The Blinkers That Threaten Our Unity: New Age Islam's Selection, 12 October 2016
New Age Islam Edit Bureau
12 October 2016
• The Blinkers That Threaten Our Unity
By Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
• Compensation Most Foul
By Apoorvanand
• Guns Won’t Destroy Terrorism: As India Ups the Military Ante against Terror It Must Also Reach Out To Pak Public
By Sagarika Ghose
• Strategists Must Know Pakistan’s India Policy Stems from False Religious Antagonism
By Vivek Katju
• The War in Yemen Will Intensify, Bringing Shame upon All The Protagonists
By Bobby Ghosh
• A Tragedy That Implicates Us All
By Shiv Visvanathan
• India Needs Help of Kashmiris to Offset Pakistan’s Dirty Cross-Border Games
By Abhijit Banerjee
Compiled By New Age Islam Edit Bureau
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The Blinkers That Threaten Our Unity
By Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
Oct 11, 2016
The difference between country and government is being deliberately obliterated. Several incidents warn us that India is moving away from the grand universalism of its past into a ghetto of the mind.
Walking in Lodi Gardens, I am reminded every morning of P.V. Narasimha Rao telling a Singapore audience that India internalised every foreign conqueror except the last. The Afghan Lodis replaced the Sayyid dynasty and ruled the Delhi sultanate from 1451 to 1526 until Babar defeated Ibrahim Lodi and established the Mughal empire. No one thinks of these waves of rulers as foreign. A host of saddening current controversies warn of the potentially dangerous disappearance of the eclecticism which enriched and integrated Indian life through the centuries.
The spirit of intolerance that is sweeping our country disturbs other nations as well. The egregious Donald Trump has threatened two abominations if American voters send him to the White House. He will impose a blanket ban on Muslim immigration and not only build a wall along the 3,201-km US-Mexico border but make Mexicans pay for it. Nigel Farage of the UK Independent Party boasts of being responsible for Britain’s vote to leave the European Union: he fanned the irrational fear of foreigners that is latent in all societies. Despite German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s brave decision, thousands of battered Syrian refugees are marooned in Greece because so many European borders are closed against them.
Man is retreating everywhere into the dark and airless security of primeval caves. Loyalty has become a sectarian attribute. Narrow-minded politicians are allowed to define patriotism. The vital difference between nation and state, between country and government, is being deliberately obliterated. Several recent incidents warn us that India is moving away from the grand universalism of its past into a ghetto of the mind. The glibness with which anyone who questions any official decision involving Muslims or Pakistan is ordered to go and live in Pakistan implies the affirmation of a single-identity majoritarian state. There are dread shades in it of the old American saying that the only good (Red) Indian is a dead Indian.
The blinkers that threaten national unity are not only communal. The incident at the Central University of Haryana in Mahendragarh when Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad activists objected to a discussion of the Army’s human rights record after a dramatised version of one of Mahasweta Devi’s short stories had been staged illustrated that patriotism is seen as the monopoly of a single dominant ideology. If you say Pakistani actors are not terrorists, you are a Pakistani stooge. If you seek evidence of the September 29 strikes, you are casting aspersions on our brave Jawans. Do the politicians who trot out the second charge really not understand that it is their veracity — not the military’s — that might be questioned? A loyal party functionary like Manohar Gopalkrishna Prabhu Parrikar is not synonymous with the Indian Army even if he is defence minister.
I can understand the Centre fearing that public respect for the military, especially in states labouring under the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, might suffer if the National Human Rights Commission investigates human rights abuse allegations against the Army. But this is colonial logic. A democratically elected contemporary government should have nothing to hide. It should also have alternative means of assuring the public that the guardians of the peace are not its violators. Telling the Supreme Court that the NHRC cannot investigate charges because it is only a recommendatory body is hiding behind a technicality.
The Ravin Sisodia case is too tragic for discussion in a newspaper column, yet some of its implications reflect on the body politic and the nature of the Indian State. The apparent violation of the Flag Code 2002 and the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act 1971 don’t concern me most. What does is the sectarian intolerance and religious bigotry that exploded in Mohammad Akhlaq’s murder and his son Danish being injured because the Hindu inhabitants of Uttar Pradesh’s Bisada village suspected them of slaughtering a cow or eating beef.
The unfortunate Sisodia was one of 18 persons accused of the crime. How he came to die in a Delhi hospital certainly demands a full investigation. Anyone found responsible must be punished. But the understandable grief of bereaved relatives doesn’t automatically make him a martyr; others are clearly exploiting the tragedy for political reasons. It’s not surprising that the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s Sadhvi Prachi should fish in troubled waters. But a modicum of responsible behaviour is expected even from a man like Mahesh Sharma since he holds Cabinet rank in the Union government.
