Bribery charge must now be investigated

The Embassy cable suggests a serious crime was committed on Indian soil to which U.S. diplomats were privy. The Prime Minister cannot cite lame arguments to justify inaction...





19 March 2011
The Hindu

Bribery charge must now be investigated

Siddharth Varadarajan

Since politics is a distraction, consider the following retelling of the WikiLeaks tale. An activist dies in a traffic accident. CCTV footage from a bank nearby suggests he might have been murdered but the case is never investigated properly. Three years later, a newspaper publishes what it says is an American Embassy cable sent a few days before that suspicious accident. In the cable, a U.S. diplomat quotes a multinational company executive talking loosely about how he paid money to some criminals to convince the activist to get out of his way.

How would a civilised country which values the rule of law react to such a disclosure? Would the government cite technicalities about the “unverified and unverifiable” nature of the “purported” cable and the executive's protestation of innocence and not even bother to ask the police to look into the matter? Or would it reassure the nation that even though the information is unverified, it will do its best to find out the truth?

In the face of the political firestorm that The Hindu's publication of a secret U.S. Embassy cable about payoffs to MPs has generated, all that the people of India needed was an assurance from the UPA government that the serious crime of bribery, if established by a proper investigation, would not go unpunished. What they got instead was cynical obfuscation.

Speaking in Parliament on the subject, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh have mounted a ‘technical' and wholly ineffective defence of the government.

The July 17, 2008 cable sent by U.S. Charge d'Affaires Steven White stated that a Congress politician named Nachiketa Kapur — described as a “political aide” to Captain Satish Sharma, M.P. — showed an Embassy staff member “two chests containing cash and said that around Rupees 50crore-60 crore (about $25 million) was lying around the house for use as pay-offs” to MPs to ensure that the Manmohan Singh government won the confidence vote that was set for July 22. The cable, which was accessed by The Hindu from WikiLeaks, also quotes Mr. Kapur saying Ajit Singh's Rashtriya Lok Dal was paid Rs.10 crore for each of its MPs.

That the RLD was actively being wooed can be seen from the Union Cabinet's July 17, 2008 decision to rename Lucknow airport ‘Chaudhry Charan Singh Airport' after Mr. Ajit Singh's father. Other inducements were also on offer but in the end, the RLD voted against the government. Here Nachiketa Kapur turned out to have been remarkably prescient. After claiming the RLD MPs had been paid off, the Embassy cable notes: “Kapur mentioned that money was not an issue at all, but the crucial thing was to ensure that those who took the money would vote for the government.”

In the face of this damaging information which is contained in a secret cable that was never meant to be publicly circulated (that too in a redacted form) till at least 2018, Mr. Mukherjee and Dr. Singh made five lame points.

First, the Finance Minister told Parliament on Thursday that since the allegation of bribery applies to the 14th Lok Sabha which has since been dissolved, the 15th Lok Sabha had no locus standi to discuss the issue.

Second, he said the cable was a sovereign communication between different branches of the U.S. government, was covered by diplomatic immunity and that the information it contained could neither be confirmed nor denied by India. Despite the U.S. State Department saying publicly last year that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had spoken to External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna to warn him of the impending publication of confidential cables by WikiLeaks, Dr. Singh told Parliament: “The Government of India cannot confirm the veracity, contents or even the existence of such communications.”

Third, the Finance Minister said the information about bribery in the cable would not be considered admissible evidence in any court of law. The Prime Minister added that “many of the persons referred to in those reports have stoutly denied the veracity of the contents,” as if the country ought to be satisfied by mere protestations of innocence by the accused.

The government's fourth argument was that a Parliamentary committee had probed the matter and concluded that there was “insufficient evidence.” Finally, the Prime Minister took refuge behind the “court of the people,” declaring that since the Congress got re-elected in 2009 the charge of bribery had been “rejected by the people.” By this logic, the Congress has no right to accuse Narendra Modi of complicity in the 2002 massacres since this allegation has been “rejected by the people” not once but twice.

Instead of hiding behind technicalities and dubious political arguments, government managers could have defused the crisis by promising that the information contained in the cable would be probed. It is nobody's claim that the contents of a U.S. Embassy cable should be treated as gospel truth. Of course, the reason the cable struck a wider chord is because there is corroborating evidence of bribery having taken place in the run-up to the confidence vote. There are video recordings from a sting operation conducted by CNN-IBN and a Parliamentary committee tasked with probing the matter in 2008 felt there was enough material for the appropriate investigative agencies to conduct a probe. That said, the Embassy cable's contents still need to be verified.

Captain Satish Sharma, Nachiketa Kapur and Ajit Singh have all said the allegations against them are false. Captain Sharma has denied Mr. Kapur was ever his political aide and the latter has said he had only passing contact with the Congress MP and with U.S. Embassy officials. Are they lying? Or was the U.S. Embassy staff member being economical with the truth when he told the Charge d'Affaires he had been shown the cash?

A proper police investigation conducted by an agency like the CBI under the supervision of the Supreme Court can certainly make a fair attempt to establish where the burden of truth lies.

Mr. Mukherjee is right that the cable is sovereign diplomatic communication but India can surely request its “strategic partner” to help probe an allegation that has diminished the country's democratic institutions in the eyes of its people and the world. For starters, the U.S. can be asked to identify the unnamed Embassy staff member. If he was an Indian employee or an American without diplomatic status, there would be absolutely no problem in the CBI recording his statement and asking him to join a criminal investigation. He could tell us, for example, where his conversation with Mr. Kapur took place. The staffer reported back to Mr. White that he was told Rs.50 crore or Rs.60 crore was “lying around the house.” Which house was he referring to? Even if the Embassy “staff member” was a diplomat — one theory is that it was the Political Counsellor himself who dropped his descriptor because he had inadvertently become party to a criminal act — diplomatic immunity would not come in the way of him informally helping the police in their investigation. India can also ask the U.S. to waive his immunity. Moreover, the call records of Captain Sharma and Mr. Kapur can be examined to fix their physical locations and ascertain the nature of their relationship, especially on the day the meetings mentioned in the cable took place. This can then be triangulated with the telephone number of the U.S. Political Counsellor, whose number is known to the Indian authorities. These are the minimum steps that any self-respecting democracy would want to take in the face of such a serious charge.

On the eve of the July 22, 2008 vote of confidence, I wrote an op-ed in The Hindu where I said: “Even if the government wins the trust vote on Tuesday, the Prime Minister and the Congress will not be able to live down the taint of impropriety surrounding their victory.” The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that the listlessness, drift and corruption that so many commentators have indicted the Manmohan Singh government for in its second innings have their origins in the manner in which that trust vote was won. The UPA lost its moral centre that day, and with it, its political bearings.

In a hideous coincidence, the taint of bribery has come back to haunt the government at a time when the nuclear dream which was supposed to make it all worth it is slowly evaporating in plumes of deadly radioactive steam above Japan. “If implemented in the way it is promised, [the nuclear deal] would increase the country's energy options in the long-run,” I wrote in the same op-ed. “But no deal is so good that it merits the short-circuiting of democratic propriety through horse-trading or worse.”

The Opposition is wrong to insist that the Prime Minister must resign because of the leaked cable. But he has a moral obligation to ensure the cable's contents are investigated properly. Refusing to do so would be an act of immense political folly, especially in the light of all the scam allegations that have buffeted his government.

It's time to get down to business

Manmohan Singh's second term has seen huge scams but also action against crony capitalism of a kind India has never experienced. Which trend will finally prevail?





19 February 2011
The Hindu

It's time to get down to business

Siddharth Varadarajan

Anyone trying to predict the outcome of our polity's life and death struggle with crony capitalism will have to make sense of two contradictory sets of images.

On the one hand is the obfuscation and prevarication that senior Ministers have served up when confronted with the reality of the 2G spectrum scam and other unprecedented instances of corporate and political robbery. The most recent display of this was by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh himself, who needlessly played down the scale and significance of the revenue loss that the 2G scam had caused. But, on the other, are the pace and scope of the current investigation, which has also been unrivalled by anything India has witnessed so far. The same Prime Minister whose silence and ambivalence on 2G was seen by the Opposition and the public at large as weakness and even complicity has pushed the Central Bureau of Investigation into summoning and questioning top industrialists like Anil Ambani, raiding Kalaingar TV, the business arm of a key political ally, the DMK, and sending A. Raja, who was Telecom Minister till some time ago, to the unwholesome confines of Tihar Jail.

These are extraordinary developments by any yardstick and government managers have let it be known that there is further excitement in the offing. In the days and weeks ahead, more iconic businessmen are likely to be questioned for their involvement in the spectrum allocation scam. Nor will Shahid Balva be the only high net worth individual to be packed off to judicial remand.

