No debate please, we're MPs

Behind the unprecedented Opposition walkout during Friday's Budget speech lies the declining salience of debate and conversation in India today ...

27 February 2010
The Hindu

Choice of decibel over decimal lets government off price hook

Siddharth Varadarajan

Whether their provisions spread cheer, gloom or even tedium, budget speeches in the Westminster tradition have always served as a platform for the display of good manners and wit. And what makes a particular budget memorable — apart from the odd essay where dramatic policy shifts are announced — is the thrust and parry between Finance Minister and Opposition. Even when the exchanges are not so scintillating, it is always possible to have a laugh about it later. Hartington’s 1881 speech in the House of Lords on Indian finances was so boring that he apparently yawned several times during its delivery and yawned again many years later when asked by a lady admirer to recall that session.

Pranab Mukherjee’s colourless delivery on Friday was neither so exciting nor so boring as to allow its mirthful recall even a few months from now. If, nevertheless, this budget is remembered in the future, it will be entirely for the gracelessness of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which led an Opposition walkout from Parliament even as the Finance Minister was reading his speech.

Unprecedented

The walkout may be unprecedented in the annals of Indian parliamentary practice but it reflects the steady erosion of civilised norms that is taking place in virtually all situations where disagreement and difference are occasioned. Whether in culture, politics or even diplomacy, bans, boycotts and noisy protests are seen as a better and more effective way of expressing opposition — even when ample, and often structured, avenues for debate and argument are available.

In the old days, parliamentary jousting was all about the fine arts of humour, irony and sarcasm. In the hands of a skilled parliamentarian, an understatement delivered firmly on the floor of the House could be more lethal than the kind of rhetorical overkill Opposition leaders like Sushma Swaraj indulged in once they had stormed out of Parliament. In parliamentary politics, there is place for mass agitation, demonstrations, public protest and even the boycott of Parliamentary sessions as a tactic. But the issue on which the last weapon is used must be commensurate with its gravity, so that the public understands the logic of the Opposition rejecting a platform that was created precisely for the purpose of holding bad policies in check. And despite the popular dissatisfaction over inflation, the announcement of an increase in diesel and petrol prices is not seen as justification enough for the walkout.

The contrast with the Budget speech of 1991 couldn’t have been starker. Manmohan Singh was finance minister and his budgetary essay — which contained reform measures much more radical than the oil price hike Mr. Mukherjee announced yesterday — was listened to attentively by the Opposition. Specific measures were greeted not with a walkout but with Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s sharp wit and repartee.

Had they been better prepared this year, the BJP and other parties could have found more decorous means of registering their dissatisfaction. But all they had in their armoury against the decimal of oil prices was decibel, which they used in ample measure to no avail.

Politically speaking, this is unfortunate. Mr. Mukherjee’s budget — and the sting of higher oil and fertiliser tariffs it brings — has been drafted for a year in which the Congress faces no major electoral test except Bihar — where its prospects are dim to begin with. The public needs a debate on the measures proposed and it needs an Opposition that can take on the government. If Friday’s walkout was spontaneous, the Government may still have a fight on its hands. But if it is an early indication of tactics the new Leader of the Opposition intends to employ, the public could well end up paying the price.

India, Pakistan take step forward, but potholes remain

The absence of a joint statement or joint press conference at the end of the meeting clearly meant the bilateral gulf was still enormous. But the original purpose, of opening a path for a new process of engagement, has been served...



26 February 2010
The Hindu

India, Pakistan take step forward, but potholes remain

Siddharth Varadarajan

So accident-prone and politically fraught is the relationship between India and Pakistan that conventional diplomatic metrics for measuring the success or failure of a meeting between them must invariably be discarded for more esoteric markers.

The absence of a joint statement or joint press conference at the end of Thursday’s meeting of the two foreign secretaries clearly meant the bilateral gulf was still enormous. But the fact that Nirupama Rao and Salman Bashir spoke of taking small first steps, stopping the “regression” in the relationship and rebuilding confidence and trust suggested their encounter had served its original purpose: of opening a path for a new process of engagement.

While agreeing to remain in touch at the foreign secretary level - it is more or less clear Ms. Rao will travel to Islamabad in the next few weeks - India demurred at Pakistan’s suggestion that the two sides work towards the timeline of a “substantial” prime ministerial meeting during the Saarc summit in Bhutan in April. And the Pakistanis did not accept India’s offer that joint secretary level meetings on a range of issues like trade be revived immediately. “That would have thrown us back to the pre-1997 days, before the composite dialogue format was created”, a Pakistani official told The Hindu.

When Mr. Bashir told reporters the meeting was neither a success nor a failure, he was stating the obvious. ‘Success’ for the Indians would have meant having their concerns on terrorism fully addressed, while for the Pakistanis it would have meant resumption of the composite dialogue. In the run-up to February 25, it was evident that these were impossibilities. To declare the meeting a success without these achievements in hand would have been politically suicidal for both sides. But if success was scripted out, what about failure? That danger was always present. It would have manifested itself in the current exercise being a one-shot affair, or one ruined by rhetoric and grandstanding. Fortunately for the process, that never happened. But there is no accounting for thin skins.

Asked whether Kashmir had figured in the meeting, Ms. Rao said yes, but added the unhelpful qualifier “briefly”. This became the basis for a question to Mr. Bashir, who felt duty bound to clarify that these discussions had indeed been “detailed”. Piqued, some Indian officials later sought to quantify the contents of the dialogue with misplaced mathematical precision. Eighty five per cent of the meeting, it was put out, was devoted to discussing terrorism.

By late evening, a section of Indian officialdom decided the Pakistani foreign secretary had crossed the line in his answers to questions put to him by reporters at a nationally televised press conference. If pressed, reporters present might have used the adjective ‘rambling’ to describe his lengthy responses but some Indian officials insisted on characterising Mr. Bashir’s briefing as “acrimonious” and full of “point scoring”. The one phrase they chose to take umbrage to was his statement that Pakistan did not need to be “lectured” to on terrorism. Mr. Bashir’s somewhat casual description of an earlier Indian dossier on Lashkar chief Hafiz Saeed as consisting of “literature” rather than evidence – a phrase he later withdrew when a follow-up question was asked – also irritated some officials enough to make them remind the media that the Pakistani foreign secretary had received his brief from “men in khaki” rather than from a democratically elected government.

One can only assume the Government of India at the highest levels was fully aware of this fact when it decided to invite Mr. Bashir to Delhi in the first place. Indeed, that it had already factored in the implications of the military being the most decisive element of the Pakistani establishment. When TV channels started reporting the churlish comments of unnamed sources, other senior officials, arguably closer to the Prime Minister than the first set, were quick to set the record straight and clarify that there was nothing unexpected or surprising in what Mr. Bashir had said and that New Delhi certainly did not intend to get into a slanging match.

A senior official told The Hindu the decision to talk to Pakistan was taken in full knowledge of the fact that there are many across the border who do not want the process of engagement to succeed. Judging from his remarks at a small dinner in his honour by the Pakistani high commissioner, Shahid Malik, late Thursday night – a dinner attended by Ms. Rao and other senior Indian officials – Mr. Bashir is clearly not one of them. In the weeks and months ahead, the challenge for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will be to push a process of engagement that restores trust and confidence on both sides, that advances India’s core concerns on terror and opens the door to meaningful dialogue on the disputes that have bedevilled bilateral ties. And of course, part of that challenge will also involve ensuring there is no public manifestation of dissonance from within his own team.

