reserved SC seats. Mayawati's spectacularly successful Dalit-Brahmin coalition now looks like an artificial contraption, which does little for its constituents, except giving ministerial positions at the apex. Unless Mayawati addresses people's gut-level needs through land reforms and access to food, healthcare and education, she's unlikely to retain her hold on UP.
The ground seems to be slipping from under Mulayam Singh Yadav's feet too. He was so unsure of his base that he begged the Congress for an alliance, and then joined hands with Kalyan Singh. The result was a loss of 13 seats and erosion of cadre support.
All these narrowly caste-based parties are likely to decline, making space for substantive social, economic and political agendas. In contrast, Nitish Kumar's Janata Dal (United) did remarkably well because he practised inclusion, reached out to backward-caste Muslims, the Extremely Backward Classes among OBCs and the Maha-Dalits. Kumar did much to control crime, renovate roads, and empower gram panchayats to recruit primary school teachers, obviating dependence on town-dwellers and reducing teacher absenteeism.
The election has revealed a shift in the voting pattern among Muslims. In UP and Bihar, they rejected community-centric agendas, including appeals by the conservative ulema. Rather than encourage particularist politics, they looked at broader issues of democracy and governance. A good chunk voted for the Congress and other secular forces in many states. This, despite the alienation and anger against the branding of the entire community as 'terrorists' after the blasts, and the Batla House encounter, widely perceived to be fake.
Muslims have moved away significantly from the Left Front in West Bengal. Acutely aware of its deficit in Muslim education and employment, and pained by its conduct in the Rizwanur case (and Nandigram killings), they punished it in 22 of the 42 constituencies where their number matters. The absence of bloc or herd voting and exercise of discriminating judgment signifies a new maturity among Muslims. This means fear and insecurity caused by Hindutva will play a lesser role in the future.
The Left has been badly mauled. The CPM has lost the most number of seats (27) of all parties. The blow was especially grievous in West Bengal. The Left plummeted from 35 to 16 seats even in the absence of factors prevalent in Kerala like the leadership tussle between VS Achuthanandan and Pinarayee Vijayan, vitiated relations between the CPM and smaller partners, and a history of pendulum-like swings between the Left and its Congress-led rival.
Two main reasons explain the Left's debacle. First, it disastrously promoted the Third Front, a rag-tag band of non-Congress-non-BJP opportunists, each of them (barring the Left) sullied by past association with the BJP. This negatively defined combine couldn't have won enough seats to make a convincing bid for power. It lacked the barest minimum of a common programme. Even if it had, optimistically, won 100-120 seats, it couldn't have come to power without Congress support.
Apart from irresponsibly overestimating the Front's integrity and prospects, the Left damaged itself by joining the league of these thoroughly opportunist, venal and corrupt parties with a shameful history of running odious governments with Rightwing policies, such as the Telugu Desam, AIADMK, Janata Dal (S) and BSP.
The Left undermined its moral stature - its greatest political asset - by propping up leaders like Mayawati and HD Deve Gowda, who have ended up supporting Singh's coalition. The Third Front's strong rejection by many Muslims and other secular citizens also affected the Left in many states.
The second reason for the Left's poor showing is related to its industrialisation and land acquisition policies in Kerala and especially in West Bengal, and its many social sector failures. Nandigram and Singur have become synonymous with the shameful pursuit of crony-capitalist policies, coercive land-grabbing and cussedness towards the dispossessed, including violence.
Nandigram and Singur were part of a plan to acquire 1.35 lakh acres and transfer it to industrial projects, including a chemical hub to be built by the Salim group, a front for Indonesia's kleptocratic Suharto family. The Left Front (LF) crafted that plan in line with its view that industrialisation is a historic necessity in West Bengal, and it must take place through the predatory private capital route involving huge subsidies. Thus, it offered Tata Motors a Rs 850-crore subsidy for the Rs 1,500-crore investment Nano plant.
The LF's embrace of Rightwing policies in West Bengal is of a piece with the state's poor performance in education - it has more school dropouts than Bihar -, health, and discrimination against and exclusion of Muslims. Three decades in power has transformed the CPM into an ossified, hierarchical and corrupt party whose cadres take a cut for all contracts and recruitments and run an extortion machine. The CPM's violence against those resisting forced land acquisitions remains a black mark on the Left's record.
It's tempting to argue that the Left deserved to be punished - so that it corrects course-but not so severely. But it's doubtful if anything less than shock therapy would have delivered the right message: namely, the Left will be sent packing unless it sincerely revises its policies, puts people before capital, and cleanses its organisation of criminals, goons and racketeers.
It's not clear if the Left parties can summon the courage to undertake radical self-introspection through a robust, no-holds-barred debate. Their organisational culture isn't conducive to frank debate. Many of their intellectuals, particularly the CPM's, tend to close ranks when criticised even from a sympathetic Left-wing standpoint.
This must change. The Left should encourage open debate and public airing of views. A small beginning has been made with CPI leaders criticising the CPM's "arrogance". The space for debate must expand.
This can only happen if the Left parties rebuild their links with progressive intellectuals and civil society activists, and involve them as well as their own members in systematically and candidly analysing the causes of the defeat. Unless they acknowledge their blunders and change course, they will face marginalisation and a historic decline.
Blundering in Nepal
Frontline, May 20 2009
by Praful Bidwai
India’s heavy-handed interference in Nepal, which aggravated its political crisis, speaks of a colossal foreign policy failure, argues Praful Bidwai.
Is India about to lose the huge fund of popular goodwill that it earned in Nepal over the past four years by encouraging reconciliation between the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M) and other parties, by facilitating a Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), by helping to bring the Maoists into the political mainstream, and by facilitating the country’s transition from a despotic monarchy to a constitutional republic?
All credible reports on recent events leading to the resignation of Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal alias Prachanda – and to a first-rate political impasse in Nepal – suggest that India is losing that goodwill, if it has not already lost it, because it is supporting discredited and reactionary forces that can only impede that transition. In the past few months, Indian policy has slid back into a deeply conservative mould, which encourages blatant interference in Nepal’s internal affairs and supports its army even as it defies civilian authority.
However much the Ministry of External Affairs pretends that the causes and effects of Prachanda’s resignation are purely “an internal affair” of Nepal, the truth is that India has been a major and partisan political player in Nepal and contributed in a big way to inflaming the confrontation between Army Chief General Rukmangad Katuwal and Prachanda’s civilian government. India used its influence with Nepal’s political parties to isolate the Maoists and negate the Prachanda Cabinet’s decision to dismiss Katuwal for gross insubordination, which was entirely the civilian government’s democratic prerogative.
In the process, India has opened up and threatened to undermine the CPA of November 2006, which it rightly – and proudly – claimed was a breakthrough and a result of its own facilitation.
New Delhi may have to regret its role in Nepal – not only because it has created a political crisis by ejecting from power a party that holds 40 per cent of the seats in the Constituent Assembly but also because it has ended up backing political forces that are untrustworthy, predominantly conservative and largely discredited in the eyes of the people. Worse, India risks losing its credibility as a state that had executed a welcome shift in 2005-08 from being an overwhelming and overweening status-quoist power bent on preserving the monarchy to a force friendly towards democracy and popular empowerment.
Contrary to the arguments of many apologists of New Delhi’s position, India’s Ambassador Rakesh Sood joined hands with his United States counterpart in lobbying for the continuation of Katuwal as the Army Chief and against the integration of the Maoists People’s Liberation Army (PLA) into the regular Nepal Army (N.A.). This was in clear violation of the CPA, which mandates such integration, the N.A.’s “democratisation”, and a reduction of its overgrown size: a 95,000-strong force in a country of 25 million people.
India, the U.S. and other important powers also condoned the grave impropriety committed by the N.A. in recently briefing foreign defence attaches on Nepal’s domestic situation. In these, it rejected the CPA and said that “the stated aim of the Maoist party still appears to be to establish a totalitarian regime, which could prove a firm base for revolutionaries with regional implications”. The N.A. accused the CPN-M of “dictatorial intent” and contended that a “united democratic alliance-led resistance from all sectors combined with international pressure is required to counter CPN-M’s hegemonic advance”.
Sood met Prachanda four times in the critical few weeks preceding his resignation. According to reliable information, he delivered an ultimatum to the elected Prime Minister that he not dismiss Katuwal or face grave consequences. Hours after the dismissal order was served upon Katuwal, President Ram Baran Yadav overturned it and asked Katuwal to continue. This made a mockery of the established convention that a non-executive president in a parliamentary democracy is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces only in titular terms, not substantive ones. He must not interfere with the Cabinet’s decisions on the appointment or dismissal of armed forces personnel.
It might be argued that Prachanda did not do enough to carry his alliance partners with him – in particular the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist), or the UML, the Nepal Sadbhavna Party and the Madhesi Janadhikar Forum – and allowed the confrontation with the N.A. to build up to a breaking point.
The CPN-M may have made tactical mistakes, but it is hard to argue that its allies were independent players who are invulnerable to pressure or inducements. They have a long history of succumbing to pressure and the loaves and fishes of office. The UML even joined a government handpicked by King Gyanendra just when his authority was in crisis.
At any rate, the principle of civilian supremacy over defence forces is unquestionable and paramount in democracy. The Prachanda Cabinet was perfectly within its rights to dismiss Katuwal. Indeed, it had no choice but to do so after he failed to provide a satisfactory explanation for at least three acts of defiance of civilian authority: the recruitment in February of 2,000 soldiers against the government’s wishes, the extension granted to eight brigadiers in March, and his decision in April to pull the army out of the National Games because the Maoists too would participate in them.
The General’s politics
Katuwal is no ordinary General. He was adopted as a son by Queen Ratna and former King Mahendra and raised with royal princes in Narayanhiti Palace. He has played politics in a brazen and divisive manner much of his adult life as an agent of the monarchy. For years, he wrote articles under a pseudonym, singing paeans to the monarchy and viciously attacking party after political party.
In 2002, just before King Gyanendra dismissed the elected government of Sher Bahadur Deuba, Katuwal argued that “enlightened despotism is preferable to chaotic democracy; the masses require protection from themselves”. A fortnight before the king usurped all executive powers in 2005, Katuwal wrote an article entitled “Support for King’s initiative”.
Katuwal was not a neutral player when the April Uprising of 2006, or Jana Andolan-II, broke out, supported by waves and waves of people. This was one of the most remarkable mass movements for democracy anywhere in the world. Katuwal advocated confrontation and the use of force. The official Raymajhi Commission investigating excesses against civilians recommended action against him.
That moment was allowed to pass by the Nepali Congress government led by Girija Prasad Koirala. The wages of inaction soon became apparent in the increasingly belligerent postures adopted by Katuwal after the CPN-M won an absolute majority of directly elected seats in the 2008 Constituent Assembly elections.
It is this man whom India decided to back against civilian authority, completely oblivious of the imperative of asserting civilian control over an army, which was the monarchy’s principal instrument of repression. Evidently, Indian policymakers have learnt no lessons from Pakistan and Bangladesh, where armies acquired larger-than-life roles in the early years after state formation, with disastrous long-run consequences. Unconventional response
Apologists for India’s decision to back Katuwal at a critical point in Nepal’s democratisation rationalised it as an unconventional response to an unconventional situation: the only way to prevent a Maoist takeover. Their argument is twofold. The Maoists were about to “capture” the army. Second, they wanted to play the “China card” by using Beijing as a countervailing power vis-a-vis India.
In support of the first premise, the apologists – including some of Nepal’s discredited political parties, especially the Nepali Congress, now in the throes of a succession struggle – cite videos that have mysteriously surfaced in Kathmandu. These show Prachanda addressing Maoist cadres. He boasts that the CPN-M greatly inflated the numbers of armed guerrillas in order to increase the scope for their integration into the N.A. and says the Maoists have not abandoned their earlier goal of taking over the Nepalese state.
Theses tapes are one and a half years old and precede the April 2008 elections. The CPN-M has not disowned them but only urged that their content be reinterpreted. One plausible explanation for Prachanda’s statements is that he was trying to placate his party’s vocal hardliners. They are close to the PLA and conditioned by the nine-year-long civil war. This is true of many militant underground movements, which undergo a transformation into parliamentary organisations committed to multi-party democracy.
Whatever the intentions of the PLA leadership, three propositions hold. First, the best way to neutralise the hardliners is to push through the PLA’s integration so that the CPN-M becomes a parliamentary entity free of the PLA’s militant pressure. Second, the actual process of integration is being discussed in a parliamentary committee of eight members, in which the Maoists are a minority of two. And third, the CPN-M has done nothing in practice that shows that it rejects or suspects the multi-party system. It is reconciled to a slow process of full democratisation and the CPA’s implementation.
It makes no sense to cast aspersions on the Maoists on the basis of presumed guilt, past political practice or the army’s prejudices. By all indications, the CPN-M has embarked on a remarkable self-transformation and must be encouraged to complete it within a cooperative climate. Ultraconservatives such as Katuwal and the army’s hardened royalists, who are loath to lose their traditional privileges or see the force downsized, are the biggest obstacle to this process. Deplorably, India has chosen to be on the side of the obstacle after having been a facilitator.
The “China card” is another bogey. The sovereign government of Nepal has every right to rework its relations with its neighbours. In the past, India paid a heavy price for rejecting that right and behaving in a paranoid way. In the late 1980s, for instance, Nepal wanted to negotiate a trade and transit treaty with India and sought to import armaments from China. India imposed a crippling blockade on the landlocked country and incurred tremendous unpopularity.