When the leaked Radia tapes exposed a small part of the inner workings of the India establishment, our crony capitalists banded together to plead privacy and complain loudly about a “witch hunt.” Top corporate figures and even some politicians spoke about the danger of India becoming a “banana republic” and issued dark warnings in serial interviews about how the investment climate in the country was being adversely affected by the absurd suggestion that respectable businessmen might actually be involved in scams. The purpose of that fully scripted campaign was to ensure that the media, the investigating agencies and the courts all back off. Fortunately for our body politic, that has not happened. Public disaffection is so high that none of the estates of our system can afford to be seen as slackening. And that includes the executive too, notwithstanding the ‘zero loss' logic it foolishly put out. In his testimony to the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament, the CBI director was at pains to distance himself from that arithmetic of denial. Though the agency was painfully slow in getting off the block, nobody can really fault its current approach. And the credit for that must be shared equally by the media, the courts but also, ironically, Dr. Singh.

Yes, the Supreme Court is monitoring the functioning of the CBI but there are scores of cases where similar monitoring has produced nothing even remotely so dramatic. The Mulayam Singh disproportionate assets case, for one. When you are in government service, individual acts of bravery without the requisite air cover can be risky. As the police officers who raided the offices of Reliance Industries in New Delhi 13 years ago when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was Prime Minister discovered, taking on the biggest captains of industry is not exactly a career advancing move. If today, the younger Ambani is answering questions about his role in Swan Telecom, there should be no doubt in anyone's mind that the agency has received pretty direct encouragement from the highest levels of the government.

The question, of course, is whether or not the CBI will persist in its endeavours. Are we being treated to an elaborate dog-and-pony show? Or does the agency's current activism represent a fundamental course correction for a system which has tolerated and thrived on corruption? If yes, does the Prime Minister have the political clout to see things through?

Rent seeking and money making have been fellow travellers of the Indian political system for more than four decades but this is arguably the first time that a Minister has been run out of office and sent to jail as part of a criminal investigation. Never before has the role of big business come under the scanner like this either. When the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power at the Centre in 1998, it promised clean governance. What the country got instead was sweetheart deals in the form of privatisation of hotels and other public sector assets, the petrol pump scam, the coffin scam and other crooked ventures. As the Justice Shivraj Patil report has catalogued, the rot in telecom policy and spectrum allocation also started then. But nothing was ever probed.

The United Progressive Alliance inherited this corrupt system and presided over its unprecedented expansion. Thanks to whistleblowers, upright auditors, a vigilant media and a fair bit of corporate rivalry, however, the truth about 2G, the Commonwealth Games and other money-making enterprises has slowly come trickling out. There are, of course, scores of other fishy deals that need probing too, especially those involving land grants and mining concessions.

What explains the schizophrenic attitude of the United Progressive Alliance government towards the 2G scam? Why does the Prime Minister peddle the fiction that companies like Swan or Unitech did not resell their spectrum (for a profit) but only expanded their equity base, when the sale of equity for a company which has no assets other than spectrum amounts to the same thing? Why does he persist in comparing the loot of public money via the sale of cheap spectrum to the cost of providing food subsidies for the poor — even as the CBI is pounding on the doors of the companies that benefited from the 2G allocation?

As an economist and a man of unquestionable integrity, Dr. Singh knew full well the revenue consequences of forgoing an auction for the allocation of 2G spectrum and recorded his unhappiness with the decision. Even if he is right in saying that he could not have been expected to get into the minutiae of decisions in all Ministries, this can at best explain why he allowed the January 2008 spectrum allocation to take place. What it does not explain is the delay of 20 months in the registration of the first FIR by the CBI. In the intervening period, there was ample material in the press for the Prime Minister to realise something wrong had happened. His argument that the compulsions of coalition came in the way doesn't cut much ice. For one, the DMK, with which the Congress has an alliance in the Tamil Nadu Assembly, would have been bound by the same compulsions and would have been hard placed to rock the boat at the national level. For another, why wasn't safeguarding the public exchequer considered as good a reason for putting the fate of the government on the line as the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal? Finally, ‘coalition dharma' cannot explain the persistence of Congress politicians with questionable credentials in the Union Cabinet, men such as Vilasrao Deshmukh, for example, against whom the Supreme Court has passed embarrassing strictures.

If the Prime Minister were anyone other than Dr. Singh, one might be justified in treating his belated intervention in the 2G matter as an indication of his own involvement. In reality, the delay was the product of both his individual political weakness and his party's failure to understand the political implications of the scam. Today, it is obvious that vigorously pursuing the case is in the best interest of the government, the ruling party and the coalition. Such is the level of public disenchantment that if the Congress fails to punish the officials, politicians and businessmen involved, it will take a beating at the next elections. But there is also a wider, systemic opportunity the 2G investigation provides for the Indian polity. Capitalism needs rules. In mature capitalist economies, those rules are designed to allow businessmen to make “normal” profit and to use (or loot) the resources of the state as a collective. The growth of monopoly power, and thus supernormal profit, is also a “natural” part of the process of accumulation. When individual corporate houses attempt a short-cut, however, they invariably corrupt the wider political edifice. Corrupt politicians come and go. But unless the crony capitalists who use them are punished, Indian democracy will continue to corrode.

India-Pakistan talks: Two years and still counting

Further delays in the resumption of dialogue with Pakistan will not make it easier to get satisfaction on the terror front....








5 February 2011
The Hindu

Two years and still counting

Siddharth Varadarajan

An entire year has passed since the Manmohan Singh government decided it was time to find a way to break the dialogue deadlock and kickstart the process of engagement with Pakistan.

During this period, Dr. Singh has met his Pakistani counterpart, Yusuf Raza Gilani, once, Foreign Secretaries from both sides have met twice, and the two Foreign Ministers sat together once, in Islamabad in July 2010. That encounter ended inconclusively, even disastrously, with the Pakistani host compounding the visible lack of progress made in their talks with the impropriety of a public diatribe against his visitor. When the opportunity for a second ministerial meeting arose at the United Nations where both Ministers spent a week in the fall, cussedness ensured a suitable date could never be found.

At the root of the Islamabad fiasco was the fact that neither side was willing to risk upsetting political equations at home by appearing to concede too much ground to the other. Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi wanted to be able to tell the stakeholders who matter in his country — the military — that he had got India to agree to a calendar for the resumption of dialogue on Kashmir and Siachen. But India's External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna was not prepared to go that far. He wanted to calibrate any timetable for the resumption of talks on politically sensitive issues like Siachen to visible progress in the investigation and prosecution of those involved in the Mumbai terrorist attack of November 2008. What resulted, thus, was a stalemate.

On February 6, the two Foreign Secretaries will make a fresh attempt to press the reset button on the frozen process in Thimphu on the sidelines of a Saarc event. Unfortunately, they will meet under circumstances that are seemingly less propitious for a breakthrough with both leaderships under siege. In India, Prime Minister Singh is battling charges of dragging his feet in high-profile corruption cases and the Opposition's hostility towards him and his government has never been greater. In Pakistan, the killing of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer and the open sympathy his assassin attracted from religious clerics and sections of civil society have vitiated the atmosphere and put the liberals and the entire secular political class — which forms a natural constituency for cooperation with India — on the backfoot.

On paper, the government of Yusuf Raza Gilani is likely to find a second helping of whatever fare India served last July as unpalatable as the first. India, too, may feel it has no option but to spurn the Pakistani demand for a clear timeline for the resumption of dialogue in the absence of headway in the 26/11 case. And yet, a deeper look at the dynamics within Pakistan and at the core interests of India ought to give both governments cause to re-examine their attitude.

In a speech to the Research & Analysis Wing on January 21, the Prime Minister's Special Envoy for Pakistan, Satinder Lambah, spelt out the government's policy dilemma. “Engagement,” he said, “does not always assure us of a desired response, nor does it guarantee success. However, rejecting the process of engagement will not enable us to achieve our long-term goals.”

In relation to Pakistan, India's principal goal today is the permanent neutralisation of terrorist organisations which operate with differing levels of support from the establishment of that country and launch attacks on Indian targets. The second key long-term goal is the establishment of normal relations with Pakistan. In his speech, Mr. Lambah made the only public reference the Government of India has cared to make in all these years to the back-channel negotiations which took place with Islamabad from 2004 to 2007. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's measures to improve relations with Pakistan were based on the principle that “borders cannot be redrawn but we can work towards making them irrelevant,'' Mr. Lambah said, adding that a lot of progress had been made. “The ball is in Pakistan's court. We will be willing to pick up the threads.”

In my opinion, Mr. Lambah's words point the way towards the possibility of forward movement but only if both governments have the courage to acknowledge the illogicality of their current official positions.