By paying his respects to Sisodia, the culture minister called him a martyr. His action seemed to condone Akhlaq’s murder, the assault of his son, and the violation of the Flag Code 2002 and the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act 1971. It pre-empted the proceedings pending against the 18 accused.
It’s unfortunate having to argue a public principle where private grief is involved. But the point is that all the individual implications of Mr Sharma’s action add up to promoting a single-culture India which ruthlessly stamps out dissenting positions. This is a total and absolute denial of the universal view of Mahatma Gandhi’s “I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.”
If this is the India that Narendra Modi and his colleagues are shaping, they will bequeath a legacy of bitter conflict to future generations. The discredited and rejected notion of a “Hindu Pakistan” would not only be an inglorious end to the lofty vision of our founding fathers; it will be Aurangzeb’s strife-torn India in reverse.
Source: asianage.com/columnists/blinkers-threaten-our-unity-950
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Compensation Most Foul
By Apoorvanand
October 12, 2016
October 8 will be remembered as the date when India crossed the Rubicon. Nothing as dramatic as the “surgical strikes” happened on this day.
On this date, the government of Uttar Pradesh decided to award a compensation of Rs 25 lakh to the family of Ravin Sisodia, a resident of Bisara, a village in Dadri. Sisodia died in jail due to multiple organ failure. The doctors and the forensic report concluded that it was a natural death. Sisodia wasn’t in jail for some petty crime. Last year, he was allegedly part of the crowd which dragged a Muslim man, Mohammad Akhlaq, out of his house and killed him. Akhlaq’s death raised indignation across the nation and led to a wave of protests initiated by writers against the state-sponsored intolerance directed at minorities.
Only one death. An insignificant figure when compared with the numbers of Muslims killed in Bhagalpur or Nellie or Gujarat or the Sikhs killed in 1984 in Delhi and elsewhere. But the shock it generated was felt across the nation. The act and its fallout played a major role in the assembly election of Bihar. The death of Akhlaq was a result of the complete failure, not only of the state’s organs, but also of our polity. It was because of the realisation of the enormity of this failure that the UP government gave a huge compensation to the family of Akhlaq.
Compensation to Muslims in the wake of communal violence has always been an issue with Hindus. I would call this compensation envy or compensation complex — which neighbours of the Muslim victims suffer from. We have heard complaints — most recently in Muzaffarnagar — that Muslims are, in fact, beneficiaries of communal violence.
Indus feels deprived and they believe that the violence is in fact invited by the Muslims themselves for this compensation. They allege that Muslims burn their houses for state money. It also leads to a hatred for Muslims as they are seen helpless, seeking alms from the state and unable to fend for themselves. They are looked down upon as lesser human beings living off the money of the Hindus, who are the real and major taxpayers.
The compensation for the death of Akhlaq was made an issue by the leaders of the BJP and the villagers. Violent campaigns in the name of cow protection even after this death continued across states which caused humiliation and claimed more Muslim lives. All this led the villagers of Bisara to feel that killing of Akhlaq was a just and pious act. The fiction of the killing of a cow and eating beef turned into fact through a sustained campaign. Within a year, Akhlaq and his family were converted from victims into accused and suspects. They had by their alleged act of killing of a cow, sacred to Hindus, instigated and lead the Hindus to express their anger which led to the death of Akhlaq. The courts have directed the authorities to file a criminal case against the family of Akhlaq.
In the imagination of the villagers of Bisara, Sisodia and others became victims and heroes at the same time. We have seen agitation by the villagers of Bisara demanding their release and withdrawal of cases against them. A similar agitation is going on in Muzaffarnagar. These agitations are led by locals blessed by the RSS and the BJP. The BJP has decided to remove the fig leaf: Its leaders openly address the revenge-seeking crowd and generate a sense of injustice and anger in them.
Sisodia was a taxi driver. Did he actually participate in the killing? It was yet to be decided. But he was an accused. And he died due to an illness awaiting trial. Are such deaths compensated by the state? We know the answer. But the UP government thought otherwise. By giving in to bullying by the kin of the accused — who refused to cremate Sisodia if their demand was not met — the government has created a dangerous precedent. What is also unique in this affair is the arrangement through which this figure has been achieved. The state government pays Rs 10 lakh, 10 lakh will be given by some NGOs and five lakh by Union minister Mahesh Sharma and Sangeet Som, a BJP MLA who is also an accused in the communal violence in Muzaffarnagar. It was a deal brokered by the minister. The state government agreed as it did not want the impression that Hindu deaths didn’t matter to go in an election year. We need to notice that the state government sheepishly allowed its jurisdiction to be violated by the Central minister.
Involvement of NGOs in this compensation package is an innovation. Why was this done?
