By voting against Iran in the IAEA, India has put its alliance with the United States above any concern of national interest, energy security or international law.
27 September 2005
The Hindu
The unravelling of India's Persian puzzle
Siddharth Varadarajan
FOR ALL its pretensions to a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, India on Saturday flunked its first real test as a rising world power. Where no less than 11 countries smaller and less powerful than us — Venezuela, Algeria, Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Vietnam, and Yemen — had the courage and good sense to join Russia and China in refusing to endorse the U.S.-backed agenda of confrontation with Iran, India threw in its lot with Washington and the European troika.
Scared by a well-choreographed bout of shadow boxing at the start of Congressional hearings on the July 18 Indo-U.S. nuclear deal, the Manmohan Singh Government convinced itself that it had to side with Washington's unreasonable pressure on Iran. In doing so, the Government has betrayed its own lack of strategic confidence — this at a time when the fine print of the nuclear deal is about to be negotiated and the slightest sign of diplomatic weakness will be used by Washington to push the envelope on issues like the scope of international safeguards and inspections India must accept in order to see the July 18 agreement through.
Moreover, the Government has chosen to go along with a confrontationist move against Iran which undercuts a key legal argument India has been making for 50 years to justify its own nuclear programme — that countries can only be held to account for international agreements they sign.
The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) gives Iran the right to pursue the nuclear fuel cycle subject to safeguards. It gives Iran the right to build a heavy water reactor. The Additional Protocol Iran has signed specifies the kind of intrusive inspections it must allow. But the International Atomic Energy Agency resolution India voted for makes demands that go far, far beyond Iran's legal obligations. This is a dangerous precedent for India to agree to since this means the safeguards agreement and additional protocol it has committed to sign with the IAEA also one day need not be the final word on its legal obligations.
The vote India cast in the IAEA Board of Governors (BoG) was in favour of a resolution finding Iran in "non-compliance" with its safeguards obligations under the NPT and expressing "the absence of confidence that Iran's nuclear programme is entirely for peaceful purposes." The finding is under two Articles, XII and III, of the IAEA Statute, both of which mandate referral of the matter to the Security Council. Unlike the referral under Article XII.C, which is more of a procedural nature, the referral under III.B.4 invokes the Security Council's responsibilities for maintaining international peace and security and holds out a thinly veiled threat of sanctions and other punitive measures.
In what is supposed to be a major "compromise," Britain, France, and Germany (the E-3) dropped earlier language stipulating that the referral to the Security Council should be immediate. The timing of this referral has been left to a future BoG meeting, presumably the one that will be convened in November. The Indian Government, in justifying its decision to back the resolution, has cited this two-step approach as a big concession. Indian officials claim this delay provides the time and space needed for dialogue and diplomacy to work, a claim of extraordinary naivety and even double-speak. First, Saturday's resolution is more likely to close the door on dialogue than re-open it since it demands Iran surrender even more of its rights under the NPT than ever before. Secondly, the U.S. itself did not necessarily want an immediate referral because there is little practical significance to dragging Iran before the UNSC where China and Russia would exercise their veto. What it really wanted was for the international community to recognise Iran's civilian nuclear energy programme as a threat to international peace and security requiring potentially endless "special verification" inspections, which go far beyond that required under the normal safeguards agreement and Additional Protocol. Armed with this broad endorsement, Washington can now choose the time and place for the political — and even military — escalation that is surely in the offing.
Given the composition of the BoG, securing a majority had never been an issue for the U.S. and its allies. But in the absence of consensus, which was an impossibility anyway, engineering India's defection from the ranks of the developing countries was crucial. The U.S. needed to undercut the charge that the West was ganging up on the Third World in denying Iran the right to nuclear fuel cycle-related facilities. Winning over Ecuador, Peru, Ghana, and Singapore was not good enough since these are not countries known for the independence of their foreign policy. The U.S. needed India to provide a cover of credibility for the unreasonable indictment against Iran and the Manmohan Singh Government happily went along. That is why U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns has hailed India's vote as "a blow to Iran's attempt to turn this into a developed world versus developing world debate."
Of all the demands the IAEA resolution makes, three are highly problematic and ultra vires. First, it says Iran must implement "transparency measures ... which extend beyond the formal requirements of the Safeguards Agreement and Additional Protocol." Calling Iran a "special verification case," the BoG said this requires an expansion in the "limited" legal authority of the IAEA to conduct inspections. Specifically, this must include "access to individuals, documentation relating to procurement, dual use equipment, certain military owned workshops and research and development locations." In this way, the road has been cleared for an Inspection Raj of the UNSCOM/UNMOVIC type, which, even after physically checking every possible location in Iraq several times over, never had the ability to say Baghdad possessed no weapons of mass destruction. The resolution's demand for access to individuals is also a bit rich, considering that the source of the technology Iran is suspected of possessing — A.Q. Khan — is sitting pretty in Pakistan, beyond the reach of IAEA inspectors.
Secondly, Iran has been told to resume the suspension of enrichment-related and reprocessing activity. Unlike all previous resolutions of the BoG which called on Iran to suspend its enrichment, this resolution makes no explicit mention of the voluntary, non-legally binding nature of Iran's commitment to suspend those activities. By this subtle act of elision, a voluntary, non-legally binding undertaking is being elevated to the status of a legally binding commitment. Thirdly, the resolution says Iran must "reconsider the construction of a research reactor moderated by heavy water." This is a new and illegal demand that did not figure in the last resolution passed by the BoG on August 11, 2005, and represents a further shift of the goalpost.
The irony of the Indian capitulation on Iran is that its display of political weakness comes at a time when the U.S. has finally become aware of India's strategic weight and significance and is attempting desperately to harness these for its own ends.
When President George W. Bush offered Dr. Manmohan Singh civilian nuclear cooperation, he did so in full knowledge that India has tended to side with the rest of the developing world on the question of Iran. Either his decision to support India's nuclear industry was taken independently of the Iran equation or it was conditional on New Delhi ditching Tehran both as a source of energy security and as a conduit for the integration of India and Central Asia. If the former is the case, the Manmohan Singh Government had nothing to fear from sticking to its earlier stand of "consensus" in the IAEA BoG. And if it was the latter, then surely this amounts to a hidden — and unacceptable — cost India is now being forced to pay in order to see the nuclear deal through.
Any deal or partnership that hangs on such a slender thread, which attempts forcibly to rewrite India's strategic equations and undermines the country's strategic autonomy cannot possibly be in the national interest. Nuclear power of the kind that might flow from this deal will never be a substitute for hydrocarbons in the medium-term. Even in the long-term, India will depend on gas imports from Iran and Central Asia, preferably via pipeline.
If not today, then five years from now, the logic of India's economic growth will compel a rewriting of the rules of international nuclear commerce for the country — this time not as a concession or favour from the U.S. but as the product of objective market forces. By blackmailing India into voting against Iran, the U.S. hopes to undermine Indo-Iranian economic relations to such an extent that New Delhi becomes a stakeholder in the drive for "regime change" there. How much the world has changed in a year. A country that once condemned the invasion of Iraq and refused to send its soldiers there is today in danger of becoming an accessory to the strangulation and targeting of Iran.
© Copyright 2000 - 2005 The Hindu
27 September 2005
24 September 2005
Much more than Modi: A review of Yagnik and Sheth's 'The Shaping of Modern Gujarat'
History usually begins or restarts at that prosaic, magical or bloody moment when civilisation dawns or is extinguished. If February 2002 was such a moment for Gujarat—when the Narendra Modi government presided over the systematic slaughter of Muslim citizens—then what can we say about the state’s ‘prehistory,’ about the social processes which created the political climate in which such a monstrous crime could be committed?Issue dated 3 October 2005
Outlook
REVIEW
History Of A Plurality
The book attempts to fill in the backstory of Gujarat's history with no glib connections
Siddharth Varadarajan
THE SHAPING OF MODERN GUJARAT: PLURALITY, HINDUTVA AND BEYOND by Achyut Yagnik, Suchitra ShethHistory usually begins or restarts at that prosaic, magical or bloody moment when civilisation dawns or is extinguished. If February 2002 was such a moment for Gujarat—when the Narendra Modi government presided over the systematic slaughter of Muslim citizens—then what can we say about the state’s ‘prehistory,’ about the social processes which created the political climate in which such a monstrous crime could be committed?
Penguin. Pages: 344; Rs 350
In a first-rate work of social-historical forensics, Achyut Yagnik and Suchitra Sheth have attempted to fill in the backstory, without making glib connections or forced linkages. Indeed, at no point in the book do the authors even say that their aim is to render intelligible the events of 2002. Rather, their narrative begins with Dholavira, moves quickly on to the state’s "oppressive encounters" with Turkic invaders and British traders, and ends with Naroda-Patiya, and it is for the reader to appreciate the finely-spun continuities between the present moment and the centuries which preceded it.
Given the paradoxical nature of Gujarat’s DNA, this is no easy task. The authors begin by acknowledging the paradox that is their field of study. "A society which has drawn diverse people to its bosom can also be exclusive and excluding". Gujaratis have travelled the four corners of the world but are also "inexplicably insular and parochial". The state is prosperous but one-fifth of its people live in poverty. Women feel safe to move about unescorted but its female sex ratio is appallingly low. "And most intriguing of all is that two Gujaratis rose to eminence in the twentieth century, one as the father of India and the other as the father of Pakistan".
The core of the book is the transformation that is wrought in the state’s economy and social dynamics by the onset of British rule. This is also the period when identities like ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ solidify. The authors argue that although British policies like the religion-based census and elections for local government communalised Gujarati society, a key role was also played by the intelligentsia, by the up-and-coming middle class, and by the press, in this process. For instance, Narmadashankar was instrumental in fashioning the 19th century Gujarati Hindu’s "Aryan identity". Nandshankar Mehta’s 1866 novel, Karan Ghelo, the first in that literary genre to be written in Gujarati, equated the ‘Muslim’ period of Gujarat’s history with the degradation and decline of the state and perhaps played a central role in communalising the psyche of the Gujarati reading public as Anandmath did for the Bengali.
"This first novel", write Yagnik and Sheth, "played a crucial part in the construction of the image of Muslims as destroyers of Gujarat and of Hindus as a community that was devastated at their hands", a theme which, incidentally, formed a dominant part of the Sangh parivar’s propaganda during the anti-Muslim violence of 2002.
Post-Independence, the state’s social landscape mirrored the changes taking place in the economic sphere. "The Gandhian moral order", tenuous though its hold might have been, "was swept aside as the Gujarati entrepreneurial class and the middle class expanded and consolidated their economic and social control". Yagnik and Sheth blame the control this class has exercised over the political levers of power for much of the negative dynamics that have become so apparent in virtually every sphere of life in the state, from ecological degradation and a declining female sex ratio to communal tension and the marginalisation of the working poor and adivasis. Some of this story is familiar to us from the recent work of Jan Breman—which, surprisingly, finds no mention here—but the authors have also sought to analyse the wider political implications.
In the concluding section, there is some useful discussion about the rise of New Hinduism, and of the social significance of new and powerful Hindu sects like the Swaminarayans (of Akshardham temple fame) but one wishes the authors had delved deeper into this fascinating phenomenon. One would like to understand, for example, how the rise of the new sects overlap with the politics of Hindutva and the mantras of the market which their adherents fervently believe in.
Perhaps this is a subject for future research. Engagingly written—and illustrated with historic photographs and cartoons from Hindi Punch—this book is bound to be considered required reading for anybody interested in the political history of modern Gujarat.
(Siddharth Varadarajan’s edited volume, Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy, was published by Penguin in 2002)
23 September 2005
The Persian Puzzle III: The world must stand firm on diplomacy
The 'nuclear crisis' is the product of 15 years of American hostility towards Iran. Any solution that does not deal with this reality is bound to fail.
23 September 2005
The Hindu
THE PERSIAN PUZZLE - III
The world must stand firm on diplomacy
Siddharth Varadarajan
WHEN BRITAIN, France, and Germany volunteered last year to try and find a diplomatic alternative to the punitive measures the United States was demanding against Iran, the expectation was that the European-3 would have the skill — and the gumption — to craft a solution that would address the legitimate concerns of both Teheran and the `international community.'
What were these concerns? The world needed assurance that Iran's pursuit of the nuclear fuel cycle, including uranium enrichment, would not lead to nuclear weapons, and Iran needed assurances that it would not be denied access to civilian technologies or subjected to sanctions or the threat of aggression by the U.S. and Israel, both of which possess nuclear weapons. Accordingly, the Paris Agreement signed by Iran and the E3 on November 15, 2004, spoke of a solution that would "provide objective guarantees that Iran's nuclear programme is exclusively for peaceful purposes." In exchange, Iran was to be provided "firm guarantees on nuclear, technological and economic cooperation and firm commitments on security issues." Given this framework, Iran said its voluntary suspension of enrichment-related and reprocessing activities "will be sustained while negotiations proceed on a mutually acceptable agreement on long-term arrangements."
Last month, the E3 slammed the door on the possibility of a "mutually acceptable agreement" by presenting proposals that turned the spirit of the Paris accord upside down. Iran was told permanently to abandon its enrichment and reprocessing facilities and heavy water reactor and provide "a binding commitment not to pursue fuel cycle activities other than the construction and operation of light water power and research reactors." In other words, the only possible "objective guarantee" the E3 was prepared to accept against misuse of enrichment facilities was for Iran not to have them at all.