Three paradoxes

India knows “rejecting the process of engagement” will not enable it to achieve its goals on the terror front and yet it is unwilling to talk until it sees satisfactory progress in the Mumbai attack case. A second policy paradox it must overcome is that it is reluctant to resume the harmless ‘front channel' talks on Kashmir even as it is “willing to pick up the threads” on the far more substantive back channel if Pakistan agrees. Finally, Pakistan, which has spent the better part of the past six decades demanding substantive progress on the Kashmir issue must explain why it is obsessed with the immediate resumption of the formal process (even though it knows this will lead nowhere) but is reluctant officially to embrace the back channel process and formula which offer the best chance for a speedy, win-win outcome.

For the past two years, I have been part of a Track-II India-Pakistan dialogue process that the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in Delhi and the Jinnah Institute in Islamabad have been conducting. The meetings take place in Bangkok because neither government is willing to guarantee it will issue visas for all the participants coming from across the border, but that is the subject of another article! Besides strategic analysts and journalists, the ‘Chaophraya Dialogues' have brought together senior retired military, intelligence and foreign service officers, many of whom spent their entire careers planning and executing moves against the other side. Even in the tense atmosphere which prevailed following 26/11, these dialogues always produced a broad consensus in favour of engagement. But this tended to stop short of a fulsome endorsement of the composite dialogue process and the back-channel. Indeed, several Pakistani interlocutors — whether from military or political backgrounds — seemed reluctant to endorse the back channel. The military men said the venture was General Pervez Musharraf's ‘solo flight,' the politicians felt the process was tainted by its association with a dictator.

In our most recent round, however, both sides made some progress. “The absence of a formal and sustained engagement on the full range of issues confronting India and Pakistan is unhealthy, counterproductive and dangerous,” the Indian and Pakistani participants declared in a joint resolution. “We welcome the forthcoming meeting of foreign secretaries in Thimphu and hope that the two sides will be able to prepare the ground for the resumption of a comprehensive and sustained dialogue.” More significantly, the principle which Mr. Lambah spoke of — and which Khurshid Ahmed Kasuri, who was Foreign Minister in the Musharraf years, has also spoken of — found joint support: “We agree with the broad vision of India-Pakistan relations in which borders cannot change but can indeed be made irrelevant. We resolve that a dialogue between the two countries should include discussions on Jammu and Kashmir. The formal bilateral dialogue should be complemented by back-channel contacts. The people of J&K should be appropriately consulted in this process”.

Terrorism, the resolution noted, is of deep concern to both India and Pakistan. “Indian concerns about the Mumbai attacks in 2008 have seriously affected the dialogue process. The perpetrators of the attack should be brought to justice at the earliest. Pakistan has deep concerns about the tragic loss of lives in the Samjhauta Express attack. India has to expeditiously prosecute those involved and keep Pakistan informed.”

Taken together with the views of Prime Minister Singh's envoy, this resolution, which leading members of the strategic community in India and Pakistan approved, indicates a possible way forward. What is required is a process that can build on the Indian enthusiasm for the back channel with the Pakistani insistence on resumption of the front channel. One way to do this is to examine whether, after a suitable period of time, the two channels can be merged. After all, once the back channel reaches an understanding on broad concepts, translating it into actionable parameters will involve painstaking negotiation. It is significant that Mr. Kasuri made well-rehearsed statements during his recent visit to India to the effect that the Pakistani military brass, including Gen. Parvez Kayani, who was head of the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate at the time, were kept fully briefed after each back-channel meeting with the Indian side. No one in GHQ, Rawalpindi, has refuted what he said.

On terror, the aftermath of the assassination of Salman Taseer has brought home to most Indians the degree to which the Pakistani state is caught in a vortex. A system which cannot ensure justice when a high constitutional functionary is killed is unlikely to be able to offer India much relief on 26/11. This is not to say India should stop insisting on progress. But tying the future course of our bilateral engagement to this futile pursuit is unhelpful and counterproductive. Liberal Pakistanis say the resumption of dialogue with India will strengthen them in their struggle against the jihadis and the ‘establishment'. They may well be exaggerating their own influence and our own. In the worst case scenario, dialogue will turn out to be a placebo that will not help them or us. But India has nothing to lose by following their prescription.

K. Subrahmanyam, strategic thinker par excellence, 1929-2011

Much more than a mere advocate of Indian nuclearisation, K. Subrahmanyam was instrumental in shaping the country's foreign and security policies in the post-Cold War world...






3 February 2010
The Hindu

Strategic thinker par excellence

Siddharth Varadarajan

Intellectual progenitor of the Indian nuclear weapons programme and by far the most influential strategic thinker of his own and subsequent generations, K. Subrahmanyam's enduring contribution was the coherent intellectual framework he helped provide for the country's foreign and security policies in a world buffeted by uncertainty and changing power equations.

He died in New Delhi on Wednesday after a courageous battle against cancer. He was 82.

In a long and distinguished career that began with his entry into the Indian Administrative Service in 1951, Subrahmanyam straddled the fields of administration, defence policy, academic research and journalism with an unparalleled felicity. His prolific writings — contained in thousands of newspaper articles (including in The Hindu), book chapters and speeches over four decades — touched upon a broad range of global and regional strategic issues and invariably generated fierce debate in India and abroad. But it was his early — and even controversial — advocacy of India exercising the option to produce nuclear weapons that made governments and scholars around the world sit up and take notice of his views.

Subrahmanyam's first formal involvement with the Indian nuclear establishment began in 1966 when, as a relatively junior bureaucrat in the Defence Ministry, he was asked to join an informal committee tasked by the Prime Minister's Office with studying the strategic, technical and financial implications of a nuclear weapons programme. Soon thereafter, he was made director of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), a post he held from 1968 to 1975. He was one of the first analysts to sense a strategic opportunity for India in the emerging crisis in East Pakistan and his public articulation of this well before the 1971 war led Pakistani officials to see him eventually as a Chanakya-like figure who managed to contrive their country's dismemberment.

Born in Tiruchi on January 19, 1929, Subrahmanyam returned to his home state of Tamil Nadu to serve as Home Secretary during the period of the Emergency. An honest and upright administrator, he considered the Constitution and the liberties it embodied to be of higher value than the political directives of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the Congress party. At a time when his counterparts elsewhere in the country became willing accomplices to the suspension of civil liberties, Subrahmanyam used his powers to shield those being targeted. Many years later, during the Gujarat carnage of 2002, he was one of the few members of the strategic community to write about how the country would pay a heavy price if it failed to uphold the rule of law and the right to life of all its citizens.

He returned to Delhi in the late 1970s and ended up working as Secretary, Defence Production during Indira Gandhi's second tenure as Prime Minister. Differing again with the government on an issue of principle, Subrahmanyam was eased out of the Ministry of Defence and returned to the IDSA as director. Though intended as a punishment posting, he took to his new assignment as a duck to water. Through his efforts, the institute emerged as India's premier think-tank with a large number of scholars, many on secondment from the armed forces, conducting research on defence and foreign policy issues.

Journalism

After retiring from the government in 1987, Subrahmanyam continued to write on security matters, eventually joining the Times of India as a consulting editor. Journalism was in many ways his true calling. Affectionately known by his colleagues as “Bomb Mama”, in reality Subrahmanyam was far from being a nuclear hawk. He wrote on a range of issues, including on spiritual and religious matters and loved nothing more than to discuss national and global issues with his younger colleagues.

He was in favour of India acquiring nuclear weapons and argued forcefully during the international negotiations on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty against India's accession. At a seminar in Washington at the time, he famously denounced American critics of India's stand as the ‘Ayatollahs of Nonproliferation on the Potomac'.

And yet, he did not believe it was absolutely essential for the country to conduct an actual weapons test. When Pokhran-II came finally in May 1998, Subrahmanyam was taken by surprise but accepted that the government's hand had been forced by the manner in which the United States had tried to foreclose the country's nuclear option. At the same time, he said that India should immediately announce that it would never be the first to use nuclear weapons, a position the Vajpayee government accepted.

After the Kargil war, he headed the Kargil Review Committee which was tasked with recommending an overhaul of the Indian national security and intelligence apparatus whose failings had allowed Pakistani soldiers to occupy high altitude posts in Jammu and Kashmir. Besides a host of systemic reforms, Subrahmanyam argued in favour of India establishing a National Security Council but was disappointed by the structure of the institution that the National Democratic Alliance regime created. He nevertheless agreed to head the first National Security Advisory Board and was also instrumental in the NSAB's formulation of India's Draft Nuclear Doctrine.

A realist in his strategic thinking, Subrahmanyam was one of the first to understand and discuss what the emergence of a multipolar world order – his preferred term was “polycentric” — meant for Indian foreign policy. He argued that India had the capacity to improve its relations with all global power centres. At the same time, he sought to leverage American interest in India's rise by pressing for the removal of restrictions on nuclear and high-tech commerce.

He also believed the emergence of an economically interdependent world meant the era of military conflict between the great powers was a thing of the past and that economic growth and internal strength would be far more important determinants of national power than mere military might.