Did the state government not have sufficient funds? What is the Central minister’s contribution doing here? This single act is a complete capitulation and surrender of its authority by the UP government. It will have grave implications for the principle of division of powers between the states and the Centre. It is also an act that informalises governance.
Muslims in India are quite used to majoritarian violence against them. They are aware of the general reluctance of the authorities and the politicians to ensure justice in such cases. They have also witnessed campaigners of hatred and violence against them reach the highest offices. The only consolation has been that these acts of violence are recognised as wrong — the violation of the constitutional promise given to them. October 8 changed that in significant ways. The principle behind state compensation was turned on its head. This was not an act of compassion shown by the state towards one of its citizens. It also negates the crime committed last year and vindicates the stand of the villagers and the BJP.
The government of UP is led by the heir of a man who as the chief minister did not hesitate to order firing on a Hindu mob which threatened to destroy a Muslim place of worship. He only felt bound by the constitutional morality which asked him to preserve the rights of the minorities.
This act reminded one of the letter by Jawaharlal Nehru to Padmaja Naidu from Patna in 1946. He had returned from Bhagalpur, which was in the grip of communal frenzy and Hindus were attacking and killing Muslims. Nehru writes that he was horrified by the madness of the Hindu peasants but what brought some solace to him that the security forces opened fire to stop them. In the firing, some 400 Hindus were killed.
Nehru tells Naidu that he generally abhorred killing but somehow this act seemed to restore a semblance of balance in favour of the victim Muslims. Nehru’s vision was instrumental in shaping our constitutional morality: To stand firmly for the rights of the minorities, undeterred by the threat of the numbers.
Indian state seems to have travelled far from 1946 and 1990. The only question minorities have now, when it would throw away the fig leaf of secularism and show itself as it really is.
Source: indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/dadri-lynching-akhlaq-accused-ravin-sisodia-custody-death-compensation-up-government-foul-beef-ban-3077505/
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Guns Won’t Destroy Terrorism: As India Ups the Military Ante against Terror It Must Also Reach Out To Pak Public
By Sagarika Ghose
October 12, 2016
On a TV debate recently, BJP MP Meenakshi Lekhi on being asked why video evidence of surgical strikes was not being released to counter Pakistan’s accusation that no strikes took place, bluntly said, “To hell with the Pakistani people.” Earlier defence minister Manohar Parikkar declared, “Pakistan is hell.” Other BJP ministers like Giriraj Singh have periodically suggested that “anti-national” Indians be packed off to Pakistan. For a large section of BJP and Sangh Parivar, there is no sane civil society in Pakistan; the country is a Hindu nightmare of terrorists and bearded mullahs.
Contrast this with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s far-sighted speech at Kozhikode where he called on Pakistan for a war against poverty and unemployment or with his speech at a BJP party meeting where he exhorted Hindu Indians to treat Muslims as their own. Whether he’s speaking on Gau Rakshaks or on the need to create a gap between the Pakistani people and the terror structure, or to avoid chest-thumping jingoism, a regular dissonance is surfacing between prime minister and party.
This may be a calibrated good cop-bad cop routine. Or it could be a fundamental and growing schism between ideologues spoiling for a fight and practical politicians mindful of the dangers of military escalation.
Who is India at war with? Is India at war with the terrorists who have not only struck India but have also attacked a Peshawar school and killed over 100 children, who have gunned down Pakistani rights activists like Sabeen Mehmud, who have taken thousands of lives across Pakistan? Or is India at war with Pakistani actors, singers, academics, cricketers, journalists, many of whom on pain of death are trying to lead normal lives, raising ever-weakening voices against the deadly ISI linked religio-terror virus raging through their land?
The dwindling liberal, soft-liner, dialogue-seeking Pakistan constituency is in dire need of empowerment. The more Indian political leaders pour abuse on the Pakistani people, the more India strengthens precisely those forces which it is supposedly trying to fight and undermine. The more the MNS attacks Pakistani actors, the more it plays into the hands of those in Pakistan gearing up for a thousand years war with India.
Instead, as India ups the military ante, it must also up the civilian ante and emphasise – as the prime minister did – that India recognises the gap between common people and the terror machine. Sane liberal India must be as determined to welcome Pakistani actors as it is to defend itself against Pakistan-based terror.
Modi pointed to this gap between people and terrorists in his Kozhikode speech; now after well publicised “surgical strikes”, the Indian leadership must move to a vigorous political reach-out process in Kashmir and people-to-people contacts with Pakistan. Providing the blistering sound bites that ISI and Hafiz Saeed want to hear, only strengthens the suicide bomber’s resolve.