Water as the carrier of concord with Pakistan

If Islamabad can win New Delhi's trust by cracking down on terror, it could pave the way for the two sides to work together for optimum development of the Indus basin...




25 February 2010
The Hindu

Water as the carrier of concord with Pakistan

Siddharth Varadarajan

As India and Pakistan move towards the welcome resumption of dialogue, New Delhi needs to factor in a new reality: More than Kashmir, it is the accusation that India is stealing water that is rapidly becoming the “core issue” in the Pakistani establishment's narrative about bilateral problems.

The issue of water is emotive, touching people across Pakistan in a much more fundamental way than the demand for Kashmiri self-determination. Per capita water availability has fallen precipitously over the past few decades, thanks to rising population and poor water management and is expected to fall below 700 cubic metres by 2025 — the international marker for water scarcity. In most years, the Indus barely makes it beyond the Kotri barrage in Sindh, leading to the ingress of sea water, the increase in soil salinity and the destruction of agriculture in deltaic districts like Thatta and Badin.

Though Pakistan's water woes predate recent hydroelectric projects like Baglihar in Jammu and Kashmir, jihadi organisations like the Lashkar-e-Taiba/Jamaat-ud-Dawa have started blaming India for the growing shortage of water. Apart from inflaming public opinion against India, this propaganda helps to blunt the resentment Sindh and Balochistan have traditionally had — as the lowest riparians in the Indus river basin — against West Punjab for drawing more than its fair share of the water flowing through the provinces. The campaign also deflects criticism of Pakistan's own gross neglect of its water and sanitation sector infrastructure over the past few decades.

At the same time, the fact that river flows from India to Pakistan have slowly declined is borne out by data on both sides. Above Merala on the Chenab, for example, the average monthly flows for September have nearly halved between 1999 and 2009. India says this is because of reduced rainfall and snowmelt. Pakistan disputes this claim, preferring to link observable reductions in flows to hydroelectric projects on the Indian side. That is why, in the run-up to the February 25 meeting of the Indian and Pakistani Foreign Secretaries, Islamabad has gone out of its way to project water as the most important topic it intends to raise.

But just because water — and not terrorism — tops the Pakistani agenda today is no reason for India to refuse to discuss the subject or to treat it as important. Even as it pushes for incremental gains on terrorism, trade and CBMs, New Delhi should take a strategic view and consider two questions. First, how would a refusal to talk water play on the Pakistani political stage, where the two provinces least inclined towards jihad — Sindh and Balochistan — are also the most vulnerable to anti-India propaganda about water theft? Second, is it just possible that Islamabad could be so keen for Indian cooperation on water that it might be willing to abandon the terrorist groups it has nurtured all these years as an instrument of policy against India?

To pose the problem in this way is not to suggest a neat symmetry between two taps — that as Pakistan turns off the terrorism faucet, India can offer to turn on the water. If matters were that simple, the two neighbours would either have solved their problems by now or gone to war. Instead, the link between terror and water is more complex and it revolves around trust. Simply put, Pakistan needs to realise that decisive action against terrorism would create an enabling environment for India to go beyond the letter of its written commitments on water and open the door for cooperation in other fields like energy that could also relieve some of the water pressure both countries are facing.

Though inter-provincial disputes over water sharing were a fact of life in this region before 1947, the partition of the subcontinent introduced a further complexity. It was easy for Radcliffe to draw a line on a map and divide up the land of British India but people and water were harder to partition. The mass migration and bloodshed this triggered is well-known but the rupture to the region's hydrological system proved to be just as traumatic. The rivers which irrigated the new nation all had their origins in India. But as an upper riparian locked in a politically adversarial relationship with Pakistan, the Indian side had little or no incentive to look at the Indus basin as an integrated water system. The early years of independence saw bitter disputes as India treated the waters of the Indus's five tributaries — Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas and Sutlej — as its own. Geography and terrain meant the Indus itself could not be harnessed on the Indian side of Jammu and Kashmir but intermittent, small-scale, diversions on the tributaries generated considerable tension with Pakistan. In 1960, the two countries sought to put an end to this tension by signing the Indus Water Treaty (IWT) with the World Bank's mediation.

The IWT partitioned the six rivers of the Indus watershed on a crudely longitudinal basis. India was given exclusive use of the waters of the three eastern tributaries, the Ravi, Beas and Sutlej, and the right to “non-consumptive” use of the western rivers, namely the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab. Under the IWT, India renounced its right to block or divert the flows of the ‘western' rivers and agreed to confine itself to run-of-the-river hydroelectric projects and the drawing of irrigation water for a specified acreage of farm land. This partitioning was irrational from an ecological standpoint and led to both sides incurring considerable expense as they were forced to develop canal infrastructure drawing on “their” allocated rivers to compensate for the non-use of the other side's rivers despite that water flowing through their own territory.

Pakistani officials from time to time do accuse India of violating the 1960 treaty on the division of the Indus waters. The Indian side, of course, denies this, and there is, in any case, a system of international mediation built into the IWT for binding international arbitration if the two countries cannot resolve a water-related dispute. Pakistan invoked this mechanism for Baglihar in 2005, though the arbitrator ruled in favour of the project subject to certain modifications. An earlier dispute over the Salal project was resolved in the 1970s by the two Foreign Secretaries. Today, nothing prevents Pakistan from referring any or all of the projects India proposes to build on the Chenab and Jhelum for arbitration.

Though the treaty has a mechanism to ensure compliance with the stipulated partitioning of rivers, a major weakness from Pakistan's standpoint is that it does not compel or require India to do anything on its side for the optimum development of what is, after all, an integrated water system. Inflows to Pakistan depend not just on rainfall and snowmelt in India and China (the uppermost eastern riparian) but also on the health of tributaries, streams, nullahs and acquifers as well as groundwater, soil and forest management practices. This is a classic externality problem. Costs incurred by the upper riparian on responsible watershed management will produce disproportionate benefits for the lower riparian, hence they are not incurred.

The IWT anticipated the importance of cooperation with Article VII stating that both parties “recognise that they have a common interest in the optimum development of the rivers, and to that extent, they declare their intention to cooperate, by mutual agreement, to the fullest extent”. So far, little has been done by either side to develop this mandate.

Since water does not figure as a standalone topic in the Composite Dialogue framework, Pakistan's insistence on its revival is at odds with its professed priority. When the Foreign Secretaries meet, therefore, they should not allow process to stand in the way of progress. They could, for example, discuss a framework for a standalone dialogue on water going beyond project-related disputes — for which an arbitration mechanism already exists. The focus could be on identifying short, medium and long-term steps for the optimum development of the rivers.
The Pakistani side would very quickly realise that such a dialogue, whose benefits, especially over the long-term, are tilted in its favour, can only deliver meaningful results if there is an atmosphere of confidence and trust. If the activities of terrorists like the LeT/JuD are allowed to continue, this is unlikely to happen. But if the action Islamabad has repeatedly promised does take place, a path might open for cooperation in other areas too.

Many of the disputes that seem to be driven by fears of water scarcity are actually a reflection of another kind of scarcity: electricity. Pakistan opposes the Indian Kishenganga hydel project on the Jhelum, for example, because it will interfere with its proposed Neelum-Jhelum power plant. But if the two countries could build trust in one another, there is no reason why they cannot agree on energy swaps that could do away with the need to duplicate power projects, especially those which restrict the flow of water. Today, given the way terrorism has eroded the Indian political system's capacity and willingness to do business with Pakistan, such ideas seem hopelessly utopian. But they do offer a glimpse of the kind of future that might be possible should the terrorist menace end. Rather than refusing to talk water, India should show Pakistan how the keys to ending its aquatic insecurities lie in its own hands.