For one who worked in government for many years, Subrahmanyam prized his independence which he saw as the key to his integrity. I have had three careers, he once said when asked why he had turned down the offer of a Padma Vibhushan — as a civil servant, a strategic analyst and a journalist. “The awards should be given by the concerned groups, not the Government. If there is an award for sports, it should be given by sportspersons, and if it's for an artist, by artists”. The state, he believed, was not qualified to judge different aspects of human endeavour.

Subrahmanyam, of course, excelled in all his endeavours. True to form, his most creative period as an analyst came after he was diagnosed with cancer. In his death, India has lost one of its most perceptive strategic minds. The void will be impossible to fill.

He is survived by his wife, Sulochana, his daughter Sudha and his three sons, Vijay Kumar, Jaishankar and Sanjay.

Ilina Sen wrongly booked under Foreigners Act

The FIR filed by the Maharashtra Police against Professor Ilina Sen tells us a lot about the official attitude of the Indian establishment towards dissent, knowledge and intellectual freedom ...

26 January 2011
The Hindu

Ilina Sen wrongly booked under Foreigners Act?

S. Arun Mohan and Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: The Indian Association for Women's Studies (IAWS) has strongly contested the Maharashtra police decision to file an FIR against Ilina Sen, wife of Binayak Sen, for her alleged failure to inform the police about the participation of foreign delegates at an academic conference organised by the IAWS and the Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Vishwavidyalaya (MGAV) in Wardha last week.

Prof. Ilina Sen, who is an Executive Committee member of the IAWS and head of the MGAV's Women's Studies Department, was booked under Sections 7 and 14 of the Foreigners Act on Monday. The police also arrested the owner of a local hotel where some foreigners were staying on account of the management's failure to inform them of their arrival.

The Foreigners Act requires hotel keepers and other persons who own, occupy or control the premises where foreigners are accommodated to submit such information to the authorities in a prescribed format known as 'Form C'. It is unclear how Prof. Sen, who is a coordinator of the IAWS, has been booked under the Act given that the relevant provisions apply only to persons who furnish lodging to foreigners for payment.

Umesh Chandra Sarangi, Additional Chief Secretary (Home), told The Hindu that the conference organisers had not informed the police about their stay. “These people came and stayed in a guest house which was booked. They were organising a conference. There is a rule that whenever a conference is organised, the police should be informed about it. The Director-General of Police is looking into the case,” he said.

In fact, the Foreigners Act itself places no such obligation on Indians who invite foreigners for conferences or social events. The four Pakistani and Bangladeshi participants named in the FIR were residing on the university campus. The IAWS sources told The Hindu that three of these women scholars were in fact staying in the Vice-Chancellor's residence as personal guests while the fourth was put up at the university guesthouse. Ironically, full political and security clearance from the Ministries of Home Affairs and the External Affairs had been obtained in advance for the participation of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan scholars as government rules currently prescribe in order for visas to be granted.

The FIR filed by the ATS Nagpur Unit notes that Form ‘C' as prescribed under the Foreigners Act has not been filed by the University. However, Form C pertains only to ‘Hotel Arrival Information' and does not contemplate the present situation in any manner. The distinction is relevant as Section 7 of the Act, under which Prof. Ilina Sen has been booked, will be applicable only to instances where the accommodation is paid for by foreigners. In fact, the Home Ministry in 2001 scrapped a controversial 1971 order that required persons to report the presence of foreigners in their households.

Even if one were to hold the University responsible for failing to provide the required information, the responsibility for filing a C form belongs only to those running a hotel, inn or hostel and not to the organisers of an event in which foreigners participate.

On the concluding day of the Conference, the police entered the Yatri Niwas premises in Wardha, where a large number of women participants, mostly students and teachers, were staying to attend the event.

ACTION CONDEMNED

The organisers have condemned the actions of the police and expressed their anguish over unwarranted interference from the authorities.

Mr. Sarangi denied that the police had taken action against the organisers because Prof. Sen was Dr. Binayak Sen's wife.

(With inputs from Rahi Gaikwad in Mumbai)

Eastern promise, western fears

Indians may be suspicious of China and the Chinese of India. But it is the West which does not want to accept the strategic consequences of a rising Asia...




25 January 2011
The Hindu

Eastern promise, western fears

Siddharth Varadarajan

Behind the heavy typeface that the release of confidential American diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks has generated lie smaller stories which sometimes tell us more about the way in which our world is changing than the headlines themselves.

The U.S. ambassador in Paris met Michel Rocard, a former Prime Minister of France, in October 2005 for one of those sweeping, freewheeling chats that Gallic statesmen evidently specialise in. The bulk of the conversation deals with the French political scene but at the end, M. Rocard shares his concerns about the place of France and the United States in the new world order and proposes a joint Euro-American think-tank to prepare for the future. “Speaking of the growth of India and China, along with all the other challenges confronting both of us,” the leaked cable quotes the senior French politician as saying, “We need a vehicle where we can find solutions for these challenges together — so when these monsters arrive in 10 years, we will be able to deal with them.”

So there we have it. Even as the Indian elephant and Chinese dragon circle each other warily, wondering how each will cope with the rise of the other, the Occidental mind which has enjoyed dominating the world and the global commons for two centuries is worrying about how to deal with the combined arrival of these two “monsters.”

Happily for the West, the arrivistes are not exactly on the best of terms with each other. India is too wary of China's rise to exploit the opportunities this ascent provides. For its part, Beijing — which alternates between feigning indifference towards New Delhi and fretting over whether it might join hands with a “democratic bloc” led by Washington — is so self-absorbed that it is unable to harness the externalities that India's rise has generated in the region.

In a recent article, Kishore Mahbubani spoke of the triangular relationship between India, China and the U.S. and noted how the U.S. had better relations with both India and China than the two Asian giants had with each other. By being in the middle, he argues, Washington has a strategic edge. It also has an incentive to ensure a certain amount of tension between India and China, so as to cement its own presence in Asia as an offshore balancer.

Though Mahbubani does not say so, it would be naïve to imagine the problems the Indian and Chinese sides have with one another are the product of an American conspiracy. The fact is that India and China do not know each other well and have not paid enough attention to understanding the social, political and economic dynamics of the other. As a result, misperceptions and misunderstandings abound and have given rise to suspicions and even fear. That is why it is essential that a continuous and wide-ranging dialogue take place between different stakeholders: officials, politicians, the military, scholars, journalists, artists and others. Above all, there must be engagement on the big strategic questions of our time.

In a series of interactions held recently in Beijing at the initiative of the Observer Research Foundation and the International Department of the Communist Party of China, Indian and Chinese analysts had a surprisingly frank exchange of views on the state of the bilateral relationship, the problem areas and the new areas for potential China-India cooperation.

From the Chinese side, a number of scholars spoke of four specific problem areas with India. There is, first and foremost, the unsettled boundary and the fact that border territories are disputed. Second, the presence of the Dalai Lama and the so-called ‘Tibetan government in exile' is seen as a continuing irritant, especially in the aftermath of the disturbances which shook Lhasa and some other Tibetan pockets in China in 2008. Third, and this was surprising, the scholars acknowledged that China's friendship with Pakistan was a source of friction with India. And though they differed from the Indian side in characterising the current nature of the relationship, they acknowledged the fact that “balancing India” used to be a primary Chinese motive in the past. Their argument was that the rise of the Indian economy in the past decade has forced Chinese policymakers to de-hyphenate their South Asian policy. Finally, many of the Chinese interlocutors spoke of growing strategic suspicions that are made worse by a trust deficit. “Many people in China believe Indians look down upon them,” a professor from the International Relations department of Renmin University said. “India sees itself as close to the West and is willing to be used by the U.S. in its desire to become a world power.” Other scholars echoed the same view in different ways — that India might become part of an American-led effort to gang-up against China, that many in India subscribe to the ‘China threat' thesis.

My own assessment is that the boundary dispute and Dalai Lama are not major problem areas. Indeed, my suspicion is that part of the recent brittleness in the relationship is the product of artificially accelerated efforts to settle the boundary question. As for the Tibetan spiritual leader, it is true that his presence in India is a red rag to those in China who see him as working against the unity and integrity of their country. But the Chinese side can also well appreciate the consequences of his being asked to leave India. A Hollywood exile for the Dalai Lama would only serve to raise the salience of the Tibetan issue globally. Besides, it is time China and India also start paying attention to what might happen to the Tibetan question once the present Dalai Lama is no more. And start engaging each other, and Bangladesh as the lowest riparian, on Tibetan water-related projects.

Responding to Indian queries on China's plans to harness the Brahmaputra, a scholar from the Chinese Institute of Contemporary International Relations spoke of the need for the comprehensive development of Himalayan hydropower resources. Citing Indian projects in Bhutan as a positive model, he said India's trust deficit with its neighbours like Pakistan and Nepal was coming in the way of the development of hydropower.