The CPN-M has never been close to the Communist Party of China (CPC). There is little ideological affinity between the two. During its rosy-eyed period, the CPN-M tried to enlist China’s support and was rebuffed. The CPC has long been hostile to the CPN-M, and during critical periods it sided with the king.
That apart, there are obvious limits to how close China will move to Nepal given India’s sensitivity on the issue. Nepal is no Pakistan, with which India has a fraught relationship, and which China will do its utmost to court. China cannot aspire to rival India in economic, political, military or cultural influence in Nepal.
Close neighbours
Nepal and India are extremely close and special neighbours, with an open border and with freedom of transit, travel, work and residency without visas or work permits. The Nepali rupee has for years been tied to the Indian rupee at a fixed rate. Such close links are inconceivable with China. India would be extraordinarily foolhardy to be taken in by luridly exaggerated propaganda about “the China card”.
There is a larger point here. India has contributed to the present impasse in Nepal and must rectify its mistakes. Even if the UML, the Nepali Congress and others form a government with India’s backing, it will lack real authority and a democratic mandate. No Constitution-writing will be possible without two-thirds majority support for each article, which cannot be secured without the CPN-M’s support. India should therefore logically support the Maoists’ demand for Katuwal’s removal as a precondition for their joining the government and lending it stability.
However, Indian policymakers tend to be myopic about Nepal. They supported Nepal’s democratisation and last year’s Constituent Assembly elections on the assumption that the Maoists would be marginalised. In fact, National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan declared India’s preference for G.P. Koirala’s Nepali Congress. This extraordinary maladroit expression of partisan support showed total incomprehension of Nepali realities.
It was rightly seen as interference in Nepal’s internal affairs and added to the resentment many Nepalis feel at India’s supercilious and imperious attitude towards their country. Similarly, India refused to accept the CPN-M-led government’s nominee, Ram Karki, as Ambassador to New Delhi. (In 2001, Indian authorities had arrested Karki and handed him over to the Royal Nepal Army.)
Policymakers such as Narayanan operate with a Curzonian mindset, which regards India as the inheritor of the British empire at its apogee and hence as the “naturally” dominant power in the entire South Asian region to which all other nations must kowtow. They do not understand that the people of Nepal do not want their country to be the 29th state of India. The Nepalis are so proud of their autonomy that they set the official clock 15 minutes ahead of Indian Standard Time.
Nor do Indian policymakers appreciate that Nepal holds the key to India’s water security. India’s greatest rivers, including the Ganga, the Indus and the Brahmaputra, originate in the Himalayas. The India-Nepal border region holds the key to controlling the floods of the Kosi and the Brahmaputra. The development of India’s hydroelectricity potential in the north-eastern region, an important component of renewable energy – in which India has a high stake in the context of reversing climate change – is conditional upon Nepal’s cooperation.
By taking an arrogant stand towards Nepal, India will only cut its nose to spite its face. Imperial- or vice-regal-style interference in Nepal’s affairs will damage India’s interests and create new insecurities in Nepal, including a return to civil war if the Maoists are cornered and victimised. The sooner Indian policymakers realise and correct their blunder, the better.
Copyright © 2009 Frontline.
Wayward trends
(Frontline, April 11-24, 2009)
by Praful Bidwai
As the BJP struggles to stem its decline by using communal means and the Congress spurns alliances, political churning is producing new uncertainties.
IF Feroze Varun Gandhi wanted to imitate his father Sanjay Gandhi in brazenly defying the law of the land, throwing civility and political decency to the winds, and mobilising goons to challenge the Uttar Pradesh administration, he could not have done better than he did by courting arrest amidst stone-throwing and slogan-shouting at Pilibhit. As his supporters celebrated his anti-Muslim hate speeches and communal villainy, Varun Gandhi emerged a hero for the Bharatiya Jana ta Party (BJP), which has refused to deny him the party ticket for the Lok Sabha elections.
Varun re-enacted the Sanjay Gandhi of the immediate post-Emergency period every inch of the way as he defied legal summons, condemned judges inquiring into his excesses as politically prejudiced, and asked his admirers to whip up hysteria and unleash violence. The only difference is that Sanjay Gandhi was an experienced practitioner of lumpen politics and had the Youth Congress apparatus behind him, while his son is a political greenhorn.
One only has to recall the headlines of 1977-79 highlighting the “free-for-all at Sanjay Gandhi’s court appearance” and the mayhem after he was held guilty of destroying a film Kissa Kursi Ka critical of the Emergency to note the parallels between the methods of Sanjay Gandhi and his son.
By maligning Muslims, and threatening to “chop off their hands” and “forcibly sterilise them”, Varun Gandhi has catapulted himself into the BJP’s top echelons. His route to fame is indisputably inglorious. He speaks the unspeakable – or rather, what many in the Sangh Parivar think, but dare not say in public – and deliberately acts like a lout, gratuitously vitiating the political discourse, offending public morality, spreading fear and loathing, and exploiting every legal loophole in the cynical pursuit of power.
Suddenly, the least-known Gandhi in the Indira Gandhi family has become a Hindutva icon. The formula is crude: spew venom against a beleaguered minority and win votes in the secure knowledge that a candidate cannot be disqualified under the Representation of the People Act (RPA) while campaigning. Others too have tried the formula, but Varun Gandhi has succeeded spectacularly, if shockingly, because he is a Gandhi.
By all accounts, this was not a BJP or Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) script. Varun Gandhi himself authored it. He knew he could present a fait accompli to the BJP and yet count on its support because it is the kind of party it is – wedded to Islamophobia, grossly communal, instinctively devious, and desperate to win votes by means however foul, so long as it can get away.
To its abiding disgrace, the BJP has backed Varun Gandhi to the hilt. With the hypocrisy that is its trademark, it says it does not share his allegedly anti-Muslim sentiments and dissociates itself from the remarks attributed to him based on a CD recording of three of his speeches. But it also supports his ludicrous claim that the CD was doctored. It has doggedly rejected the Election Commission’s (E.C.) advice not to field Varun Gandhi.
The fact that the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate L.K. Advani fully endorses this position, itself based on egregiously immoral double standards and crass cynicism, speaks poorly both of him and his party.
Varun Gandhi confronted the legal-political system with a big challenge. The E.C. found itself helpless to debar him despite strong prima facie evidence. Unlike in the Bal Thackeray case, where the speech was made to support another person (candidate Ramesh Prabhoo), this instance involves Varun Gandhi’s own act. The E.C. could have fortified itself by getting an expert opinion on the CD’s authenticity, but did not.
This is not the first time the BJP (or the equally communal Shiv Sena) has used viciously anti-Muslim appeals to win votes. The E.C. has over the years disqualified 3,423 people from contesting elections for “corrupt electoral practices”, many involving communal canvassing.
Yet sadly, according to most interpretations, the E.C. has no powers to disqualify a candidate until after a court holds him/her guilty. This is a gaping loophole. It does not stand to reason that disqualification should only become possible after a candidate has poisoned the political climate, polarised opinion along communal lines, and converted hatred into votes. Belated disqualification can at best partially remedy the original offence.
The E.C. recommended in 1998 that the law be amended to allow disqualification before trial where the offence is grave and a charge-sheet has been filed. Ironically, last year, a parliamentary committee rejected the recommendation. Its members included legal luminaries such as Ram Jethmalani and Abhishek Singhvi. MUCH-ABUSED LAW
Now the Mayawati government in Uttar Pradesh has booked Varun Gandhi under the draconian National Security Act (NSA), 1980, which allows him to be detained for up to a year without bail subject to approval by an advisory board, to which the case must be referred within three weeks, and which must give its decision within seven weeks. If the detention is approved, Varun Gandhi will not be able to campaign although he can contest the election.
In one sense, this remedies the flaw in the RPA, but risks another excess. The NSA is indeed a much-abused law. It has been routinely applied in numerous States to make preventive arrests of hardened criminals and those inciting communal violence, indeed even to deter riots and unrest. Its objective is defined by a holdall term: preventing a person from acting “in any manner prejudicial to the security of the state or … to the maintenance of public order…”
Incitement of communal violence logically falls within this category, but the law should be used with the utmost caution. The U.P. government can claim that it acted with patience. It filed two First Information Reports against Varun Gandhi and tried repeatedly to stop him from acting provocatively, but he recklessly went ahead, leaving it with no other option. It is probable that Mayawati had a political purpose too: of countering the Samajwadi Party’s (S.P.) charge that she is soft on the BJP. But Varun Gandhi’s political agenda was far worse.
At any rate, the NSA has been used by several governments, including BJP-led ones, for much lesser offences. For instance, it was used under the BJP in 11 districts of Rajasthan in 2007 against the Gujjar agitation for reservation. Last December, a Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) MLA was detained under the Act in U.P. for killing engineer Manoj Kumar Gupta. Nobody protested against this. So the BJP is on slippery ground in criticising Varun Gandhi’s detention as “political vendetta” – another case of its double standards.
The plain truth is that the BJP is desperate. Its campaign is not doing well. The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) has shrunk to less than a third of its original size. Its second most important component, Janata Dal (United), is deeply uncomfortable with the BJP’s stance on many issues, including its Hindu-communal orientation in general, and its support for Varun Gandhi’s antics, in particular.
Further, the BJP has wantonly antagonised the JD(U) by fielding Shatrughan Sinha and Rajiv Pratap Rudy, both vitriolic critics of Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. Nitish Kumar says he does not want Narendra Modi and other communally tainted BJP leaders to campaign for the NDA in his State.
Although Nitish Kumar’s own State-level popularity is not in doubt – thanks to his record of relatively good, responsive governance – many of his supporters, especially Muslims, but not just them, will not cast their ballots for the NDA in the national election because that would mean endorsing Advani as Prime Minister. No wonder the JD(U) has dropped hints that it may quit the NDA soon after the Lok Sabha elections. DIVIDED BJP
Organisationally, the BJP presents a picture of disunity and disorder. Campaign strategist Arun Jaitley has rebelled against the U.P.-centric and rustic party president Rajnath Singh, who only wields limited clout. Narendra Modi has acted tough on candidate selection in Gujarat, even defying Advani. And in acceptance and authority, Advani is no match for Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The recent change in the RSS’ top leadership can at best provide a minor boost to the BJP as it flounders for strategy.
If the voting pattern of the recent Assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh repeats itself in the national elections, the BJP will lose 10-12 seats in its Central Indian bastion. In addition, it will probably lose some in Karnataka and Maharashtra. Karnataka’s last Lok Sabha election was a freak. The Congress bagged more votes but fewer seats than the BJP, the JD (Secular) split the anti-BJP vote, and the iron-ore miners’ lobby played a disproportionate role. In Maharashtra, the Shiv Sena has split.
It is unclear if the BJP can make up these losses in its core geographical base area through (probably small) gains in Gujarat, Jharkhand and Haryana. It could also suffer further erosion in U.P. and Bihar, where it is already marginal. Its allies are unlikely to do brilliantly, especially in Punjab, U.P. and Assam. CONGRESS’ ISOLATION
However, this cannot bring much cheer to the Congress which vetoed a joint national campaign or profile for the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), and is now paying for its decision.
Unlike in 2004, when Sonia Gandhi walked the extra mile to recruit allies and reach out to numerous leaders, including the Communist Party of India (Marxist)’s Harkishan Singh Surjeet, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s M. Karunanidhi, BSP’s Mayawati, Nationalist Congress Party’s Sharad Pawar and Lok Janshakti Party’s (LJP) Ram Vilas Paswan, this time the Congress is confining alliance-building to Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, West Bengal and Jharkhand.
It has spurned seat-sharing deals in the Hindi heartland. It probably was never serious about one with the S.P., but strung the party along and refused its offer of 17 seats. (It currently has nine of U.P’s 80 seats.) It will now fight the S.P. in more than 60 seats, losing the advantage of a fruitful alliance that would have drawn some Muslim and upper-caste votes away from the BSP, and conceivably won 35-40 seats. In Bihar, the RJD-LJP upped the ante by offering the Congress a minuscule three seats. Effectively, it has no allies there.
The Congress’ decision to go solo was reportedly heavily influenced by Rahul Gandhi and functionaries such as Digvijay Singh and Ahmed Patel, who believe the party must be rebuilt from scratch in the Hindi heartland; so it must contest as many seats as possible. The Congress leadership is loath to sacrificing the party’s distinct political identity and space, and believes that it must counter the “Tamil Nadu-isation” of U.P. and Bihar, under which it would forever play second fiddle to the S.P. or the BSP, much as it does to the DMK or the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK).
This is a huge gamble. The Congress not only lacks the leaders and cadre with which to rebuild itself in U.P. and Bihar; but Rahul Gandhi’s attempts to create a youthful new leadership there has failed to produce results, indeed even credible candidates.
The party can only be rebuilt through grassroots organising and by developing progressive policies and programmes, which can help it connect with the social groups which have been at the centre of recent transformative processes, including Dalit self-assertion and the Mandal mobilisation, to which the Congress has not related at all for three decades.
There is no sign of this happening. Rahul Gandhi’s social agenda is even more confused than his right-leaning economic policy orientation. So the Congress’ decision to go solo is fraught with the risk of growing isolation. It also carries the disadvantage of not having a pre-election alliance, which is likely to be cited, after the precedent set by former President K.R. Narayanan, as the criterion for being invited to form the government in case of a hung Parliament.