The conference visa debate continues...

... in which the Ministry of Home Affairs says we're not policing thought and I reply that that is precisely what the restrictions on foreign scholars are intended to do...





23 February 2010
The Hindu

Ministry guidelines on conference and tourist visas

Ashim Khurana, Joint Secretary (Foreigners), Ministry of Home Affairs, writes:

I invite attention to the article ‘Policing thought, not controlling terror' (Feb. 22, 2010). I am afraid that the report is based on considerable misunderstanding and does not reflect the position correctly.

Conference Visa

The guidelines on Conference Visas have been in place for quite some time. These guidelines were revisited through a process of Inter-Ministerial consultations with the stakeholder Ministries/Departments concerned and revised instructions were issued in July, 2009.

As per the revised guidelines, prior security clearance from MHA is required

• in respect of participants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China, Iran, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Iraq, Sudan, foreigners of Pakistani origin and Stateless persons;

• if the participation involves visit to restricted or protected areas in India or areas affected by terrorism, militancy and extremism, etc. viz. Jammu & Kashmir and North-Eastern States;

• if the conference involves politically and socially sensitive subjects.

The participants from other countries can obtain Conference Visas from the Indian Mission concerned on production of

(i) invitation letter from the organiser,

(ii) event clearance from the Ministry of Home Affairs,

(iii) administrative approval of the nodal Ministry,

(iv) political clearance from the Ministry of External Affairs and

(v) clearance from the State Government/UT concerned.

The above guidelines supersede all the previous instructions on the subject.

The fresh guidelines were put in place to streamline the procedure for grant of Conference Visas to bona fide participants. In the present scenario, security imperatives cannot be ignored. As security vetting is a comprehensive process to be performed within a prescribed time line, a period of six weeks has been prescribed to the organisers to submit the details of the proposals so as to ensure that the clearance from MHA is granted well in time for the event and for the participants so that they are not put to any undue hardship in making their travel plans to attend the conference.

The guidelines are intended to facilitate conferences, not to control free speech or thought.

Tourist Visa

The recent guidelines on Tourist Visas stipulating a gap of at least two months between two visits to the country on a Tourist Visa have been introduced with a view to curbing the abuse/misuse of Tourist Visa. This stipulation of two months gap does not apply to foreign nationals coming on any other type of visa. This also does not apply to people of Indian origin holding PIO and OCI Cards. In case a foreign national holding a Tourist Visa has to come to the country within the period of two months of his/her last departure due to any exigent situation, he/she may have to obtain special permission from the Mission/Post concerned after duly satisfying the Mission/Post about the exigency.

A provision has also been made for genuine tourists who have to re-enter India largely on account of neighbourhood tourism. In such cases, the Indian Missions/Posts abroad have been authorised to permit two or three entries, subject to submission of a detailed itinerary and supporting documentation (ticket bookings).

Furthermore, instructions have already been issued on 24.12.2009 authorising the Immigration authorities in all the Immigration Check Posts in the country to allow such foreign nationals on Tourist Visas arriving in India without the specific authorisation from the Indian Missions/Posts to make two or three entries into the country (need based), subject to production of an itinerary and supporting documentation (ticket bookings).

It has also been decided that in emergent cases involving re-entry of persons of Indian origin on Tourist Visa within sixty days, of their earlier departure from India, FRROs may exercise their discretion in allowing such passengers to enter into the country after being convinced of the genuineness of their visit.

Siddharth Varadarajan replies:

Mr. Ashim Khurana is right to say security imperatives cannot be ignored in the present scenario. But why does the visit of a scholar from Europe or America trigger “security imperatives” only when she or he comes for a conference on “politically and socially sensitive subjects” and not when she or he visits India as a tourist? Obviously because the government believes a security threat is posed not by the scholar as an individual but by the views she or he has on "sensitive" subjects, a term so elastic it could cover virtually any topic. As for scholars from the eight blacklisted countries, India issues the maximum tourist visas to Bangladeshis and it is not difficult for a Bangladeshi academic to visit India for tourism. What is it about a “conference” that prompts the MHA to insist on security clearance for the scholar? Clearly, the ministry believes the exchange of ideas with foreign scholars has “security” implications.That is why I said what is being policed here is thought.

As for the two-month cooling off period for foreign visitors — a decision triggered by David Headley's frequent visits to India on a business visa — Mr. Khurana himself admits the stipulation of a two months gap does not apply to foreign nationals coming on any type of visa other than a tourist visa.

Despite all the safeguards and exemptions he has listed, many bona fide tourists and persons of Indian origin not holding PIO/OCI cards have been denied entry because of the new rule. The rule has also deterred potential visitors. Given the expense involved, tourists and Indian-origin visitors want an assurance that they would be allowed in and are unlikely to have confidence in the display of “discretion” by immigration officials.

Policing thought, not controlling terror

The Home Ministry's policy on visas for foreign scholars attending conferences in India is just as bone-headed as its recent restrictions on the entry of tourists and non-resident Indians...





22 February 2010
The Hindu

Policing thought, not controlling terror

Siddharth Varadarajan

As Union home minister P. Chidambaram grapples with the new architecture for counter-terrorism that he says India desperately needs, here's a suggestion he ought to consider: Dismantle the Department of Bad Ideas. Never heard of it? This is the section of his ministry which recommended that preventing foreign tourists and non-resident Indians from visiting India twice in a two month period would somehow protect the country from the likes of David Headley. That the alleged American terrorist travelled here to and from Pakistan multiple times on a business visa — for which the new restrictions do not apply — is a matter of detail the Ministry of Home Affairs seems to have overlooked.

One month on, the geniuses in Bad Ideas have struck again. Scholars from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Sudan, as well as scholars from any country who are of Pakistani origin, they reminded us last week, will no longer be given visas to attend conferences, seminars and workshops in India unless the MHA grants them “security clearance” in advance.

Security vetting

This is what the security guidelines, first framed in 1999 during the paranoid days of the BJP-led Vajpayee government and amended thrice since then, state. Any event that is either (i) on a subject which is political, semi-political, religious, communal or linked to human rights, or which has a bearing on external relations or national security, or (ii) is to be held in an area requiring an inner line or restricted area permit regardless of subject, or (iii) is to be attended by scholars from the eight red-flagged countries, must be referred to the MHA for “security clearance” at least six weeks before its commencement date. As the MHA stated in its recent press release, the lengthy timeline is needed to “ensure that security clearance for the event and for the participants could be suitably assessed … Security vetting is a time-consuming process”.

Now why is this a bone-headed idea from the security standpoint? Consider the example of a Sri Lankan professor at a small college in Kandy who plans to use an invitation to present a paper at a Pune University conference on food technology to plan an act of terror in India. In Mr. Chidambaram's fantasy world, the university would apply for clearance from the MHA, whose procedure for “security vetting” is so good that it would uncover the professor's terrorist proclivities and deny him a visa. So far so good. But guess what? If the same professor were to simply apply for a tourist visa, he would get it without any security vetting!