Attempts at peace have brought reprisals. Vajpayee’s Lahore bus journey led to the Kargil war, Modi’s birthday diplomacy led to Pathankot and Uri. India’s hardest targets have been hit, namely well-fortified military camps to nudge the subcontinent towards battle. Should Indian politicians then echo the words of Zia-ul-Haq and rage about bleeding each other by inflicting a thousand cuts?
The Indian state has always rejected Jinnah’s two nation theory – the basis of Partition – that Hindus and Muslims were two nations who could not coexist. Today, Pakistan has virtually no Hindu population, India has the second largest Muslim population in the world. India, the multi-religious, federal, secular state was seen to have triumphed over the theocratic Pakistan, when religious allegiance could not hold it together in 1971.
As LSE professor Barry Buzan writes, if the organising principle of Pakistan based on Islamic allegiance threatens India with secession then the secular principle of India undermines the very raison d’etre of the existence of Pakistan as a homeland for Muslims. When the very existence of one country is already a threat to the other, why heighten the conflict by harking to the fires of the discredited two nation theory and stoking conflict between common people?
A weak, terror ravaged, nuclear-armed Pakistan next door, many are agreed, would be a disaster for India. A thousand years war is hardly a realistic option. To fight the terror machine, India must reassert its organising principles of secularism and tolerance and urgently, on priority, restart the political process in Kashmir.
A photo or video of the prime minister visiting a Srinagar hospital to cradle youth injured by pellet guns would do a great deal to fight those instigating violence, rather than pouring more troops into Baramulla and Anantnag.
A hot-eyed ideologically driven “Hindu Rashtra”, where Gau Rakshaks wreak violence on Muslims or Sangh activists call for Akhand Bharat can neither make peace in Kashmir nor reach out to Pakistan. An India that turns its back on its own founding principles, however “right-wing” and “tough on terror” the government claims to be, will remain hostage to the terrorist. Our Constitution framers did not imagine Indian nationalism as Hindu hegemony over all Muslims in the subcontinent. Indian nationalism was imagined as the hegemony of constitutional principles.
In the pursuit of nationalism based on principles rather than religion, the Indian government must recognise and embrace the Kashmiri Muslim, reach out to Pakistani citizens and signal its commitment to sensible modern values. If India continues to marginalise Kashmir, belittle Pakistanis and if noisy zealots demand a perpetual Hindu versus Muslim holy war, there is little hope. Today the military track against Pakistan is highly visible, the civilian track should be equally visible.
Source: blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/bloody-mary/guns-wont-destroy-terrorism-as-india-ups-the-military-ante-against-terror-it-must-also-reach-out-to-pak-public/
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Strategists Must Know Pakistan’s India Policy Stems from False Religious Antagonism
By Vivek Katju
October 12, 2016
No previous Prime Minister has focussed on the Indus Waters Treaty, MFN, Balochistan or coordinated a boycott of the Saarc summit, leave alone order a surgical strike. These steps taken by Prime Minister Narendra Modi since the Kashmir agitation’s present round, and especially after the Uri attack, seem to indicate a re-examination of the foundations of India’s Pakistan’s policy. It would be a pity if they constitute only unrelated tactical measures to deal with the current situation.
As Modi proceeds, it is useful to examine if the underlying principles of the traditional approach towards Pakistan have served India well. Pakistan was created on the basis of faith and on the assumption that Muslim interests would never be secure in a Hindu majority state. It was a logical corollary that India would be considered through the prism of faith; a Hindu country. It was equally inevitable that if a Hindu majority within India was projected to be perpetually antagonistic to a Muslim majority, a Hindu India would be looked on as a permanent threat — and a constant enemy.
Some Pakistani scholars claim Jinnah wanted both countries to cooperate but that proposition ignores the path he chose. Leaked official Pakistan documents such as the Abbotabad Commission Report conclusively show that what should have been anticipated by Indian policy makers came to pass. The Kashmir issue provides the clearest example of Pakistan’s faith-based India policy. Pakistan holds that it is the “unfinished agenda of Partition” and wants the state’s Muslim majority areas. However, even if Kashmir is resolved, it’s unlikely Pakistan will give up its basically hostile approach towards India for it is rooted in the fundamental principle of its state’s creation — a perception, though false, of two antagonistic faiths.
The Kashmir issue provides the clearest example of Pakistan’s faith-based India policy. Pakistan holds that it is the “unfinished agenda of Partition” and wants the state’s Muslim majority areas. However, even if Kashmir is resolved, it’s unlikely Pakistan will give up its basically hostile approach towards India for it is rooted in the fundamental principle of its state’s creation — a perception, though false, of two antagonistic faiths.The founding fathers of the Republic correctly rejected a theocratic state to mirror Pakistan. However, should this have led those who fashioned Indian foreign policy thereafter to approach Pakistan by overlooking its theological moorings? Was this done partly because of the fear that such an acknowledgement itself would weaken the national enterprise? That a secular India could not premise its policies towards Pakistan on the basis of its inherent hostility? That such an approach would weaken India’s secular fabric? If this is so, it did the greatest disservice to our Muslim co-citizens — for it assumed they had a special interest in Pakistan. This was not warranted. And it led India to positions that ironically pandered to Pakistani prejudices.
