| The News, Feb 9, 2009 |
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 News Desk NEW DELHI: Indian Army chief General Deepak Kapoor on Sunday said the option of surgical strikes against ‘the terror infrastructure’ in Pakistan was “very much feasible” militarily. “Surgical strikes are definitely feasible but whether you wish to take that decision or not is a separate issue,” he said when asked by PTI whether such strikes were feasible. “Definitely, yes. Whether you would like to look at doing it (carrying out such strikes) by air or artillery or by another means or physically there,” he said in reply to questions. Asked if the Indian armed forces were ready for such strikes if the political leadership gave the go-ahead, Kapoor said: “We are an army which has been involved in operations in Kashmir and the Northern Command on a perpetual basis and on an ongoing basis.” During the wide-ranging interview, the Indian Army chief also sought to dispel the impression that there was no clarity about the nuclear command when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was hospitalised for heart surgery last month. Also, Indian ruling Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi warned Pakistan against aiding terrorists, saying those supporting terror elements should not mistake India’s patience as its weakness. Addressing the Congress Convention here, Sonia Gandhi said India will give those supporting terror a befitting reply. ‘’We have resolved to fight terrorism till the end, those supporting terror elements from across the border will be given a befitting reply,” Sonia added. She said Mumbai and Assam attacks had been a painful reminder of the problem the country was facing. |
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Indian Army chief terms surgical strikes feasible
February 9, 2009Germany, 1933 / Gujarat, 2009
January 23, 2009the Triumph of Positivism
By Badri Raina, ZNet, January 23, 2009
Epigraph:
“what matters today is to preserve and disseminate freedom rather than to accelerate . . . the advance towards the administered world”
(Adorno & Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment)
I
Just the other day, at the “Vibrant Gujarat” conclave in Ahmedabad, two of India’s leading industrialists, Anil Ambani and Mittal, speculated from public platform what a radiantly developed country India could become were Narendra Modi to be made the “next leader of India” (read Prime Minister).
At which memories of a similar conjuncture in the Germany of 1933 came rather rushingly to the fore.
Jackson J. Spielvogel tells us how Hitler “knew that to fulfill his foreign policy goals he needed the technological skills of the industrialists and capitalist industry itself.”
Thus he was to appoint Reichsbank Schacht as the new president of the Reischbank, “staunch defender of capitalism, which certainly reassured business and industrial leaders about Hitler’s economic direction. Fortunately for Hitler, Schacht was also an astute financier willing to use his many talents to benefit the Nazis” (Hitler and Nazi Germany: A History, Prentice Hall, 1988).
Sure enough, the Krupp family and a bevy of other industrialists were drafted to set Germany on the autobahn course, leading eventually within a year to a massive attention to rearming the Reich, and everything that followed, as Jews came to be seen to constitute the sinister fifth column of the Bolsheviks, threatening to capture the German economy and the state.
II
In our own Gujarat, it is not so much foreign policy that Modi has in mind as the domestic ascendance of a Fascist pattern of development that might in course of time yield him the position of the chief CEO of the country.
And, although such thinking has come to permeate the whole Indian state, what makes Gujarat stand out for the captains of industry is the social ground that Modi has prepared since the pogrom of 2002.
Briefly, a graveyard of peace where Modi’s administration faces no opposition from any quarter—other political parties, labour organizations, tribals, what-have-you; and where the least voice of dissent from within his own party, the BJP, is put down with no-nonsense repression. Add to that a totalitarian control over investigative agencies, state apparatus, and large sections of the judicial apparatus—the sort of objective conditions that have led the Supreme Court of India repeatedly to intervene in their maladroit operations and to refer both the investigation and juridical determination of cases related especially to the Muslim Gujaratis to agencies outside the state, or to special task forces directly under its own aegis.
As to the media, Gujarat is one place where the most puissant of them can be put into the doghouse: for example, when recently the Times of India did an expose on the Police Commissioner of Ahmedabad, charges of sedition—no less—were slapped on the those who ran the local edition of the newspaper.
State agencies like the Collectorate of Police, the Charity Commissioner, not to speak of party fascios, are used to terrorise individuals and groups who show the gumption to work on behalf of the poor, the minorities, or the other marginalized sections. Not to speak of the intimidation meted out with full state support to artists, film-makers, other cultural practitioners whose work is seen to transgress or question the preferences of a traditional, high-caste Hindu order of things.