It is one thing for Mr. Chidambaram to be wary of visitors from these eight countries but why does he believe scholars are potentially more dangerous than their less educated compatriots and, therefore, in need of “security vetting”? In fact, it is not just scholars from the red-flagged eight who worry North Block but academics from anywhere in the world who may be invited to speak on a “political”, “semi-political”, religious, “communal” or human-rights related subject. Were the recent Nobel-prize winning NRI chemist, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, to be invited to give a talk on the relationship between chemistry and the Vedas, for example, he would require “security clearance” from the Home Ministry.

Security vetting for scholars is only the most restrictive hurdle that academic institutions need to surmount but there are a raft of other clearances that all conferences with foreign speakers must secure. And it doesn't require a Nobel prize to guess that what the MHA is concerned about is not “security” but ideas and thought.

According to the “liberalized” overall “Guidelines for organisers of international conferences, seminars, workshops etc. being held in India' — issued by the ministry in 2000 and still in force today — official clearance from a “nodal ministry” is needed to invite foreign scholars and experts for any event “where substantive discussions/deliberations/interaction and exchange of thoughts and ideas will take place on a specific subject matter.” The nodal ministry will then decide whether to permit the event or refer it on to the MHA if any of the three conditions cited above are triggered.

Business and corporate meetings with foreign participants are excluded from the purview of visa restrictions, as are sporting and cultural events. But what is striking about the ministry's guidelines is the attempt to regulate and control every branch of learning. Thus, the rules say that the organizers of an academic event involving foreign scholars must first approach their “nodal/administrative ministry” — defined as that ministry of the Government of India “which is dealing/regulating framing rules etc. in respect of subject matter chosen for the event”. Now a conference on education can be referred to the Ministry of Human Resource Development but one wonders which ministry the organizers of an international conference on the hermeneutics of Gadamer would have to go to in order to get “clearance” for their event, or one on emergence of nationalism in 19th century Europe! Presumably knowledge isn't knowledge if our omniscient babus are not framing rules for it. A scholar can't be a scholar if she or he has no “nodal ministry”.

At the heart of the home ministry's guidelines on conference visas is the fear of knowledge, ideas, discussion and scholarship. And this in a government headed by a former professor of economics. Which brings me back to the visa rules for tourists announced last month. Another Very Well Known economics professor recently told a very, very important person about the difficulty some equally eminent friends of his were experiencing getting a visa for India because of the new mandatory two month ‘cooling off period' ‘between visits. The VVIP apologized and indicated that a top official in the Ministry of External Affairs could intervene on their behalf. But surely India has more pressing tasks for its top officials than getting foolish restrictions waived, the professor is said to have replied.

Sadly, all appeals to reason and logic and all attempts to shame have failed as far as the two month rule is concerned. Meanwhile, the travel horror stories multiply. An NRI groom had to turn back from Delhi airport unmarried because he had visited India just a few weeks earlier. A U.S.-based techie who used to visit his ageing mother in Bangalore on his way to and from Singapore can no longer do so. A British couple who left their luggage in a Mumbai hotel and flew to Colombo for an extended holiday were unable to come back to claim their bags. The world-renowned African-American scholar, Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard, couldn't get a visa for the Jaipur Literary Festival in January because he could produce neither his birth certificate nor his 10th grade marksheet — apparently the only documents the Indian consulate in New York is willing to accept as proof that he was not really of Pakistani origin!

Needless to say, none of the mindless restrictions the MHA has imposed will help prevent terrorists from coming to India. Most will come without a visa; the others will have the ingenuity to come up with all the required paperwork. As for genuine tourists and scholars – who care for and love India — many will be scared off while those who brave the absurdity of our rules will be resentful. The organizers of academic events would rather plan their conferences and workshops in Sri Lanka, Nepal or perhaps even Malaysia or Singapore, confident that they would face less restrictions on what they can or cannot discuss than they would in India.

Shyam Saran quits in changed policy climate

Whatever the trigger, Mr. Saran is the second high-profile climate negotiator to exit the stage after crossing swords with the United States...




20 February 2010
The Hindu

Shyam Saran quits in changed policy climate

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: Rumours of his unhappiness and impending departure had been swirling around the Capital even before last December’s Copenhagen summit but Shyam Saran finally decided to call it quits on Friday. The Special Envoy of the Prime Minister on Climate Change “has been permitted to demit office from Friday, March 14,” a terse announcement from the PMO said.

But behind the simplicity of the notice is a more complex story — about who gets to set India’s negotiating line on climate change at a time when there is enormous pressure on the country to give up its core positions on the issue.

Last year, the tussle between Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh and the SEPM virtually spilled out into the open with the leak of a letter written by Mr. Saran to the Prime Minister listing his misgivings about the direction the Minister seemed to be heading in. And he was not alone. C. Dasgupta and Prodipto Ghosh — retired officials who have specialised on the subject and who were part of the Indian negotiating team — also questioned the wisdom of some of Mr. Ramesh’s pronouncements, especially on accepting international monitoring and diluting the per capita norm. They only agreed to go to Copenhagen after the Minister reassured them there would be no dilution in India’s stand.

In the aftermath of the summit, the Prime Minister came under pressure to re-evaluate the role of the SEPM with some arguing that the Environment Minister should be given sole authority to decide India’s climate change strategy at the global level.

One of those who wrote to Manmohan Singh asking that Mr. Ramesh be given full charge was N. K. Singh, the Rajya Sabha M.P. Mr. Singh’s letter appreciated Mr. Saran’s negotiating skills but said the absence of symmetry was leading to confusion.

Whatever the trigger, Mr. Saran is the second high-profile climate negotiator to exit the stage after crossing swords with the United States. Last December, the Philippines government sacked its chief negotiator, Bernaditas Castro-Muller, in the run-up to the Copenhagen summit, a move civil society groups said was taken to please Washington.

Sources close to Mr. Saran said his reasons for resigning from the job, which had an open-ended tenure, were personal and had nothing to do with the politics of climate change policy.

Highly placed sources told The Hindu that although the Prime Minister was still to take a final call on the matter, the SEPM would not be replaced and his office will likely be shut down. One of the options is for the Environment Ministry to take full charge of India’s negotiating strategy on climate change. A senior official said Mr. Saran was brought in at a time when the Environment Ministry was headed by less articulate ministers and that with Mr. Ramesh at the helm now there was no need to have a special envoy.

At the same time, the fact that the climate change issue requires inter-agency consultations and has not just technical but political and strategic dimensions means there is a logic to the PMO remaining in overall control. One of the options, therefore, could be for National Security Adviser Shiv Shankar Menon to be tasked with coordination.

Senior officials brushed aside suggestions in a section of the media that protocol issues might have played a role in the SEPM’s departure.

They said the Prime Minister had told Mr. Saran (and his special envoy on Pakistan, Satinder Lambah) last month that they would both have ‘Minister of State’ rank since Mr. Menon, their junior in the Indian Foreign Service, had MoS status as NSA.

As for Mr. Dasgupta and Mr. Ghosh who have sounded a contrarian note to Mr. Ramesh in the past, their services as negotiators will likely not be availed of in the future, officials said.

From Mumbai to Pune, signs of a lesson learnt

The post-attack response from the government was much better coordinated this time around...
15 February 2010
The Hindu

From Mumbai to Pune, signs of a lesson learnt

Siddharth Varadarajan

Gone are the multiple changes of ministerial clothing, the delay in mobilising investigators and the information vacuum which led the media into speculative frenzy. Granted the scale of the Pune bomb attack pales in comparison to the full frontal assault that heavily armed terrorists launched on Mumbai in November 2008, but Saturday’s terror strike saw a more self-assured government step forward to pick up the pieces and instill a sense of confidence in ordinary citizens.