The founding fathers of the Republic correctly rejected a theocratic state to mirror Pakistan. However, should this have led those who fashioned Indian foreign policy thereafter to approach Pakistan by overlooking its theological moorings? Was this done partly because of the fear that such an acknowledgement itself would weaken the national enterprise? That a secular India could not premise its policies towards Pakistan on the basis of its inherent hostility? That such an approach would weaken India’s secular fabric? If this is so, it did the greatest disservice to our Muslim co-citizens — for it assumed they had a special interest in Pakistan. This was not warranted. And it led India to positions that ironically pandered to Pakistani prejudices.
This is best seen in India’s acceptance of the Indus Waters Treaty, extraordinarily generous to Pakistan, providing it 80 per cent of the waters, harshest to Jammu and Kashmir. India agreed to it to assuage Pakistani fears of being starved of water. It failed to do so. Indian policy makers never probed the reasons for this failure. Is it because it would throw up inconvenient conclusions about India’s refusal to accept Pakistan for what it is? Foreign policy must never overlook the fundamental moorings of a state, especially an antagonistic one. This doesn’t imply doors for negotiations should be shut. However, generous concessions must be evaluated to assess if they lead to a dilution of hostility. Often, they reinforce prejudices, as seen in India-Pakistan trade relations. Pakistani studies demonstrate Pakistan would gain far more with a MFN-based trade regime. However, the army disallowed it because of fears that it may not be able to control it — but also because of its prejudicial association of trade and Hindus, it has felt trade is a pressure point against India.
Foreign policy must never overlook the fundamental moorings of a state, especially an antagonistic one. This doesn’t imply doors for negotiations should be shut. However, generous concessions must be evaluated to assess if they lead to a dilution of hostility. Often, they reinforce prejudices, as seen in India-Pakistan trade relations. Pakistani studies demonstrate Pakistan would gain far more with a MFN-based trade regime. However, the army disallowed it because of fears that it may not be able to control it — but also because of its prejudicial association of trade and Hindus, it has felt trade is a pressure point against India.
The Indian political and strategic class does not think in religious terms in public policy, including foreign policy. It finds such thinking retrogressive. It offends its sensibilities. But Pakistan does and the refusal to acknowledge that has served India ill. Realism demands Indian policy makers accept Pakistani decision-makers’ thinking arises from fundamentally different motivations from their own.
Source: indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/india-pakistan-modi-saarc-summit-mnf-status-uri-attack-surgical-strike-3077670/
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The War in Yemen Will Intensify, Bringing Shame upon All the Protagonists
By Bobby Ghosh
Oct 12, 2016
In March last year, several wealthy Arab nations ganged up to start a bombing campaign against the poorest Arab nation: Yemen. The coalition was led by Saudi Arabia, and backed by the United States. The war stranded over 4,000 Indians in Yemen, and prompted the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to launch Operation Raahat, a highly successful airlift that won New Delhi international attention and kudos.
Yemen quickly faded from the headlines, not only in India, but across much of the world. The even greater horrors being perpetrated in another Arab country, Syria, drowned out the tragedy being played out in the heel of the Arabian Peninsula.
This week, Yemen returned briefly to the spotlight, to remind us all of the shame it has brought to all the parties involved in the conflict.
If you haven’t been keeping up with events in Yemen, here’s a brief recap. The ostensible target of the Saudi-led campaign was a rag-tag militia, known as the Houthi, which had taken control of large swathes of Yemen, including its capital, Sana’a. The coalition claimed its goal was to return power to the country’s president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi.
But, as with so much else in West Asia, there were sectarian and geopolitical subtexts to the war. The coalition was made up of Sunni-majority nations, and the Houthis are adherents of a kind of Shia Islam. For Saudi Arabia, which regards Shia Islam as a heresy, the prospect of a Shia uprising along its southern border was intolerable. Even more alarming, the Houthis were being backed by Saudi Arabia’s old nemesis, Iran.
The coalition had hoped to conduct the fighting mainly from the safety of the air, where the Arab states’ expensively assembled air forces had total domination; the Houthis have no planes, and their patrons in Tehran were never going to send squadrons of Iranian jets to support them. The US provided logistical and intelligence support.
Saudi Arabia and its allies were confident of ending the war in weeks, or at most, months. The fact that the war continues to rage to this day is a matter of profound humiliation for the Arab states, whose military forces, built to combat domestic dissent from unarmed political activists, have proven incapable of subjugating an enemy that fires back, even with inferior weapons. To be saddled with such allies is also an embarrassment for the US.