As if this was not provocative enough, the E3's proposals on the guaranteed supply of enriched uranium and security assurances were so vague as to make a mockery of the concepts of "firm guarantees" and "firm commitments." For example, far from committing itself to assist whatever remains of the Iranian nuclear programme once fuel cycle-related activity is excluded, all the E3 was willing to promise was "not to impede participation in open competitive bidding." Not surprisingly, the Iranians said this manifest demonstration of bad faith on the E3's part meant negotiations had come to an end. Accordingly, Teheran ended its voluntary suspension and notified the International Atomic Energy Agency of its intention to resume conversion activities at its Esfahan facility. This, in short, is the backstory to the current crisis
In an analysis of the E3 offer, Paul Ingram of the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) — a leading Western arms control think-tank — called it "vague on incentives and heavy on demands" and concluded that the European proposals seemed "designed to fit closely with US requirements." "Even the establishment of a buffer store of nuclear fuel is proposed to be physically located in a third country, rather than in Iran under safeguards," he noted, adding that the E3/EU "do not seem to have had the courage to offer either the substantial, detailed incentives or a creative, compromise solution on enrichment which could reasonably have been expected to receive Iran's endorsement."
Pellaud proposals
Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took one step towards a creative solution when he proposed running Iranian enrichment facilities as joint ventures with private and public sector companies from other countries. Though it has been dismissed out of hand, the latest Iranian offer is a variant of a formula that was proposed in February this year by an IAEA expert group on "multilateral approaches" to the nuclear fuel cycle headed by Bruno Pellaud.
The Pellaud committee had been tasked by the IAEA to recommend measures that could bridge the gap between a country's right — under the NPT — to the nuclear fuel cycle, and the proliferation concerns that would arise from an increase in the worldwide number of facilities capable of uranium enrichment or plutonium separation. The relevance of this issue to the Iran question hardly needs elaboration.
Of the five proposals made by the committee, three concerned different types of international fuel supply guarantees as an incentive for countries to forswear their own enrichment facilities, and two were based on the notion of shared ownership or control. The latter involved "promoting voluntary conversion of existing facilities to multilateral nuclear approaches (MNAs), and pursuing them as confidence-building measures with the participation of non-nuclear-weapon states and nuclear-weapon states, and non-NPT states" — precisely the kind of offer Mr. Ahmadinejad made in his speech to the U.N. General Assembly last week — or "creating, through voluntary agreements and contracts, multinational, and in particular regional, MNAs for new facilities based on joint ownership, drawing rights or co-management."
Could an MNA provide the international community with the kind of assurances it needs that enriched uranium would not be diverted to a clandestine nuclear weapons programme? While releasing his report earlier this year, Dr. Pellaud said he believed it could. "A joint nuclear facility with multinational staff puts all participants under a greater scrutiny from peers and partners, a fact that strengthens non-proliferation and security ... It's difficult to play games if you have multinationals at a site."
Instead of threatening sanctions, the E3 should engage Iran in a dialogue which can develop the Pellaud-Ahmadinejad proposals to a level where Teheran can provide "objective guarantees" that its programme is entirely peaceful and Europe can give "firm guarantees" and "firm commitments" on the issues which concern the Iranians. The only problem, of course, would be what to do about the Americans.
The fact of the matter is that it is impossible to separate the present "nuclear crisis" from Washington's track record of unremitting hostility towards the Iranian Government. Indeed, any solution that does not bring about a change in U.S. behaviour is unlikely to be acceptable or durable as far as Teheran is concerned. As part of its long-term framework proposals, therefore, the E3 must undertake to get the U.S. to abandon its sanctions against the Iranian oil and gas industry and drop its aim of bringing about `regime change' in Iran.
Instead of falling in line with Washington's pressure on Iran, Europe and the rest of the world should also ask themselves whether the cause of international peace and security is served by selective concern about `proliferation.' The NPT allows enrichment but Iran is being told it cannot have a fuel cycle. The NPT mandates nuclear disarmament but the U.S. is conducting weapons research and formulating military doctrines that will weaponise space and increase the salience of nuclear weapons in its force posture. Britain and France have no conceivable nuclear adversaries yet continue to deploy nuclear weapons. Countries in West Asia are being told they can never walk out of the NPT but nothing is done to denuclearise Israel. These issues too are very much part of the "nuclear crisis" and it is time something were done to address them.
(Concluded)
23 September 2005
The Hindu
THE PERSIAN PUZZLE - III
The world must stand firm on diplomacy
Siddharth Varadarajan
WHEN BRITAIN, France, and Germany volunteered last year to try and find a diplomatic alternative to the punitive measures the United States was demanding against Iran, the expectation was that the European-3 would have the skill — and the gumption — to craft a solution that would address the legitimate concerns of both Teheran and the `international community.'
What were these concerns? The world needed assurance that Iran's pursuit of the nuclear fuel cycle, including uranium enrichment, would not lead to nuclear weapons, and Iran needed assurances that it would not be denied access to civilian technologies or subjected to sanctions or the threat of aggression by the U.S. and Israel, both of which possess nuclear weapons. Accordingly, the Paris Agreement signed by Iran and the E3 on November 15, 2004, spoke of a solution that would "provide objective guarantees that Iran's nuclear programme is exclusively for peaceful purposes." In exchange, Iran was to be provided "firm guarantees on nuclear, technological and economic cooperation and firm commitments on security issues." Given this framework, Iran said its voluntary suspension of enrichment-related and reprocessing activities "will be sustained while negotiations proceed on a mutually acceptable agreement on long-term arrangements."
Last month, the E3 slammed the door on the possibility of a "mutually acceptable agreement" by presenting proposals that turned the spirit of the Paris accord upside down. Iran was told permanently to abandon its enrichment and reprocessing facilities and heavy water reactor and provide "a binding commitment not to pursue fuel cycle activities other than the construction and operation of light water power and research reactors." In other words, the only possible "objective guarantee" the E3 was prepared to accept against misuse of enrichment facilities was for Iran not to have them at all.
As if this was not provocative enough, the E3's proposals on the guaranteed supply of enriched uranium and security assurances were so vague as to make a mockery of the concepts of "firm guarantees" and "firm commitments." For example, far from committing itself to assist whatever remains of the Iranian nuclear programme once fuel cycle-related activity is excluded, all the E3 was willing to promise was "not to impede participation in open competitive bidding." Not surprisingly, the Iranians said this manifest demonstration of bad faith on the E3's part meant negotiations had come to an end. Accordingly, Teheran ended its voluntary suspension and notified the International Atomic Energy Agency of its intention to resume conversion activities at its Esfahan facility. This, in short, is the backstory to the current crisis
In an analysis of the E3 offer, Paul Ingram of the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) — a leading Western arms control think-tank — called it "vague on incentives and heavy on demands" and concluded that the European proposals seemed "designed to fit closely with US requirements." "Even the establishment of a buffer store of nuclear fuel is proposed to be physically located in a third country, rather than in Iran under safeguards," he noted, adding that the E3/EU "do not seem to have had the courage to offer either the substantial, detailed incentives or a creative, compromise solution on enrichment which could reasonably have been expected to receive Iran's endorsement."
Pellaud proposals
Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took one step towards a creative solution when he proposed running Iranian enrichment facilities as joint ventures with private and public sector companies from other countries. Though it has been dismissed out of hand, the latest Iranian offer is a variant of a formula that was proposed in February this year by an IAEA expert group on "multilateral approaches" to the nuclear fuel cycle headed by Bruno Pellaud.
The Pellaud committee had been tasked by the IAEA to recommend measures that could bridge the gap between a country's right — under the NPT — to the nuclear fuel cycle, and the proliferation concerns that would arise from an increase in the worldwide number of facilities capable of uranium enrichment or plutonium separation. The relevance of this issue to the Iran question hardly needs elaboration.
Of the five proposals made by the committee, three concerned different types of international fuel supply guarantees as an incentive for countries to forswear their own enrichment facilities, and two were based on the notion of shared ownership or control. The latter involved "promoting voluntary conversion of existing facilities to multilateral nuclear approaches (MNAs), and pursuing them as confidence-building measures with the participation of non-nuclear-weapon states and nuclear-weapon states, and non-NPT states" — precisely the kind of offer Mr. Ahmadinejad made in his speech to the U.N. General Assembly last week — or "creating, through voluntary agreements and contracts, multinational, and in particular regional, MNAs for new facilities based on joint ownership, drawing rights or co-management."
Could an MNA provide the international community with the kind of assurances it needs that enriched uranium would not be diverted to a clandestine nuclear weapons programme? While releasing his report earlier this year, Dr. Pellaud said he believed it could. "A joint nuclear facility with multinational staff puts all participants under a greater scrutiny from peers and partners, a fact that strengthens non-proliferation and security ... It's difficult to play games if you have multinationals at a site."
Instead of threatening sanctions, the E3 should engage Iran in a dialogue which can develop the Pellaud-Ahmadinejad proposals to a level where Teheran can provide "objective guarantees" that its programme is entirely peaceful and Europe can give "firm guarantees" and "firm commitments" on the issues which concern the Iranians. The only problem, of course, would be what to do about the Americans.
The fact of the matter is that it is impossible to separate the present "nuclear crisis" from Washington's track record of unremitting hostility towards the Iranian Government. Indeed, any solution that does not bring about a change in U.S. behaviour is unlikely to be acceptable or durable as far as Teheran is concerned. As part of its long-term framework proposals, therefore, the E3 must undertake to get the U.S. to abandon its sanctions against the Iranian oil and gas industry and drop its aim of bringing about `regime change' in Iran.
Instead of falling in line with Washington's pressure on Iran, Europe and the rest of the world should also ask themselves whether the cause of international peace and security is served by selective concern about `proliferation.' The NPT allows enrichment but Iran is being told it cannot have a fuel cycle. The NPT mandates nuclear disarmament but the U.S. is conducting weapons research and formulating military doctrines that will weaponise space and increase the salience of nuclear weapons in its force posture. Britain and France have no conceivable nuclear adversaries yet continue to deploy nuclear weapons. Countries in West Asia are being told they can never walk out of the NPT but nothing is done to denuclearise Israel. These issues too are very much part of the "nuclear crisis" and it is time something were done to address them.
(Concluded)
22 September 2005
The Persian Puzzle II: What the IAEA really found in Iran
The best way for the world to satisfy itself that there are no undeclared nuclear activities in Iran is for the IAEA to use its inspection rights under the Additional Protocol.22 September 2005
The Hindu
THE PERSIAN PUZZLE - II
What the IAEA really found in Iran
Siddharth Varadarajan
THE REPORT Mohammed El-Baradei presented to the International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors on September 2, 2005 represents the most recent assessment of Iran's nuclear programme made by the watchdog body. In this report, the Director-General sought to quantify the progress made in dealing with a number of adverse findings first brought to the Board's notice on November 15, 2004.
Those findings involved six instances of Iran's "failure to report" certain nuclear activities, mostly concerning enrichment and laser experimentation and including the import of uranium from China in 1991; two instances of "failure to declare" enrichment facilities; six instances of "failure to provide design information or updated design information" for certain facilities, and a general charge of "failure on many occasions to cooperate to facilitate the implementation of safeguards, as evidenced by extensive concealment activities."
Dr. El-Baradei then noted that Iran had taken a number of corrective actions as a result of which "the Agency was able by November 2004 to confirm certain aspects of Iran's declarations [related to conversion activities and laser enrichment], which ... would be followed up as matters of routine safeguards implementation." This was a major statement by the IAEA because, in effect, it was saying that much of the "concealment" the Iranians are accused of resorting to in the past had been effectively neutralised and was no longer a source of extra concern for the Agency.
If the IAEA was still not in a position to declare that Iran had no undeclared nuclear material and undeclared enrichment activities, this was for two sets of reasons. First, it was still assessing Iran's explanations for questions raised by it about the Gchine uranium mines and two long-since abandoned research projects into polonium (Po-210) and plutonium separation. Secondly, questions still remained on two important fronts. In the course of its visits to the not-yet-operational Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant at Natanz and the Kalaye Electric Company in 2004, the IAEA had found trace amounts of highly enriched uranium (HEU) and low enriched uranium (LEU), giving rise to concerns that Iran had already begun enriching uranium — presumably at an undisclosed third location. The Iranians denied producing the HEU and LEU but the IAEA needed to satisfy itself. Moreover, the Agency felt it had yet to learn the full extent of Iranian research work on the P-2 gas centrifuge, the designs for which had been procured from the A.Q. Khan clandestine network.
After analysis of swipe samples, IAEA experts now say the HEU was Pakistani and presumably came to be in Natanz because imported centrifuge components were contaminated. The origin of the LEU contamination has yet to be established but there are some indications it is of Russian provenance. As for the centrifuges themselves, the IAEA wants more documentation to convince itself that Iran is telling the truth about not pursuing any work on the P-2 design between 1995, when it first acquired the technology, and 2002, when it made modifications necessary for composite rotors. This, then, is the main outstanding question Iran needs to answer.
No threat to peace
Not only is Iran's failure in this regard far less dramatic than the American accusations of a "clandestine weapons programme" and of "deception," it also cannot conceivably be called a threat to international peace and security. Yes, the IAEA has yet to conclude there are no undeclared nuclear materials or activities in Iran. But, as Dr. El-Baradei himself noted in his September 2 report, "the process of drawing such a conclusion, after an Additional Protocol is in force, under normal circumstances, is a time consuming process." Since the Agency believes Iran has had a "past pattern of concealment," this conclusion "can be expected to take longer than in normal circumstances."
In effect, Dr. El-Baradei was saying that the IAEA's inspectors should be allowed to do their work. For this, "Iran's full transparency is indispensable and overdue." What he did not — and could not — say was that the inspections process should not be short-circuited or politicised by interested parties. A case in point is the polonium-beryllium controversy, which Washington had hoped would emerge as Iran's proverbial smoking gun.
When asked about bismuth irradiation experiments it had conducted at the Teheran Research Reactor (TRR) between 1989 and 1993 to extract polonium, Iran pointed out that it had not been required to inform the IAEA under the safeguards agreement and that "in any case, details of the experiments were in the logbook of the TRR reactor, which has been safeguarded for 30 years." Polonium has many civilian applications but also plays a role, when combined with beryllium, as a neutron initiator in some nuclear weapon designs. Seizing on this, the U.S. insisted Iran had imported beryllium as well. When the IAEA investigated this and ruled out any such imports, U.S. officials planted stories about how Dr. El-Baradei had "succumbed to Iranian pressure." These stories were then used to build a campaign to deny him another term as Director-General, a campaign which ultimately failed.