Within three hours of the blast, Union Home Secretary G.K. Pillai met the press for a no-nonsense, factual briefing. Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok Chavan also met the press while Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram struck a calm and measured tone both on Saturday night and at his press conference on Sunday morning. All of them refused to say any more than what they knew about who might be responsible, which wasn’t much, and asked the media not to whistle in the dark.

Behind the scenes, the Ministry of External Affairs and the Prime Minister’s Office also showed signs of having learnt how to work the information system, with senior officials offering the media perspective rather than leaving them to drum up sound bites and wild theories from ‘sources’ lower down the administrative food chain. The intention was primarily to tamp down unhelpful speculation on television about whether India would withdraw its offer of talks to Pakistan now that terrorists had struck again.

During Mumbai, television narratives very quickly took on a life of their own. In November 2008, one leading channel claimed, wrongly, that India had begun to move its troops, prompting the Pakistani side to whip up fears of an imminent conflict. This time, officials appear keen for everyone to stay on message.

Conscious of the fact that this was the first major terrorist incident to happen on his watch in North Block, Mr. Chidambaram made it a point to arrive in Pune at the earliest opportunity, visit the wounded, take stock of the investigation and field questions from reporters. All told, his open style of functioning couldn’t have been more different from that of his two predecessors in the Ministry, Shivraj Patil and L.K. Advani.

When the dust settles, of course, the usual questions will surface again about intelligence failure. Why, for example, did the February 5 threat against Pune, Delhi and Kanpur by a Jamaat-ud-Dawa leader not trigger a higher level of alert in those cities? Is the government complacent about having busted the Indian Mujahideen? Has enough attention been paid to the network of Hindu extremists in Maharashtra who have planted bombs in the past? For the moment, however, the government can take some satisfaction from the orderly manner in which it has responded to the latest terrorist incident.

No rethinking on talks with Pakistan

“Terrorists are opposed to the dialogue. Why should we oblige them?”, asj senior officials ...

15 February 2010
The Hindu

No rethinking on talks with Pakistan

Siddharth Varadarajan

India has no intention of allowing terrorists to dictate the scope and schedule of diplomatic interaction with Pakistan and will not let Saturday’s bombing of a bakery in Pune derail the February 25 meeting of foreign secretaries, highly placed sources told The Hindu.

With investigations into the attack still underway, officials said on Sunday that there would be no “knee-jerk reaction”. India knows the situation is complex, they added.

Speaking to reporters in Chennai, where he had gone to deliver the Rajaji memorial lecture, External Affairs minister S.M. Krishna hinted that the motive of the bombers was to disrupt the impending dialogue with Pakistan. “We are well aware that the dark forces of terrorism are against peace and amity between nations", he said.

The message from Mr. Krishna and senior officials was clear: there will be no backing away from talks. Even if the Pune incident is traced to a Pakistan-based organization like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, this would only strengthen India’s position that terrorism needs to be the main focus of the forthcoming meeting.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a senior official criticized the opposition BJP’s demand that the proposed talks be called off. “Not talking may be a legitimate diplomatic option, as Arun Jaitley has said, but is it an effective option?” he asked. Terrorists will attempt to strike at targets in India whether there are talks or not. “What we do know is that the terrorists are opposed to the dialogue. Why should we oblige them?”, the official added.

In Sunday’s interactions between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Home Minister P. Chidambaram, National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon, the intelligence chiefs and others, all stakeholders agreed there should be no deviation from the current policy of trying to have a dialogue with Pakistan on terrorism. And the Congress party supports this line as well, the sources said.

“If we stop talking, it is not true that terrorism will stop”, a senior official said. “Terrorist threats require a different response. Calling off talks will not reduce those threats”. He added that the government was still not sure who was responsible for Pune. “We have our suspicions but Pakistan has been creating layers of deniability over the years which may make it difficult to directly pin the blame on anyone there”.

As far as the talks themselves are concerned, the sources stressed that they had low expectations. “We are not dealing with the Pakistan of 2004 or 2005”, said an official, referring to the period when the two sides made progress on a number of issues. “There is a very different situation across the border today”.

A reminder from terrorists: We don’t want India-Pakistan talks

The first major act of terrorism since 26/11 strongly indicates a likely motive ...




14 February 2010
The Hindu

NEWS ANALYSIS
A reminder from terrorists: We don’t want India-Pakistan talks

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: Investigators will doubtless establish the identity of those behind Saturday evening’s bomb blast in Pune but the timing of the first major act of terrorism since 26/11 strongly indicates a likely motive: to ensure the forthcoming dialogue between India and Pakistan is sabotaged even before it has a chance to get off the ground.

The coincidence is striking, the bomb attack coming just a day after the two governments announced their foreign secretaries would meet in New Delhi on February 25.

The targeting of a café frequented by foreigners and the proximity of the blast site to Pune’s Chabad House for Jews suggest the terrorists who are behind the latest attack want to remind ordinary Indians of the November 2008 strike on Mumbai. They want to remind India that neither their ability nor their determination to kill innocent civilians has been diminished by the security measures the country has taken. Most of all, they want to drive a still brittle body politic and civil society back into a confrontationist mode with Pakistan.

The ‘syndicate of terror’ whose footprints appear evident from both the choice of timing and target would like nothing better than a continuation of the diplomatic stalemate. The aim of the 26/11 attack was to provoke a military confrontation between India and Pakistan.

That didn’t work because the Manmohan Singh government understood what the jihadi groups and their backers were trying to accomplish. What followed, then, was a year of ‘no war, no peace’ but with India offering talks late last month, the terrorist groups felt the initiative slipping out of their hand once again.

At a rally in Islamabad on February 5 to denounce the idea of an India-Pakistan dialogue, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa deputy chief, Abdur Rehman Makki, posted warning of Pune being a target. “Kashmir had become a cold issue. But by denying Pakistan water, India has ensured that every farmer in Punjab is lining up with his tractor and plough, ready to overrun India.” At one time, jihadis were interested only in the liberation of Kashmir, but the water issue had ensured that “Delhi, Pune and Kanpur” were all fair targets, The Hindu’s correspondent in Islamabad, Nirupama Subramaniam quoted him as saying.

Though the opposition will try and corner the government for trying to meet its goal of ending terrorism from across the border through both a focussed dialogue and renewed emphasis on homeland security, the Pune bomb blast has underlined the importance of staying the course. And one of the first issues India will have to raise with the Pakistani Foreign Secretary is the need for Makki to be arrested and interrogated for his ‘prescient’ statement about Pune. The fact that terrorist groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba don’t want India and Pakistan to talk is a good reason to question the logic of not talking. Talks do not represent an easing of pressure on Pakistan to crack down on the LeT/JuD. Indeed, that they are likely to be a more effective instrument for pressing one’s demands is precisely why terrorist organisations are so keen to ensure the proposed dialogue never takes off.

India’s embrace of dialogue remains limited, reluctant

For government, talks agenda is leavened by concerns about terrorism and political fallout ...




12 February 2010
The Hindu

NEWS ANALYSIS
India’s embrace of dialogue remains limited, reluctant

Siddharth Varadarajan

Now that India has pushed for the resumption of dialogue with Pakistan, the government has begun the task of fleshing out the precise agenda that it will bring to the table when the two Foreign Secretaries meet later this month.

But if the first step represented a political challenge for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as he struggled to get all stakeholders on board his new initiative, the second will test the skill of his diplomatic advisers.