If the Congress fails to equal or better its 2004 score of 145 seats, it will be hard put to stake a credible claim to government – unless it is prepared to make all kinds of compromises. On present reckoning, 145 seats are not assured. The Congress-UPA is likely to suffer setbacks in Tamil Nadu, and probably in Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand and Gujarat. Whether it can recoup these likely losses is an open question. If the gamble fails, the Congress may have to lend support to a non-Congress non-BJP Third Front – if only to keep the NDA out of power. NEED FOR A PROGRAMME
The Third Front has recently expanded and acquired momentum. But without a convincing common programmatic document asserting its commitment to secularism, an inclusive economic policy, and independent foreign and security policies, it cannot project itself as a credible and attractive alternative.
This will not be easy because all the Third Front’s constituents barring the Left stand tainted by their past association with the BJP-NDA, including the Telugu Desam Party (TDP), the JD(S) and the AIADMK. The BSP too has thrice shared power with the BJP in U.P. and Mayawati has campaigned for Narendra Modi in Gujarat. Again, many regional parties in the Third Front no longer represent the plebeian social coalitions and egalitarian or emancipatory agendas they did in the late-1980s or 1990s.
Still, the Third Front is a worthy idea but it will have to be forged over a period of time through grassroots struggles on issues that really matter to the underprivileged. A non-Congress non-BJP combine could make a good beginning if it wins 130-150 seats. This will help it attract support from other parties, including some NDA constituents. But this assumes that the TDP, AIADMK, the JD(S) and above all the BSP perform remarkably well, and that the Left parties do not lose a significant number of seats. These are big ifs.
Even if the Third Front can become the nucleus of a government, it will need external support. That spells uncertainties. The Biju Janata Dal, the Akali Dal, the Asom Gana Parishad and probably the TDP will find it difficult to accept Congress support. If the BSP joins the Third Front, the S.P. will not. If the Left is part of it, the Trinamul Congress will keep away. If the RJD joins it, the JD(U) may not. Amidst these uncertainties, political churning continues unabated.
India: 'Satyam Scam Tip of Corporate Fraud Iceberg'
Inter Press Service, 30 January 2009
by Praful Bidwai
NEW DELHI, Jan 30 (IPS) - Three weeks after the Satyam Computer Services promoter-chairman B. Ramalinga Raju confessed that he had cooked the information technology (IT) company's books, the scam continues to send shock-waves through Indian business and industry.
As more facts come to light, it becomes clear that Raju and his family have been spiriting cash out of the company since 2001, if not earlier, through an elaborate, well-ramified set of arrangements and manoeuvres, including forgery, inflating expenses, stripping assets, and manipulating income, inventory value and profits.
The disclosures have tarnished the image of India's IT industry, which has enjoyed a remarkable growth of 25 to 30 percent a year, generally attributed to hard work and inventiveness.
They have shattered the myth that the "free market" policies launched in 1991, including liberalisation and deregulation, have promoted genuine competition and a clean relationship between business and government.
Most importantly, the 1.5 billion US dollars scandal shows up enormous cracks in India's corporate governance and regulatory systems
Satyam, based in Hyderabad in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, is India's fourth largest IT company, with a turnover of 2.1 billion dollars and 690 clients in 20 industry groups in more than 65 countries.
The clients include 185 Fortune-500 corporations. Satyam specialised in engineering and product development, supply chain management, business process quality, business intelligence, enterprise integration, and infrastructure management.
The World Bank was also a Satyam customer until September last year, when it blacklisted it for making "improper payments" (read, offering bribes) to its employees. Since then, the Bank has blacklisted two other Indian IT companies, including the third largest, Wipro.
"It seems unlikely that Satyam is a unique exception, a one-off case, as is being claimed by many industrialists and chambers of commerce," says Jay Bhattacharjee, a highly experienced Delhi-based capital markets analyst. "Corporate malfeasance and outright fraud is widely prevalent in Indian industry."
Adds Bhattacharjee: "Satyam may be an exception because of the sheer magnitude of the amount of defalcation, which is two-and-a-half times the sum involved in the Enron scandal. But the fact remains that all the supervisory and regulatory agencies failed to detect and prevent the Satyam scam, and that this failure is structural and pervasive."
These agencies include the statutory auditor (Price Waterhouse, the Indian subsidiary of PriceWaterhouseCoopers), Satyam's independent directors, the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, the Registrar of Companies, the Company Law Board, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), and the Quality Review Board (QRB), a high-powered 11-member committee appointed by the Indian government for chartered accountants.
Many of the agencies did not perform their assigned oversight functions, ignored complaints and warnings, or actively covered up the fraud.
Price Waterhouse, which has been Satyam's auditor since 1991, blindly certified its account-books to be correct and accurate without verifying their authenticity. It failed to detect huge transfers of funds, of the order of over one billion dollars, according to Raju's own confession.
Two of accounting company's directors have since been arrested. They failed to verify the authenticity of the bank documents pertaining to cash reserves and balances presented to them by Satyam's management.
It is likely that there was collusion between Satyam and its auditor. According to Deepak Parekh, the chairman of a reputed private bank who was appointed to the Satyam board after the scandal broke out, these documents were "obvious forgeries" and would have been visible as such to anyone.
One of the biggest sources of defalcation at Satyam was the inflation of the number of employees. Raju claimed that the company has 53,000 people on its payroll. But according to the Criminal Investigation Department of the Andhra Pradesh police, the real number was just over 40,000. This closely matches the number of Satyam employees registered for provident fund payments, a little over 43,000.
The fictitious number could be conjured up only because payment to the remaining 10,000 employees was faked year after year - an operation that evidently involved the creation of bogus companies with a large number of employees. Yet, no one detected this massive fraud.
Similarly, going by Raju's account, Satyam's operating margin was as low as three percent. But India's top-ranking IT companies have margins of 20 to 30 percent. If Satyam's margin was indeed higher, then hundreds of millions of dollars were spirited out of the company, without detection.
Another source of fraud was the Satyam board's decision last December to invest 1.6 billion dollars to acquire a 100 percent stake in Maytas Properties and in 51 percent stake in Maytas Infrastructure. Both of these real estate firms were promoted by Raju's sons. They also floated 21 other companies under the Maytas brand.
This investment decision was in gross violation of the Companies Act 1956, under which no company is allowed without shareholders' approval to acquire directly or indirectly any other corporate entity that is valued at over 60 percent of its paid-up capital.
Yet, Satyam's independent directors went along with the decision, raising only technical and procedural questions about SEBI's guidelines and the valuation of the Maytas companies.
They did not even refer to the conflict of interest in buying companies in a completely unrelated business, floated by the chairman's relatives. Indeed, one of the independent directors, Krishna Palepu, a professor at Harvard Business School, praised the merits of real estate investment on Satyam's part.
"Palepu was earlier an independent director on the Global Trust Bank, which collapsed in 2003," recalls former union revenue secretary E.A.S. Sarma, a public-spirited civil servant of high integrity.
Sarma recently warned SEBI and the Prime Minister's office about malfeasance in Satyam, but was ignored.
SEBI's failure was even more stark. Irregularities were repeatedly reported to it in Price Waterhouse's handling of Satyam accounts in 2001 and 2002. But mysteriously, it failed to conduct an investigation. Similarly, a complaint was filed with SEBI by a Member of Parliament in 2003. But under political pressure, this was not pursued.
Last December, SEBI also approved the Maytas investments. The investment decision were eventually reversed because of shareholder protests, not because of the regulatory authorities' actions.
After Ramalinga Raju made his "voluntary confession" on Jan. 7, SEBI wasted precious time and did not move to interrogate him or to seize Satyam's papers until after he had surrendered to the state police. The police have still not allowed SEBI to question him.
Similarly, other official agencies, including those under the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, did not discharge their obligations or were prevented from doing so.
The Income Tax Department unearthed several cases of illegal transfers by Satyam as early as 2002. But the concerned official was transferred and the investigation suppressed.
Equally striking is the failure of the Institute of Chartered Accounts of India (ICAI) to take punitive action against Price Waterhouse, which it is empowered to do. Ironically, Price Waterhouse has two members in the ICAI disciplinary council!. The council met earlier this month, but failed to take action against PwC.
Says Bhattacharjee: "ICAI is a closed professional guild. Like the Bar Council or Medical Association of India, it shields even the most errant of its members. To the best of my knowledge, not a single auditor in India has ever faced punitive action by ICAI or been convicted and sentenced under the Companies Act and other laws."
One reason for this is the laxity of Indian laws. If an auditor fails in his duty in India, he faces a ridiculous penalty of Rs 10,000 (under 200 dollars) and maximum imprisonment of two years. In contrast the U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley Act, passed after the Enron and WorldCom scandals, awards imprisonment for 20 years.
The U.S. and many other countries have greatly improved fraud detection by reforming audit methods and offering incentives to whistle-blowers. India is yet to do any of this.
India lacks adequate corporate regulation. And its enforcement is appalling. For instance, as many as 1,228 of the Bombay Stock Exchange's 4,995 listed companies have failed to submit reports required by the Listing Agreement, including information on their boards' composition, audit committees, CEO certification of accounts, and related-party transactions and subsidiary companies.
"Unless we urgently take corrective measures, corporate fraud will continue, cheating shareholders and milking the public exchequer,'' says Sarma.
Statutory auditors aren't enough. We need a Board of Audit, which is authorised to conduct surprise audit on its own or on whistle-blower complaints, Sarma said. ''Only then will the conviction rate in corporate frauds, which is currently under five percent in India, improve."
Among other measures being suggested are compulsory rotation of auditors every three years, the creation by the government of a pool of independent directors from amongst citizens of high integrity, and their appointment by impartial authorities, as well as tighter enforcement and stiffer penalties.
However, the government seems to be preoccupied with rescuing Satyam rather than radically reforming the system of corporate governance and regulation.
(END/2009)
India: 'Good Cop, Bad Cop' Approach to Pakistan
Inter Press Service, 16 January 2009
by Praful Bidwai
NEW DELHI, Jan 16 (IPS) - Exasperated by what it regards as "a continuing pattern of evasiveness and denial in Pakistan's response to the terrorist attack on Mumbai", India seems to be fashioning a two-pronged approach towards Islamabad to get it to act firmly against terrorist networks based on its soil.
If one element in this approach is to downgrade relations with Pakistan and remind it that the military option is not entirely off the table, the second element is to cajole Pakistan to proceed legally against jehadi extremist groups such as Lashkar-e-Toiba (renamed Jamaat-ud-Dawa, and yet again, Tehreek-e-Tahafuz Qibla Awal).
Different officials of the Indian government have recently made varying statements suggesting the existence of such a dual strategy, or 'the good cop, bad cop' approach.
India's Ministry of External Affairs has by and large adopted a soft stance, while other officials have spoken as if they preferred a strategy to ratchet up pressure on Pakistan in a calibrated way.
Thus, following the second approach, India's newly appointed Home Minister P. Chidambaram told 'The (London) Times' that India could consider ending people-to-people and trade relations with Islamabad.
Chidambaram said: "There are many, many links between India and Pakistan, and if Pakistan does not cooperate and does not help to bring the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks to heel, those ties will become weaker and weaker and one day snap."
On Thursday, in another instance of this graded approach, India's army chief Deepak Kapoor told the media that New Delhi is keeping all its options open, but the military option would be "the last resort". He said: "There is no need for war hysteria" and emphasised that "waging war is a political decision".
More ominously, Kapoor hinted at the possibility of covert action in Afghanistan and said increasing India's strategic presence in Afghanistan is "one of the factors" to be considered in exerting pressure on Pakistan. But he made it clear that the decision would be a political one.
Kapoor said: "Changing our strategic policy towards Kabul in terms of raising military stakes is one of the factors that is to be determined politically."
Just a week earlier, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had accused Pakistan of using "terrorism as an instrument of state policy".
Yet another indication of this gradual hardening of India's stance came in the cancellation of a meeting with Pakistan to discuss a maritime border dispute at Sir Creek, a narrow 100 kilometre-long estuary which divides the two countries on the Arabian Sea.
It was from the Sir Creek area that the 10 men who conducted the Mumbai attacks of Nov. 26-29 hijacked a fishing boat to reach their destination.
The Creek has long been a bone of contention between India and Pakistan, who disagree on the location of the maritime border, and have debated it since 1999. Officials of the two countries recently conducted a survey of the estuary.
The dispute is considered extremely close to resolution. "We have made considerable progress and hopefully, a solution should emerge in a couple of meetings," says an Indian official who declined to be identified.
"But the Mumbai attacks and Pakistan's refusal to take action on the basis of the detailed dossier on Mumbai recently given to it by India have complicated matters,'' the official added.
Pressure on New Delhi to adopt a tough stance vis-à-vis Pakistan comes especially from the media, from retired diplomats and military and intelligence officials. This is apart from ultra-nationalist, opposition political parties.
Immediately after the Mumbai attacks, several television channels launched a campaign in favour of punishing Pakistan. This has, however, become less hysterical recent days.
But 10 former ambassadors, last week, urged the government to downgrade diplomatic ties with Pakistan.
In a joint statement, the ambassadors, including four former foreign secretaries, called upon the government to suspend bilateral negotiations and the peace process, discontinue state-assisted cultural, sporting and other exchanges, review existing bilateral treaties and agreements and take specific economic measures against Pakistan.
They also want New Delhi to restrict procurement from countries or companies supplying defence material to Pakistan.
However, their appeal, and their view that that the attacks were carried out "with the knowledge and support of sections of the Pakistan military and the ISI" (Inter-Services Intelligence agency), are at variance with the Foreign Ministry's position against suspending trade, transport and cultural relations with Pakistan.
A senior Ministry official has said that the demand for terminating diplomatic and people-to-people links would "actually play into the hands of the Pakistani military establishment", which would like to stoke tensions and generate a state of siege in the neighbouring country.