Regardless of U.S. motivations, however, Iran, at the end of the day still has a responsibility to demonstrate to the world that it is in full compliance with its safeguards obligations. And the world has the right to satisfy itself that Iran is not planning to make nuclear weapons. Earlier this year, Bruno Pellaud, former IAEA Deputy Director-General for safeguards, was asked by Swissinfo whether Iran was intent on building a nuclear bomb. "My impression is not," he replied, adding that "the IAEA says there is no evidence of a weapons programme." Dr. Pellaud then posed a rhetorical question — Is this naiveté? — and elaborated on his assessment: "My view is based on the fact that Iran took a major gamble in December 2003 by allowing a much more intrusive capability to the IAEA. If Iran had had a military programme they would not have allowed the IAEA to come under this Additional Protocol. They did not have to."
As matters stand, the only major unexplained issue is the extent of Iran's research work on the P-2 centrifuge. Even if the Agency's worst fears are true — that Iran actually worked on the P-2 design during that time — this matters only if that knowledge was used to set up another enrichment facility somewhere else in the country. Though this is unlikely, especially given the rather modest achievements on display at Natanz (which itself was supposed to be a "concealed" facility), the Additional Protocol gives the IAEA a broad licence to inspect any facility it wishes. Using those powers — and relying on intelligence inputs from the U.S. — Agency inspectors recently visited military sites at Kolahdouz, Lavisan, and Parchin. Nothing was found. If a secret enrichment plant exists, the enforcement of Iran's safeguards and inspection obligations is a far better way to unearth it than the threat of sanctions.
To be continued
21 September 2005
The Persian Puzzle I: Iran and the invention of a nuclear crisis
The world has forgotten everything and learned nothing from the charade over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
21 September 2005
The Hindu
THE PERSIAN PUZZLE - I
Iran and the invention of a nuclear crisis
Siddharth Varadarajan
BARELY TWO years after the United States invaded Iraq in the name of weapons of mass destruction which never existed, the world is being pushed towards a confrontation with Iran on a similarly flawed premise.
On September 17, Iran's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the United Nations General Assembly that his country would not give up its sovereign right to produce nuclear power using indigenously enriched uranium. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which Iran signed in 1974, allows Iran to build facilities involving all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle, including enrichment, subject to international safeguards. Given the fact that the U.S. continues to impose sanctions on the development of Iran's oil and gas sector (under the extra-territorial `Iran Libya Sanctions Act'), it is only logical that the Iranians should seek a civilian nuclear energy industry in which they won't have to be dependent on the West for fuel like enriched uranium.
However, as a major concession to Britain, France and Germany — the so-called EU-3 which has sought to prevail upon Iran to abandon enrichment in exchange for guarantees of assured fuel supply — Mr. Ahmadinejad offered to run his country's enrichment plants as joint ventures with private and public sector firms from other countries. Britain and France have rejected this offer, which the Iranians say is a demonstration of their intent to be as transparent as possible. The EU-3 and the U.S. insist Teheran must not work on enrichment because once the technology is mastered, the same facilities could be used to produce not just low enriched uranium (LEU) for energy reactors but highly enriched uranium (HEU) for bombs. Accordingly, they have circulated a resolution in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors meeting — which began Monday — calling for Iran's civilian nuclear programme to be referred to the U.N. Security Council as a potential threat to international peace and security.
It is not difficult for the U.S. and its European allies to get a majority of the 35-nation Board of Governors to recommend referral; however, the board has operated on the basis of consensus for the past 12 years — ever since the forced vote referring North Korea to the UNSC split the IAEA — and the non-aligned group of countries and China remain opposed to taking Iran to the Security Council. If the U.S. is convinced a consensus will elude it for the foreseeable future, it could push for a vote this week rather than wait any longer. Next month, following the annual IAEA General Conference, a new Board of Governors will take over. And with Cuba and Syria entering the Board in place of Peru and Pakistan, the ranks of those firmly opposed to an SC referral are likely to increase.
Although the immediate trigger for the European and American pressure is Teheran's decision last month to end its voluntary suspension of uranium conversion at its Esfahan facility, the Iranian case cannot be referred to the Security Council on this ground.
First, the NPT allows uranium conversion and other processes central to enrichment. Secondly, the Esfahan facility is under IAEA safeguards and as recently as September 2, i.e. nearly a month after Iran resumed uranium conversion there, the Director-General of the Agency, Mohammad El-Baradei, certified that "all the declared nuclear material in Iran has been accounted for and, therefore, such material is not diverted to prohibited activities." Thirdly, the agreement to suspend enrichment, which Iran reached with the EU-3 at Paris last November, clearly states that "the E3/EU recognize that this suspension is a voluntary confidence building measure and not a legal obligation." In other words, if the voluntary suspension was not a legal obligation, the ending of that suspension can hardly be made the grounds for legal action by either the IAEA or the UN.
Myth of 'concealment'
If at all Iran is to be referred, then, its desire to pursue a complete fuel cycle for its civilian nuclear energy programme cannot be cited as legal grounds. Nor can the hitherto "secret" nature of its fuel cycle facilities currently under construction. Though there has been a surfeit of motivated and ill-informed commentary about how Iran "concealed" its uranium enrichment programme from the IAEA "in violation of the NPT" until it was "caught cheating" in 2002, the fact is that Iran was not obliged to inform the Agency about those facilities at the time. David Albright and Corey Hinderstein — who first provided the international media with satellite imagery and analysis of the unfinished fuel fabrication facility at Natanz and heavy water research reactor at Arak on December 12, 2002 — themselves noted that under the safeguards agreement in force at the time, "Iran is not required to allow IAEA inspections of a new nuclear facility until six months before nuclear material is introduced into it." In fact, it was not even required to inform the IAEA of their existence until then, a point conceded by Britain and the European Union at the March 2003 Board of Governors meeting. The Arak reactor is planned to go into operation in 2014. As for the pilot fuel enrichment plant (PFEP) at Natanz, it is still not operational today.
This `six months' clause was a standard part of all IAEA safeguards agreements signed in the 1970s and 1980s. It was only in the 1990s, following the Iraq crisis, that the Agency sought to strengthen itself by asking countries to sign `subsidiary arrangements' requiring the handing over of design information about any new facility six months prior to the start of construction. Many signed, some did not. Iran accepted this arrangement only in February 2003. Later that year, it signed the highly-intrusive Additional Protocol. Though it has yet to ratify it, Teheran has allowed the IAEA to exercise all its prerogatives under the protocol, including more than 20 "complementary accesses," some with a notice period of two hours or less. Dr. El-Baradei also reported that "Iran has, since October 2003, provided the Agency upon its request, and as a transparency measure, access to certain additional information and locations beyond that required under its Safeguards Agreement and Additional Protocol."
What Iran has yet to do is provide the IAEA sufficient information on the history of its centrifuge programme for it to satisfy itself that there are no "undeclared nuclear materials or activities." However, this alone can hardly constitute grounds for referring the country to the Security Council under Article III.B.4 of the Agency's Statute since the IAEA, in the past two years, has found discrepancies in the utilisation of nuclear material in as many as 15 countries. Among these are South Korea, Taiwan, and Egypt. In 2002 and 2003, for example, South Korea refused to let the IAEA visit facilities connected to its laser enrichment programme. Subsequently, though Seoul confessed to having secretly enriched uranium to a 77 per cent concentration of U-235 — a grade sufficient for fissile material — neither the U.S. nor EU suggested referring the matter to the UNSC.
In contrast, there is no evidence whatsoever that Iran has produced weapon-grade uranium. Despite intrusive inspections, no facility or plan to produce weapon-grade uranium has been discovered, nor have any weapon designs surfaced.
To be continued
21 September 2005
The Hindu
THE PERSIAN PUZZLE - I
Iran and the invention of a nuclear crisis
Siddharth Varadarajan
BARELY TWO years after the United States invaded Iraq in the name of weapons of mass destruction which never existed, the world is being pushed towards a confrontation with Iran on a similarly flawed premise.
On September 17, Iran's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the United Nations General Assembly that his country would not give up its sovereign right to produce nuclear power using indigenously enriched uranium. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which Iran signed in 1974, allows Iran to build facilities involving all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle, including enrichment, subject to international safeguards. Given the fact that the U.S. continues to impose sanctions on the development of Iran's oil and gas sector (under the extra-territorial `Iran Libya Sanctions Act'), it is only logical that the Iranians should seek a civilian nuclear energy industry in which they won't have to be dependent on the West for fuel like enriched uranium.
However, as a major concession to Britain, France and Germany — the so-called EU-3 which has sought to prevail upon Iran to abandon enrichment in exchange for guarantees of assured fuel supply — Mr. Ahmadinejad offered to run his country's enrichment plants as joint ventures with private and public sector firms from other countries. Britain and France have rejected this offer, which the Iranians say is a demonstration of their intent to be as transparent as possible. The EU-3 and the U.S. insist Teheran must not work on enrichment because once the technology is mastered, the same facilities could be used to produce not just low enriched uranium (LEU) for energy reactors but highly enriched uranium (HEU) for bombs. Accordingly, they have circulated a resolution in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors meeting — which began Monday — calling for Iran's civilian nuclear programme to be referred to the U.N. Security Council as a potential threat to international peace and security.
It is not difficult for the U.S. and its European allies to get a majority of the 35-nation Board of Governors to recommend referral; however, the board has operated on the basis of consensus for the past 12 years — ever since the forced vote referring North Korea to the UNSC split the IAEA — and the non-aligned group of countries and China remain opposed to taking Iran to the Security Council. If the U.S. is convinced a consensus will elude it for the foreseeable future, it could push for a vote this week rather than wait any longer. Next month, following the annual IAEA General Conference, a new Board of Governors will take over. And with Cuba and Syria entering the Board in place of Peru and Pakistan, the ranks of those firmly opposed to an SC referral are likely to increase.
Although the immediate trigger for the European and American pressure is Teheran's decision last month to end its voluntary suspension of uranium conversion at its Esfahan facility, the Iranian case cannot be referred to the Security Council on this ground.
First, the NPT allows uranium conversion and other processes central to enrichment. Secondly, the Esfahan facility is under IAEA safeguards and as recently as September 2, i.e. nearly a month after Iran resumed uranium conversion there, the Director-General of the Agency, Mohammad El-Baradei, certified that "all the declared nuclear material in Iran has been accounted for and, therefore, such material is not diverted to prohibited activities." Thirdly, the agreement to suspend enrichment, which Iran reached with the EU-3 at Paris last November, clearly states that "the E3/EU recognize that this suspension is a voluntary confidence building measure and not a legal obligation." In other words, if the voluntary suspension was not a legal obligation, the ending of that suspension can hardly be made the grounds for legal action by either the IAEA or the UN.
Myth of 'concealment'
If at all Iran is to be referred, then, its desire to pursue a complete fuel cycle for its civilian nuclear energy programme cannot be cited as legal grounds. Nor can the hitherto "secret" nature of its fuel cycle facilities currently under construction. Though there has been a surfeit of motivated and ill-informed commentary about how Iran "concealed" its uranium enrichment programme from the IAEA "in violation of the NPT" until it was "caught cheating" in 2002, the fact is that Iran was not obliged to inform the Agency about those facilities at the time. David Albright and Corey Hinderstein — who first provided the international media with satellite imagery and analysis of the unfinished fuel fabrication facility at Natanz and heavy water research reactor at Arak on December 12, 2002 — themselves noted that under the safeguards agreement in force at the time, "Iran is not required to allow IAEA inspections of a new nuclear facility until six months before nuclear material is introduced into it." In fact, it was not even required to inform the IAEA of their existence until then, a point conceded by Britain and the European Union at the March 2003 Board of Governors meeting. The Arak reactor is planned to go into operation in 2014. As for the pilot fuel enrichment plant (PFEP) at Natanz, it is still not operational today.
This `six months' clause was a standard part of all IAEA safeguards agreements signed in the 1970s and 1980s. It was only in the 1990s, following the Iraq crisis, that the Agency sought to strengthen itself by asking countries to sign `subsidiary arrangements' requiring the handing over of design information about any new facility six months prior to the start of construction. Many signed, some did not. Iran accepted this arrangement only in February 2003. Later that year, it signed the highly-intrusive Additional Protocol. Though it has yet to ratify it, Teheran has allowed the IAEA to exercise all its prerogatives under the protocol, including more than 20 "complementary accesses," some with a notice period of two hours or less. Dr. El-Baradei also reported that "Iran has, since October 2003, provided the Agency upon its request, and as a transparency measure, access to certain additional information and locations beyond that required under its Safeguards Agreement and Additional Protocol."
What Iran has yet to do is provide the IAEA sufficient information on the history of its centrifuge programme for it to satisfy itself that there are no "undeclared nuclear materials or activities." However, this alone can hardly constitute grounds for referring the country to the Security Council under Article III.B.4 of the Agency's Statute since the IAEA, in the past two years, has found discrepancies in the utilisation of nuclear material in as many as 15 countries. Among these are South Korea, Taiwan, and Egypt. In 2002 and 2003, for example, South Korea refused to let the IAEA visit facilities connected to its laser enrichment programme. Subsequently, though Seoul confessed to having secretly enriched uranium to a 77 per cent concentration of U-235 — a grade sufficient for fissile material — neither the U.S. nor EU suggested referring the matter to the UNSC.
In contrast, there is no evidence whatsoever that Iran has produced weapon-grade uranium. Despite intrusive inspections, no facility or plan to produce weapon-grade uranium has been discovered, nor have any weapon designs surfaced.
To be continued
16 September 2005
When Jaswant took Indian politics to foreign shores
As a former resident of the glass house called diplomacy, Mr. Singh should have thought twice before throwing stones.