Pending Islamabad’s formal response, notes and papers have begun circulating among the principal players in the Ministry of External Affairs -- External Affairs minister S.M. Krishna, Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao and Joint Secretary for Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, Yash Sinha – with the entire exercise being quarterbacked by National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon and other officials in the Prime Minister’s Office.

Having hit a plateau with its strategy of ‘no talks,’ the challenge is to get Pakistan to up the level of its cooperation on terrorism using engagement as a lever. In order for that to happen, however, officials realise India will also have to bring something more to the table than the same finger it has been wagging the past year. In particular, it will have to demonstrate that there are tangible benefits for Islamabad from the meaningful dialogue which would logically follow the restoration of confidence and trust.

Even as they seek to craft a viable agenda for talks, senior officials say the latest initiative is driven by another, more pressing consideration: the need for India to step back from the edge so that it retains some flexibility in its response should another terrorist attack take place. “If you are talking, you can always suspend talks. But if you are not talking, there will be enormous political pressure to react in ways that might be counterproductive. And this government does not want to provide such an incentive to the terrorists,” an official told The Hindu on condition of anonymity.

In line with the open-ended offer made last month and reiterated by the Foreign Secretary in her meeting with Pakistan’s High Commissioner in Delhi, Shahid Malik, India is willing to discuss any issue that Islamabad chooses to raise. This means Kashmir, water-related disputes and allegations of Indian interference in Balochistan could all figure if Pakistan is keen to prioritise them. However, India’s own priority, for the present at least, is to make headway on the limited topic of terrorism.

This narrow goal is a product of frustration that the headway made so far on the composite dialogue process and back-channel diplomacy has not prompted Pakistan to shut down the operation of terrorist groups on its territory. But it also a reflection of the political perception of many in the ruling Congress party that public opinion in India is still not ready to accept a return to ‘business as usual’ with Islamabad.

Even if the Manmohan Singh government has come to realise that the absence of talks does not diminish the threat posed by terrorism, senior officials believe talks without the required level of trust promise, at best, limited gains. “The paradox,” writes Mr. Menon in a forthcoming article for the Harvard International Review, “is that while there is no alternative to dialogue, it is and cannot be the entire answer to India’s dilemma.” The article was written just after Mr. Menon retired as Foreign Secretary and well before he was appointed NSA but provides useful pointers to Delhi’s current approach.

Even without the setback that the November 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai represented, Indian officials say the existing dialogue tracks were running out of steam. “In four and a half rounds of the composite dialogue process, we had managed to pick most of the low hanging fruit. But something like trade across the Line of Control could only be clinched at the Foreign Secretaries level,” an official speaking on condition of anonymity told The Hindu. Gains could still be made on trade and CBMs, he added, but that would require a step change in the political relationship which does not seem realistic now.

As for Kashmir, officials say the problem is not Indian reluctance to discuss what Pakistan once regarded as the ‘core issue’ but Islamabad’s apparent repudiation of what was achieved on the back-channel between 2004 and 2007.

In the same article, Mr. Menon revealed that “intensive back-channel diplomacy made considerable progress in charting a way forward that would enable the issue to be dealt with in humanitarian and practical terms without affecting the territorial stance of each country … The progress achieved in these discussions was considerable but not conclusive or formalised.”

Two worries about process

Since the Pakistani negotiator in the back-channel, Tariq Aziz, was a close friend of General Pervez Mushharaf “whose relationship with the rest of the Pakistani establishment was nebulous,” Mr. Menon wrote that India had two worries about the process. “One was whether future governments of Pakistan would respect agreements, since Pakistan is a country where orderly transfers of power from one government to the next are the exception rather than the rule. The other was whether the internally omnipotent Pakistan army was on board. The first question was never put to the test and remains unanswered. All too soon the second was answered in the negative.”

Since Mr. Menon’s article was written, the first question, too, seems to have been answered in the negative, at least going by the questions Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi’s raised recently about the back-channel.

None of this is surprising, say Indian officials, since New Delhi has been working with the assumption that authority in Pakistan is fragmented and that the struggle between the military establishment and the civilian government is ongoing. And today, the pendulum has swung in favour of GHQ. “The dilemma for Indian policy is to craft a credible and workable response to existing threats, including that of more Mumbai-like attacks from Pakistan, while attempting to work for a more normal relationship with Pakistan,” Mr. Menon wrote in his Harvard International Review article. “Faced with a fragmented situation, the logical answer would be to engage those elements in Pakistan, such as the civilian democratic leadership, that may share India’s interest in opposing extremism and terrorism and in promoting a peaceful democratic periphery.” And this would mean using dialogue as a means of pushing for gains on the terrorism front.

India wants no preconditions for talks

Not willing to provide assurance on composite dialogue resumption ...

11 Febrary 2010
The Hindu

India wants no preconditions

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: India is ready to discuss any issue Pakistan wishes to raise but is unwilling to assure Islamabad that the proposed Foreign Secretaries’ meeting will quickly lead to resumption of the composite dialogue, senior officials told The Hindu.

If Wednesday’s Pakistani statement reaffirming the need for the “composite dialogue process” is aimed at its domestic audience, India would have no problem, officials say. Nor are they opposed to the Foreign Secretaries discussing Pakistan’s desire to resume the composite dialogue. If an assurance about resumption is sought beforehand, however, the talks are likely to run into trouble even before they begin.

“Opinions in government may be divided on composite dialogue as a format,” one official acknowledged. “But if they are going to hold a gun to our head and say ‘only now will we talk’, that’s not going to work.”

Although Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has the backing of Congress president Sonia Gandhi and Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee for his latest peace initiative, the government is aware it is walking on eggshells.

Last month’s decision on talks was never formally discussed in the Cabinet Committee on Security, The Hindu has learned. But in informal consultations, CCS members like Defence Minister A.K. Antony are known to have expressed reservations about engaging Pakistan. “There is huge political aversion to resumption of the composite dialogue,” said an official, adding this was not out of fear of the BJP’s opposition but because many in the Congress believe the ‘no to talks’ stand helped the party win the April 2009 elections.

For India and Pakistan, nomenclature triggers more unease than dialogue

As long as the rose is not named, each side can live in hope that it will prevail. But if the two sides start fighting over names at the first sight of a bud, chances are the rose will never bloom....





5 February 2010
The Hindu

NEWS ANALYSIS
For India and Pakistan, nomenclature triggers more unease than dialogue

Siddharth Varadarajan

What’s in a name? A lot, apparently, as India and Pakistan agonise over whether the dialogue they would both officially like to start should be called ‘composite’, ‘limited’, ‘measured’ or ‘open-ended.’

When India offered foreign secretary level talks to Pakistan, it decided not to publicise the initiative until Islamabad had responded. But after a fortnight of secrecy, officials here went semi-public on Thursday despite the absence of a Pakistani answer. The reason: to tamp down a potentially damaging controversy over nomenclature.

Mindful of the terminological minefield that sub-continental diplomacy can be, the Indian offer was purposely vague and open-ended.

Pakistani hawks want nothing less than the immediate resumption of the composite dialogue — the multi-track process involving sequential meetings between different sets of officials on a full range of issues from Kashmir and Siachen to trade.

Indian hawks want no dialogue or at best, limited dialogue on one topic — terrorism.

Under the circumstances, the foreign secretary’s invitation was crafted to satisfy Islamabad’s demand for meaningful discussions that went beyond simply reviewing what progress had been made on the 26/11 case, while sidestepping the right-wing charge at home that India’s concerns about terrorism were somehow being diluted.