India’s foreign ministry has reacted in a relatively cool and sober fashion to statements emanating from Pakistan to the effect that the Mumbai dossier contains "information", but not "evidence".
In a significant move, Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee told a television channel on Friday that India would be satisfied if those involved in planning and executing the Mumbai attacks are tried in Pakistani courts, provided they are "tried fairly".
An identical view was stated two days earlier in New Delhi by visiting British Foreign Secretary David Miliband.
This marks a departure from India's earlier demand that Pakistan must hand over to it some 40 terrorists and fugitives from Indian law. India has made this demand repeatedly since the Parliament House attack of December 2001, allegedly conducted by a Pakistan-based group.
India has not officially withdrawn that demand. "But there seems to be a tacit acknowledgement that it is not very practical to expect Pakistan to surrender its nationals for trial in India," says Achin Vanaik, a professor of international relations and global politics at the University of Delhi.
"This recognition is welcome, but Pakistan must do more on its own to crack down on jehadi groups,'' Vanaik added.
Many Pakistan-based analysts believe that Islamabad, in particular its weak civilian government, cannot afford to be seen to be caving in to Indian pressure.
For instance, former general Talat Masood has repeatedly said on Indian television channels that there is likely to be a divergence between officials pronouncements and actions, but that he expected some action on the ground.
As if on cue, on Thursday, Pakistan’s prime ministerial advisor on interior affairs, Rehman Malik, announced the detention of 71 members of outlawed militant groups such as the JuD and the LeT and such of their top ranking leaders as Hafiz Mohammed Saeed founder of both groups, Mufti Abdur Rehman and Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi.
Malik, in a televised press conference, said five "training camps" of the JuD had been shut down and its websites banned. A special investigation team headed by a top official of Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) will now examine "without any prejudice" all aspects of the Mumbai attacks and the information provided by India, he said.
"India's best bet lies in patient diplomacy at the bilateral and multilateral levels to secure a firm commitment and action from Pakistan to put down jehadi groups,’’ argues Vanaik.
‘’All talk of covert operations in Afghanistan is a major distraction from this, Vanaik said. It can only stoke suspicion and hostility in Pakistan and strengthen the hardliners, besides creating new intractable rivalries in Afghanistan's already troubled situation."
Vanaik believes that it is unwise for India to place too much reliance on the United States, given President-elect Barrack Obama's intention to intensify the Afghanistan war. This, he said, calls for cooperation from the Pakistan Army and limits the amount of pressure the U.S. can mount on Pakistan.
Another of New Delhi's priorities has been to persuade Washington to abandon its plans to appoint a special envoy to South Asia, who will help mediate Kashmir as well as other outstanding regional issues. Recent indications suggest that the Indian government has had a measure of success in this.
Meanwhile, civil society groups in both India and Pakistan are stepping up their efforts to maintain people-to-people contacts and ask their governments to abjure the military option and jointly fight religious extremism and terrorism.
A 20-member delegation of Pakistani civil society activists is planning to visit New Delhi between Jan. 21 and 23. It will be hosted by a number of Indian peace groups and activists and will interact with senior political leaders, key policymakers, the academic community and the media.
(END/2009)
Concern for Zardari's Civilian Gov't Stays India
[Inter Press Service, 7 December 2008 |http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=45015|en]
by Praful Bidwai
NEW DELHI, Dec 7 (IPS) - After United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s visit to New Delhi and Islamabad, in the wake of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, India has added a new rationale for stepping up pressure on Pakistan for taking decisive action against jehadi extremists operating from its soil.
However, India has still not determined what approach to adopt to achieve its objective, and is wary of using means which might escalate hostility with Pakistan in ways which would "play into the hands" of those responsible for acts of terrorism against its citizens.
In a special background briefing for the media, a senior Indian official only identifiable under briefing rules as "authoritative source" said India has proof of the involvement of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency in the Mumbai attacks, which left nearly 200 people dead.
But India will not make this accusation publicly for fear that that would escalate tensions and weaken the civilian government of President Asif Ali Zardari, which it regards as favourably disposed towards the peace process with India.
This is the first time since last week's attacks that India has named the ISI for its role in them. By implication, the unnamed official also suggested that the Pakistan army was aware of the ISI's links with the attackers, because "it would be surprising" if the agency were able to operate independently and without the military leadership's knowledge.
The official did not share specific details of the evidence that Indian investigators claim to have found of the ISI's role in the attacks, but said they had "the names of the handlers and trainers of the attackers, the locations where the training was held, and some of their communications".
The messages he referred to were sent using Voice-over-Internet-Protocol to "addresses that have been used by known ISI people before’’.
The attackers are believed to belong to an extremist group called Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the military wing of a fundamentalist organisation, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, headed by Hafiz Mohammed Saeed. LeT is formally banned, but continues to be active under a different guise.
U.S. intelligence agencies too claim to have intercepts of the attackers' conversations on satellite and mobile telephones during the 60 hour-long operation launched by Indian security and police agencies to overpower them. But it is not known if they have compared this information with the details gathered by Indian agencies.
A U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation team is currently in India, as are British and Israeli agencies. They are sharing intelligence and coordinating their investigations with Indian agencies.
As New Delhi formulates its strategy amidst domestic public and political pressure to show that it "means business", it makes a sharp distinction between Pakistan's elected civilian government and the army.
Indian officials believe the Pakistan army would want a military crisis on its eastern border, so that it could have a reason for redeploying the 100,000 thousand troops that are currently on the western border with Afghanistan, where they are engaged in a highly unpopular war supporting U.S.-led troops of the International Security Assistance Force.
But India does not want to "play their game" and wants the Pakistan army "to continue being engaged in the fight against terrorism" along the Afghan border, "because that's also our war’’.
This is the closest that India has come to in endorsing and associating itself with the ISAF operation in Afghanistan and along its extremely volatile areas bordering Pakistan.
"In some ways, this is a subtle departure from India's earlier position, which did not vocally declare the U.S.-led anti-al-Qaeda Taleban operation as 'our war'," says Achin Vanaik, professor of international relations and global politics at Delhi University.
"This shift seems to be related both to Indian leaders' discussions with Rice, and their desire to keep open the option of persuading U.S.-led forces to undertake military operations against the strongholds of jehadi militants operating against India from within Pakistan,’’ Vanaik said.
In her talks here during what may be one of her last forays into South Asia before she demits office, Condoleezza Rice promised all "cooperation, support and solidarity" to India in its fight against terrorists originating in Pakistan, but said it was primarily Pakistan's responsibility to act against them.
Reacting to President Zardari's statement that the perpetrators of the Mumbai attack were "non-state actors", Rice also said: "Non-state actors sometimes act in the confines of the state and there has to be strong action against them... it's a matter of responsibility."
However, Rice made it clear that U.S. support for India is premised upon the assumption that India will not escalate tensions with Pakistan and offer it an excuse to divert its troops from the Afghanistan border. Their deployment at that border, and their cooperation with ISAF, are top priorities for the U.S. in a war that it is not winning.
Rice emphasised this in response to Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee's statement and their joint press conference. Mukherjee said New Delhi is determined to take whatever action is necessary "to protect India's territorial integrity". She responded: "Any response by India has to be judged in terms of prevention and not by creating unintended consequences or difficulties."
In Islamabad, Rice extracted from Zardari a promise of "strong action" against any Pakistani elements found involved in the Mumbai attacks. She underlined the "urgency" of such action and emphasised the American nationals were killed in Mumbai.
The unnamed Indian official's briefing made clear that India's response to the Mumbai attacks would not replicate the strategy it adopted in December 2001 after India's Parliament House was attacked, allegedly by Pakistani terrorists.
India broke off or downgraded diplomatic and transportation links with Pakistan, and mobilised 700,000 troops at the border in an attempt to compel Pakistan to surrender "20 wanted fugitives" living on its soil, including the chief of the terrorist group Jaish-i-Mohammed, Massod Azhar, who had been exchanged for hostages in a 1999 hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane.
Pakistan responded by mobilising 300,000 troops. The eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation continued for 10 long months, during which India and Pakistan at least twice came close to actual combat with a real potential for escalation to the nuclear level.
At his briefing, the anonymous Indian official said today's situation in Pakistan, with a divided or fragmented power structure, is not comparable to 2001: "Then, we were dealing with one Pakistan. There was Musharraf (the former president and army chief), and that was it. Today, the situation is different."
Some Indian officials are worried at the possible consequences of coercive diplomacy and any strategy of ratcheting up pressure on Pakistan to act against groups like LeT.
A senior diplomat who insisted on anonymity said: "We are acutely aware that the Pakistan situation is extremely fragile, and the state could disintegrate or unravel. The army could stage a coup citing a national crisis."
Vanaik argues that "excessive pressure from India, and especially any move towards deploying the military option, would impel the pro-Taliban and al-Qaeda militants in the border areas near Afghanistan to offer to join hands with the Pakistan army to unitedly fight India, which they now regard as a major ally of the U.S. and part of what they describe as the Christian-Zionist-Hindu global axis".
Former Pakistan foreign minister Gauhar Ayub Khan confirmed this assessment during a television debate on an Indian channel. He said: "These elements are strongly anti-India and joined wars against India in 1947-48, 1965 and 1971. They will do it again if India exercises the military option."
Some of these groups have already offered a ceasefire if Pakistan allows them to fight India on the eastern border.
As they try to fashion a coherent strategy to deal with the fallout of the Mumbai attacks, Indian officials are balancing different factors, including pressure from the domestic rightwing for tough action, their concern to keep the Western powers, especially the U.S., on board, and their anxiety not to further weaken the Zardari government.
As the unnamed "authoritative source" says: "The perpetrators have to be fixed", but we face a "dilemma".
(END/2008)
India: Uneasy About Obama Victory
Inter Press Service, 15 November 2008
by Praful Bidwai
NEW DELHI, Nov 15 (IPS) - Unlike the rest of the world, which has welcomed the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States, Indian policymakers have misgivings, rooted in his campaign statements on Kashmir, nuclear non-proliferation and business process outsourcing from the U.S. to India.
However, according to independent commentators, these misgivings may be misplaced, not least because Obama is unlikely to translate his campaign remarks into actual policies, and because they underestimate the positive contribution that his presidency is likely to make at the global level.
Yet, some of these misgivings and apprehensions persist despite a long-awaited telephone call from the president-elect to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, which materialised Thursday.
Soon after his election, Obama had called the leaders of nine nations, including Pakistan, but did not make contact with Singh. Indian officials say Obama had tried to reach Singh earlier, but no call could be put through because Singh was on a visit to West Asia.
"Whatever the truth about difficulties in completing a telephone call in this age of communication and mobile telephone proliferation, the fact is that Indian policymakers have been loath to give up their preoccupation with George W. Bush," says Kamal Mitra Chenoy, a professor at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
"That probably was a factor in the lack of enthusiasm that they feel about welcoming the next president of the U.S.,'' Chenoy said.
Chenoy added: "This is unfortunate given the historic character of Obama’s victory, the tectonic shift in the balance of forces that it represents in the globe’s most influential nation, and the hope it has kindled the world over in the possibility of major and radical change towards inclusion, equality, and respect for diversity and pluralism."
The debate in the corridors of power in New Delhi is focused not so much on whether Obama will pursue a less arrogant, aggressive and unilateralist foreign policy, as on whether he will restore the ‘even-handed’ treatment of India and Pakistan that existed before the Bush administration came into power.
Similarly, Indian business leaders, especially in information technology-related companies, are more concerned with warding off pressures for restrictions on outsourcing from the U.S. to India than on exploring new opportunities and avenues of cooperation.
The most worried lot in India are the foreign policy mandarins, who have for three years invested heavily in negotiating and completing the U.S.- India nuclear cooperation deal, itself part of Washington’s effort to draw India into a close strategic relationship with itself.
As Kanwal Sibal, a former foreign secretary (chief of diplomatic service), puts it: " India's view of the U.S. has been heavily coloured by the nuclear deal. Politically and professionally, an excessive public show of gratitude to Bush, however appropriate in private for his staunch support for India, was inadvisable and needlessly made the U.S.-India relationship personality-driven rather than interest-driven."
Sibal here refers to Singh telling Bush in September: ‘’The people of India love you deeply..." This was widely criticised by the political opposition in this country and by many foreign policy and strategic experts.
So obsessed were Indian policymakers with portraying the nuclear deal as a great achievement, and as amounting to Bush's acceptance of India as a nuclear weapons state, that they did not publicise - as they would normally have done - a letter that Obama wrote to Singh on Sep. 23.
In the letter, Obama regretted that he could not meet Singh during his September visit to the United States, and said he very much looked forward "to doing so in the near future". He also expressed his "great admiration for the courage you showed in shepherding the civil nuclear cooperation agreement through your Parliament, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Nuclear Suppliers Group."
Obama added: "But I see this agreement only as a beginning of a much closer relationship between our two great countries. I would like to see U.S.-India relations grow across the board to reflect our shared interests, shared values, shared sense of threats, and ever burgeoning ties between our two economies and societies."
However, Obama also wrote: "I will work with the U.S. Senate to secure ratification of the international treaty Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty banning nuclear weapons testing at the earliest practical day, and then launch a major diplomatic initiative to ensure its entry into force."
He also promised to "pursue negotiation on a verifiable, multilateral treaty to end production of fissile material for nuclear weapons," known as the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT).
This raised hackles in New Delhi because it is reluctant to sign either of these treaties and would like to build a substantial stockpile of bomb fuel and nuclear weapons before doing so.
Obama’s stated positions on many issues are progressive, favour a more balanced and peaceful world, and deserve to be welcomed. These include Iran, Russia, and Son-of-Star-Wars-style ballistic missile defence (BMD).