16 September 2005
The Hindu
When Jaswant took Indian politics to foreign shores
Siddharth Varadarajan
WHEN THE Bharatiya Janata Party chose to protest the fact that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had made a reference to Atal Bihari Vajpayee's opposition to the India-United States nuclear agreement in his meeting with President George W. Bush in New York, it perhaps did not realise the party spokesperson being fielded was somebody least suited to accuse anybody of discussing "domestic politics" on "foreign soil."
On Wednesday, Jaswant Singh criticised the Prime Minister for telling Mr. Bush he was "surprised" at Mr. Vajpayee's opposition. "Media reports highlight PM Dr. Manmohan Singh's half hour meeting with President Bush in a particular vein as if the Prime Minister was complaining to the President of the USA about our domestic politics," Jaswant Singh's statement said. He added: "It needs to be emphasised that all established conventions, mutual regards and due courtesy demand that domestic politics is not made a subject of discussion by our Prime Minister when visiting abroad."
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the allegation — and there is merit on both sides — Jaswant Singh himself stands guilty of "complaining ... about our domestic politics" while on an official trip overseas.
In a speech to the Israeli Council on Foreign Relations in Jerusalem on July 2, 2000, Mr. Singh — who was External Affairs Minister at the time — spoke about how there had been a "tectonic shift of consciousness" under the BJP and said the failure of India to draw closer to Israel until then was because of a "very strong urge among politicians" to continue in office. This, he explained, was because the Muslim vote could not be ignored. "India's Israel policy became a captive to domestic policy that came to be unwittingly an unstated veto to (sic) India's larger West Asian policy."
Here, not only was Mr. Singh raising an issue of "domestic politics," he was blaming an entire section of Indian citizens for an official policy that he wished to disown. Needless to say, this was also a misrepresentation of reality, unlike Dr. Manmohan Singh's accurate characterisation of Mr. Vajpayee's public opposition to the nuclear deal. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi as well as Jawaharlal Nehru's writings belie Mr. Singh's claim that India traditionally supported the Palestinian cause on anything other than its merits. And so widespread was the pro-Palestinian political consensus in India that no less a person than Mr. Vajpayee — who was External Affairs Minister-designate at the time — sat on the dais of a large pro-Arab rally in Delhi's Ramlila grounds in March 1977.
Mr. Jaswant Singh's tendency to discuss domestic politics in his discussions with foreign leaders was not confined to this one example. In his extended "strategic dialogue" with Strobe Talbott, Deputy Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton, domestic Indian political issues often came up. "Jaswant had been candid with me many times about his domestic politics and how they obtruded on our diplomacy, and I now owed him a bit of reciprocity," Talbott writes in his recent book, Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb(page 203). On page 121, Mr. Talbott says Jaswant "referred again to the difficulties of Indian domestic politics."
Unlike Dr. Manmohan Singh, who mentioned the flak he had got from Mr. Vajpayee and others in the Opposition, Mr. Jaswant Singh appears not to have spared those on "his own" side. In his book, Mr. Talbott writes of a meeting in New York on September 20, 1999. "I registered a strong objection to the draft nuclear doctrine [Brajesh] Mishra had presented in August. Jaswant replied that since the paper had no imprimatur from the government, it should not be taken too seriously. It was not really even a doctrine — it was just a set of recommendations that Vajpayee would almost certainly not accept. The U.S. should not `dignify' it by over-reacting."
Mr. Talbott was clearly taken aback. "I pointed out that Jaswant was disavowing in private something that Mishra had unveiled in public, which suggested that the more-is-better philosophy of deterrence had significant backing from powerful forces in the government, the BJP, the Parliament, the defence and foreign establishment. Not necessarily, Jaswant replied. Everything had to be understood against the backdrop of a hard-fought election campaign."
Mr. Jaswant Singh can be faulted here for his choice of words with Mr. Talbott but — unlike his Israel remarks — not the fact that he was discussing domestic politics. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a discussion among world leaders where domestic political realities are not articulated or shared. As a former resident of the glass house called diplomacy, Mr. Singh should have thought twice before throwing stones.
© Copyright 2000 - 2005 The Hindu
16 September 2005
The Hindu
When Jaswant took Indian politics to foreign shores
Siddharth Varadarajan
WHEN THE Bharatiya Janata Party chose to protest the fact that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had made a reference to Atal Bihari Vajpayee's opposition to the India-United States nuclear agreement in his meeting with President George W. Bush in New York, it perhaps did not realise the party spokesperson being fielded was somebody least suited to accuse anybody of discussing "domestic politics" on "foreign soil."
On Wednesday, Jaswant Singh criticised the Prime Minister for telling Mr. Bush he was "surprised" at Mr. Vajpayee's opposition. "Media reports highlight PM Dr. Manmohan Singh's half hour meeting with President Bush in a particular vein as if the Prime Minister was complaining to the President of the USA about our domestic politics," Jaswant Singh's statement said. He added: "It needs to be emphasised that all established conventions, mutual regards and due courtesy demand that domestic politics is not made a subject of discussion by our Prime Minister when visiting abroad."
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the allegation — and there is merit on both sides — Jaswant Singh himself stands guilty of "complaining ... about our domestic politics" while on an official trip overseas.
In a speech to the Israeli Council on Foreign Relations in Jerusalem on July 2, 2000, Mr. Singh — who was External Affairs Minister at the time — spoke about how there had been a "tectonic shift of consciousness" under the BJP and said the failure of India to draw closer to Israel until then was because of a "very strong urge among politicians" to continue in office. This, he explained, was because the Muslim vote could not be ignored. "India's Israel policy became a captive to domestic policy that came to be unwittingly an unstated veto to (sic) India's larger West Asian policy."
Here, not only was Mr. Singh raising an issue of "domestic politics," he was blaming an entire section of Indian citizens for an official policy that he wished to disown. Needless to say, this was also a misrepresentation of reality, unlike Dr. Manmohan Singh's accurate characterisation of Mr. Vajpayee's public opposition to the nuclear deal. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi as well as Jawaharlal Nehru's writings belie Mr. Singh's claim that India traditionally supported the Palestinian cause on anything other than its merits. And so widespread was the pro-Palestinian political consensus in India that no less a person than Mr. Vajpayee — who was External Affairs Minister-designate at the time — sat on the dais of a large pro-Arab rally in Delhi's Ramlila grounds in March 1977.
Mr. Jaswant Singh's tendency to discuss domestic politics in his discussions with foreign leaders was not confined to this one example. In his extended "strategic dialogue" with Strobe Talbott, Deputy Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton, domestic Indian political issues often came up. "Jaswant had been candid with me many times about his domestic politics and how they obtruded on our diplomacy, and I now owed him a bit of reciprocity," Talbott writes in his recent book, Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb(page 203). On page 121, Mr. Talbott says Jaswant "referred again to the difficulties of Indian domestic politics."
Unlike Dr. Manmohan Singh, who mentioned the flak he had got from Mr. Vajpayee and others in the Opposition, Mr. Jaswant Singh appears not to have spared those on "his own" side. In his book, Mr. Talbott writes of a meeting in New York on September 20, 1999. "I registered a strong objection to the draft nuclear doctrine [Brajesh] Mishra had presented in August. Jaswant replied that since the paper had no imprimatur from the government, it should not be taken too seriously. It was not really even a doctrine — it was just a set of recommendations that Vajpayee would almost certainly not accept. The U.S. should not `dignify' it by over-reacting."
Mr. Talbott was clearly taken aback. "I pointed out that Jaswant was disavowing in private something that Mishra had unveiled in public, which suggested that the more-is-better philosophy of deterrence had significant backing from powerful forces in the government, the BJP, the Parliament, the defence and foreign establishment. Not necessarily, Jaswant replied. Everything had to be understood against the backdrop of a hard-fought election campaign."
Mr. Jaswant Singh can be faulted here for his choice of words with Mr. Talbott but — unlike his Israel remarks — not the fact that he was discussing domestic politics. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a discussion among world leaders where domestic political realities are not articulated or shared. As a former resident of the glass house called diplomacy, Mr. Singh should have thought twice before throwing stones.
© Copyright 2000 - 2005 The Hindu
15 September 2005
Why India's poor need an employment guarantee...Transcript of an interview to ABC TV
ABC TV Asia-Pacific interviewed a colleague and I on India's radical new Employment Guarantee Act for an episode of one of their regular programmes, The Editors.
Siddharth Varadarajan: I think this is definitely something which has global significance, because for the first time in the past 20-25 years, you actually have a government which is acknowledging it has a responsibility to provide some measure of employment protection to its citizens.
Broadcast date: 14 September 2005
ABC Asia-Pacific
Episode 33: Poor plan
This week we examine an Indian government plan to give work and hope to the poor. Will the new scheme turn the tide of poverty in India?
Plus, we speak to Australian journalist, Peter Olszewski, who has been working in Rangoon and critisises America's sanctions against Burma's military regime. (Note: Burma has been renamed Myanmar by the military regime)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jason Tedjmasukmana: Hello and welcome to The Editors, I'm Jason Tedjmasukmana in Singapore standing in for Grace Phan. Tonight India and two very different opinions about the latest government plan to help the poor.
Siddharth Varadarajan, deputy editor, The Hindu: I think this is definitely something which has global significance because for the first time in the past 20-25 years you actually have a government which is acknowledging that it has a responsibility to provide some measure of employment protection to its citizens.
Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, foreign editor, Hindustan Times: The political landscape of India is littered with poverty alleviation programs of almost every possible description, and they've all been abandoned after three or four years largely because they don't seem to work very well, or the funding for them simply dries up.
Jason Tedjmasukmana: Also tonight Myanmar or Burma as some still prefer to call it, is there balance in the international community's approach to the military junta there? One journalist who has worked in Myanmar accuses the west and the US particularly over its economic sanctions as being overly harsh and doing Burmese people more harm than good.
Peter Olszewski, journalist: You will not starve the Myanmar people into submission and in my book I quote a Myanmar intellectual who says how dare you westerners starve us and make us fight a revolution from the comfort of your lounge room.
Jason Tedjmasukmana: That interview later in the program but first to India's poor plan, which is exactly what its detractors are calling it, a poorly devised political ploy that does little for India's most needy and destined to fail. Its defenders on the other hand claim that legislation just passed by the Indian parliament will be a conduit for India's new found prosperity to flow through to millions of people mostly in rural areas who remain wretchedly poor.
The legislation says that at least one adult in every poor household in the countryside should be guaranteed 100 days of work a year at the rate of at least 60 rupees or a $68 a day, just to put that wage into perspective, the World Bank says that more than 30 per cent of India's one billion people live on less than a dollar a day. The program is expected to cost an estimated 250 billion rupees or $5.6 billion a year, but sceptics say it could end up at six times that amount.
In a moment two senior Indian editors with very different views debate the issue. But first a look at how the proposed plan has been covered in the media both at home and abroad. 'BBC News' ran the story under the heading, "India's villagers get job promise". It quoted the president of India's ruling Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, telling parliament that "we are today passing a truly radical law which has far-reaching and profound consequences". The US 'Christian Science Monitor' said "India moves to spread wealth", and added, "social welfare spending it seems is staging a comeback here after 15 years of focus on privatisation and encouraging the high tech sector.
The 'Interpress Service' newsagency reported a story under the headline, "India passes world's biggest job guarantee plan". It quoted economics professor Prabhat Patnaik saying "this is the most important piece of legislation on behalf of India's impoverished millions since India won independence in 1947". The same story quoted another economist, Surjit Bhalla saying, "the law opens the floodgates to widespread corruption".
In a similar vein the 'Financial Times' reported, "India bill to help the poor criticised". It quoted analysts saying "the proposed scheme was too expensive to be tenable, and was unlikely to benefit those for whom it was intended". The 'Economist' pointed to critics of the new rural employment laws who it said, "regarded the legislation as yet another way of pouring unmeasured pots of good money after bad". Both sides of the debate were summed up in a piece in Calcutta's 'The Telegraph', which said "the debate is stuck between unthinking idealism and intemperate cynicism".
And finally the Indian website, 'rediff.com' said "we have tried to fight poverty by various means but have met with little success. So what India needs is something more lasting than patchwork policies to help its millions of poverty stricken people".
So is this new scheme more than just a patchwork of policies? To discuss this I'm joined by our guests both from New Delhi, Pramit Pal Chaudhuri is the foreign editor of the 'Hindustan Times' and The Editor's regular commentator on Indian affairs, and Siddharth Varadarajan is the deputy editor of 'The Hindu'. Gentlemen thanks for joining us on The Editors. Before we debate this issue could you both give me some idea of the feedback you've been getting from people about how the new program might work?
Siddharth Varadarajan, deputy editor, The Hindu: I attended a public rally in a very poor village where there were poor people talking about why they needed this law, and one thing which stuck in my mind was the testimony of a young boy. He was hardly nine or 10 and he told the audience that he went to school maybe twice a week, that most days if his mother and father both managed to find work then he himself did not have to seek work in a brick kiln after school. But he says half the week he would have to work for four to five hours in a brick kiln and earn just ten rupees, that's hardly 20 cents. And only then would there be enough money in the family to have a meal at breakfast, lunch and dinner of simply rice and a bit of gruel. No question of vegetables, no question of any other high protein, God, this is the kind of poverty we're talking about and this is endemic. Surely the government cannot begrudge its people some measure of employment and income support.
Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, foreign editor, Hindustan Times: In West Bengal, the state that I lived in and one that is ruled by a left-communist government, they also have a lot of public works programs that were designed to alleviate poverty. The ultimate point though was that the party, even the left parties essentially ensure that the money was siphoned off to their local patronage networks.
And even whatever public works that they did were specifically designed to collapse at the end of the year, they were building essentially dykes on the river because Bengal has a lot of, is a river and delta state, were designed to collapse so that they could ask for the same amount of money next year. There was absolutely nothing productive being done out of this and they were ensuring that the people who were getting the work were not necessarily poor but people who had party affiliation to the left party in power.