The problem, however, is that the foreign policy and security establishments in both countries are deeply divided. And that for every official batting for the resumption of engagement on either side, there are many who remain unconvinced and some who feel they should bat for the opposite goal.

On Wednesday, unidentified officials in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Islamabad told the Aaj channel in Pakistan that India had offered the resumption of the composite dialogue. The leak was untrue, but was perhaps intended to tempt the Indian side to issue a denial, thereby killing the process before it had a chance to begin.

A few days earlier, in fact, the waters had already been muddied in Delhi by fleeting Indian wire service reports of “highly placed sources” saying India favoured only “measured” contact with Pakistan and not the resumption of composite dialogue.

The identity of these “sources” was never revealed and the comments themselves never got much play in the Indian press after the MEA realised the damage they might cause.

But in Pakistan, where officials were mulling over how to respond to the Indian offer of “open-ended” talks on all outstanding issues affecting peace and security, this apparently categorical rejection of the composite dialogue by a “highly placed” official did not go down well. That may have been the reason for the ‘leak’ to Aaj.

As with all damage limitation exercises, however, Thursday’s controlled release of information could have unpredictable consequences. Reporters under pressure to cover the story but with no access to additional information get tempted to embellish the barebones narrative with either their own opinion or the views of ‘sources’. Stories can thus emerge which end up destroying the carefully crafted ambiguity that officials worked so hard to introduce in the first place.

As long as the rose is not named, each side can live in hope that it will prevail. But if the two sides start fighting over names at the first sight of a bud, chances are the rose will never bloom.

Given the difficulty with which the latest proposal has emerged out of a divided Indian establishment and the reluctance of a divided Pakistani establishment to do what it takes to build confidence, the battle over what to call the dialogue adds a new and unhelpful layer of complexity.

If the amount of skill and energy being expended on talks about talks about talks were saved up for when the talks really begin, who knows, the two sides might well end up making progress on issues that actually matter.

India awaits Pakistani response to talks offer

Invitation to discuss ‘issues affecting peace, security’ conveyed two weeks ago ...

5 February 2010
The Hindu

India awaits Pakistani response to talks offer

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: In an effort to get bilateral relations moving again, India has offered Pakistan open-ended talks at the level of Foreign Secretary on all outstanding issues affecting peace and security, including counter-terrorism. But though Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao made the proposal in a telephone call to her counterpart, Salman Bashir, nearly two weeks ago, the Pakistani side has yet to respond, highly placed sources told The Hindu on Thursday.

Sources said the phrase used to describe the contents of the proposed talks was carefully chosen to reflect the broad scope of interaction envisaged for the two Foreign Secretaries in the now-suspended composite dialogue process. With the political fall-out from Sharm el-Sheikh still fresh in their minds, Indian officials are keen to obviate a pointless debate on whether the composite dialogue — on hold since the November 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai — is being resumed or not. At the same time, it is clear that what Islamabad is being offered is the prospect of interaction on an agenda that goes well beyond what the two Foreign Secretaries discussed the last time they met in New York in September 2009.

With Pakistani High Commissioner Shahid Malik due to meet Ms. Rao in the next couple of days, Indian officials are hopeful that the proposed talks could get off the ground sooner rather than later. They said that although Ms. Rao had invited Mr. Bashir to come to Delhi, the venue was unimportant and that she could just as easily travel to Islamabad for the first meeting.

Sources told The Hindu this is the second time in three months that India has proposed an official-level meeting. In November, days after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said Delhi was “ready to discuss” humanitarian and other issues with Islamabad, the Ministry of External Affairs suggested a meeting between its Joint Secretary dealing with Pakistan and the Pakistani Foreign Ministry Director-General dealing with India. But that meeting never took place. Instead, Pakistan, in a unilateral humanitarian gesture, released a number of Indian fishermen who had been arrested for straying into its territorial waters.

Though P. Chidambaram will travel to Pakistan for the SAARC Home Ministers meeting later this month and will also hold talks with his Pakistani counterpart, sources say the proposed Foreign Secretary talks are not tied to the outcome of the Home Minister’s visit.

Can Chidambaram pass the Thackeray test?

The Centre and the Maharashtra government must make it clear to the Shiv Sena that they will not be allowed to threaten Shah Rukh Khan with violence...



3 February 2010
The Hindu

Can the idea of India pass the Thackeray test?

Siddharth Varadarajan

Now that he has come up with a radical plan for overhauling the country’s capacity to deal with terrorism and other threats to its national security, P. Chidambaram must turn his attention to a problem that none of his predecessors in the Union Home Ministry ever had the courage to deal with: putting goondas in their place.

The task is urgent and brooks no delay. After sparring with Shah Rukh Khan for several days over the Bollywood actor’s statement regretting the absence of Pakistani players in the forthcoming IPL cricket tournament and declaring that Mumbai belongs to all Indians and not just Maharashtrians, the Shiv Sena has now come up with an ultimatum: Mr. Khan must apologise or else the party will not allow his films to be shown in the city, India’s commercial capital.

For me, this contest is as nerve-wracking and stomach churning as any the IPL could throw up. Will this political tournament end with the jailing and prosecution of the Shiv Sena’s leaders and goons who are conspiring to vandalise cinema halls and beat up those who defy this ban? Or will it end with the desolate spectacle of an isolated Shah Rukh being forced to surrender before the ridiculous diktat of the Shiv Sainiks — the way dozens of artists, actors, musicians and politicians have done over the past two decades in the face of the cowardice of policemen, ministers and judges who refused to defend the rule of law?

Well placed to influence

As Union Home Minister, Mr. Chidambaram may lack direct authority to ensure either outcome in Mumbai. But with Maharashtra ruled by the Congress in alliance with the Nationalist Congress Party, he is certainly well placed to influence what happens next. And he has a moral and intellectual responsibility as well since he shares the actor's views. Asked last week by reporters for his opinion about the exclusion of the Pakistani cricketers by the IPL, the minister echoed Shah Rukh Khan in saying it was a “disservice to cricket that some of these players were not picked.” As for the status of Mumbai, Mr. Chidambaram described the ‘Maharashtrians only’ thesis of the Shiv Sena and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena as “pernicious.”

In the face of the Shiv Sena’s latest ultimatum, delivered by no less a person than Manohar Joshi, Mr. Chidambaram should remind the former Speaker of the Lok Sabha about the rights the Indian Constitution guarantees its citizens. And he should publicly declare that not only will the Shiv Sena’s goondas and leaders be prevented from disrupting the screening of My Name is Khan in Mumbai but that he himself intends to be present at the film’s first screening in the city.

A price Shiv Sena must pay

The Shiv Sena may be a recognised political party with an electoral presence at the state and central level but there is a price it must pay for being part of a democratic system. That price is fidelity to the rule of law and the principle of equality that is a basic feature of the Indian Constitution. For years, this party and its leader, Bal Thackeray, have tested the limits of the law by threatening and often actually unleashing violence on political opponents, trades unionists, religious and linguistic minorities and cultural personalities. Each time, the Indian system has proved too weak to defend the law.

When confronted by the mob power of the Shiv Sena, MNS or other right-wing groups, the police in India invariably give in to their demands, no matter how irrational or unreasonable, and force the targets of their illegal pressure to give up their rights. So art galleries anywhere in India think once, twice and a hundred times before exhibiting a single painting by M.F. Hussain, movie hall owners agonise over whether to show ‘controversial’ films or not, screenplay writers and movie directors allow politicians, pundits, granthis and maulvis to vet their projects before they are launched, scholarly works of history are banned because their contents do not conform with the cherished hagiography of some group or sect, writers like Taslima Nasrin are hounded out of the country by mobs who claim to have been offended by books they have never read, shops fear to stock Valentine cards because of threats by self-appointed guardians of morality and ‘Indian culture’.