If he begins a dialogue with Iran, stops NATO expansion, builds friendly relations with Russia, delays BMD deployment, and renews the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty due to expire next year, while de-alerting and disarming a substantial number of nuclear weapons, he will have made a major contribution to defusing rivalries aggravated by the Republicans.
Obama also holds that unless the U.S. and Russia radically reduce their nuclear arsenals, they won't be able to persuade smaller nations like Iran and North Korea to forgo their nuclear programmes.
But Indian policymakers have been lukewarm towards these positions because they view them through the narrow prisms of India-Pakistan relations, his remarks about mediating on the Kashmir issue with the possible involvement of former president Bill Clinton, and outsourcing.
In practice, Obama is unlikely to want to undermine the competitiveness of U.S. industry by halting outsourcing. Many Indian IT industry leaders think so too.
His campaign statements on the Kashmir question are unlikely to translate into policy since they will have to take into account India’s reservations on the issue. As his transition team recently clarified, the U.S. remains committed to supporting the bilateral India-Pakistan dialogue process to resolve Kashmir and other contentious issues.
As for the CTBT, even Atal Behari Vajpayee was all prepared to sign it in 1999, after declaring a unilateral moratorium on nuclear test explosions, based on a careful strategic assessment that further testing is not necessary for an adequate minimum nuclear deterrent.
"If India is truly committed to global, universal nuclear disarmament, as it says it is, it must recognise that the CTBT and FMCT are indispensable steps in that process, says Achin Vanaik, professor of international relations and global politics at Delhi University. "India must stop being defensive about these treaties and actively help bring them into force.
Vanaik said it was unlikely that Obama will risk damaging Washington’s relations with India by aggressively pushing agendas, especially regional ones that New Delhi is uncomfortable with. It is a sign of Indian policymakers’ diffidence and their lack of appreciation of India’s growing economic, political and strategic weight in today’s world that they think otherwise.
Vanaik argues that India can positively engage Obama by seeking his cooperation in an initiative for reform of the global governance system, including a more democratic United Nations, restructuring of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation, by promoting a a more equitable international economic order, and by demanding a non-confrontational cooperative security system.
Religion-India: Secular Fabric Under Threat
Inter Press Service, November 5, 2008
by Praful Bidwai
NEW DELHI, Nov 5 (IPS) - Police in India have unearthed a well-organised terrorist network inspired by intensely Hindu-chauvinist ideas, which they suspect, has been involved in a series of bombings since 2003, primarily targeting mosques and intended to kill Muslims.
The discovery follows investigations into two bomb blasts on Sep. 29 at Malegaon, an industrial town in central Maharashtra, notorious for strained Hindu-Muslim relations and periodic communal (or inter-community) violence. Seven people were killed in the latest explosions.
At the network's centre are various organisations and individuals affiliated to the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its parent body, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). They are tied together by adherence to the ideology of Hindutva (Hinduness or Hindu-supremacism), and are collectively called the Sangh Parivar (RSS family or cabal).
Also implicated are three retired officers of the Indian army, and a serving colonel, belonging to the intelligence corps. At least two of them are connected with the Bhonsala Military School, a Hindutva-inspired institution established in 1937 at Nashik in Maharashtra.
The most prominent of the suspects arrested by the police for the bombings is Pragya Singh Thakur, a 38 year-old saffron-clad woman who calls herself a Sadhvi (the feminine for sadhu).
One of the bombs that exploded in Malegaon was planted on a motorcycle owned by Thakur and loaned by her to prime accused Ramji. She has reportedly confessed to this. The police also claim Thakur was unhappy at the relatively low number of fatalities in the blast and wanted to know from Ramji the reason for this.
Thakur has a strong RSS background and was an office-bearer of the BJP-sponsored students' union, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad for nine years, and more important, of the militant women's outfit, Durga Vahini.
The BJP has been badly embarrassed by the disclosures, which have shocked the secular public. But after initial hesitation, the party has decided to brazen things out and take the stand that Parivar activists are being framed.
The police have gathered evidence exposing the myriad connections between the RSS, the BJP, and their front organisations, estimated at more than 100 in number, which are active in fields as diverse as labour unions, indoctrination and education, lawyers' organisations, semi-religious groups, relief and service delivery, and specific targeting of India's religious minorities, which make up 18 percent of its population of a billion plus people.
Among the better known of the Sangh Parivar organisations are the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (world Hindu council) and Bajrang Dal (violent vigilantes named after the monkey warrior-god Hanuman), Vidya Bharati (which runs thousands of Hindutva-oriented schools) and Adivasi Kalyan Ashram (which actively proselytises among indigenous people).
Groups like Durga Vahini, Rashtriya Jagaran Manch, Sanatana Sanstha and Abhinav Bharat are less well-known but often more active in militant ways.
These groups have been involved in a spate of attacks on Indian Christians across seven states, after first erupting in eastern Orissa last Christmas. Affected states include southern Karnataka and Kerala, central Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra and western Rajasthan and Gujarat.
The Catholic-Christian Secular Forum (CSF), an influential non-government organisation (NGO) has demanded, in an open petition to the government that the Bajrang Dal- which it holds mainly responsible - be banned for attacks that are ‘’unconstitutional and threaten the secular fabric of the country’’.
According to published CSF estimates, over 50 Christians have been killed, 4,000 houses destroyed and dozens of nuns raped.
‘’The State of India has abdicated its responsibility and duty to protect Indian Christians, by not taking the concerned state governments ruled by the BJP to task and failing to protect the life and personal liberty of Indian citizens,’’ the CSF petition charged.
In the Malegaon bombing case, police say they have irrefutable evidence that three key individuals, Thakur, Abhinav Bharat, Sameer Kulkarni and former army major Ramesh Upadhye, were conspirators. They were also probably responsible, along with other RSS-Bajrang Dal activists, for recent bombings outside mosques in four other towns in Maharashtra and Gujarat.
The police are also looking for evidence of their possible involvement in recent mosque bombings, as in Hyderabad in May 2007, in Ajmer in October 2007, and possibly on the Samjhauta Express train to Pakistan in February last year.
Police believe that Hindutva activists have been training themselves in bomb-making and other violent skills for many years with help from former military officers and institutions like the Bhonsala Military School.
In April 2006, two RSS-Bajrang Dal activists were killed during a bomb manufacturing operation at Nanded, also in Maharashtra.
According to the Maharashtra police's Anti-Terrorism Squad, the Nanded operation was part of a larger criminal conspiracy to create the impression that Muslim extremists would not hesitate to kill other Muslims. The motive was to sow disaffection, widen the communal divide and help Hindutva forces blame Muslims for acts of terrorism.
Similar cases of parivar activists' involvement in other bomb-fabrication operations has recently come to light through accidental explosions in Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and again in Nanded, Maharashtra (in February 2007).
"This is not the first time that Hindu fundamentalists have been implicated in acts of violence," says Tanika Sarkar, a professor of modern Indian history at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and author of several books and scholarly papers on the Sangh Parivar and the Hindutva movement.
"But this is probably the first time that an underground network operating on a large scale across different states, which has actually planted bombs targeted at Muslims, has been unearthed,'' Sarkar told IPS.
Sarkar added: "These Hindutva-inspired terrorists are no less dangerous and indefensible than terrorists inspired by jehadi Islam. But the difference is that the first kind of terrorism has a wider base because the Hindus are a majority in India. It also enjoys official sanction and state patronage, unlike jihadi militancy."
Sarkar argues that majoritarian extremism tries to pass itself off as inspired by nationalism, and that this is a major fallacy. It is as pernicious as minority extremism. The BJP stands isolated on the issues of its links with Sadhvi Thakur. It first denied that she has had anything to do with the BJP, the RSS or ABVP in recent years.
However, Thakur campaigned for the BJP in the last two legislative assembly elections in Gujarat, in 2002 and 2007. She also has close links with high BJP functionaries, including Madhya Pradesh state Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan.
The BJP's prime ministerial nominee LK Advani tried to distance the party from Thakur, and said the law should be allowed to take its own course.
But last week, the RSS intervened and demanded that the BJP staunchly defend Thakur and other suspects. Party president Rajnath Singh now says that there can be no such thing as a "Hindu terrorist" and those who believe in Hindutva can never be attracted to extremism because Hinduism is inherently tolerant.
"This is hogwash," holds Sarkar, "because Hindutva is nothing if not a concentrated expression of intolerance, which believes in forcibly asserting and imposing Hindu primacy or supremacy on a society that is deeply plural, multicultural and multireligious."
The BJP claims to be uniquely concerned about and determined to fight terrorism, and makes security a central plank of its politics. Its hypocrisy and double standards on terrorism have shocked secular liberals in India. They are anxiously watching the United Progressive Alliance government's moves.
"The discovery of this network throws up a major challenge to the Indian state," says Zoya Hasan, an eminent political scientist, who is currently a member of the National Commission on Minorities. "The state has been tainted in the past by its perceived softness towards majoritarian and Hindu-communal groups. For instance, a Congress government allowed the Babri mosque to be demolished by the Hindutva forces in 1992.
"If the ruling United Progressive Alliance government rises to the challenge and pursues the investigation and prosecution in the present case through to the end, it will have made a major contribution to the reaffirmation of secularism in India,’’ Hasan said.
(END/2008)
Body blow to nuclear disarmament
Rediff.com, September 12, 2008
by Praful Bidwai
In contrast to the euphoric headlines in the Indian media proclaiming a 'nuclear dawn; and the 'remaking' of the world to suit Nuclear India's ambitions, the internal reception to the completion of the heated debate in the Nuclear Suppliers' Group in Vienna was sullen and frosty. When the decision, incontestably a major decision, to grant India a waiver from the NSG's tough trading rules was announced on September 6, there was no applause whatever.
A European diplomat at the gathering told Reuters: 'For the first time in my experience of international diplomatic negotiations, a consensus decision was followed by complete silence in the room. No clapping, nothing ' This showed the extent to which many of the NSG's 45 member-states 'felt pressured' by the United States's furious lobbying for the waiver, which bludgeoned them into submission. Very few NSG members were fully satisfied with the waiver, and many entered caveats through their 'national statements'. Said a dismayed diplomat: "NPT RIP (rest in peace)!"
Announcing the death of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty may be a trifle premature, but there's simply no doubt that the waiver has shaken the global nuclear order and blown a gaping hole through the nuclear export control system. For the first time, the world's major powers have agreed to resume nuclear trade with a country that possesses nuclear weapons, but has neither signed the NPT nor acceded to any other agreement on nuclear restraint or disarmament, including the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
This confronts us all with a choice. We can be short-sighted, narrow and parochial and welcome the waiver as a historic victory signifying India's "arrival" as a Great World Power. Or, we can take a broad-horizon, long-term view and consider the causes and consequences of the waiver not just for India, but the whole world. If India is ever to exercise a major influence on world affairs, its policy-makers and -shapers should surely be concerned with the global consequences of any major event, action or decision, and not just India's self-interest.
Sadly, just the opposite is true. The bulk of the English-language media celebrates the waiver in a gung-ho manner and sees itself as a campaigner/outrider for the US-India nuclear deal from a narrow national-chauvinist perspective. A majority of the deal's opponents too share that same perspective, and regard it as a litmus test of national sovereignty. Both viewpoints vest sovereignty in mass-destruction weapons, not the people.
This column offers a different perspective, based on a commitment to peace, nuclear disarmament, and balance and equity in international relations. Seen from this angle, both the nuclear deal and the waiver are indeed unmitigated disasters for the cause of global nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament. They will not even enhance India's security, but intensify an arms race in this region, degrading the security of all its states and detracting from their peoples' true priorities. Nor will the deal help India's energy security. Costly and unsafe nuclear power isn't the route to energy security.
First, consider three big claims made about the waiver. It's a victory of "sweet reason", proffered Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee's Images September 5 statement. This generated a "positive momentum" and convinced half the dissenting six states - Austria, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand Images, Norway and Switzerland Images -to radically change their stand. Second, the waiver rights a historic wrong by lifting sanctions and discriminatory technology denial wrongly imposed on India after 1974. And third, it will bring India into the global "non-proliferation mainstream" and promote restraint on India's part.
Mukherjee's was a vague statement saying India opposes nuclear proliferation, doesn't subscribe to an arms race, and will behave "responsibly". This doesn't square up with India's actual record in initiating and sustaining a nuclear arms race in South Asia for three decades. Nor did Mukherjee provide the specific assurance the world sought: a legally binding commitment not to test, or else, nuclear commerce with India would end.
The truth is, the waiver happened not for arms-control reasons, but because of the onslaught of US pressure on the dissenting NSG members The pressure was described as "brutal and unconscionable" by former United Nations undersecretary for disarmament Jayantha Dhanapala. Regrettably, India too practised "with-us-or-against-us" threats to push its case. The US and India both offered economic inducements to supplement strong-arm methods.
Second, it's simply not true that "innocent India" was punished unfairly for conducting the 1974 test with indigenously developed materials and technologies. The critical materials were imported or clandestinely procured. The plutonium for the test came from the CIRUS reactor built with Canadian and US assistance, which was only meant for "peaceful purposes". Hence, the blast was hypocritically called a "peaceful nuclear explosion". But India had cheated the world by diverting civilian material to military use - and become an accomplished proliferator.
Unfortunately, the NSG has made a dangerous double standards-based distinction between "good" and "bad" proliferators and rewarded India because it has become Washington's friend and ally. Tomorrow, another country could exploit the same distinction. This will undermine efforts to contain Iran's and North Korea's nuclear programmes and weaken the global non-proliferation norm.