The other protagonist, Iran, is not so easily embarrassed, but it has not exactly covered itself with glory, either. For Tehran, the cost of engagement in Yemen is small, the benefit substantial: It keeps the Saudis constantly looking warily over their shoulders, distracting them from the larger geopolitical challenge posed by Iran. From time to time, Iran has also sought to use the conflict in Yemen to deflect attention from its own enthusiastic participation in the carnage in Syria — an order of hypocrisy that is ambitious even for the Islamic Republic.
For Yemen, the war has been calamitous. Already one of the world’s poorest nations, it has been reduced to abject destitution. More than 3,600 people have been killed. Millions have been made homeless. The World Food Programme has warned the country is on the brink of famine, and Amnesty International reckons that 83% of the population depends on humanitarian assistance for survival. The Houthis, for whom this conflict had begun as a quest for greater autonomy in the northern part of the country, now find themselves responsible for a large, desperate population.
The Saudis and their allies have routinely bombed urban targets, with little regard for civilian casualties. Human-rights agencies have repeatedly complained that the coalition pays little heed to the rules of war. This has attracted no more than the occasional murmur from the US, which has more roundly condemned similar attacks in Syria, by the air forces of dictator Bashar al-Assad and Russia. Late last week, US Secretary of State John Kerry called for war-crimes investigations into the Syrian bombings. He made no such recommendation for the Saudi attacks in Yemen.
But this week, Yemen finally seems to have stirred the conscience of the Obama administration, after the Saudi coalition bombed a funeral in Sana’a, killing 140 people, most of them non-combatants. The US said it was reviewing its participation in the war, and warned Saudi Arabia not to expect a “blank cheque” to conduct its campaign.
This was hardly in the same league as Kerry’s statement on Syria, and it gave the impression that the White House was merely seeking to absolve itself of responsibility for the misery being wrought on Yemen.
But war has a way of making a mockery of political calculations. On Sunday, the US Navy said one of its destroyers off the coast of Yemen was attacked by two missiles, fired from Houthi-controlled territory. The missiles fell harmlessly into the sea. Saudi media said another missile was fired at one of its airbases. There are no reports of casualties.
This marks a dangerous new turn in the war: The Houthis have not previously been known to possess such firepower. Inevitably, fingers will be pointed at their patron, Iran. The US will also worry about the potential for these weapons to fall into the hands of al Qaeda’s Yemeni operation, which has used the chaos of the war to expand the territory it controls, and to raid government armouries. There’s every likelihood that the war in Yemen will intensify, visiting yet more tragedy upon the people — and still more shame upon all the protagonists.
Source: hindustantimes.com/columns/the-war-in-yemen-will-intensify-bringing-shame-upon-all-the-protagonists/story-4F5NTeqcmdb695jSHiPCMP.html
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A Tragedy That Implicates Us All
By Shiv Visvanathan
October 12, 2016
If India fails to respond to the suffering in Yemen, and all we do is pat ourselves pompously for a few air evacuations from West Asia, we fail as a moral community and a democratic nation.
Catastrophes are no longer the epic tragedies that they were earlier. There is something stereotyped about the way we look at them. They become an event in somebody else’s backyard and therefore need not disturb us. Our everydayness is not touched by the others’ starvation. As we gorge on pizza and watch BBC reports on starvation, I sometimes wonder what happened to my generation. Years ago when famine struck Biafra, in Africa, there was at least a protest, a concern, a consternation. Biafra became a metaphor and, like Sahel, created some impact. Yet today the death and starvation in Yemen hardly affect people. You watch a child withering, dying a slow death and flip the page. He does not touch us. We are able to move on without batting an eyelid. There is no anger, no pain. It is as if ‘not caring’ is an essential part of surviving the global world.
Failure of Our Imagination
I realise part of the problem is Yemen does not capture the imagination. Yemen seems an Arab backwater, an agricultural country, not oil rich like Saudi Arabia. The contrast itself captures the realpolitik of the situation. Saudi Arabia is the paradigm of Arab respectability and hypocrisy. It is backed by America and Europe. The West, in fact, helped create the Islamic respectability of Saudi Arabia at a time when Indian and other Islams were far more creative and plural. In this moralistic contrast, Saudi Arabia is as respectable as its banks and its oil wells while Yemen is backward, a failed country in terms of the Arab dream. To an Indian, going Saudi is to search for a fortune. Yemen hardly enters the imagination.