As far as Pakistan is concerned, it is obvious that China and India have a crucial stake in the stability of that country and need to discuss between them what they can do to help the situation there. The Chinese side is well aware of the emerging ideological and institutional fault lines in Pakistan. If there is any country other than the U.S. that has the ability to exercise leverage over the Pakistani military, it is China. Until now, however, China has been reluctant to use its influence. For more than four decades, Chinese strategic thinking on Pakistan has been dominated by the need to ‘balance' India. But with India having outgrown South Asia and Pakistan in danger of imploding as the problem of extremism and terrorism slowly gets out of control, Beijing cannot afford to remain wedded to this anachronistic mindset.

On strategic issues too, the Indian and Chinese sides have much to talk about. India and China are both officially committed to an open, inclusive architecture for the Asia-Pacific region. Both also have a stake in the freedom of navigation. During the visit to India by Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, the two countries committed their navies to joint anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden. A commitment was also made to discuss the wider issue of maritime security. These are all promising new areas of cooperation that should be actively pursued. One Chinese scholar spoke of the need for strategic transparency, another made a pitch to launch new security principles by updating the Panchasila concept. Of course, such an effort is unlikely to go beyond the reiteration of homilies unless China and India both recognise that the world and their own national profiles have moved on since the 1950s. It has become a cliché to say the world is big enough to accommodate the rise of India and China. Since the world is a finite place, this means those who are today squatting on strategic space despite their leases having run out will have to be displaced. Let the West have nightmares about demons and monsters. The elephant and the dragon cannot afford to be scared of each other.

The fabric of belonging

Had the national flag which the BJP wants to unfurl in Srinagar also been dipped by them to honour the memory of the hundred young Indians who were shot dead in the valley last year, Kashmir would be a very different place ...








24 January 2011
The Hindu

The fabric of belonging

Siddharth Varadarajan

Jammu and Kashmir is a part of India but the people of Kashmir can be forgiven for believing their country has forsaken them.

Throughout the summer of their most recent discontent, when a hundred young men and women lost their lives in police firing, leaders from the ruling and opposition parties acted as if nothing untoward had happened. Six months earlier, the mere threat of violence in Hyderabad led the Union Home Minister to declare the government had agreed to the formation of a separate state for Telangana. In Rajasthan, the blockade of national highways by agitating Gujjars produced an instant offer of dialogue and negotiation. But in Kashmir, the corpses kept piling up while the government, the Opposition (with some honourable exceptions) and civil society in the rest of India reacted with the kind of detachment reserved for death and destruction in faraway lands like Darfur and Iraq.

The fact that the public mood in the valley began to soften slightly only after an all-party delegation visited Srinagar and condoled with some of the victims' families underlined something quite unpleasant about ourselves. That the indifference of mainland India to the suffering of the ordinary Kashmiri is as much a factor in the alienation of the State as the politics of separatism and the violence of extremist groups operating with the tacit and sometimes overt backing of the Pakistani military. With characteristic indecisiveness, however, the Manmohan Singh government failed swiftly to capitalise on that initiative. When a group of interlocutors was finally appointed with a fairly open-ended mandate to listen, talk and report back, the mood in Kashmir had once again begun to harden. The fact that Dileep Padgaonkar, Radha Kumar and M.M. Ansari have still managed to make some headway in their interactions is more a result of their own personal commitment to changing the terms of New Delhi's engagement with the valley than with the attitude of the Centre and of Political India, which continue to send mixed signals.

One day, the Union Home Secretary tells reporters the government is prepared to pare down the presence of the security forces in Kashmir, the next day this statement is bluntly contradicted by the Defence Minister. The Prime Minister and Union Home Minister speak of amending the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act while the Army Chief announces publicly that he will never accept this. In the Machchil fake encounter case, the same general declares that his soldiers — who are accused of kidnapping and killing three young Kashmiri men — can never get justice in Kashmir, as if the State is not a part of India. Only the Army, he said, will be allowed to investigate the matter. Of course, in the Pathribal fake encounter of 2000 — where the Army has taken the Central Bureau of Investigation all the way to the Supreme Court to prevent its officers from standing trial for murder — the Army has not seen fit to even proceed against them under its own authority. Surely such a cavalier attitude to justice ought not to be tolerated in an integral part of India?

The Government of India rightly protested when Beijing began treating Kashmir-born or Kashmir-domiciled Indians differently from the rest while issuing visas for travel to China. But the same government does not mind treating Kashmiri Indians differently when it comes to issuing passports for them to travel. A Srinagar-born colleague of mine whose family left Kashmir to live in Delhi as part of the forced migration of Pandits from the valley in the 1990s was recently told by the Passport Office that she had to provide additional documentation that other Indians are not required to do in order to obtain a passport. As for Kashmiris applying for Indian passports in Srinagar, a recent documentary film by Ashvin Kumar, Inshallah Football, documents the heartbreaking experience they have to endure before the country which so emotionally claims them as its own will allow them to travel abroad.

Hoisting the flag

As the Centre's three interlocutors plough a lonely furrow through the infertile and even hostile soil of distrust and alienation, patiently listening to and cataloguing popular grievances, the Bharatiya Janata Party wants to rekindle a sense of estrangement by staging a provocative and high profile yatra to Srinagar in order to hoist the Indian flag at Lal Chowk in the heart of the city's commercial centre on January 26.

There is nothing patriotic or noble about the BJP's plans and intentions. Instead of a voyage of solidarity and empathy aimed at reassuring the people of the State that the party will fight for the sacred values of truth, justice and inclusiveness which the flag embodies, the party is planning an expedition based on the flawed belief that meaningless symbolism is all that is required to win hearts and minds and cement Kashmir's status as a part of India.

If a sense of national belonging can be instilled and solidified by the mere hoisting of a flag, 60 years of official ceremonies in Srinagar ought to have ended the sense of alienation that is writ large over the valley. Even if the BJP goes ahead with their mindless yatra, it will not alter the realities on the ground one bit and would actually make the situation worse. Whatever we may say or do or wish, surely Kashmir will be an integral part of India in a meaningful sense only when the residents of Srinagar themselves throng to Lal Chowk and hoist the tri-colour themselves. The challenge for the Indian polity is to create the conditions for that to happen one day, however difficult that may seem today. But the BJP's proposed flaghoisting is not just an exercise in naivette or cynicism. It is the product of a mindset that considers Kashmir to be terra nullius, an empty landscape to be coveted and possessed rather than a land with a people and soul who acceded to India in 1947 on the basis of a covenant which must be respected in full measure and who have as much right to a life with dignity as those elsewhere in the country do.

A politician can drape himself in the national flag but it is the texture of his politics which will determine whether he truly cares for the nation and its peoples or not. Today, the Congress politician and businessman Naveen Jindal is known not for fighting a landmark case over the right of ordinary citizens to fly the flag but for his endorsement of the obscurantist tradition of khap panchayats. Ministers and officials will preside over flag hoisting ceremonies on Republic Day throughout India even as their policies and actions in the preceding year have bled the hallowed earth on which they stand dry. Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel and the people of India know this only too well. If the BJP really wants to do something for the country, let them take their yatra to Karnataka. There is a large plot of land in that State which the party's chief minister signed over to his relatives. Let the process of safeguarding this country from those who are undermining its foundations begin by planting the national flag there.

Musical chairs on a drifting ship

More than a reshuffle, the UPA government needs a new deck of cards and, much more urgently, a new game...






20 January 2011
The Hindu

Musical chairs on a drifting ship

Siddharth Varadarajan

Any ministerial rearrangement which leaves the big four portfolios of Home, Defence, External Affairs and Finance untouched is bound to disappoint headline writers but so underwhelming is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's latest reshuffle that it is hard to understand the motivation or logic behind the entire exercise.

Three weaknesses

The United Progressive Alliance is suffering from three major weaknesses. The first is the public's perception — notwithstanding the ouster of Ashok Chavan from Maharashtra and A. Raja's resignation from the Union Cabinet last year — that Dr. Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi are unwilling to act firmly against corruption. The second is that cronyism and personal loyalties are seen as bigger virtues than efficiency. The third is that the Prime Minister himself is unwilling to lead from the front and stare down individual ministers who think they have the individual power to veto collective decisions.

So long in the making was Wednesday's reshuffle that it seemed as if Dr. Singh and Ms Gandhi might actually be willing to make the “course correction” the Prime Minister promised in his New Year's message. While the compulsions of coalition politics limit his options when it comes to the non-Congress ministers, he should have used the prevailing mood in the country to sweep aside Congress ministers who have either failed to make a positive mark or actually done damage. He could have also struck a blow for probity by ousting Vilasrao Deshmukh — indicted recently by the Supreme Court for abusing his authority when he was Chief Minister of Maharashtra — and asking Virbhadra Singh to step aside till he clears himself of charges that the High Court in Himachal Pradesh has already taken congnisance of. Had he done just that much, the Prime Minister could have overcome some of the negative atmospherics generated by the fiasco over 2G spectrum and the controversy over Central Vigilance Commissioner P.J. Thomas.