Third, the waiver won't bring India into the "non-proliferation mainstream" or encourage restraint on its part. In fact, the nuclear deal will allow India to produce more fissile material for bombs. Under the deal, India will separate its military-nuclear facilities from civilian installations and subject some of the latter to International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards to ensure that no material from them is diverted to military purposes.
However, India will only put 14 of its 22 operating/planned civilian reactors under safeguards. But it can use the remaining eight reactors to produce as much weapons-grade plutonium as it likes. According to a report by independent scientists for the International Panel on Fissile Materials two years ago, these eight reactors alone can yield fuel for as many as 40 Nagasaki-type bombs every year. In addition, India can produce more bomb fuel from dedicated military-nuclear facilities and fast-breeders.
All this makes nonsense of the idea of India's professed "credible minimum deterrent", which is understood as a few dozen weapons. (After all, how many bombs does it take to flatten five Chinese or Pakistani cities? 15, 20, 50?) India already has an estimated 100 to 150 nuclear weapons. Adding to the stockpile can only encourage a vicious nuclear arms race with Pakistan and, more ominously, with China, further destabilising already volatile South Asia.
At any rate, is the waiver "clean and unconditional", as India had insisted it must be? Strictly speaking, no. True, India formally accepted only one of the three conditions proposed by the dissenters through more than 50 amendments in the August 21-22 NSG meeting. This is periodic review of India's compliance with non-proliferation commitments. But the other two conditions - exclusion of enrichment and reprocessing technologies from nuclear trade, and terminating the trade in the event of testing - figure in the "national statements" of interpretation of the waiver by the six "like-minded" countries, and by Japan Images and Germany Images.
So, in practice, nuclear trade with India will be limited. It will most certainly be terminated if India conducts a nuclear explosion, withdraws from IAEA safeguards because of interruptions in fuel supplies, or fails to abide by its other non-proliferation commitments.
Many national statements interpret Mukherjee's speech as a solemn promise not to test, which will automatically terminate cooperation in the event of a test. Although New Delhi Images won't admit it, this isn't quite the unconditional waiver it wanted. But it can live with this.
Both the Left and the Bharatiya Janata Party accuse the government of having betrayed the nine commitments regarding the deal made by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Parliament, and of having compromised India's "strategic sovereignty". This criticism is off the mark and exaggerates the degree of compromise involved in the waiver. More important, it altogether misses the crucial point concerning the disarmament and peace implications of the deal, in particular, the waiver.
Joining the Nuclear Club, which the Indian elite has long craved to do, won't remotely end global "atomic apartheid". India will merely become another participant in the apartheid ruling regime. India's nuclear weapons will be legitimised. But India will sanctify other countries' nuclear weapons. The last thing India will do on joining the Club is to demand its dissolution or a radical change in its rules! This India will inevitably betray its promise to fight for a nuclear weapons-free world, held out by the United Progressive Alliance .
The UPA seems determined to ram the deal through despite its divisive character and lack of a domestic consensus on it. There's now a good chance that with the Bush administration's hard push, the 123 agreement will clear the US Congress in the current session ending September 26 or in a special lame-duck session.
However, the deal won't win the hearts of the Indian public - and certainly not its votes. The Congress would be ill-advised to make it an election plank.
Nuking democracy
by Praful Bidwai (India Vision)
INDIA'S United Progressive Alliance won the Parliament confidence motion, but lost credibility by buying votes. It has inflicted great damage upon democracy by weakening the people's trust in its integrity. This harm will prove more enduring than any gains from the UPA's victory.
During the run-up to the vote — one of the worst periods of cynical manipulation in India's politics —,every fear that the democratic process would be defiled and subverted came true. MPs were offered ministerial berths, election tickets, new states/districts, and cash.
The most nauseating episode was the display of Rs one crore (10 million) in banknotes by three BJP MPs, who claimed they were given it by Samajwadi Party general secretary Amar Singh to secure their abstentions.
The Bharatiya Janata Party is trying to exploit this episode by playing the innocent victim of manipulation, of the kind Amar Singh is known for. But going by credible accounts, it too played dirty. One of its three MPs was unhappy at the prospect of losing his constituency due to delimitation.
He was approached by the SP, which was unaware that he had already made up with the BJP. He deviously set up not a sting but an entrapment operation, roping two other BJP MPs. Then, the BJP's dirty tricks department took over. The three MPs, with a tainted history, deceived the SP. The SP offered them Rs 9 crores (nine million), and delivered Rs one crore.
Whatever the finer truth, there's no doubt that the SP bribed them. It's equally incontrovertible that they accepted the bribe, and were as culpable as those who offered it to them. The BJP was as Machiavellian as the SP. It also involved a television channel. (The channel didn't air the footage. This doesn't condone its collusion in an unethical act.)
The BJP is adopting a holier-than-thou posture. But its credibility is questionable: 8 of its MPs defied the party whip while taking bribes. So much for this disciplined "party with a difference"!
The BJP also bribed defectors from other parties. And so did the UPA-SP combine.
In fact, the whole premise underlying the UPA-SP's efforts to manufacture a majority was that it could engineer defections or abstentions. Triggering cross-voting was essential to the strategy of the UPA-SP and the BJP and BSP too.
Finally, the UPA-SP won by 275-to-256. Had all "rebel" MPs obeyed their respective party whips, the motion could have been defeated 261-to-277. When Manmohan Singh precipitated this confrontation on the nuclear deal, he was aware of the indispensable need to use defections to win. He encouraged his colleagues to play dirty. The confidence vote showed up most parties in a poor light-with few exceptions barring the Left.
The degeneration lies not just in the votes' unprincipled character, but in their non-representative nature. Party-based democracy isn't about individual choice, but about structured decisions which are representative because they refer to party positions.
The vote saw democracy diminished from governance based on the people's will to a system of power, without legitimacy or purpose. This only shows that India has failed to build democracy based on robust conventions and norms, which outlaw the buying of legislators and discourage the rule of money and muscle-power. The episode has set India's democracy back by a decade, if not more.
It also witnessed three disconcerting trends. First, all the major alliances that drive Indian politics in the near future will be unprincipled and opportunistic. True, all cross-party coalitions involve compromises on policies, programmes and priorities. But they needn't be as completely devoid of content as, say, the present Congress-SP arrangement, or that between the BSP and what's left of the UNPA.
Even the UNPA, a lose coalition of regional parties, had a distinct political identity until the SP deserted it. Yet more programmatically cohesive was the UPA-Left arrangement.
But that's now history. In his anxiety to be free of the constraints the Left imposes on the Centre-Right Congress, Singh hitched his party to the SP with which the Congress has nothing in common.
Similarly, the UNPA has tied up with the BSP and elevated Mayawati to a secular progressive heroine — a complete myth. This will blur lines of political demarcation and result in the BJP becoming disproportionately important as a party with a distinct identity.
This doesn't bode well for political diversity and plurality, which is essential in a one-billion plus country. India's numerous political subcultures must not get subsumed under a couple of blocs.
Second, the Congress has fatefully decided to move away from the Left, to a party which has pronounced pro-Big Business policies and is deeply compromised with the Sangh Parivar. This will spur the Congress to move Rightwards and alienate it further from the poor.
Already, corporates are salivating at the prospect of Right-wing shifts in health, education, insurance, banking, and organised retail.
As between the early 1990s and 2004, this is likely to accelerate the Congress' decline as a broadly centrist coalition of different social groups, amongst whom the urban poor, Dalits and Adivasis figured, as did Muslims, Sikhs and Christians. This shrinking of the Centre-Left space doesn't augur well for democracy.
Finally, the Left has gravitated towards supporting Mayawati as a future Prime Ministerial candidate. This ignores her narrow agenda, spectacular opportunism and corruption. By retreating from principle, and by having truck with tainted politicians, the Left can only lose the high moral ground which it occupies because of its probity and pro-people policies.
The Left is unlikely to regain in the short run the political leverage which it enjoyed with the UPA-even if it retains its 59 Lok Sabha seats, an all-time record. The BSP/UNPA won't be even half as amenable to Left influence as the UPA. After all, the UPA came to power on a secular, pro-equity platform-and on a strong popular rejection of the BJP.
If the Left's parliamentary representation decreases, as seems likely, its moral-political weight and influence will decline rapidly. That too is bad news for the prospect of inclusive participatory democracy aiming at popular empowerment.
Praful Bidwai is a veteran Indian journalist and commentator. He can be reached at praful(at)bol.net.in
Top Activist's Detention Blot on Democracy
Inter Press Service, 15 May 2008
by Praful Bidwai
NEW DELHI, May 15 (IPS) - Protests are mounting all over the world against the year-long detention of Dr. Binayak Sen, a distinguished Indian human rights and health activist, under draconian laws in the central state of Chhattisgarh.
Sen, national vice president and Chhattisgarh general secretary of the well-known People's Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL), was arrested under allegations of helping left-wing extremists, known in this country as Naxalites.
The charges shocked human rights organisations and citizens’ groups, which on independent investigation, have found them totally fictitious. They believe that the Chhattisgarh government filed them to harass Sen and set a horribly negative example for all civil liberties activists and intimidate them.
Sen is probably India’s first human rights defender to have faced such prolonged detention.
Sen’s detention raises serious questions about the content and quality of democracy in India, and the state’s failure to respect liberties and fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution. It also points to links between human rights violations and the government’s social and economic policies.
The protestors are demanding Sen’s unconditional release, repeal of the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, 2005, (PSA), and the disbanding of a state-sponsored right-wing militia called Salwa Judum, which has been rampaging through the state killing and maiming people in the guise of fighting Naxalites.
On Sunday, when Sen’s detention completed one full year, poets, artists, musicians, theatre personalities, social scientists and writers, including the award-winning novelist Arundhati Roy, joined hands with social activists in 15 Indian cities, including Raipur, Sen’s hometown and Chhattisgarh’s capital.
As many as 48 international organisations such as Amnesty International and citizens’ groups based in the West also organised demonstrations or vigils in nine cities in the United States, including New York, Washington, San Francisco and Boston, and in London, Paris and Stockholm
Meanwhile, 22 Nobel laureates from the world over have called for Sen’s release so that he can receive in person the prestigious Jonathan Mann award for health and human rights, an "international honour that will be bestowed for the first time on a citizen of India".
The award is due to be presented in two weeks by the Global Health Council (GHC), an alliance of medical organisations and professionals, in Washington, DC.
In a letter to India’s President Pratibha Patil, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh, the Nobel Prize winners have expressed "grave concern that Dr Sen appears to be incarcerated solely for peacefully exercising his fundamental right, in contravention of Articles 19 (freedom of opinion and ex-pression) and 22 (freedom of association) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights", which India has signed.
The letter also says that the two internal security laws under which Sen was charged, the PSA and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act 2004, "do not comport with international human rights standards".
The PSA criminalises even peaceful activity and protest, by declaring it "a danger or menace to public order, peace and tranquillity", because it might interfere with or "tends to interfere with the maintenance of public order… the administration of law or its… institutions", and encourages or preaches "disobedience to established law and its institutions."
Under these laws, Sen can be awarded the death penalty or life imprisonment. Among the charges he faces are being a member of a terrorist gang or organisation, knowingly holding the proceeds of terrorism, sedition, abetting unlawful activity, undermining public safety, and conspiracy to wage war against the state.
These charges hinge on one allegation by the police: namely, that Sen visited a detained and ailing Naxalite leader, Narayan Sanyal, in Raipur prison 33 times, and allegedly passed notes from him to his collaborators outside jail through a Kolkata-based businessman, Piyush Guha.
But Guha has denied that he received any letter from Sanyal, and said and that he signed a false confession under duress. During the trial, which began after long delays on April 30, key witnesses failed to corroborate the police version or turned hostile.
"As for the numerous visits to meet Sanyal, that cannot be a charge at all," says Prashant Bhushan, a public interest lawyer based in Delhi. "It was entirely in Sen’s line of work both as a civil rights defender and a physician. Besides, the visits were not surreptitious or illegal. They took place with the permission of and under the supervision of the jail authorities".
During a visit paid to Sen last September in the same prison IPS found it impossible - given the small size of the room and the eagle eyes of the officials - to smuggle out a piece of paper. All conversation is audible to the wardens.
Kavita Srivastava, Jaipur-based national general secretary of PUCL, holds that Sen was singled out by the Chhattisgarh government partly because he was trying to expose the brutality and outright criminality of the vigilante Salwa Judum group, armed and trained by the state.
Salwa Judum has perpetrated gruesome atrocities against ordinary citizens, besides Naxalites and their suspected sympathisers. It has burned down entire villages in Chhattisgarh’s dirt-poor southern districts, populated by acutely disadvantaged Adivasis or indigenous tribals.
The militia’s campaign of violence has turned nearly 100,000 people into refugees. But both the Chhattisgarh the central government continue to shield, support, finance and encourage it.
They recently told India’s Supreme Court that Salwa Judum is the only means available to them to counter Naxalite violence. The court has not yet pronounced judgement on a public interest petition filed by reputed academics demanding the disbanding of the militia.
Recently, Manmohan Singh described left-wing extremism as "the greatest internal security threat" facing India and promised to crush it. He said his government would not rest until the virus of Naxalism is eliminated.
His government pledged to spend over 750 million US dollars on fighting it. But its efforts have failed to contain the movement. Over the past two years, more people have been killed in Naxalite-related violence, including police counter-violence, than in Kashmir or India’s turbulent Northeast.