Jason Tedjmasukmana: An Indian government plan to give work and hope to hundreds of millions of impoverished people, will it work? We'll be back after the break.
[PROMO]
Jason Tedjmasukmana: Welcome back, tonight we look at India's underclass, after achieving higher incomes for its skilled and educated India's now looking to its poor. It has introduced new laws to provide work for millions of people, mostly in rural areas who languish on the bottom rung of Indian society. The big question is will the plan work? With me from New Delhi is Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, foreign editor of the 'Hindustan Times', and Siddharth Varadarajan, the deputy editor of 'The Hindu'.
Siddharth you describe this plan to help the poor as a global breakthrough. Why such strong praise?
Siddharth Varadarajan: I think this is definitely something which has global significance because for the first time in the past 20-25 years you actually have a government which is acknowledging that it has a responsibility to provide some measure of employment protection to its citizens. I mean, over the last 20 years you've had the orthodoxy of liberal neo-classical economics which says that job creation should be left to the market, and in India you have for the first time an official acknowledgement that markets are not really up to the task and given that reality it is the duty of the government to take some kind of interventionist or corrective steps to provide some measure of job protection or some measure of employment guarantee to its most impoverished citizens. So I think globally this is very definitely a breakthrough.
Jason Tedjmasukmana: Pramit how would you describe the plan?
Pramit Pal Chaudhuri: I'd have to be a little more cynical, I think that in fact poverty alleviation programs are dime a dozen in Indian history. We have literally, the political landscape of India is littered with poverty alleviation programs of almost every possible description, and they've all been abandoned after three or four years largely because they don't seem to work very well, or the funding for them simply dries up. Even the present one for example to help finance this one, an earlier one called the Food for Work program is being essentially abolished to help provide the funding for the present one. So I don't really see anything new in this program other than perhaps the scale of this poverty alleviation program.
Jason Tedjmasukmana: Pramit you mentioned the cost, the plan is said to cost a minimum of 5-point-6 billion dollars a year. Can India afford that?
Pramit Pal Chaudhuri: I think India can, I mean 5-billion dollars will not break the bank. The issue though of course is 5-billion dollars in the initial projection, which is essentially a pilot project covering about 200 districts. That's covering an estimated 20, it's assuming about 20 to 25 million people sign up for the program. If perhaps for example it then is extended to all of the Indians below the poverty level, which is roughly two or three-hundred people, then you're looking at, at a budget busting amount of money because we can make out the calculations, you multiply that by about 15, you're looking at about $65 to $75 billion, which is definitely well beyond something the Indian government could afford.
Siddharth Varadarajan: No I don't agree, I think when this program is extended to the rest of the country it will not necessarily be a straightforward multiplication process, in other words if you're spending 5.6 billion for the first stage there's every likelihood that the amount needed for subsequent stages may actually be less because you have, in economic terms, what's known as the multiplier effect -- money that you pour in and you provide for poor people to spend is money that gets recycled into the rural economy.
And I think the money will not be as large as people think, but even if it is a large sum, it is money well spent, and this country is spending an enormous amount of money on all kinds of wasteful things. You have any number of hidden subsidies for the rich, you have I think in many senses wasteful defence acquisitions.
Jason Tedjmasukmana: Pramit, Ila Patnaik, business editor of the 'Indian Express' says this employment guarantee plan has the potential to become, "India's best anti-poverty program if implemented well". What's to say it can't be properly handled and why would that be difficult?
Pramit Pal Chaudhuri: Rajiv Gandhi when he was prime minister made a famous statement where he said that out of every rupee that is spent on anti-poverty alleviation, only 15 per cent actually makes it to the people who it's targeted for, the rest of it just leaks out through the system through bureaucracy inefficiency. And one of the key criticisms of the employment guarantee scheme is that there has been almost no major administrative reform in how it functions.
It more or less functions exactly for example as an earlier scheme, which is run by the Maharashtra government, and the Maharashtra government one was riddled with corruption, it was riddled with all sorts of fake workers, people say politicians claiming 20 grandchildren were the people under the poverty scheme and taking the money, nobody showing up for work, it went on and on. It's been the entire history of fighting poverty in India at the government level. It's how do we ensure that nobody ever has any problems with these programs when they're announced, the problem always is that after two years everybody looks and says where has the money gone? And this program has nothing administratively new to make it function any better than any previous program.
Jason Tedjmasukmana: Siddharth would you agree that there is a history of failed programs?
Siddharth Varadarajan: No I don't agree with that, I think there are two things which separate the employment guarantee act from all those schemes, in this case a poor person who presents himself or herself to work under the employment guarantee scheme has a legal right, and if the government does not provide her that job or him that job then they're entitled to some kind of unemployment benefit.
Secondly this law has been accompanied by the passage of the Right to Information act, which for the first time in India is going to make governments, it's going to oblige governments to make public details of expenditures at the grassroots level. For example the way in which this scheme works and to a certain extent in Rajasthan where you have the Right to Information act in operation for the past two or three years, it's been very, very difficult for the bureaucracy to cheat, this act is well structured and I think there is every reason to expect that it's going to perform much better than earlier anti-poverty schemes.
Pramit Pal Chaudhuri: Well the Rajasthan program that he mentioned where you had a program of poverty alleviation merge with the Right to Information bill had a relatively I think, I can't remember the figure but I think roughly 40 per cent of the money actually made it through, and that's very high by the standards of most Indian anti-poverty schemes. The Right to Information factor is very important and I completely agree on that, the program is that most states in India do not have Right to Information bills, or the ones they have have been eviscerated or just ignored. Rights by themselves don't necessarily result in people understanding or even factoring this into the way they think, and the poorest people of India, and we're really looking at people who are below sub-Saharan African levels of poverty, don't have a clue as to what their rights are.
Siddharth Varadarajan: Given the manner in which this law has come about and the involvement of political mobilisation at grassroots level, I think the signs are optimistic, we are going to look at something which is going to be quite empowering in the rural areas and which has the potential to transform the social, economic and political equations in the countryside.
Jason Tedjmasukmana: Pramit Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has set the goal of eradicating poverty by 2020. How confident are you that this could happen?
Pramit Pal Chaudhuri: If we could achieve eight per cent plus economic growth rate then yes, poverty will fall. It may not be by 2020 but I think we would be able to see the back of poverty in India at some point in the near future.
Jason Tedjmasukmana: Siddharth an end to Indian poverty by 2020, is that possible?
Siddharth Varadarajan: No I don't agree because India has grown at seven, eight per cent for the past seven or eight years, poverty hasn't fallen by as much as the advocates of trickle down would suggest, so I think if the employment guarantee program is implemented properly and is expanded gradually and is accompanied by other forms of income support, nutritional support, public investment in education and health of the kind that this country sorely needs, I think by 2020 it is quite possible that poverty in India can be eliminated. But it can only be done if the government fulfils its obligation and does for its people what the private sector so far has failed to do.
Jason Tedjmasukmana: Thank you gentlemen very much, I've been speaking with Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, the foreign editor of the 'Hindustan Times', and Siddharth Varadarajan, the deputy editor of 'The Hindu'. Coming up one man's view of Myanmar, is the heavy-handed approach to the military regime there the wrong way to go? We'll be right back after the break. [PROMO]
Siddharth Varadarajan: I think this is definitely something which has global significance, because for the first time in the past 20-25 years, you actually have a government which is acknowledging it has a responsibility to provide some measure of employment protection to its citizens.
Broadcast date: 14 September 2005
ABC Asia-Pacific
Episode 33: Poor plan
This week we examine an Indian government plan to give work and hope to the poor. Will the new scheme turn the tide of poverty in India?
Plus, we speak to Australian journalist, Peter Olszewski, who has been working in Rangoon and critisises America's sanctions against Burma's military regime. (Note: Burma has been renamed Myanmar by the military regime)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jason Tedjmasukmana: Hello and welcome to The Editors, I'm Jason Tedjmasukmana in Singapore standing in for Grace Phan. Tonight India and two very different opinions about the latest government plan to help the poor.
Siddharth Varadarajan, deputy editor, The Hindu: I think this is definitely something which has global significance because for the first time in the past 20-25 years you actually have a government which is acknowledging that it has a responsibility to provide some measure of employment protection to its citizens.
Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, foreign editor, Hindustan Times: The political landscape of India is littered with poverty alleviation programs of almost every possible description, and they've all been abandoned after three or four years largely because they don't seem to work very well, or the funding for them simply dries up.
Jason Tedjmasukmana: Also tonight Myanmar or Burma as some still prefer to call it, is there balance in the international community's approach to the military junta there? One journalist who has worked in Myanmar accuses the west and the US particularly over its economic sanctions as being overly harsh and doing Burmese people more harm than good.
Peter Olszewski, journalist: You will not starve the Myanmar people into submission and in my book I quote a Myanmar intellectual who says how dare you westerners starve us and make us fight a revolution from the comfort of your lounge room.
Jason Tedjmasukmana: That interview later in the program but first to India's poor plan, which is exactly what its detractors are calling it, a poorly devised political ploy that does little for India's most needy and destined to fail. Its defenders on the other hand claim that legislation just passed by the Indian parliament will be a conduit for India's new found prosperity to flow through to millions of people mostly in rural areas who remain wretchedly poor.
The legislation says that at least one adult in every poor household in the countryside should be guaranteed 100 days of work a year at the rate of at least 60 rupees or a $68 a day, just to put that wage into perspective, the World Bank says that more than 30 per cent of India's one billion people live on less than a dollar a day. The program is expected to cost an estimated 250 billion rupees or $5.6 billion a year, but sceptics say it could end up at six times that amount.
In a moment two senior Indian editors with very different views debate the issue. But first a look at how the proposed plan has been covered in the media both at home and abroad. 'BBC News' ran the story under the heading, "India's villagers get job promise". It quoted the president of India's ruling Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, telling parliament that "we are today passing a truly radical law which has far-reaching and profound consequences". The US 'Christian Science Monitor' said "India moves to spread wealth", and added, "social welfare spending it seems is staging a comeback here after 15 years of focus on privatisation and encouraging the high tech sector.
The 'Interpress Service' newsagency reported a story under the headline, "India passes world's biggest job guarantee plan". It quoted economics professor Prabhat Patnaik saying "this is the most important piece of legislation on behalf of India's impoverished millions since India won independence in 1947". The same story quoted another economist, Surjit Bhalla saying, "the law opens the floodgates to widespread corruption".
In a similar vein the 'Financial Times' reported, "India bill to help the poor criticised". It quoted analysts saying "the proposed scheme was too expensive to be tenable, and was unlikely to benefit those for whom it was intended". The 'Economist' pointed to critics of the new rural employment laws who it said, "regarded the legislation as yet another way of pouring unmeasured pots of good money after bad". Both sides of the debate were summed up in a piece in Calcutta's 'The Telegraph', which said "the debate is stuck between unthinking idealism and intemperate cynicism".
And finally the Indian website, 'rediff.com' said "we have tried to fight poverty by various means but have met with little success. So what India needs is something more lasting than patchwork policies to help its millions of poverty stricken people".
So is this new scheme more than just a patchwork of policies? To discuss this I'm joined by our guests both from New Delhi, Pramit Pal Chaudhuri is the foreign editor of the 'Hindustan Times' and The Editor's regular commentator on Indian affairs, and Siddharth Varadarajan is the deputy editor of 'The Hindu'. Gentlemen thanks for joining us on The Editors. Before we debate this issue could you both give me some idea of the feedback you've been getting from people about how the new program might work?
Siddharth Varadarajan, deputy editor, The Hindu: I attended a public rally in a very poor village where there were poor people talking about why they needed this law, and one thing which stuck in my mind was the testimony of a young boy. He was hardly nine or 10 and he told the audience that he went to school maybe twice a week, that most days if his mother and father both managed to find work then he himself did not have to seek work in a brick kiln after school. But he says half the week he would have to work for four to five hours in a brick kiln and earn just ten rupees, that's hardly 20 cents. And only then would there be enough money in the family to have a meal at breakfast, lunch and dinner of simply rice and a bit of gruel. No question of vegetables, no question of any other high protein, God, this is the kind of poverty we're talking about and this is endemic. Surely the government cannot begrudge its people some measure of employment and income support.
Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, foreign editor, Hindustan Times: In West Bengal, the state that I lived in and one that is ruled by a left-communist government, they also have a lot of public works programs that were designed to alleviate poverty. The ultimate point though was that the party, even the left parties essentially ensure that the money was siphoned off to their local patronage networks.
And even whatever public works that they did were specifically designed to collapse at the end of the year, they were building essentially dykes on the river because Bengal has a lot of, is a river and delta state, were designed to collapse so that they could ask for the same amount of money next year. There was absolutely nothing productive being done out of this and they were ensuring that the people who were getting the work were not necessarily poor but people who had party affiliation to the left party in power.
Jason Tedjmasukmana: An Indian government plan to give work and hope to hundreds of millions of impoverished people, will it work? We'll be back after the break.
[PROMO]
Jason Tedjmasukmana: Welcome back, tonight we look at India's underclass, after achieving higher incomes for its skilled and educated India's now looking to its poor. It has introduced new laws to provide work for millions of people, mostly in rural areas who languish on the bottom rung of Indian society. The big question is will the plan work? With me from New Delhi is Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, foreign editor of the 'Hindustan Times', and Siddharth Varadarajan, the deputy editor of 'The Hindu'.
Siddharth you describe this plan to help the poor as a global breakthrough. Why such strong praise?
Siddharth Varadarajan: I think this is definitely something which has global significance because for the first time in the past 20-25 years you actually have a government which is acknowledging that it has a responsibility to provide some measure of employment protection to its citizens. I mean, over the last 20 years you've had the orthodoxy of liberal neo-classical economics which says that job creation should be left to the market, and in India you have for the first time an official acknowledgement that markets are not really up to the task and given that reality it is the duty of the government to take some kind of interventionist or corrective steps to provide some measure of job protection or some measure of employment guarantee to its most impoverished citizens. So I think globally this is very definitely a breakthrough.