Unfortunately, none of this happened. Like old card players who never die — they just shuffle away — the non-performers in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's cabinet have simply reshuffled their way to new ministries. And Mr. Deshmukh, whose illegal intervention in a police case in favour of a usurious moneylender ultimately cost the Maharashtra government a Rs.10 lakh fine, actually ended up getting a promotion. He has been moved from Heavy Industries to the much more crucial Rural Development portfolio, which is responsible for the rural employment guarantee programme of the government.

Sources in the Prime Minister's Office told The Hindu the reshuffle was intended to send a “perform or perish” message to ministers holding economic portfolios. Thus, Murli Deora, Kamal Nath, Virbhadra Singh and a few others who have not exactly set the Yamuna on fire with their performance were ‘demoted' to less grand ministries. Though Youth Affairs and Sports is not an economic ministry, his handling of the multi-crore Commonwealth Games too cost Mr. M.S. Gill that portfolio. One wonders, however, why these ministers weren't simply thanked for services rendered and their places given to others in the party who might do a better job all round?

The plus side

On the plus side, the biggest positive to emerge from the reshuffle is the transfer of Jaipal Reddy to Petroleum and Natural Gas, a strategic ministry that has never fully recovered from the exit in 2006 of Mani Shankar Aiyar. The pruning of Sharad Pawar's portfolio is another plus, as is the handing over of a crucial ministry like water resources to Salman Khurshid. Minority Affairs, however, will be an unnecessary encumbrance and one hopes the government will have the good sense to think out of the box and give that charge not to a minority politician but to a dynamic, secular non-minority leader with a genuine commitment to the welfare of the minorities. Taking tourism away from Kumari Selja makes no sense given the fair job she was doing; one can only hope the additional charge of Culture given to her is meant for the long-haul. As far as other changes — full cabinet rank for Salman Khurshid, Shriprakash Jaiswal and the induction of Beni Prasad Verma from Uttar Pradesh, for example — tactical considerations seem to have been uppermost in the Congress high command's mind with assembly elections in the crucial state less than a year away. Also, the ‘asset stripped' civil aviation portfolio — temporarily handed over to Vayalar Ravi — is being kept in reserve for allocation to the DMK if the political situation following the Tamil Nadu assembly elections warrants it.

Tactics, however, will take you only so far. Whatever end he hoped the reshuffle would serve, the Prime Minister is likely to find himself confronting the same political challenge tomorrow as he did yesterday: how to restore public confidence in his ability to lead a clean and efficient government. This was not the challenge the Congress faced when it got re-elected to power in 2009 and the party needs to introspect over how it has lost its way. The cabinet reshuffle indicates it is still not ready to do so. The official obfuscation over revenue losses caused by the arbitrary sale of spectrum and the confrontationist stand the Centre is taking over both the CVC and Joint Parliamentary Committee issues suggest the stalemate in Parliament is likely to continue into the Budget session. That this will be bad for Indian democracy is clear. But it is also likely to irreparably harm the political fortunes of the ruling coalition.

Sorry people, we're hanging up on you

The Manmohan Singh government is digging an even bigger hole for itself by claiming there was no loss of revenue from the sweetheart sale of 2G spectrum to favoured corporate houses...





12 January 2011
The Hindu

Sorry people, we're hanging up on you

Siddharth Varadarajan

“Milord,” cunning lawyers have argued in countless Hindi movies, “how can there have been a murder when there is no dead body?” I was reminded of this line when I heard Kapil Sibal — who has been performing as an understudy at the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology ever since A. Raja was ousted on corruption charges — bravely defending the legacy of his predecessor at a press conference. By attacking the Comptroller and Auditor General's 2G spectrum scam report and claiming the government lost no revenue despite the fact that “procedural irregularities in the implementation of the first-come first-served policy” may have occurred, Mr. Sibal has done the political equivalent of removing the “dead body” from the crime scene and then declaring his clients innocent. For if the government lost no money through the sale of spectrum in 2008, it stands to reason that the politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen who are today being investigated could not have made any money either. Illegitimate profits cannot be conjured out of thin air — which is what spectrum essentially is. There is no dead body milord.

Sadly for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi, who no doubt prepped Mr. Sibal to make his ill-advised arguments, the CAG report is full of incriminating corpses. And their ghosts are likely to stick around long enough to haunt the ruling party at the time of the next general election.

The central thrust of Mr. Sibal's argument is that the PAC used flawed logic to arrive at the conclusion that the sale of Universal Access Service licenses by the Department of Telecom in 2008 led to a revenue loss of Rs.1,76,000 crore. But here's what he chose not to say. The CAG itself acknowledged in its concluding chapter that the amount of loss could be debated but “the fact that there has been loss to the national exchequer in the allocation of 2G spectrum cannot be denied.”

Indeed, the CAG made separate calculations based on four different methodologies in order to demonstrate the flawed nature of the licensing system the DoT ran. The figure cited by Mr. Sibal came from using the 3G spectrum auction proceeds as a guide to the revenue the government gave up by not auctioning 2G spectrum. Other methods used were looking at the sale of equity by shell-company licensees Swan Telecom and Unitech. Both of these companies sold a chunk of their otherwise worthless equity to established operators, thereby providing a helpful indication of what the licenses they had bought for a song were truly worth. Extrapolating from those sales figures, the CAG estimated that the government short-changed itself by anywhere from Rs.57,666 crore to Rs.69,626 crore.

The CAG report methodically establishes how the great spectrum robbery of 2008 was essentially a scam within a scam. The original scam was designed to benefit the universe of existing and potential telecom operators by selling them a scarce resource — spectrum — on a first come, first served (FCFS) basis at a seven-year-old price that had no bearing on current market conditions. Given the exponential increase in teledensity between 2001 and 2008 — by some estimates, the number of mobile subscribers had already risen from four million to 300 million and was expected to continue to grow at a rapid clip — the failure to use an efficient price discovery mechanism meant the government was prepared to forsake an enormous amount of revenue in order to benefit operators fortunate enough to get hold of new spectrum.

But having scripted super profits for the lucky telecom companies in the spectrum allocation process, it was inevitable that the politicians and bureaucrats running the show would take the next step. The only way to accumulate rent from companies benefiting from a giveaway that is available to all as a matter of policy is to use one's allocative power to favour some over others. This was the genesis of the second scam in which a handful of applicants — many of whom were completely unqualified to be applying for telecom licenses at all — were cherry-picked by the DoT in an arbitrary subversion of the first come, first served process. The CAG report demonstrates how Swan, in which the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group had a key stake, and Unitech were among the beneficiaries of this. Bank drafts and guarantees were prepared in advance by some companies who were unofficially tipped off so that their completed applications for spectrum could be submitted literally within minutes and hours of the official call going out.

Mr. Sibal, who tore into the CAG, was sporting enough to admit there may have been some wrongdoing in the manner in which the FCFS policy was implemented. At the same time, he insisted the policy of charging 2001 prices was correct and that a 2G spectrum auction would have led to an increase in the price of telecom services. What he ignores is the fact that the cost of telecom services emerging from the 2G allocation will be a function not of the absurdly low price at which the government sold spectrum but of the prevailing tariff rate in the market and also the higher resale price at which this precious commodity finally enters the system. To paraphrase an argument first made by Sunil Jain in the Financial Express last year, there was indeed an auction for 2G spectrum whether Mr. Sibal approves of auctioning or not. But this auction was conducted not by the government, as it should have been, but by the companies who benefited from the arbitrary manner in which spectrum ended up getting allocated. They simply turned around and resold what they had received to the highest bidder.

Mr. Sibal also sought to argue that the government policy on spectrum allocation — of underpricing it or even giving it away free — was justified in the name of keeping the cost of basic telephony down. He compared the Rs.17 a minute cost of a mobile phone call a decade back with the 30 paise per minute rate today to prove his point but this is a flawed argument. Most technology-driven consumer goods and services experience a declining price curve over time. I paid $1,000 as a graduate student in New York for my first laptop computer in 1990. It was a no-brand, 386 chip, 40MB hard drive heavyweight monster whose battery lasted about an hour if I was lucky. Today, $1,000 will buy you a powerful notebook and decent variants can be bought for as little as $300. It also cost me $2 a minute to call my parents back home (which is why I rarely did so). The last time I was in the U.S., I could call India for eight cents a minute. The drop in call rates has nothing to do with subsidised spectrum as Mr. Sibal would have us believe, but with competition, increases in productivity and the global ebb and flow of technological change and obsolescence which allowed Indian companies to buy 2G network equipment at a relatively inexpensive cost. In any case, even at the supposedly low call rates in India, telecom operators are making serious money. The last thing they need is a free handout in the form of an FCFS spectrum allocation policy, that too one which is rigged.