Chhattisgarh is the worst example of the failure of the state’s strategy of combating left-extremism exclusively by unleashing state repression against unarmed civilians.
Sen was trained as a paediatrician at the Christian Medical College in Vellore, Tamil Nadu, and has devoted most of adult life to improving the health and living conditions of the very poor in the Adivasi districts of Chhattisgarh, besides defending the civil liberties of wretchedly poor and exploited people.
Sen’s organisation, ‘Rupantar’, has run a clinic for 10 years in Dhamtari district. He has done exemplary voluntary work in the Gandhian mould in providing primary and preventive healthcare to people long deprived of access to any health facilities, especially from the state.
There are no medical personnel in the area, often not even a chemist within a 30-kilometre distance. Even in emergencies, the public is forced to depend on quacks, and corrupt, apathetic, incompetent, and usually missing, government employees.
Rupantar’s clinic offers a range of services at nominal cost, including rapid testing for the deadly Falciparum strain of the malaria parasite, which has saved scores of lives. These services are provided through local "barefoot doctors", who give the public invaluable advice on nutrition and preventive medicine.
Sen appears to have been victimised precisely because he formed a bridge between the human rights movement and other civil society organisations, and created a forum of empowerment for Chhattisgarh’s disadvantaged people.
The state government, whose very existence is premised upon the rapacious exploitation of the indigenous Adivasis and the staggering natural wealth of Chhattisgarh -and whose primary function is to subserve big business, forest contractors and traders - is loath to tolerate such individuals.
Chhattisgarh has an egregious recent history of repression. One of India's most creative trade unionists, Shankar Guha Niyogi, who ignited a mass awakening on social, cultural and economic issues, was assassinated at the behest of the state’s powerful and politically well-connected industrialists in 1991. They still roam free.
Chhattisgarh has among India’s worst indices of wealth maldistribution and income inequality. Some of its rural regions present a dismal picture of malnutrition, starvation deaths, illiteracy, and severe scarcity of safe drinking water. Some have suffered a rise in infant mortality.
The literacy rate among tribals here is less than one-third the national average -just 30 percent for men and 13 percent for women. Of the 1,220 villages of one district (Dantewada), 214 have no primary school..
But the state’s cities are booming with ostentatious affluence, spanking new hotels and glittering shopping malls.
The difference in life-expectancy between an advanced state like Kerala and tribal Chhattisgarh is a shocking 18 years. The two regions could well belong to different continents like Europe and Africa.
Chhattisgarh is extraordinarily rich in forests and in mineral wealth, including high-quality iron ore, bauxite, dolomite, quartzite, granite, corundum, precious stones, gold, diamonds and tin ore, besides limestone and coal.
This wealth has been voraciously extracted. But it has produced virtually no gains for the local population.
"Naxalism has thrived in Chhattisgarh as a response, albeit an irrational and violent one, to this obnoxious system of exploitation, dispossession and outright loot," says Rajiv Bharagava, a political scientist at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. "In Chhattisgarh, the state has collapsed as a provider of public services and a relatively impartial guardian of the law. The Naxalites flourish because the state has failed."
"This is a terrible comment on India’s democracy, adds Bhargava. Democracy isn’t only about elections. Unless it has accountable institutions and a system of rights, it loses much of its meaning."
(END/2008)
India - Iran: Course Correction
[Inter Press Service, 2 May 2008 |http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42202|en]
by Praful Bidwai
NEW DELHI, May 2 (IPS) - Relations between India and Iran, which deteriorated over the past three years from traditional friendship and warmth into mutual suspicion and tension, have started looking up again.
This development has significant implications for India’s role in West Asia and Central Asia as well as ties with its new 'strategic partner', the United States.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s one-day visit to New Delhi on Tuesday is expected to kickstart talks aimed at reviving long-stalled contracts for the purchase of natural gas, and at improving cooperation in a number of areas, including industry, communications and trade.
This was the first visit to India by an Iranian President since January 2003.
Ahmadinejad was originally meant to stop over in Delhi en route from Colombo for refuelling his plane.
But as soon as it was sounded out on this, India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) seized the opportunity to make the stopover a full-fledged official visit, with a meeting with Indian President Pratibha Patil, and a dinner meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, to which petroleum minister Murli Deora was also invited.
At the top of the agenda of the meeting with Singh was a proposed 7.4 billion dollar 2,600 km-long gas pipeline from Iran to Pakistan and India, which has become an icon of mutual cooperation, friendship and peace, as well as a test for India’s willingness to chart out a foreign policy course independent of Washington.
The pipeline, considered relevant for India long-term energy security, was stalled for a variety of reasons. Some of these are commercial, but the more important ones are related to political pressure from the U.S., which regards Iran as a rogue state or "state of concern" and wants to isolate it.
More talks will be needed to finalise the pipeline agreement. But if India, Iran and Pakistan do complete the deal, New Delhi will have to reorient its overall foreign policy posture and prepare to face more explicit opposition and greater pressure from the U.S.
"India signalled a small shift in that direction just before Ahmadinejad’s visit," says Qamar Agha, a Middle East expert who was until recently a visiting professor at the Centre for West Asian Studies at Jamia Millia Islamia university here. "Last week, the MEA issued an unusually strong statement rebuffing the U.S. State Department deputy spokesperson Tom Casey, which asked India to tell Iran that it must meet the obligations imposed upon it by the Security Council to suspend its uranium enrichment activities."
The MEA statement said: "India and Iran are civilisations whose relations spans centuries. Both nations are perfectly capable of managing all aspects of their relationship with the appropriate degree of care…. Neither country needs any guidance on the future conduct of bilateral relations as both countries believe that engagement and dialogue alone lead to peace."
A day later, Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee also said that it is not for the U.S. or any other state to usurp the power to declare Iran a rogue nuclear state; it is entirely for the UN watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), to decide if Iran is developing nuclear weapons or not.
Earlier, India’s National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan too had stressed India’s "civilisational and economic ties" with Iran, which give India a vantage point to engage with it. Iran, he said, "is a major country with tremendous influence, and you need to deal with it diplomatically... (with) erudition and understanding ..."
India’s new position stands in sharp contrast to its votes against Iran at the IAEA in September 2005 and again in early 2006, which resulted in Iran being brought before the United Nations Security Council for sanctions.
A former U.S. official and chief arms-control negotiator, Stephen Rademaker, has publicly said that India’s votes against Iran were secured through "coercion".
The reason for India’s recent change of stance has been attributed to various factors, including the ruling United Progressive Alliance’s need to demonstrate its "foreign policy independence" ahead of a general election due within a year, a desire to ensure the Left parties’ support, and keenness to tie up long-term energy supplies in an era of historically unprecedented oil prices.
"Perhaps the most important consideration," says Agha, "is that the Indian government knows that the nuclear cooperation deal with the United States is unlikely to be clinched soon, under George W. Bush’s presidency. This means that India does not have to look over the shoulder all the time at Washington, and that it can have greater autonomy in practice."
Agha added: ''New Delhi is also anxious to broaden and deepen its relationship with Tehran, not least because Iran holds the key to India’s access to Afghanistan, and to Central Asia, with its enormous natural wealth, including oil and natural gas. If India is to sustain 8 percent GDP growth, its policymakers believe it must establish guaranteed access to Central Asia’s resources before China and Russia consolidate their position in the region."
In recent weeks, India has discussed possibilities of deepening industrial and economic cooperation with Iran, beyond oil and gas.
India has agreed to help Iran build a crucial 600-km rail link in the north-south corridor of the proposed Trans-Asian Railway project. This will run from the Iranian port of Chabahar to Fahraj, and through Azerbaijan and Russia all the way to St Petersburg.
India is already constructing a road link between Zaranj and Delaram in Western Afghanistan, which will be linked to a transit corridor to Chabahar, which is close to India’s upper West coast.
This will enable India to trade with Afghanistan while bypassing Pakistan, which is reluctant to grant it India transit rights.
Other projects - including metallurgical industries, gas liquefaction and port development - are also under discussion. India is being offered large contracts in Iran for laying railway tracks, supplying electrical equipment, and upgrading railway signalling systems and train operations.
However, what of the crucial Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline? Ahmadinejad expressed the hope that the three countries’ petroleum ministers would reach an agreement on the project within the next 45 days.
But India’s Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon was more cautious and said a "lot of work" needs to be done to ensure that the pipeline is commercially viable and secure, and that gas supply is not interrupted.
However, it is clear that India sees the pipeline as a "confidence-building measure", not just a commercial project.
"Yet, that does not mean that the project will go through without major problems," says a high official in India’s petroleum ministry, who requested anonymity under briefing rules. "At least three issues need to be resolved. First, India wants a dedicated gas field to be nominated for the project, with detailed development plans. Second, India wants custody of the gas only at the India-Pakistan border, and not at the Pakistan-Iran border near Gwadar, as proposed."
Adds the official: "And then there’s the issue of pricing of the gas. India, Iran and Pakistan reached an agreement in January last year on the base price. But Iran wants any future price revision based on a shifting band, not a fixed one. This may not be acceptable to major consumers of gas in India, who can only pay a limited price for fuel in power generation."
None of these problems is insuperable but most agree that political will is needed to resolve them.
(END/2008)
Will To Stop Live Kidney Sales Missing
[Inter Press Service, 8 February 2008 |http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41117|en]
by Praful Bidwai
NEW DELHI, Feb 8 (IPS) - The arrest of Indian kidney transplant racketeer Amit Kumar alias Santosh Raut has lifted the lid off a huge well-ramified illicit international organ trading ring with operations running into billions of dollars across several countries.
Kumar, who was tracked down in a resort in neighbouring Nepal on Thursday, has been absconding from the law since Jan. 24, when the police raided his clinic in a Delhi suburb and arrested his associates. He is thought to have been responsible for some 600 illegal kidney transplants.
The global kidney transplant racket is one of the most obnoxious manifestations of North-South inequality and of the repugnant practice of stealing organs from the poorest of the poor in the Third World, usually for patients in rich countries suffering from end-stage organ failure.
India is a major source of organs sold in the illicit international bazaar. Donors are usually induced into selling a kidney - for as little as 1,000 US dollars to a maximum of 2,000 dollars - just to survive.
The bazaar itself is highly evolved, with extensive cross-border transactions and a hierarchy of preferences and prices.
Thus, kidneys from South Asian countries, the Philippines and much of sub-Saharan Africa are sold for as little as 1,000 - 2,000 dollars according to a medical professional who has tracked organ trading, but who insisted on anonymity.
"A Romanian kidney goes for 3,000 dollars," he says. "A kidney from Turkey costs 10,000 dollars plus. Mexico, Brazil and South Africa fall in between. These base prices are marked up by middlemen, and further jacked up by the high fees that unscrupulous doctors charge."
The source adds: "The recipient can end up paying anything between 35,000 and 125,000 dollars for kidney donation, including hospital stay and operation charges."
Trade in human organs poses a series of ethical and practical challenges to the medical profession, healthcare regulators, governments and the larger public.
But it also opens an opportunity for investigative and oversight agencies to develop innovative methods to track down and bring to justice those who profiteer on the backs of the destitute.
Kumar has been conducting his ghoulish business, since 1994, from numerous facilities spread across India's national capital region. Earlier, he was based in the central Indian city of Nagpur and in the western metropolis of Mumbai.
According to the police, multimillionaire Kumar was not a surgeon or physician trained in mainstream modern medicine. He had a degree in the traditional Ayurvedic system of indigenous medicine.
His operation in and around Delhi was run on a massive scale and involved three hospitals, five diagnostic centres and 10 laboratories. Besides he relied on a network of more than 50 accomplices, including doctors and nurses, "spotters" and touts who would lure potential donors with the promise of jobs, and thugs who would force them to part with their kidneys.
The kidney donors were typically extremely poor, unemployed people from backward states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, who have become victims of India's neoliberal economic policies and are often in deep debt.
The kidney recipients were nationals from several countries, including Canada, Greece and Turkey.
The racket was unearthed thanks to the initiative of an earnest young woman police officer. "But it is inconceivable that it could have been conducted for years without police collusion," says K.S. Subrahmaniam, a scholar and former senior police officer.
Evidence suggests that Kumar evaded arrest last month because he was tipped off by the police. According to one of his chauffeurs, he was arrested some years ago in Delhi with a surgeon who collaborates with him, but was let off upon paying a bribe of Rs 1.8 million (45,000 dollars).
What demarcated Kumar's operation from the kidney trade which flourishes in many Indian cities, including relatively prosperous Chennai, is the use of muscle power against the donors. Typically, extreme economic distress compels poor people to sell their body parts.
But Kumar's goons would abduct and illegally detain their dirt-poor victims, and drug them or beat them into agreeing to the removal of their kidneys.
"This outrageously criminal angle only highlights the gravity of the failure of the police in enforcing the law of the land," adds Subrahmaniam.
Besides flagrant corruption, the kidney scam underscores the dysfunctional state of India's regulatory systems and laws in respect of healthcare and medical ethics. Thus, Kumar could operate his hospitals and clinics in different cities without registering them.
"Some recently passed laws do mandate the registration of such facilities in some states," says Dr Subhash Gupta, a gastrointestinal and liver transplant specialist at Delhi's Indraprastha Apollo Hospital. "But there are few inspectors, and the concerned agencies don't bother to implement the mandate."
Professional self-regulatory bodies like the Indian Medical Council concern themselves only with the registration qualifications of physicians formally trained in mainstream medicine.
However, an estimated third or more of all self-styled medical professionals or healers in India belong to other streams, including Ayurveda, Unani medicine and homeopathy. They escape the regulatory net altogether.