The intolerance of the Shiv Sena (and now the MNS) may be the most virulent and violent but it is symptomatic of a sickness that has spread to every corner of the country. Shah Rukh Khan is a cultural icon, a face that the whole world identifies as Indian. If the Shiv Sena is able to silence him or make him take back his words by threatening violence, we might as well pack up and throw away the idea of India as a land where democracy and culture flourish. So how is this contest going to end? When confronted by mobs, each and every one of his predecessors in the Home Ministry chose the path of least resistance. Mr. Chidambaram cannot afford to fail the Thackeray test.

Absence of dialogue is hurting India

The IPL fiasco shows it is impossible to maintain cordiality or rationality at the level of civil society when the government lacks the will to engage with Pakistan ...





2 February 2010
The Hindu

Absence of dialogue is hurting India

The IPL fiasco shows it is impossible to maintain cordiality or rationality at the level of civil society when the government lacks the will to engage with Pakistan

Siddharth Varadarajan

When the Angels who rule India say they favour dialogue and peace with Pakistan but then fear to tread, is it any surprise that fools would rush in to destroy that virtuous path? We will never know whether somebody from our shadowy security establishment whispered something dark and fanciful in the ears of the owners and managers of the Indian Premier League as they went in for the player auction last week and if so, for whom he was batting.

Certainly, the manner in which every Pakistani cricketer was boycotted despite the initial expression of interest by the teams smacks of considerations other than sports, business or common sense. Most of all, the decision betrays such a poor understanding of the geographies of market development, brand building and soft power that its net effect will be to undermine India’s interests in the widest possible sense.

My own view is that the boycott was not ordered or engineered by the Government of India or any of its agencies acting on instructions from the top. But that does not free our leadership from the vicarious responsibility of needlessly perpetuating a bilateral vacuum that has produced one of the most spectacular self-dismissals sub-continental cricket — and diplomacy — have ever seen.

In the face of a popular backlash across the border, the Ministry of External Affairs rightly noted that the government had nothing to do with the IPL selection. But instead of expressing regret over an outcome that it played no direct role in producing, the MEA statement threw a heap of salt on the wounded national pride of all Pakistanis. “Pakistan,” the Ministry smugly declared, “should introspect on the reasons which have put a strain on relations between India and Pakistan and adversely impacted on peace, stability and prosperity in the region.”

If anything, a little introspection on the Indian side may have been equally appropriate, since some senior Ministers — including P. Chidambaram — later went out of their way to say the exclusion of Pakistani cricketers was indeed unfortunate. Apart from reflecting badly on India, the insulting exclusion has allowed reactionary, extremist elements in Pakistan to seize the moral high ground. And it has pushed Pakistani public opinion and civil society further into the embrace of those who would like to perpetuate a climate of hostility with India and who have more than a soft spot for terrorism.

When terrorists from the Pakistan-based group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, attacked Mumbai in November 2008, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh decided not to repeat the mistake the Vajpayee government made in December 2001 of cutting off transport and people-to-people relations as part of its strategy of coercive diplomacy. Dr. Singh’s advisers knew they were dealing with a fractured polity and society across the border. They knew India needed a differentiated approach that would help isolate those elements in the Pakistani establishment with connections to jihadi organisations while strengthening those who had realised the damage state sponsorship of extremism was inflicting on Pakistan itself.

Within this framework, suspension of official dialogue was seen as a way of putting pressure on the Pakistani military and the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, a strange conclusion given that the army and the ISI were never too hot on talks in the first place and used the resulting tension to rally the nation behind them. The civilian leadership, which managed to get a reluctant establishment to accept that Pakistani soil had indeed been used to plan 26/11, needed the limited resumption of dialogue to strengthen itself for the larger domestic battle against military dominance and jihadism. The arrest of senior LeT operatives should have occasioned some let up from India, at least by the time their trial got under way last year. But the hysterical cries of sell-out which greeted the July 2009 Sharm el-Sheikh summit stayed the Manmohan Singh government’s hand. As for civil society, New Delhi believed it would be possible to push ahead with people-to-people relations despite the freeze that had set in at the official level. Subsequent events have shown that belief to be slightly misplaced. The problem was not with the willingness of Pakistani businessmen, cricketers, artists and others to engage with India but the corrosive effect the suspension of dialogue would have on the capacity of the Indian system to use soft power to its advantage.

The IPL fiasco is one example of the negative externalities generated by the lack of official contact between the two governments. But there are others. During the India International Trade Fair in 2009, several container loads of Pakistani products got held up in lengthy customs clearance procedures. Needless to say, this petty if unscripted harassment of traders and exhibitors from across did nothing to enhance India’s national interest. This year, many Pakistani publishers and book distributors have been unable to obtain visas for the Delhi book fair.

Instead of people-to-people relations influencing official relations in a positive way, the freeze in official ties has inevitably begun to cast a chill on all forms of interaction. Businessmen, who should be looking to exploit opportunities for mutual gain, have become infected with the same hard-line pathology that our security establishment suffers from. Last year, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry Task Force on National Security and Terrorism came up with a report so strident and hawkish that it provoked an unhelpful backlash from traders in Pakistan. Among the “hard options” the FICCI task force said India could take against Pakistan in the event of another major terrorist attack were “surgical” strikes, covert retaliation inside Pakistani territory, the blocking of imports, all-out assault and “leveraging the water issue” to pressure Pakistan.

Like nature, the relationship between the two countries abhors a vacuum. India held back the tide of dialogue in the hope that Pakistan would permanently dismantle the infrastructure of terror on its territory and a more fertile ground for bilateral progress results. The strategy might have worked up to a point but diminishing returns set in a long time ago. Today, India is acting as if the continuing suspension of dialogue is buying it security and that the resumption of dialogue would be a concession to Pakistan. In fact, dialogue is nothing other than a mechanism for advancing one’s own goals. In the hands of a skilled diplomatic establishment, dialogue, even on a range of difficult issues and disputes, can be used selectively to harvest gains. New Delhi has talked to Islamabad for decades about Kashmir without conceding an inch of territory and there is no reason to fear what might happen if talks are resumed. Especially if the same dialogue process also allows bilateral trade to increase beyond the current annual level of $2 billion and allows Indian soft power to create a wider constituency for peace and good relations in Pakistan.

It goes without saying that Pakistan needs to do more to demonstrate its willingness to crack down on extremist elements that continue to plan attacks on India. On its part, India needs to realise that engaging with Pakistan will be a more effective way of driving home that point than trading statements and insults every few weeks and refusing to sit down at the same table. A new start must immediately be made with the convening of a meeting of the two Foreign Secretaries. Neither side should stand on ceremony as far as the venue is concerned. Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram should make it a point to visit Islamabad for the Saarc Home Ministers meeting later this month and meet his Pakistani counterpart to review not just the Mumbai case but other subjects of mutual concern. The Saarc summit in Bhutan in April will provide another occasion for bilateral interaction at the Prime Ministerial level though careful preparation is needed to ensure a productive and implementable outcome. In the meantime, a moratorium on sound-bites, especially by those who are not in the loop or in synch with Prime Minister Singh’s thinking, is essential.