The structure of perception also determines the way we see a country. We look at countries in terms of success and rankings. There is a clinical and technocratic attitude here that is startling. One can see it in the UN reports on starvation. There is almost something botanical about Yemen, as if it is a failed or endangered species. The State of Food Insecurity in the World report of 2014 states: “Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the world, with a Human Development Index ranking of 160 out of the 187 countries. Progress in economic and social development over recent years has been slow, mainly as the result of the political crisis of 2011, ongoing instability and weak governance....” The language is antiseptic. It is as if Yemen suffers from an epidemic instead of a man-made catastrophe orchestrated by the Saudis. It is almost as if food security books measure hunger, starvation and records them like temperature, without comment.
Being obsessed with the political economy of the struggle alone will not do. To reduce Yemen to a surrogate war between Iran and the Saudis explains little. There is an ethics here which transcends politics and asks a deeper set of questions. Writers like Vijay Prashad and those of the International Crisis Group have captured it competently. They are able to pin down the responsibility of the West and the Saudi government for starving a nation to death. Yet what one misses is a voice of conscience which asks a deeper set of questions. Years ago a Bertrand Russell could create, with great courage, a tribunal to try the U.S. for war crimes in Vietnam. A Noam Chomsky would follow suit, but today few have the courage to demand and label the U.S. and Saudi Arabia for a crime against humanity. People often blame it on disaster fatigue, observing that the world is tired of reacting to disasters, that mass death and refugee politics haunt every page of international relations.
The bold clarity of the Russellian statement is missing. Even Pope Francis, one of the few great voices of our time, had only elliptical comments to make. He expressed shock and sadness at the diabolical attack on one of the Mother Teresa homes in Yemen, where four Missionaries of Charity and 12 others were murdered. Yet Yemen as a whole seems to elude the Pontiff. We are in a strange situation where charity and humanitarianism are equated to conscience, where politics creates the demologies of our time, but ethics and the everydayness of citizenship have nothing to say. The standard narrative is of a civil war between Houthi rebels and the deposed President now backed by Saudi Arabia and the U.S. The very logic of the power struggle seems to permit and exonerate a slow genocide.
A Narrower Citizenship
I was wondering whether India has any stand on it. One senses that the BJP government in its narcissistic pursuit of India as a great nation state has no sense of global issues. One would have thought a nation which sends so many workers to the so-called Gulf would have something to say about Yemen. There is a little apart from a few notes on Aden, a little fragment of nostalgia. For Prime Minister Modi, Aden or Addis Ababa creates no trigger of action. He knows it is not a topic for Davos. But beyond the ethical illiteracy of regimes, one has to think of the India, the middle class, it’s sense of ethics and citizenship. I sometimes wonder whether apart from feeling a paranoid superiority over Pakistan in ethical terms, whether any crisis of conscience haunts India. We want to be global in terms of economic and technological participation; we are not international in our concern. Our media is America-centric or obsessive about India. To transform an old observation, we think a dog fight in Brooklyn is more important than the starvation of half a million children in Yemen.
There is a deeper problem in terms of civil society and our social movements. Our movements have been theoretically acute and organisationally substantial on issues like the right to information, the question of biotechnology, but they have been parochial, failing to combine the local and the international in creative ways. At a time when civil society should have reinvented the UN and its idea of peacekeeping, it has been retreatist and parochial. India has to step out and take stands on starvation, rights, energy, violence, sustainability without being knee-jerk and imitative. We cannot wait for the power game of the West to code our responses. In terms of responses to Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, India has been complicit with the West or tongue-tied. Its moral imagination in a post-Cold War world lacks the confidence to stand up, to challenge current frameworks. It has little empathy with the downtrodden and in fact tries to distance itself from what the West calls “the failed societies” of Asia and Africa, lest it be tarred with the same brush.
It behaves like a newly upwardly mobile nation, pretending that poverty and violence are things of the past. India’s new obsession is captured in the idea of “governmentality”. The emphasis creates a sanitised, technocratic space which has no sense of empathy or solidarity with other struggling nations. It is captured in the opposition of the idea of the migrant versus the refugee. The Indian elite feels Syria, Somalia, Bosnia are refugee material at the mercy of the West. India feels that along with its non-resident Indians it shares the American dream. Sadly, it also replicates the American need for hegemony and its lack of political ethics. Otherwise one cannot grasp what India has in common with sordid states like Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Responding As a Community
Years ago, one could attend an art or history of science lecture where a portrait of Vesalius’ anatomy lesson would trigger a lecture on power of the linear perspective, about the need for alienation and objectivity, of the necessary distance between observer and observed. Today, as I see a picture of a mother watching a starved and staring child, standing helpless as it dies without food and medicine, I think of an anatomy class. The face of the child and the distorted body of the child haunt me. I pray and apologise for my previous indifference. I realise that the body, sculpted by pain into a surrealism of suffering, challenges our sense of empathy, haunts the everydayness of our conscience. I have to respond. India has to respond as a community. Caring has to go beyond aid to create a new sense of community. If India fails, and all we do is pat ourselves pompously for a few aerial rescues from the Gulf, we fail as a moral community and a democratic nation. Yemen might survive but India’s moral idiocy may take decades to rehabilitate.