Voluntar organisations like the People's Health Movement and Medico Friends' Circle have long complained of the absence of authoritative medical practice guidelines.
Again, India's state-level food and drug administrations are notoriously weak, ill-equipped and understaffed. They only inspect a minuscule proportion of pharmaceutical factories or chemists for quality.
Virtually anyone who calls himself a doctor can prescribe a range of medicines and be reasonably confident that the chemist will sell them. This is true even of drugs that can only be sold on the recommendation of a qualified medical practitioner.
In 1994, India enacted the Transplantation of Human Organs Act (THOA), which illegalised the sale of human organs and facilitates organ donations from the brain-dead (cadaverous transplants). But it came years after illegal transplants had become established.
The Act allowed organ donations by close relatives without government clearance. But all other relatives or strangers who wish to donate must be cleared by an expert Authorisation Committee.
In practice, such committees are rarely formed before a potentially illegitimate transplant is carried out. THOA also has a big loophole. It dispenses with prior approval if the donor feels "affection" or "attachment towards the recipient". This is so vague as to permit extensive mercantile abuse.
In India, like in most other Third World countries, the donors' consent is typically secured through coercion or under extremely exploitative and unequal conditions. It cannot be remotely termed free or informed.
The donors are usually quickly discharged without being warned of risks from their surgery. There's no follow-up treatment, nor any attempt to monitor if the remaining kidney malfunctions. Many donors end up ill and even more destitute.
The medical profession's involvement in the organ trade racket betrays the Indian elite's contempt for human life and the principle of inviolability of the human body, which is fundamental to any civilised society.
This view justifies the raiding of flesh-and-blood people to steal their vital but non-regenerating organs. It places an abysmally low value on the bodies of vulnerable people and accepts their ‘cannibalisation’.
The Indian medical profession has long been complicit in all kinds of malpractices, including female foeticide, leading to "27 million missing women" through a falling sex ratio. But only 66 cases have been registered against doctors for sex selection, so far.
"Yet, there is a smart way of detecting and zeroing on clandestine organ transplants," says Dr Gupta. "All transplant recipients are given immuno-suppressant drugs, such as cyclosporin, tacrolimus and mycophenolate. These are only made by a handful of companies like Novartis Roche and Panacea, which know exactly which hospitals/clinics order them."
If the Indian government and its police agencies muster the will, they can easily track, monitor and raid these centres of crime, said one conscientious doctor.
(END/2008)
Novartis Patents Case Far From Dead
Inter Press Service, 9 August 2007
by Praful Bidwai
NEW DELHI, Aug 9 (IPS) - Cancer patients in India have reason to be relieved at a high court ruling this week which dismissed a petition by Swiss pharmaceuticals multinational corporation (MNC) Novartis challenging an Indian law which denies patents for minor or trivial improvements to known drugs.
At immediate stake is the cost of a leukaemia drug, imatinib mesylate. Novartis prices its brand of the medicine, Gleevec/Glivec, at Rs 120,000 (3,000 US dollars) per dose. Indian generic drug manufacturers sell it at Rs 8,000 (200 dollars).
India’s average per capita annual income is equivalent to only a fifth of the price of a single dose of Gleevec/Glivec. Had Novartis been granted a patent on its version of the drug, tens of thousands of Indians would have been deprived of life-saving treatment.
The Novartis judgment will have far-reaching implications for generic drugs used in many countries of the world for the treatment of countless diseases and disorders, including vaccines for HIV-AIDS, as well as medicines for cancer, asthma, heart disease and mental illness.
Health activists the world over, including Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF), the Berne Declaration group, as well as the All-India Drug Action Network (AIDAN) based in this country, have welcomed the verdict in the Novartis case for its "positive impact on public health" and the cause of promoting patients’ access to affordable medicines.
They see the judgment as a vindication of India’s Patents Act, in particular its Section 3(d), which disallows frivolous patents for "the mere discovery of a new form of a known substance which does not result in the enhancement of the known efficacy of that substance". They have also appealed to Novartis not to contest the judgment.
However, the Indian government is itself reportedly planning to amend that very Section to allow the "evergreening" of patents on the original molecule of a new drug through its marginal modification which does not constitute an original invention.
This will in effect achieve more than Novartis can by appealing the Madras (Chennai) High Court verdict in India’s Supreme Court.
"That would make a travesty of the very rationale of one of the few measures in the Patents Act of 1970, amended in 2005, which protects the public from the abuse of a monopoly patent right granted to corporations," says Mira Shiva, a long-standing health activist with AIDAN.
Adds Shiva: "The sour irony is that by changing Section 3(d), the government would be sanctifying the discredited report of an official committee on patent laws, headed by the former director general of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), R.A. Mashelkar, which had recommended just such an amendment."
The Mashelkar report created a scandal six months ago because it plagiarised text pertaining to "incremental innovations" (or marginal modifications to patented drugs) from a document prepared for a pro-Big Pharma think-tank based in Europe, funded by drug multinationals, including Novartis.
Disgraced and embarrassed, Mashelkar himself withdrew the report, although he unconvincingly denied the plagiarism.
But India’s commerce ministry is now trying to smuggle his recommendation into law though the backdoor. "The Economic Times" reported Thursday, quoting a senior bureaucrat, that the government is planning to allow "incremental innovation" by redefining "efficacy" enhancement.
That would entirely negate the effect of the Madras High Court judgment, dismissing Novartis’ contention that section 3(d) is "vague, arbitrary and violative of Article 14" of the Indian Constitution, which guarantees the right to equality and non-discrimination.
Novartis also claimed that the Section does not comply with the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement of the World Trade Organisation, mandating a strict patent regime, which India has signed.
The Court ruled that it had no jurisdiction to decide whether Indian patent laws comply with TRIPS; and that Section 3(d) does not suffer from "vagueness, ambiguity and arbitrariness" and contains reasonable "in-built protection" for patent applicants.
Novartis can appeal against the judgement in the Supreme Court, or get the Swiss government to move the WTO’s Disputes Settlement Body against it. The company has not announced what it intends to do.
The fate of Section 3(d) of the Indian Patents Act will have a huge impact on the health situation in the countries of the Global South.
India, called "the medicine factory of the Third World", is a leading manufacturer of generic drugs and has successfully developed cheap but high-quality medicines across a wide spectrum. Indian-made generics cost only a fraction of the same chemical entities manufactured in the West, which enjoy monopolistic privilege through strict product patents.
More than half the medicines currently used for AIDS treatment in the developing countries come from India. Indian-made products are also used to treat over 80 percent of the 80,000 AIDS patients in (MSF) projects.
Currently, nearly 10,000 drug patent applications await examination in India. If India grants "evergreening" patents, that would spell the end of affordable medicines in the developing countries.
That is why the Novartis case triggered widespread protest in global civil society. Over 420,000 people worldwide signed a petition asking Novartis to drop the case.
Among them were Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the former Switzerland president and health minister Ruth Dreifuss (currently chair of the World Health Organisation board on intellectual property and TRIPS), and several members of the European Parliament and the U.S. Congress.
"Given this context, it would be utterly treacherous for the Indian government to amend or drop Section 3(d)," says Dinesh Abrol, a specialist in intellectual property issues at the National Institute of Science, Technology and Development Studies in New Delhi. "The arguments commerce ministry bureaucrats advance for doing so are largely specious and wrongly hold that India will lose foreign direct investment in the drugs industry and offshoring opportunities in pharmaceuticals research and development (R&D)."
Many researchers argue that R&D offshoring is largely a function of low costs and the state of the pharmaceutical sciences in India, and not of the degree of patent protection. "There is no evidence that India has lost contracts because of poor intellectual property protection or lack of confidentiality in pharmaceuticals research," says Abrol.
He adds: "What the government needs to do after the Madras judgment is to systematically set out in a Patents Office manual the criteria for judging the enhanced efficacy of a drug, including reduced side-effects, contraindications and hard data on assessing greater bio-availability. That's the best way of defending and preventing the abuse of Section 3(d)."
However, it is far from clear if the Indian government, in particular its commerce ministry, itself deeply compromised with the WTO, can summon up the will to defend the public interest against predatory multinational corporations.
(END/2007)
G8: India Stonewalls Demand for Emission Cuts
Inter Press Service, 7 June 2007
by Praful Bidwai
NEW DELHI, Jun 7 (IPS) - India is likely to cut a sorry figure on climate change issues during and after the G8 summit at Heiligendamm in Germany.
As the world's fifth largest emitter of greenhouse gases (GHG) and one of its fastest growing economies, India will come under intense pressure both from the European Union and the United States to cut its emissions. But India will doggedly refuse to make any time-bound commitment to reducing them, and strongly resist legally binding caps.
At press briefings on the eve of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to Germany -ironically, on World Environment Day - senior officials made it clear that New Delhi sticks to its stand that it is the developed world which caused climate change through its industrial activities; the onus to reverse the damage lies on the developed countries.
Singh said: "Due care must be taken not to allow growth and development prospects in the developing world to be undermined or constrained." Singh emphasised the "principle of common but differentiated responsibility and respective capabilities between the developed and developing world".
This is shorthand for demanding that the industrialised countries cough up the bulk of the costs for reversing climate change.
Singh added: "...more and not less development is the best way for developing countries to address themselves to the issue of preserving the environment and protecting the climate."
This means India will demand special concessions for the developing countries like patent-free technology transfer in respect of "clean energy", and financial assistance, including venture capital funding, to make a transition towards reduced greenhouse gas emissions.
"With such a stonewalling and negative approach, India won't emerge from the G-8 meeting smelling of roses," says Himanshu Thakkar, South Asia coordinator of Dams, Rivers and People, which looks closely at climate change issues and which recently highlighted the contribution of India's large dams to releases of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
Adds Thakkar: "This will seriously compromise India's claim to any kind of global leadership. But evidently, the Indian government is not particularly bothered about its international credibility. Like the Chinese, it too adopts a parochial and narrowly nationalist position on climate change."
China has joined India in rejecting mandatory caps on greenhouse emissions or cuts in them. There is one difference, though. China has at least prepared a 62-page comprehensive national strategy document on climate change, including a plan to improve energy efficiency. Chinese officials say they won't accept "any quantified emissions reduction targets, but that does not mean we will not assume responsibilities in responding to climate change."
China has pledged to improve, before the end of this decade, its energy efficiency by 20 percent over its 2005 level. It has also committed itself to raising the proportion of renewable energy in its total energy consumption to 10 percent by 2010.
India has set no such (voluntary) targets. All it will do is reiterate the stand that mandatory emission caps would be unfair to the developing countries, which are still trying to fight poverty and modernise their economies.
China and India together are set to surpass the U.S. as the world's biggest emitters of greenhouse gases in two years' time.
The Indian government's strategy to avert pressure to cut emissions is essentially to hide behind the country's poor people, 60 percent of whom live on less than $2 a day. It repeats ad nauseam that India's per capita emissions are low, about a quarter of the world average.
However, these per capita emissions are rising rapidly. India's total greenhouse emissions too have been increasing almost four times faster than the world average. They are expected to rise two-and-a-half times by 2030.
Citing low per capita emissions does not make sound sense because India is a highly stratified society.
The bulk of the recent rise in India's emissions comes from the increasingly profligate and luxurious lifestyles of its rich and middle classes and their skyrocketing consumption of private vehicles, energy and water, as well as air-conditioners, washing machines, microwave ovens, and plasma and liquid crystal display television sets.
"Indian policy-makers are victims of a double fallacy", says Thakkar. "First, they wrongly assume that development must inevitably mean higher consumption of resources and hence emissions, when it need not. And secondly, they believe that more development (in reality, higher GDP growth) is the sole key to reducing poverty. This assumes that ‘trickle-down' will work. That has proved an illusion."
India officials parrot the view that "India is not a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and nor will it be so in the foreseeable future." But India is already the fifth largest greenhouse gas emitter and is close to overtaking the number 3 and 4, Japan and Russia.
India, many environmentalists believe, will eventually agree to emission caps, but only for a price.
"The price will be greater carbon trading quotas which can be sold at a high profit by Indian companies to polluting corporations from the industrialised countries under the Clean Development Mechanism agreed under the Kyoto Protocol", says Soumitra Ghosh, a West Bengal-based activist of the Northeastern Society for the Preservation of Nature, and a member of the Durban Coalition for Climate Justice, an international activist network.
Ghosh said India's position was dubious. ''It is lobbying for the inclusion of hazardous technologies like nuclear power into the CDM. More important, it wants to promote plantations on India's forest lands, which can then be brought into the ambit of carbon trading. This will mean selling India's forests to Western corporations which will thus avoid reducing their own emissions by buying largely fictitious carbon credits."
For all its lip service to promoting renewable energy and clean technologies, India's real emphasis in energy generation is on extracting and burning fossil fuels. Their contribution to electricity generation is now as high as 70 percent.
As a result, India's carbon emissions per dollar of GDP are three times higher than those of the U.S.
And yet, many influential Indian commentators are calling for a U.S.-sponsored "Marshall Plan II", no less, which will finance the developing countries' transition towards cleaner, less polluting technologies.
"But we have seen from the experience of the Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting substances that such funds are cornered by corporates and nothing trickles down to the larger society," says Ghosh.
The evolving Indian approach to the issue of climate change is best revealed by the government's latest move, to constitute a high-powered advisory group called the Prime Minister's Council on Climate Change.
The Council has 22 members, 14 of them ministers and officials, most of them opposed to greenhouse emission caps. Of the non-official members, only one is a known environmentalist. The others comprise a business magnate, former bureaucrats and journalists with no particular distinction in reporting on or analysing environmental issues. (END/2007)
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