Jason Tedjmasukmana: Pramit how would you describe the plan?
Pramit Pal Chaudhuri: I'd have to be a little more cynical, I think that in fact poverty alleviation programs are dime a dozen in Indian history. We have literally, the political landscape of India is littered with poverty alleviation programs of almost every possible description, and they've all been abandoned after three or four years largely because they don't seem to work very well, or the funding for them simply dries up. Even the present one for example to help finance this one, an earlier one called the Food for Work program is being essentially abolished to help provide the funding for the present one. So I don't really see anything new in this program other than perhaps the scale of this poverty alleviation program.
Jason Tedjmasukmana: Pramit you mentioned the cost, the plan is said to cost a minimum of 5-point-6 billion dollars a year. Can India afford that?
Pramit Pal Chaudhuri: I think India can, I mean 5-billion dollars will not break the bank. The issue though of course is 5-billion dollars in the initial projection, which is essentially a pilot project covering about 200 districts. That's covering an estimated 20, it's assuming about 20 to 25 million people sign up for the program. If perhaps for example it then is extended to all of the Indians below the poverty level, which is roughly two or three-hundred people, then you're looking at, at a budget busting amount of money because we can make out the calculations, you multiply that by about 15, you're looking at about $65 to $75 billion, which is definitely well beyond something the Indian government could afford.
Siddharth Varadarajan: No I don't agree, I think when this program is extended to the rest of the country it will not necessarily be a straightforward multiplication process, in other words if you're spending 5.6 billion for the first stage there's every likelihood that the amount needed for subsequent stages may actually be less because you have, in economic terms, what's known as the multiplier effect -- money that you pour in and you provide for poor people to spend is money that gets recycled into the rural economy.
And I think the money will not be as large as people think, but even if it is a large sum, it is money well spent, and this country is spending an enormous amount of money on all kinds of wasteful things. You have any number of hidden subsidies for the rich, you have I think in many senses wasteful defence acquisitions.
Jason Tedjmasukmana: Pramit, Ila Patnaik, business editor of the 'Indian Express' says this employment guarantee plan has the potential to become, "India's best anti-poverty program if implemented well". What's to say it can't be properly handled and why would that be difficult?
Pramit Pal Chaudhuri: Rajiv Gandhi when he was prime minister made a famous statement where he said that out of every rupee that is spent on anti-poverty alleviation, only 15 per cent actually makes it to the people who it's targeted for, the rest of it just leaks out through the system through bureaucracy inefficiency. And one of the key criticisms of the employment guarantee scheme is that there has been almost no major administrative reform in how it functions.
It more or less functions exactly for example as an earlier scheme, which is run by the Maharashtra government, and the Maharashtra government one was riddled with corruption, it was riddled with all sorts of fake workers, people say politicians claiming 20 grandchildren were the people under the poverty scheme and taking the money, nobody showing up for work, it went on and on. It's been the entire history of fighting poverty in India at the government level. It's how do we ensure that nobody ever has any problems with these programs when they're announced, the problem always is that after two years everybody looks and says where has the money gone? And this program has nothing administratively new to make it function any better than any previous program.
Jason Tedjmasukmana: Siddharth would you agree that there is a history of failed programs?
Siddharth Varadarajan: No I don't agree with that, I think there are two things which separate the employment guarantee act from all those schemes, in this case a poor person who presents himself or herself to work under the employment guarantee scheme has a legal right, and if the government does not provide her that job or him that job then they're entitled to some kind of unemployment benefit.
Secondly this law has been accompanied by the passage of the Right to Information act, which for the first time in India is going to make governments, it's going to oblige governments to make public details of expenditures at the grassroots level. For example the way in which this scheme works and to a certain extent in Rajasthan where you have the Right to Information act in operation for the past two or three years, it's been very, very difficult for the bureaucracy to cheat, this act is well structured and I think there is every reason to expect that it's going to perform much better than earlier anti-poverty schemes.
Pramit Pal Chaudhuri: Well the Rajasthan program that he mentioned where you had a program of poverty alleviation merge with the Right to Information bill had a relatively I think, I can't remember the figure but I think roughly 40 per cent of the money actually made it through, and that's very high by the standards of most Indian anti-poverty schemes. The Right to Information factor is very important and I completely agree on that, the program is that most states in India do not have Right to Information bills, or the ones they have have been eviscerated or just ignored. Rights by themselves don't necessarily result in people understanding or even factoring this into the way they think, and the poorest people of India, and we're really looking at people who are below sub-Saharan African levels of poverty, don't have a clue as to what their rights are.
Siddharth Varadarajan: Given the manner in which this law has come about and the involvement of political mobilisation at grassroots level, I think the signs are optimistic, we are going to look at something which is going to be quite empowering in the rural areas and which has the potential to transform the social, economic and political equations in the countryside.
Jason Tedjmasukmana: Pramit Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has set the goal of eradicating poverty by 2020. How confident are you that this could happen?
Pramit Pal Chaudhuri: If we could achieve eight per cent plus economic growth rate then yes, poverty will fall. It may not be by 2020 but I think we would be able to see the back of poverty in India at some point in the near future.
Jason Tedjmasukmana: Siddharth an end to Indian poverty by 2020, is that possible?
Siddharth Varadarajan: No I don't agree because India has grown at seven, eight per cent for the past seven or eight years, poverty hasn't fallen by as much as the advocates of trickle down would suggest, so I think if the employment guarantee program is implemented properly and is expanded gradually and is accompanied by other forms of income support, nutritional support, public investment in education and health of the kind that this country sorely needs, I think by 2020 it is quite possible that poverty in India can be eliminated. But it can only be done if the government fulfils its obligation and does for its people what the private sector so far has failed to do.
Jason Tedjmasukmana: Thank you gentlemen very much, I've been speaking with Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, the foreign editor of the 'Hindustan Times', and Siddharth Varadarajan, the deputy editor of 'The Hindu'. Coming up one man's view of Myanmar, is the heavy-handed approach to the military regime there the wrong way to go? We'll be right back after the break. [PROMO]
14 September 2005
It's time for boldness on the Siachen issue
The India-Pakistan peace process will get the credibility and longevity it needs if Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Pervez Musharraf find a way to bring their soldiers down from the world's highest battlefield.
14 September 2005
The Hindu
It's time for boldness on the Siachen issue
Siddharth Varadarajan
WHEN PRIME Minister Manmohan Singh and President Pervez Musharraf meet for dinner in New York on Wednesday to review what has been achieved on the bilateral front since their first meeting in September 2004, they should begin by accepting that there are really two peace processes under way, not one, and that some way has to be found of harmonising them.
The first process is the `composite dialogue,' which has completed two rounds and will enter a third in January 2006. Without in any way belittling the amount of official labour that has gone into each of this process' eight components, the results so far have been rather meagre. Indeed, the two concrete outcomes are the draft agreement on the pre-notification of missile tests and the exchange — on the very eve of this year's New York summit — of some 500 Indian and Pakistani prisoners.
On the other hand, the second process — the political dialogue that the two principals have been having with each other — has been highly productive. On the two occasions Dr. Singh and General Musharraf have met and had substantive discussions, they have managed to introduce new and dynamic elements into the relationship. In independently speaking of `soft borders' and of making borders irrelevant, the two men have produced something resembling a common political vocabulary that people on both sides seem quite comfortable with. Thanks to their leadership, we also have the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus service, the very real prospect of a gas pipeline linking Iran, Pakistan, and India, and much more. Compared to what they have achieved in just two meetings, the composite dialogue, then, seems like so much nitpicking.
This time last year, the Pakistani side was still looking for reassurances that the policy of engagement set in motion by the Vajpayee Government in January 2004 had the full backing of the new coalition that had come to power in India. Not only was Dr. Singh able to provide those assurances in ample measure, he also demonstrated a welcome willingness to go beyond the artificial limits imposed by his predecessor.
Previous breakthroughs
The joint statement issued by the two leaders on September 24, 2004, established three important points. First, that the implementation of confidence building measures (CBMs) of all kinds would "contribute to generating an atmosphere of trust and mutual understanding" between the two countries. Secondly, "that possible options for a peaceful, negotiated settlement of the [Kashmir] issue should be explored in a sincere spirit and purposeful manner." Thirdly, that a gas pipeline via Pakistan to India "could contribute to the welfare and prosperity of the people of both countries and should be considered in the larger context of expanding trade and economic relations between India and Pakistan."
The reference to the "larger context" in the formulation on gas reflected the South Block bureaucracy's reticence at the time to look at the pipeline as a stand-alone issue. By January, however, the economist and strategist in Dr. Singh had managed to prevail over the conservatism of his advisers and the Union Cabinet authorised the Energy Minister to begin exploring the project in earnest. The Prime Minister's intervention was also crucial in getting the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus on the road after months of inconclusive, pedantic wrangling over what documents the passengers would be required to carry.
When the two leaders met again in April this year, it was General Musharraf's turn to overrule his advisers, who were opposed to more people-to-people contact across the Line of Control and dragging their feet over the proposed Sindh-Rajasthan train link and the opening of consulates in Mumbai and Karachi. The joint statement issued in New Delhi on April 18 not only set a deadline for these initiatives but, more importantly, introduced three important concepts that were vital to the peace process. First, the process was declared irreversible; secondly, it was declared that neither side would allow acts of terrorism to disrupt the relationship; and thirdly, that cross-Line of Control interaction would be extended to include trade via trucks.
Prime Minister Singh, on his part, made two commitments in an effort to reassure General Musharraf — and his domestic constituency in Pakistan — that India saw CBMs not as an end in themselves but as a via media for the resolution of disputes. Thus the April 18 joint statement spoke of continuing the discussion on the issue of Jammu and Kashmir "in a sincere and purposeful and forward looking manner for a final settlement" and also of the need "expeditiously" to find a solution to both the Sir Creek and Siachen issues. The reference to a "final settlement" of Kashmir was not new in the bilateral context. The phrase figured in the 1972 Shimla Declaration but had subsequently fallen out of favour in New Delhi. Its revival, in the context of the reference to "possible options" and the talk of soft borders, was a clear political signal that India was willing to move away from the administrative status quo in Kashmir even as it insisted the territorial status quo could not be altered.
If the Foreign Secretary-level talks on Kashmir have not so far managed even to scratch the surface of any "options," this is mainly because the level of confidence this requires is still not adequate. Infiltration and terrorism remain a problem, and the process of people-to-people interaction across the LoC is at a very early stage. The more this interaction takes place — of buses, trucks, tourists, journalists, scholars, cultural workers, and even politicians — in every divided region of the former princely state including Jammu-Doda-Rajouri and Kargil-Skardu, the better the prospects of the official dialogue on Kashmir will be. At some point, a demi-official commission consisting of academics and experts from both sides could be set up to examine the necessity and feasibility of cross-LoC administrative initiatives such as water resource management.
Siachen as factor
As new facts get created on the ground, India and Pakistan will find it easier to conceptualise the politico-administrative aspects of a mutually acceptable "final settlement." With the best of intentions, however, this is not a process that can or should be rushed. What is important, however, is that conditions be quickly created that will allow the people of the State to lead a better, more secure life — free from the violence that insurgency and counter-insurgency inevitably bring. And the way to do that is to push ahead with the logic of CBMs. The only fly in the ointment is the residual suspicion in Pakistan that CBMs are simply India's way of avoiding the `core issue'. Is there any way India can allay those fears? There is, by demonstrating its willingness to find a solution to Siachen, a dispute that weighs heavily on the Pakistani national psyche.
Left to themselves, the two Defence Secretaries — who are responsible for conducting the Siachen part of the composite dialogue — will never be able to produce a solution. In April, Dr. Singh and General Musharraf said their "existing institutional mechanisms" should meet immediately to find an expeditious solution to Siachen and Sir Creek. In June, the Prime Minister himself travelled to the glacial battlefield — which has claimed the lives of hundreds of Indian and Pakistani soldiers for no strategic or military purpose — and spoke of turning the area into a "mountain of peace". Yet, at the official-level dialogue, there has been no forward movement.
Since demilitarisation of the glacier will mean Indian troops pulling back from Gyong La, Bilafond La, and Sia La — the three key passes along the Saltoro range — the Indian Army and Ministry of Defence want assurances that Pakistan will not move up and occupy posts India vacates. Getting Pakistan to authenticate its existing ground positions has been seen by Indian negotiators as the best way to ensure it does not eventually occupy posts higher and further afield. The bottom line, however, is whether General Musharraf and the Pakistani establishment and army can be trusted to keep its word. This is a political assessment that the Prime Minister has to make. Dr. Singh has already once invoked that old Reagan phrase — "trust, but verify" — in the context of Pakistani assurances on ending cross-border crossings by militants. The same principle can be applied to Siachen.
The way forward
Verification of any Siachen withdrawal is better accomplished not by authenticating ground positions but by demarcating the triangular region bounded by NJ9842 in the south (where the LoC ends), Indira Col in the north, and the Karakoram Pass in the east as a demilitarised zone that neither Indian nor Pakistani armed forces troops will enter except jointly, for purposes of regular inspection. Such an agreement — with a signed map of the zone appended — would provide at least as much protection in international law as a signed map of the actual ground position line (AGPL), which Pakistan refuses to agree to because it feels this might prejudice its eventual claim to the entire glacier.
Dr. Singh and General Musharraf should look seriously at such an option and recognise that their political intervention is needed to get the officials concerned to work out the required details. The risks are few, and the payoff is enormous — not just in terms of lives and money saved but also in terms of producing a highly visible and concrete outcome that will provide the peace process with the longevity and credibility it needs to sustain itself till the end.
© Copyright 2000 - 2005 The Hindu
14 September 2005
The Hindu
It's time for boldness on the Siachen issue
Siddharth Varadarajan
WHEN PRIME Minister Manmohan Singh and President Pervez Musharraf meet for dinner in New York on Wednesday to review what has been achieved on the bilateral front since their first meeting in September 2004, they should begin by accepting that there are really two peace processes under way, not one, and that some way has to be found of harmonising them.