Source: thehindu.com/opinion/lead/yemen-bombing-a-tragedy-that-implicates-us-all/article9208449.ece
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India Needs Help of Kashmiris to Offset Pakistan’s Dirty Cross-Border Games
By Abhijit Banerjee
Oct 11, 2016
Anyone who has a child knows the importance of not over-playing your hand. He was up all night playing some game on his smartphone and you feel like saying that if it happens again the phone is gone. Forever. Till he is old enough to buy his own. Till then he can have your old Nokia.
The question is always whether, when it comes to it, you will feel up to carrying out the threat — knowing what his friends will say, realising how delighted the neighbourhood bully will be to get such an opportunity to get to him, worrying about all the other bad things he could get up to. The rational economist in me says why would he, knowing the consequences, ever get to the point where you have to act, but then a rational economist is not a 15-year-old with a fragile sense of himself and a strong desire to be proved that he is a man.
At the risk of sounding patronising, Pakistan is that troubled adolescent, unsure about the kind of country it wants to be, caught between the mad dreams of power-hungry theocrats and the more middle class aspirations of much of its population, a country born in the rejection of its conjoint twin and committed, above all, to step out of its long and looming shadow. China is that neighbourhood bully, secure in its immense power and recently earned economic credentials, happy to play its neighbours off against each other with gentle needling and occasional encouragement. And, we, alas, are the hapless parent, trapped between uncertainties about how to deal with the troubled teenager and our own, not infrequent, childish impulses.
Let me be clear about one thing: I don’t have an opinion, or at least a considered opinion, about whether the “surgical strikes” were a good idea or a bad one. If the strikes were successful in taking out the next group of attackers on one of our army camps or civilian destinations, they would indeed have served an important purpose. What is indefensible is what we have done since — the tom-tomming of our great success — the chest thumping that Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned us against but continues, seemingly unabated, in the media.
If you were the Pakistani government how are you supposed to react to that? Pretend that it never happened? They tried that but it did not stick. Admit that our security forces succeeded in pulling off a fast one over their Pakistani rivals? What Pakistani government could even think of that without risking a coup? The Pakistani army has not only pride riding on the image of their being the one institution that works in dysfunctional Pakistan, but also real money. It is well known that the army in Pakistan controls a substantial part of the country’s GDP (I have heard the number 15%) through its various trusts. According to Dawn, the Fauji Foundation has oil refineries, natural gas companies, power, fertiliser and cement plants as well as a bank. The armed forces are also a leading real estate developer in Pakistan. That gravy train would be upset if people started to question the army’s competence and relevance. Isn’t that why no peace attempt is allowed to go very far?
With the local media not convinced by the State propaganda so far, the Pakistani State is probably under pressure to do something to salvage the army’s honour — not revenge — one cannot take revenge for something that one is claiming never happened — but something definitive and surely violent. The question for us is what if that does happen. More strikes? This time they will be ready for it, happy to have our soldiers walk into a trap and the opportunity to humiliate us. Abrogate the Indus waters treaty? Good heavens no. We forget that we are downstream from China, which is always happy for an excuse to capture more water in dry Tibet, especially if it also helps a friend in need. It may not be a coincidence that just when we were talking about doing something with the Indus waters to punish Pakistan, China announced the building of a dam on the Brahmaputra. So what’s left? All-out war? Nuclear weapons?
Let us face it. We overplayed our hand. The strikes themselves Pakistan might have swallowed as a move in our age-old game of tit for tat. The propaganda, the public display of our delight at their expense, force their hand — it’s the smartphone moment. And we may very well come to regret it.
The question is how to climb down from here. It has to come from us. They cannot afford to look any weaker. The problem is that our present government has often shied away from disappointing its most rabid supporters, which might seem strange, since those supporters have nowhere else to go.
But it is also time to think hard about Kashmir. The best way to secure the border is to get local people to start looking out for terrorists — which is what ultimately helped us in Punjab. For that we need the local people on our side. The most compelling case we can make to the Kashmiri people is that the real alternative for them is to be swallowed up by the mess called Pakistan, and we can surely offer them better than that. But we severely undermine that case every time we tolerate anti-Muslim hysteria, or some arm of the India State shoots an unarmed student in the Valley.
Source: hindustantimes.com/columns/india-needs-help-of-kashmiris-to-offset-pakistan-s-dirty-cross-border-games/story-QLgIYBUVNzgon5TylMdbSL.html