The government's argument about keeping mobile call rates low may have had some credibility if the logic was applied consistently. But everything in India is contingent on whose asset is being sold to whom. When a public asset like spectrum is to be sold to a private company like Anil Ambani's Swan Telecom, or to Tata or others, we are told the price must be kept low even if there is a revenue loss. When a public asset like food grain is to be sold to the poor under the proposed Right to Food Act, the same people say prices cannot be kept low because this would lead to a revenue loss. When a public resource like Krishna-Godavari (KG) gas comes into the hands of an industrialist like Mukesh Ambani, the price must be kept high even if this means consumers end up paying a higher price for electricity and fertilizers. From 2G to KG to CWG the system's logic and rules will always be designed to allow maximum profits for those with real connections.

The CAG in its report has demonstrated how “the entire process of allocation of UAS licenses lacked transparency and was undertaken in an arbitrary, unfair and inequitable manner … which gave unfair advantage to certain companies over others.” It was this “unfair advantage” which allowed “certain companies” to earn revenue that rightly belonged to the government. So compelling is the charge of corruption on a massive scale in the spectrum licensing matter that the Supreme Court has said it will monitor the progress of investigations by the CBI.

Public disenchantment with the corrupt ways of our political and business establishment is running so high that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was forced to promise in his New Year greetings a “course correction” that would “cleanse governance” in India. If Mr. Sibal's arguments are any indication, however, Dr. Singh's New Year resolutions have not lasted very long at all. If the UPA government continues to remain in denial, it will pay a heavy political price. At the time of the next general election, when Congress managers scratch their heads and wonder where on earth the seats to form the next government are going to come from, Mr. Sibal's arithmetic will be remembered as the point where the game which was not going the party's way anyway finally slipped out of its hands.

Singed by WikiLeaks, Indian official says U.S. cable a lie

‘Trip to Washington did happen, but it was private visit, not junket' ...

31 December 2010
The Hindu

Singed by WikiLeaks, Indian official says U.S. cable a lie

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: A former Indian official criticised for making unauthorised contact with the United States embassy and angling for a junket in order to “feed” American views on Iran into the Indian system, has accused a senior American diplomat of fabricating the contents of the confidential cable — published by WikiLeaks earlier this month — which “outed” him.

“I cannot answer for what [the former U.S. Charge d'Affaires Geoffrey] Pyatt might or might not have reported and if he did send such a cable, why he should have done so,” K.V. Rajan, a former secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs and a former member of the Prime Minister's National Security Advisory Board (NSAB) told The Hindu.

In the cable titled ‘Iran manipulating Indian elite opinion makers' of May 4, 2007, Mr. Pyatt — who is now the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for South Asia at the U.S. State Department — said Mr. Rajan sought an urgent meeting to discuss a Tehran-sponsored visit to Iran by Indian opinion-makers. According to the cable, Mr. Rajan said he had turned down the invitation but gave a list of the other invitees to the U.S. Embassy.

“To counter this new and worrying effort to reach out to Indian opinion makers, Mr. Rajan proposed a visit to the U.S., starting May 14, in his NSAB capacity, for five to seven days, to talk to officials, think tanks, and the intelligence community to discuss ways to understand better the U.S. assessments of Iran. He would expect this to feed into NSAB discussion of Iran policy options,” the embassy cable said. “To counter this insidious new Iranian effort, we recommend Rajan receive meetings, if possible, with xxx,” the cable concluded.

WikiLeaks redacted the names of the senior U.S. officials Mr. Pyatt wanted Mr. Rajan to meet. But The Hindu has been able to establish that the U.S. embassy sought meetings with four senior intelligence officials: Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, National Intelligence Council (NIC) Vice-Chair David Gordon, NIC Deputy South Asia Officer John Dister and CIA Director of Intelligence John Kringen.

Mr. Rajan, who coincidentally travelled to Washington D.C. shortly after the cable was sent, denies meeting these or other officials during that trip.

The Hindu published details of the Rajan cable on December 18. Mr. Rajan, who was travelling at the time and could not be reached for comment, said upon his return: “It is true that an invitation was addressed to me by the Iranian government in my capacity as member, National Security Advisory Board.' After checking with the Ministry of External Affairs, I declined as it would have been inappropriate to have accepted such an invitation. I have no idea about what happened subsequently and certainly have no recollection about discussing the matter with any foreign diplomat, apart from conveying my apologies to the Iranians. I can emphatically confirm that I have never discussed the Iran non-visit with U.S. officials.”

Asked why Mr. Pyatt would fabricate a conversation which never took place in a confidential cable that was not meant to be read by anyone outside the U.S. system, Mr. Rajan said he could not answer for what the U.S. diplomat might or might not have reported.

He admitted travelling to the U.S. in May-June 2007, but denied that visit was arranged by the U.S. government. “I visited the U.S. and some European countries during that period in connection with seminars and conferences. The U.S. government/Embassy were in no way involved,” he said.

The U.S. trip “was for a conference and celebration of the silver jubilee of Washington Times,” Mr. Rajan said, when asked for details of the visit. “I did not meet a single one of the persons you have mentioned. Indeed, I can confirm that I did not meet any other official of the U.S. government either, before during or after the visit to discuss any other subject pertaining to foreign policy,” he added.

Describing himself as “not a particular favourite of the U.S. embassy,” he said: “My only guess as to the sudden affection they developed later is a gross misunderstanding of the reasons for my declining the Iran invite.”

With the State Department advising its missions and posts abroad not to engage with any questions stemming from the leaked cables, attempts to clarify matters with the U.S. embassy drew a blank.

Speaking on background, however, MEA officials said it was unlikely the U.S. embassy would invent a conversation or meeting which never took place. Indeed, South Block has been struck by how accurately the leaked cables have captured the contents of sometimes complicated meetings between senior American and Indian officials on a whole range of topics. “I think I'm going to go with Mr. Pyatt on this one,” a senior official said. “Look at the people Mr. Pyatt wanted Mr. Rajan to meet. Even if the meetings never worked out, a career diplomat would be mad to get State to pitch for top guys at the NIC and CIA on the basis of some made up story.”

Carrying anti-Iran tales, top official angled for U.S. junket

Ratting out on his pals for an imaginary offence, he pushed for a trip to the United States ...






18 December 2010
The Hindu

Carrying anti-Iran tales, top official angled for U.S. junket

Siddharth Varadarajan
Sandeep Dikshit

New Delhi: India's first major embarrassment from the Wikileaks closet came tumbling out on Friday with the revelation that a top official had initiated unauthorised contact with the United States embassy to complain about Iran and pitch for a U.S. visit, where he could receive inputs that would then “feed the [Indian] discussion of Iran policy options”.

On May 4, 2007, K.V. Rajan — described in a confidential cable by U.S. Charge d'affaires Geoffrey Pyatt as “Former Secretary of the Ministry of External Affairs and then Chairman of the Prime Minister's National Security Advisory Board (NSAB)” — sought an urgent meeting with the U.S. embassy to inform it that he and a number of other Indian “politicians, scholars and commentators” had been invited by Iran on an “all-expenses-paid trip” to visit nuclear installations there and meet officials.

“Rajan told the Charge [Pyatt] that this trip was part of an effort of the Iranian government to encourage anti-American, pro-Muslim scholars and think-tanks in India to influence Prime Minister [Manmohan] Singh's supporters to take a more pro-Iranian, anti-U.S. view, and that his presence on the delegation would have handed Iran a Public Relations coup. In light of his suspicions, Rajan cancelled at the last minute, citing a sudden family emergency.” The cable then notes that Mr. Rajan provided the embassy a list of invitees.

“To counter this new and worrying effort to reach out to Indian opinion-makers”, the U.S. Charge d'Affaires wrote, “Rajan proposed a visit to the United States starting May 14 in his NSAB [chaiman] capacity for five-seven days to talk to officials, think tanks, and the intelligence community to discuss ways to better understand U.S. assessments of Iran.” Mr. Rajan “would expect this to feed the NSAB discussion of Iran policy options”, the confidential cable titled ‘New Iranian Mischief' added.

After hearing him out and noting reports of a visit to Iran's heavy water reactor at Arak that had appeared in The Hindu and The Asian Age, the cable records Mr. Pyatt's recommendation: “To counter this insidious new Iranian effort, we recommend that Rajan receive meetings, if possible, with [xxx]”. The names of his recommended interlocutors are blanked out.

Mr. Rajan was unavailable for comment and it is not known if the proposed trip materialised. But Indian government officials speaking to The Hindu on background said it was most inappropriate for an NSAB member to have approached the U.S. embassy in this way.