The first process is the `composite dialogue,' which has completed two rounds and will enter a third in January 2006. Without in any way belittling the amount of official labour that has gone into each of this process' eight components, the results so far have been rather meagre. Indeed, the two concrete outcomes are the draft agreement on the pre-notification of missile tests and the exchange — on the very eve of this year's New York summit — of some 500 Indian and Pakistani prisoners.
On the other hand, the second process — the political dialogue that the two principals have been having with each other — has been highly productive. On the two occasions Dr. Singh and General Musharraf have met and had substantive discussions, they have managed to introduce new and dynamic elements into the relationship. In independently speaking of `soft borders' and of making borders irrelevant, the two men have produced something resembling a common political vocabulary that people on both sides seem quite comfortable with. Thanks to their leadership, we also have the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus service, the very real prospect of a gas pipeline linking Iran, Pakistan, and India, and much more. Compared to what they have achieved in just two meetings, the composite dialogue, then, seems like so much nitpicking.
This time last year, the Pakistani side was still looking for reassurances that the policy of engagement set in motion by the Vajpayee Government in January 2004 had the full backing of the new coalition that had come to power in India. Not only was Dr. Singh able to provide those assurances in ample measure, he also demonstrated a welcome willingness to go beyond the artificial limits imposed by his predecessor.
Previous breakthroughs
The joint statement issued by the two leaders on September 24, 2004, established three important points. First, that the implementation of confidence building measures (CBMs) of all kinds would "contribute to generating an atmosphere of trust and mutual understanding" between the two countries. Secondly, "that possible options for a peaceful, negotiated settlement of the [Kashmir] issue should be explored in a sincere spirit and purposeful manner." Thirdly, that a gas pipeline via Pakistan to India "could contribute to the welfare and prosperity of the people of both countries and should be considered in the larger context of expanding trade and economic relations between India and Pakistan."
The reference to the "larger context" in the formulation on gas reflected the South Block bureaucracy's reticence at the time to look at the pipeline as a stand-alone issue. By January, however, the economist and strategist in Dr. Singh had managed to prevail over the conservatism of his advisers and the Union Cabinet authorised the Energy Minister to begin exploring the project in earnest. The Prime Minister's intervention was also crucial in getting the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus on the road after months of inconclusive, pedantic wrangling over what documents the passengers would be required to carry.
When the two leaders met again in April this year, it was General Musharraf's turn to overrule his advisers, who were opposed to more people-to-people contact across the Line of Control and dragging their feet over the proposed Sindh-Rajasthan train link and the opening of consulates in Mumbai and Karachi. The joint statement issued in New Delhi on April 18 not only set a deadline for these initiatives but, more importantly, introduced three important concepts that were vital to the peace process. First, the process was declared irreversible; secondly, it was declared that neither side would allow acts of terrorism to disrupt the relationship; and thirdly, that cross-Line of Control interaction would be extended to include trade via trucks.
Prime Minister Singh, on his part, made two commitments in an effort to reassure General Musharraf — and his domestic constituency in Pakistan — that India saw CBMs not as an end in themselves but as a via media for the resolution of disputes. Thus the April 18 joint statement spoke of continuing the discussion on the issue of Jammu and Kashmir "in a sincere and purposeful and forward looking manner for a final settlement" and also of the need "expeditiously" to find a solution to both the Sir Creek and Siachen issues. The reference to a "final settlement" of Kashmir was not new in the bilateral context. The phrase figured in the 1972 Shimla Declaration but had subsequently fallen out of favour in New Delhi. Its revival, in the context of the reference to "possible options" and the talk of soft borders, was a clear political signal that India was willing to move away from the administrative status quo in Kashmir even as it insisted the territorial status quo could not be altered.
If the Foreign Secretary-level talks on Kashmir have not so far managed even to scratch the surface of any "options," this is mainly because the level of confidence this requires is still not adequate. Infiltration and terrorism remain a problem, and the process of people-to-people interaction across the LoC is at a very early stage. The more this interaction takes place — of buses, trucks, tourists, journalists, scholars, cultural workers, and even politicians — in every divided region of the former princely state including Jammu-Doda-Rajouri and Kargil-Skardu, the better the prospects of the official dialogue on Kashmir will be. At some point, a demi-official commission consisting of academics and experts from both sides could be set up to examine the necessity and feasibility of cross-LoC administrative initiatives such as water resource management.
Siachen as factor
As new facts get created on the ground, India and Pakistan will find it easier to conceptualise the politico-administrative aspects of a mutually acceptable "final settlement." With the best of intentions, however, this is not a process that can or should be rushed. What is important, however, is that conditions be quickly created that will allow the people of the State to lead a better, more secure life — free from the violence that insurgency and counter-insurgency inevitably bring. And the way to do that is to push ahead with the logic of CBMs. The only fly in the ointment is the residual suspicion in Pakistan that CBMs are simply India's way of avoiding the `core issue'. Is there any way India can allay those fears? There is, by demonstrating its willingness to find a solution to Siachen, a dispute that weighs heavily on the Pakistani national psyche.
Left to themselves, the two Defence Secretaries — who are responsible for conducting the Siachen part of the composite dialogue — will never be able to produce a solution. In April, Dr. Singh and General Musharraf said their "existing institutional mechanisms" should meet immediately to find an expeditious solution to Siachen and Sir Creek. In June, the Prime Minister himself travelled to the glacial battlefield — which has claimed the lives of hundreds of Indian and Pakistani soldiers for no strategic or military purpose — and spoke of turning the area into a "mountain of peace". Yet, at the official-level dialogue, there has been no forward movement.
Since demilitarisation of the glacier will mean Indian troops pulling back from Gyong La, Bilafond La, and Sia La — the three key passes along the Saltoro range — the Indian Army and Ministry of Defence want assurances that Pakistan will not move up and occupy posts India vacates. Getting Pakistan to authenticate its existing ground positions has been seen by Indian negotiators as the best way to ensure it does not eventually occupy posts higher and further afield. The bottom line, however, is whether General Musharraf and the Pakistani establishment and army can be trusted to keep its word. This is a political assessment that the Prime Minister has to make. Dr. Singh has already once invoked that old Reagan phrase — "trust, but verify" — in the context of Pakistani assurances on ending cross-border crossings by militants. The same principle can be applied to Siachen.
The way forward
Verification of any Siachen withdrawal is better accomplished not by authenticating ground positions but by demarcating the triangular region bounded by NJ9842 in the south (where the LoC ends), Indira Col in the north, and the Karakoram Pass in the east as a demilitarised zone that neither Indian nor Pakistani armed forces troops will enter except jointly, for purposes of regular inspection. Such an agreement — with a signed map of the zone appended — would provide at least as much protection in international law as a signed map of the actual ground position line (AGPL), which Pakistan refuses to agree to because it feels this might prejudice its eventual claim to the entire glacier.
Dr. Singh and General Musharraf should look seriously at such an option and recognise that their political intervention is needed to get the officials concerned to work out the required details. The risks are few, and the payoff is enormous — not just in terms of lives and money saved but also in terms of producing a highly visible and concrete outcome that will provide the peace process with the longevity and credibility it needs to sustain itself till the end.
© Copyright 2000 - 2005 The Hindu
13 September 2005
Take me to the sea
Of all the sins visited upon the people of Palestine by Israel, and there are many, the one I find truly unforgivable is the fact that Palestinians who lived a stone's throw from the Mediterannean never had the chance to walk on a beach, to swim in the sea.
So the first thing Palestinian men, women and children did when Israeli troops and settlers finally left the Gaza Strip on September 12 was to run to the beach.
The Israeli daily, Ha'aretz, reports:
So the first thing Palestinian men, women and children did when Israeli troops and settlers finally left the Gaza Strip on September 12 was to run to the beach.
The Israeli daily, Ha'aretz, reports:
"Joyous Palestinians flooded into empty settlements while others headed straightThe photographs here say it all. Sadly, so unused to the waves were the Palestinian children that five of them drowned.
for the beach. Palestinian teens Mahmoud Barbakh and Mohammed Jaroun
grew up just a few minutes from the Mediterranean, but had never been to the
beach before.
On Monday, they waded into the waves with their jeans rolled up, then abandoned all caution and threw themselves into the surf. "It was the sweetest thing in the whole world," said 15-year-old Mahmoud, beaming... Hundreds of Palestinians enjoyed the water off the Gaza coast, some at the former beachfront settlement of Shirat Hayam. One used a refrigerator door as a makeshift surfboard. Nearby, youngsters collected spent Israeli bullet casings, stuffing them into empty bottles."
Take me to the sea at sunset,that I may hear what the sea says to you
when it returns to
itself, tranquil, so tranquil.
I shall not change what is in me. I shall steal into a wave
and say: take me to the sea again.This is what those who are afraid do with themselves.They go to the sea when tormented by a starthat burnt itself in the sky.
Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, 'The Strangers Pleasure Trip'
From Why have you left the horse alone ( Translated by Lena Jayyusi)
From Why have you left the horse alone ( Translated by Lena Jayyusi)
12 September 2005
The final levee has given way...
As if the official ineptitude of the Bush administration in the aftermath of Katrina and the callousness of the Bush family were not enough to digest, a U.S. Federal appeals court has just ruled that President Bush has the right to lock up anyone, forever, without charge.
12 September 2005
The Hindu
12 September 2005
The Hindu
America bids farewell to the rule of law
Siddharth Varadarajan
VIRTUALLY FOUR years to the day terrorists levelled the World Trade Center, a federal court in the United States has delivered another shocking body blow to the edifice of civil society in that country. In a unanimous verdict on Friday, the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld as legal one of the most controversial weapons the Bush administration has armed itself with in its "global war on terror": the power to incarcerate anybody — including U.S. citizens — indefinitely, without charge. The ruling was made in the case of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen who has been kept in a military detention centre in South Carolina since May 2002. Mr. Padilla is accused of being a member of Al-Qaeda and of conspiring to explode a "dirty bomb" inside the U.S. The administration, however, refuses to charge him or test the veracity of its allegations in a court of law, claiming instead that it has the right to hold him indefinitely in the interests of national security.
The Court of Appeal has now upheld that claim, ruling that the U.S. Congress — in passing a joint resolution soon after 9/11 for "Authorisation for Use of Military Force" — had "provided the President all powers necessary and appropriate to protect American citizens from terrorist acts." Those powers "include the power to detain identified and committed enemies such as Padilla, who [was] associated with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban regime, who took up arms against this Nation in its war against these enemies, and who entered the U.S. for the avowed purpose of further prosecuting that war by attacking American citizens and targets on our own soil...," the court said.
What this means is that unless the Supreme Court overturns this verdict, Mr. Padilla — like the non-U.S. prisoners at Guantanamo — will remain in legal limbo. And since the war on terror has been described by U.S. officials as "an endless war," the period of incarceration could also be endless. Indeed, the U.S. administration is now at liberty to invoke the power of indefinite detention against anyone it likes, since the Appeal Court considered the exercise of presidential powers to be unconstrained by any consideration about the authenticity of allegations levelled against an individual to be detained.
While the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) bravely insists the judgment "does not authorise the government to designate and detain as an `enemy combatant' anyone who it claims is associated with Al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups," the bitter truth is that neither national or international legal covenants and jurisdictions or the possession of U.S. citizenship will protect individuals from being deprived of their liberty if the administration decides they are a threat to U.S. national security. Once the President decides to lock someone up in the name of national security, no Bill of Rights and no court can stand in the way.
The legitimisation of this extraordinary power is precisely what the Italian scholar, Giorgio Agamben, means when he says the `state of exception' — which in `democratic' countries is meant to be a `provisional measure' — has become a normal, routine, paradigmatic form of rule. In his State of Exception, published in 2004, Mr. Agamben writes: "President Bush's decision to refer to himself constantly as the `Commander in Chief of the Army' after September 11, 2001, must be considered in the context of this presidential claim to sovereign powers in emergency situations. If, as we have seen, the assumption of this title entails a direct reference to the state of exception, then Bush is attempting to produce a situation in which the emergency becomes the rule, and the very distinction between peace and war... becomes impossible." (Translated by Kevin Attell).
In designating Mr. Padilla an `enemy combatant,' President Bush invoked his authority as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces and instructed Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to detain him indefinitely. In his Writ of Habeas Corpus , filed on July 2, 2004, Mr. Padilla said he disputed this designation — and the allegations on which it was based — and wanted to be able to go to trial so that the true factual position could be established:
"Padilla is not an `enemy combatant'," his writ stated. "He has never joined a
foreign army and was not arrested on a foreign battlefield. He was arrested in a
civilian setting within the United States. Padilla carried no weapons or
explosives when he was arrested. He disputes the factual allegations underlying
the Government's designation of him as an `enemy combatant'."
So confident were Mr. Padilla's lawyers of their client's right to due process — and so pressing the urgency for a legal remedy since he had already been in detention for more than two years — that last October they filed a motion for summary judgment arguing that he was "entitled to judgment as a matter of law even if all of the facts pleaded [in the Government's allegations] are assumed to be true."
That confidence proved well-founded when a district court in South Carolina on February 28, 2005 granted the summary judgment motion and habeas petition and ordered that Mr. Padilla either be released or charged with a crime. The Bush administration went on appeal and has now won. The September 9 judgment was written by Judge J. Michael Luttig on behalf of a three-judge bench. Described in 2001 by CNN as "a rising star among conservatives", Judge Luttig is one of several judges in the running for a U.S. Supreme Court slot.
Chilling logic
The Appeal court essentially relied upon the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Hamdi case (involving another U.S. citizen alleged to be a member of Al-Qaeda) and the Quirin precedent, involving the case of German saboteurs who entered the U.S. during the Second World War and were detained as enemy combatants.
However, it rejected Mr. Padilla's argument that if Quirin were to apply, then he should be given the benefit of a trial as one of the defendants in that case, Haupt, also a U.S. citizen, had been.
The court said the "availability of criminal process cannot be determinative of the power to detain, if for no other reason than that criminal prosecution may well not achieve the very purpose for which detention is authorised in the first place — the prevention of return to the field of battle. Equally important, in many instances criminal prosecution would impede the Executive in its efforts to gather intelligence from the detainee... "
Implicit in this logic is the possibility that a criminal prosecution might not go in the Government's favour if the original allegations — which the appeal court assumed to be correct — turn out to be false. One would have thought the very possibility that the Government's evidence against Mr. Padilla is infirm is reason enough to insist on a trial. However, in declaring that a man detained by Presidential order has no right to challenge his detention, the court is essentially saying a detainee should not be put on trial if a court is likely to find that he is innocent and that this "may well not achieve the very purpose for which detention is authorized in the first place."
In other words, Judge Luttig and his colleagues have legitimised preventive detention without a time limit and without the need to demonstrate either necessity or proportionality.
President Bush has declared a war against a faceless, stateless enemy, and the power to detain `enemy combatants' is paramount, not the right of a citizen to contest the basis of his detention.
© Copyright 2000 - 2005 The Hindu
05 September 2005
Hurriyat and the Government: Dialogue in search of common ground
5 September 2005
The Hindu
Zero tolerance towards human rights violations and terrorist violence is the most important CBM that the Government and the Hurriyat must agree upon.
See text of statement issued by PMO after Manmohan Singh-Hurriyat meeting, 5 September 2005
Dialogue in search of common ground
Siddharth Varadarajan
THE GOVERNMENT of India and the All Parties Hurriyat Conference have had two unmemorable encounters in the past but Monday's meeting between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the Kashmiri outfit could well prove to be third time lucky if the two sides concentrate on the low-hanging fruit.
So great is the distance separating the formal positions of the Government and the Hurriyat that finding anything remotely resembling common ground is a difficult task at the best of times. Though the erstwhile Vajpayee Government deserves credit for having first invited the Hurriyat for talks, the BJP's approach to the Kashmir question was too rigid to allow any meaningful outcome. This was, after all, a government that had dispatched the autonomy resolution of Farooq Abdullah to the gallows without even the courtesy of a formal appraisal. The first pronouncement made by L.K. Advani after being named official interlocutor for the Hurriyat talks was predictably unhelpful: he said the only matter to discuss was "devolution." It took several weeks of delicate political surgery by concerned intermediaries — and the Vajpayee-Musharraf meeting in Islamabad on January 6, 2004 — to finally bring the Hurriyat leadership and Mr. Advani together.
The first meeting was held on January 22, the second on March 27. However, both produced little more than comforting photo-ops. The Hurriyat said the "role of the gun should be replaced by the sound of politics" and Mr. Advani promised "zero-level human rights violations" as part of his plan for "security with a human face." Of course, neither side delivered much. Critics in Kashmir lampooned the talks as encounters between a shopkeeper who had no desire to sell and a customer who had no money to spend.
The change of government at the Centre did little to push the process forward. Shivraj Patil, as Union Home Minister, inherited both the mantle of official interlocutor and his distinguished predecessor's penchant for setting out unnecessary preconditions. His statement that the dialogue had to be "within the four walls of the Constitution" effectively ensured no further meetings with the Hurriyat took place. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh wisely stepped into the breach with his own invitation but even then, it has taken several months for the right conditions to emerge.
Then and now
When the Hurriyat leaders meet the Prime Minister on Monday, they will do so in circumstances quite different from when they were last entertained on Raisina Hill. For one, the India-Pakistan peace process is rolling along with a third round of the composite dialogue to be launched in January 2006. A bus service operates between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad and an in-principle agreement has been reached to ply trucks on the same route. The Hurriyat leaders themselves travelled across the Line of Control and onwards into Pakistan, something no government in India had had the courage — or acuity — to permit in the past. Pakistani journalists have begun making forays into Jammu and Kashmir. Most recently, India issued visas for the first ever intra-Kashmir dialogue involving politicians and intellectuals from both sides of the LoC to be held in Srinagar. The dialogue, sponsored by the Delhi Policy Group and Centre for Dialogue and Reconciliation saw the participation of a number of delegates from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and the Northern Areas.
Of course, underlying conditions in the State continue to be difficult, if not grim. Militancy and infiltration continue, albeit at lower levels, but the desperation of those who wield the gun is reflected in a growing number of terrorist attacks near schools and other public places. `Breakaway' Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, too, remains a significant fly in the ointment. Though disowned by Pakistan and the Jamaat-e-Islami of Kashmir, he continues to have a measure of public support in the Valley, certainly more than the Hurriyat leaders, as evidenced by the rally outside his house in Hyderpora last month on the first anniversary of the founding of his Tehreek-e-Hurriyat.
Convinced it has militancy on the run, the Army is unwilling to countenance another unilateral `non-initiation of combat operations.' Elements within the Hurriyat are open to the idea of encouraging groups such as the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen to come forward with a ceasefire offer but they will be able to deliver on this account only if Pakistan weighs in with the same demand. While the idea of a ceasefire is worth exploring, the Hurriyat and Dr. Singh should begin on Monday with three simple proposals: First, there should be zero tolerance towards violence against civilians; secondly, the logic of `confidence-building measures' as a way of creating room for a political settlement between India and Pakistan in Kashmir must be allowed to continue; and third, the space must be created for peaceful political protest.
Zero tolerance towards violence against civilians means the government must not put up with human rights violations — whether deliberate or inadvertent — and must act punitively in those cases where the facts establish wanton violence against civilians. What the Manmohan Singh Government does in the Pathribal-Panchalthan incident — where the Rashtriya Rifles abducted five civilians at random in March 2000 and killed them in cold blood in order to pin the Chittisinghpora massacre of Sikhs on them — will be an important test case for establishing its bona fides. The matter is an open and shut case of murder and the CBI is believed to have recommended the prosecution of the Army officers involved. By sanctioning prosecution, the Government can demonstrate that it means business and that there will be no protection for those who violate the law.
On its part, the Hurriyat must take a clear and unambiguous stand against terrorists who target — or endanger — civilians in Kashmir. Just as a civilised society expects its security forces to abide by the rules of conflict, so must it insist that militants have an equal obligation not to harm civilians. Whenever there have been terrorist killings in Kashmir, the Hurriyat leaders either maintain an unbecoming silence or disingenuously try to blame the Government. The Hurriyat must declare that the killing of civilians — and the planting of explosives in places where civilians are likely to be killed or injured — is a crime against humanity and demand that militant groups stop these activities.
As for confidence-building measures (CBMs), the Hurriyat has a crucial role to play in convincing the Pakistani establishment that the interest of the people of Jammu and Kashmir will be served by allowing greater freedom of movement of individuals, families, trade and commerce across all main points of the LoC.
To the extent to which Islamabad is wary of starting bus services from Poonch to Rawalakot, Jammu to Mirpur and Kargil to Skardu, the Indian Government should ask the Hurriyat to press for the same. Similarly, mail and telephone services could be liberalised so that communication could be quicker and cheaper.
Finally, if the Government wishes to delegitimise violence and promote dialogue and politics, it must provide legal avenues for the expression of protest and dissent. Rallies and demonstrations are an important — and crucial — part of political culture throughout India. Given the possibility of disruption by agents provocateur, suitable parameters and protocols need to be devised to ensure protests remain peaceful. Nevertheless, it is time the Central and State Governments conceded the principle that peaceful protest — by the Hurriyat or any other force — cannot be prohibited indefinitely in Kashmir.
© Copyright 2000 - 2005 The Hindu
The Hindu
Zero tolerance towards human rights violations and terrorist violence is the most important CBM that the Government and the Hurriyat must agree upon.
See text of statement issued by PMO after Manmohan Singh-Hurriyat meeting, 5 September 2005
Dialogue in search of common ground
Siddharth Varadarajan
THE GOVERNMENT of India and the All Parties Hurriyat Conference have had two unmemorable encounters in the past but Monday's meeting between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the Kashmiri outfit could well prove to be third time lucky if the two sides concentrate on the low-hanging fruit.
So great is the distance separating the formal positions of the Government and the Hurriyat that finding anything remotely resembling common ground is a difficult task at the best of times. Though the erstwhile Vajpayee Government deserves credit for having first invited the Hurriyat for talks, the BJP's approach to the Kashmir question was too rigid to allow any meaningful outcome. This was, after all, a government that had dispatched the autonomy resolution of Farooq Abdullah to the gallows without even the courtesy of a formal appraisal. The first pronouncement made by L.K. Advani after being named official interlocutor for the Hurriyat talks was predictably unhelpful: he said the only matter to discuss was "devolution." It took several weeks of delicate political surgery by concerned intermediaries — and the Vajpayee-Musharraf meeting in Islamabad on January 6, 2004 — to finally bring the Hurriyat leadership and Mr. Advani together.
The first meeting was held on January 22, the second on March 27. However, both produced little more than comforting photo-ops. The Hurriyat said the "role of the gun should be replaced by the sound of politics" and Mr. Advani promised "zero-level human rights violations" as part of his plan for "security with a human face." Of course, neither side delivered much. Critics in Kashmir lampooned the talks as encounters between a shopkeeper who had no desire to sell and a customer who had no money to spend.
The change of government at the Centre did little to push the process forward. Shivraj Patil, as Union Home Minister, inherited both the mantle of official interlocutor and his distinguished predecessor's penchant for setting out unnecessary preconditions. His statement that the dialogue had to be "within the four walls of the Constitution" effectively ensured no further meetings with the Hurriyat took place. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh wisely stepped into the breach with his own invitation but even then, it has taken several months for the right conditions to emerge.
Then and now
When the Hurriyat leaders meet the Prime Minister on Monday, they will do so in circumstances quite different from when they were last entertained on Raisina Hill. For one, the India-Pakistan peace process is rolling along with a third round of the composite dialogue to be launched in January 2006. A bus service operates between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad and an in-principle agreement has been reached to ply trucks on the same route. The Hurriyat leaders themselves travelled across the Line of Control and onwards into Pakistan, something no government in India had had the courage — or acuity — to permit in the past. Pakistani journalists have begun making forays into Jammu and Kashmir. Most recently, India issued visas for the first ever intra-Kashmir dialogue involving politicians and intellectuals from both sides of the LoC to be held in Srinagar. The dialogue, sponsored by the Delhi Policy Group and Centre for Dialogue and Reconciliation saw the participation of a number of delegates from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and the Northern Areas.
Of course, underlying conditions in the State continue to be difficult, if not grim. Militancy and infiltration continue, albeit at lower levels, but the desperation of those who wield the gun is reflected in a growing number of terrorist attacks near schools and other public places. `Breakaway' Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, too, remains a significant fly in the ointment. Though disowned by Pakistan and the Jamaat-e-Islami of Kashmir, he continues to have a measure of public support in the Valley, certainly more than the Hurriyat leaders, as evidenced by the rally outside his house in Hyderpora last month on the first anniversary of the founding of his Tehreek-e-Hurriyat.
Convinced it has militancy on the run, the Army is unwilling to countenance another unilateral `non-initiation of combat operations.' Elements within the Hurriyat are open to the idea of encouraging groups such as the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen to come forward with a ceasefire offer but they will be able to deliver on this account only if Pakistan weighs in with the same demand. While the idea of a ceasefire is worth exploring, the Hurriyat and Dr. Singh should begin on Monday with three simple proposals: First, there should be zero tolerance towards violence against civilians; secondly, the logic of `confidence-building measures' as a way of creating room for a political settlement between India and Pakistan in Kashmir must be allowed to continue; and third, the space must be created for peaceful political protest.
Zero tolerance towards violence against civilians means the government must not put up with human rights violations — whether deliberate or inadvertent — and must act punitively in those cases where the facts establish wanton violence against civilians. What the Manmohan Singh Government does in the Pathribal-Panchalthan incident — where the Rashtriya Rifles abducted five civilians at random in March 2000 and killed them in cold blood in order to pin the Chittisinghpora massacre of Sikhs on them — will be an important test case for establishing its bona fides. The matter is an open and shut case of murder and the CBI is believed to have recommended the prosecution of the Army officers involved. By sanctioning prosecution, the Government can demonstrate that it means business and that there will be no protection for those who violate the law.
On its part, the Hurriyat must take a clear and unambiguous stand against terrorists who target — or endanger — civilians in Kashmir. Just as a civilised society expects its security forces to abide by the rules of conflict, so must it insist that militants have an equal obligation not to harm civilians. Whenever there have been terrorist killings in Kashmir, the Hurriyat leaders either maintain an unbecoming silence or disingenuously try to blame the Government. The Hurriyat must declare that the killing of civilians — and the planting of explosives in places where civilians are likely to be killed or injured — is a crime against humanity and demand that militant groups stop these activities.
As for confidence-building measures (CBMs), the Hurriyat has a crucial role to play in convincing the Pakistani establishment that the interest of the people of Jammu and Kashmir will be served by allowing greater freedom of movement of individuals, families, trade and commerce across all main points of the LoC.
To the extent to which Islamabad is wary of starting bus services from Poonch to Rawalakot, Jammu to Mirpur and Kargil to Skardu, the Indian Government should ask the Hurriyat to press for the same. Similarly, mail and telephone services could be liberalised so that communication could be quicker and cheaper.
Finally, if the Government wishes to delegitimise violence and promote dialogue and politics, it must provide legal avenues for the expression of protest and dissent. Rallies and demonstrations are an important — and crucial — part of political culture throughout India. Given the possibility of disruption by agents provocateur, suitable parameters and protocols need to be devised to ensure protests remain peaceful. Nevertheless, it is time the Central and State Governments conceded the principle that peaceful protest — by the Hurriyat or any other force — cannot be prohibited indefinitely in Kashmir.
© Copyright 2000 - 2005 The Hindu
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