M.K. Rasgotra, the actual chairman of the NSAB at the time — Mr. Rajan having been a mere member of the board, it is not known why Mr. Pyatt described him as its head — reacted angrily to the revelation that a board member had approached the U.S. embassy to provide information and propose a trip for himself. “Firstly, I was chairman and there was never any mention of this bloody nonsense. I never sought to go out on any one's account nor did any member approach me to discuss this. He was clearly acting on his own. I am really surprised.”

Mr. Rasgotra, a former foreign secretary, said that all NSAB members take an oath of secrecy. Speaking on background, a former official of the National Security Council Secretariat said NSAB members are meant to provide reports only to the Government of India. “They are not meant to approach foreign embassies/governments. It is not their job to be doing diplomacy.”

The names of the respected Indian commentators who visited Iran in April 2007 are blacked out in the cable but their identities are no secret: Vikram Sood, former head of Research and Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence agency; A. Gopalakrishnan, former head of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board; Anuradha and Kamal Chenoy from Jawaharlal Nehru University; Bharat Karnad from the Centre for Policy Research; and Amit Baruah, the then Diplomatic Correspondent of The Hindu.

Correspondents from this newspaper and other publications routinely visit foreign countries on official invitations. Asked for his reaction to Mr. Rajan's apprehensions about the Iran trip, Mr. Sood said he was amused at his presumption that seasoned commentators and ex-officials would be unable to form their own opinions on places they visited.

Time to reset the India-China relationship

Sixty years have already elapsed without the boundary issue being settled. Waiting a few more years should not be a problem for either side, especially if it helps to 'deterritorialise' the relationship ...

December 15, 2010
The Hindu

Time to reset the India-China relationship

Siddharth Varadarajan

When Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Jiang Zemin decided in 2003 to appoint Special Representatives (SRs) to explore and presumably accelerate “the framework of a boundary settlement” between India and China, little did they imagine that their vast but disputed borderlands would end up casting a dark shadow on the overall bilateral relationship seven years later.

The Line of Actual Control in the western and eastern sectors may be extraordinarily tranquil but the artificially speeded up prospect of a boundary settlement has increased the salience of territoriality at a time when the relationship most needs a de-territorialised agenda.

China and India are confronting the same set of challenges that their spectacular rise has exposed them to, from globalisation and its imbalances to transnational security threats, environmental degradation, piracy, maritime security and political instability in various parts of Asia. As the two preeminent powers of the Asian region, India and China have an enormous responsibility to discharge — and discharge jointly. The burden they carry is too great to allow either the kind of assertive, ‘go-it-alone' strategy the Chinese seem to favour or the ‘bandwagoning with an off-shore balancer' that the Indians appear to prefer.

Instead of focussing inward on their disputed border, the two countries need to look together at the wider region and its challenges and see how the pooling of equities they do so well on global issues like trade, financial rebalancing and climate change can also occur on the Asian front. But this is not happening.

Two years ago, the Chinese side implicitly started questioning the status of Jammu and Kashmir by giving Indians domiciled in the State a loose-leaf ‘stapled' visa instead of the regular visa given to Indians from elsewhere. That China regarded Arunachal Pradesh as disputed and was pressing a claim in the SRs talks for what it calls ‘Southern Tibet' was well known. But the stridency of its assertions — especially its objections to Indian leaders visiting the north-eastern State — took the Indian side by surprise.

On their part, some Indian military commanders muddied the waters by making irresponsible public pronouncements which have fuelled both the jingoism and insecurity of a hyper-nationalist media and middle class. The suggestion made on background by some Indian officials that China's claims to the whole of Arunachal Pradesh violated the “political principles and parameters” governing the boundary settlement agreed to by both sides (because of the reference there to due regard being paid to the wishes of settled populations) may also have pushed Beijing into a more assertive mode. After all, from the Chinese point of view, if that were to mean all settled areas automatically belong to India then why are the SRs still negotiating?

Whatever the causes, however, it is clear that the prioritised quest for a boundary settlement, far from bringing the two countries closer, has emerged as a source of irritation and even tension.

In their own way, it seems as if both countries are aware of this negative dynamic. That is why, at their 13th round of talks in 2009 and again at the 14th round in Beijing last month, the two SRs opened a door for a wider discussion on issues of political and strategic concern. Hopefully, this new discussion will help ‘de-territorialise' the relationship.

The broad contours of the way New Delhi looks at Beijing were spelt out in a remarkable speech to the Observer Research Foundation by Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao on December 3.

Ms Rao touched on all the prickly issues from stapled visas for Kashmiris to the imbalance in trade, Chinese hydro projects on the Brahmaputra and the Sino-Pakistani relationship. But she also said the view that India and China are rivals “is an over-generalisation and over-simplification of a complex relationship which encompasses so many diverse issues.”

In the wider strategic community, there are other issues which tend to get flagged such as the ‘string of pearls' thesis and the fear that China is “encircling” India by building close relations with its smaller South Asian neighbours like Nepal and Sri Lanka. But these fears are not uniformly shared within the government.

As one examines the future of the relationship, it is useful to flesh out the areas where Indian and Chinese interests may actually diverge or converge.

If we divide Indian foreign policy analytically into three concentric circles encompassing South Asia, Asia and the world, then it is primarily at the Asian level that the two powers are rubbing up against each other. Within South Asia, which India would like to develop as a cohesive economic space, the primary obstacle is Pakistan. To be sure, Pakistan benefits a great deal from the military and economic help it receives from China, especially in the nuclear and missile spheres. But even in the absence of an axis with Beijing, the binding constraint in South Asia remains the role of the Pakistani military establishment in determining the fate of that country.

Elsewhere in South Asia, it may hurt Indian pride to see a major infrastructure project in Hambantota, Sri Lanka, say, go to a Chinese firm, but this is because Indian companies did not bother to avail of the opportunity.

In any case, physical infrastructure of this kind is not a zero sum game.

Last year, I happened to give a talk on national security to senior executives from a company with very diverse business interests. One executive asked me whether India ought to be worried by a report he had read recently of China planning to connect Nepal to Tibet by rail. Before I could answer, another executive put up his hand. He was from the clothing division and spoke about how the company's factory in Nepal imports fabric from China by sea via Kolkata. Each journey takes six to eight weeks. “If a rail link comes up from Tibet, I'll be able to bring in my shipments within ten days,” he said.

The wider point is that as China grows, Chinese companies will increase their presence in South Asia, especially India. By the same token, Indian businesses and economic interests are also getting entrenched across Asia, including South East and East Asia, where Japanese dominance has already made way for both China and South Korea. These developments would become “threatening” if they are imbued with a strategic dynamic that is powerful enough to overturn the imperatives of geography. In both South Asia and East Asia, for the foreseeable future at least, this is unlikely.

Globally, other than at the highest table — the United Nations Security Council — India and China have more in common with each other than with other big powers. True, Chinese companies have made spectacular commercial inroads in Africa but many of the infrastructure projects they have embarked on will generate multiplier effects that will create space for Indian and other companies to get involved. But it is on the question of Asia — East Asian security and the related question of maritime security in the Indian Ocean — that India and China seem, at least superficially, to be working at cross purposes.

From the Chinese point of view, preventing a U.S.-India axis in Asia is a key priority.

As New Delhi draws closer to Washington, Beijing feels it necessary to make its own overtures towards the Indians but also to take “defensive” measures of one kind or another. That is why China has alternated between criticism and negative rhetoric, on the one hand, and blandishment on the other. But this is a risky strategy. Overshoot with the negativity and you run the risk of driving India into willing American arms. Overshoot with the platitudes and the Indians may end up taking you for granted.

It is my sense that the Chinese inability to deal with the dynamics of the Indo-U.S. relationship is responsible, in large measure, for the up-and-down perturbations we have seen in the bilateral trend line since 2004.

India, too, has allowed itself to be paralysed by the prospect of a Sino-American axis and has tended to retreat into a strategic shell whenever the concept of G-2 rears its unwelcome head. Today, with G-2 in retreat and the Obama administration repeating the Sino-centric overtures to India that George W. Bush did, New Delhi needs to play its cards wisely. Prime Minister Singh should explain to Premier Wen that India wants strong relations with both China and the U.S., that it does not see one as a substitute for the other and that it certainly does not intend to sacrifice one for the other.

Second, that India and China need to work closely together on issues of Asian security and the emerging security architecture, and should not leave the heavy lifting that may be required to outside powers.

Third, given China's critical dependence on shipping, especially energy, across the Indian Ocean, and given India's strategic location at the centre of east-west SLOCs, the two countries ought to cooperate more on broad maritime issues, including anti-piracy, marine pollution and ensuring the openness of the sea commons.

Broadening the regional and global agenda is the best way to move away from the rancour that the boundary question has started to generate. Sixty years have already elapsed without it being settled. Waiting a few more years should not be a problem for either side.