Modi’s satraps routinely take recourse to the argument that having won elections, Modi has proved his legitimacy—an argument that is denied to the repeated and impressive victories scored by the Left in West Bengal, Lalu Prasad in Bihar, Shiela Dixit in Delhi, and so on, victories that have not had the underpinnings of a fascicised, majoritarian produce of hate to propel them. Yet the world knows that Modi’s electoral victories have resulted from a Hitlerite polarization of the majority Hindus against, not the Jews but the Muslims?
Nowhere in India, for these reasons, does the road to “development” and profit-maximisation seem as smooth to the industrialists as it does in Gujarat. As to the living indices of common Gujaratis, and of the relegated sections and victims of communal pogroms especially, how are they material to the story of “vibrant Gujarat”?
III
Adorno and Horkheimer, seeking in 1944 to understand what could explain the transmogrification of Europe from Enlightenment reason to Fascism, were to theorise how a “tireless self-destruction of enlightenment hypocritically celebrated by implacable fascists and implemented by pliable experts in humanity” had taken place—a process calculated to to turn “thought into commodity” and “language into a celebration of the commodity.”
Indeed, in a whole section devoted to the media. A&H were to show brilliantly, long before Marshall McLulan, how that decline of Enlightenment humanism into reified class interest was to turn the message into the substance, thus scoring a mythical and fraudulent triumph of “communicative reason” to which such votaries of that reason as Habermas have remained cruelly oblivious.
Given that the Indian bourgeoisie that supported the anti-colonial freedom movement, far from producing any European-Enlightenment moment of opposition, not to speak of sustained opposition, to the social/mythical weltanshuuang of the old feudal classes, simply incorporated the past into both their own lives and into the political manipulations of the anti-colonial movement, the Gujarat variety of fascism could the more easily marry instrumentalist positivism with social stasis and rootedness.
A structure of inherited prejudices and organized corporate religion have, thus, been brought to buttress commodified reason rather than thwart its virulently benumbing operations.
A & H were to point out that “if enlightenment does not assimilate reflection in this repressive moment, it seals its own fate,” as “motorized history” furthers the “oblivious instrumentalization of science.”
And, with uncanny pertinence to the contemporary Indian situation: “in the mysterious willingness of the technologically educated masses to fall under the spell of any despotism, in its self-destructive affinity to nationalist paranoia. . . the weakness of contemporary theoretical understanding is evident.”
This decline of the Enlightenment into an unreflective and despotic positivism ensures that “the flood of precise information and brand new amusements make people smarter and more stupid atonce.” Brilliant formulation if ever there was one.
Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944,1947,1969,2002, the last in Edmund Jephcott’s excellent translation) was thus intended as a “critique of enlightenment…to prepare a positive (rather than “positivist”) concept of enlightenment which liberates it from entanglement in blind domination.”
Put another way, this project was to liberate the enlightenment from the extensions it was to find in the work of Kant, Sade, and Nietzsche—all of that leading to Fascism and Nazism.
In our own case, the event in Gujarat suggests the long road still to be taken first to arrive at the Enlightenment moment, and then to disabuse that moment of its instrumentalist, anti-democratic hegemony, both tasks ominously coterminous rather than sequential. And all that almost exclusively the onus of a weak organized Left and civil society organizations that often find both the state and the classes that kow-tow to it in concerted antagonism.
IV
Imagine that even as India’s leading industrialists think it mouth=wateringly desirable that Modi be set-up as the Prime Minister (by which term they intend really the CEO of the state reconceived as a Corporation), here are some facts about common life in Gujarat:
–one of the lowest gender ratios in demography in terms of females to males;
–one of the highest rates of female infanticide;
–girls raped by teachers for better grades, and in govt., hostels;
–boys mysteriously murdered in religious ashrams;
–vigilante violence against young people wishing to cohabit or marry across communities or castes, all duly ignored by state agencies;
–a “freedom of religion” law that infact punishes change of religion;
–denial of ordinary civic rights to Muslims who are denied both trade rights and housing in up-market areas dominated by Hindus;
–organised lying about developmental indices: e.g concealment of the fact that it is one of the most indebted states in the country; that industrialists are attracted by government subsidies given to them; that no more than some 23% of MOUs signed with them since 2003 are actually in the pipeline; that the waters of the Narmada still do not reach the most needy regions of the state; that thousands have been displaced from the banks of the Sabarmati river to make way for the Sabarmati River Front Development Project; that fisher folk find themselves ruthlessly dispossessed without alternative recourse;
–that Dalits continue to live in inhuman conditions;
–that massive numbers of children remain enslaved in the labour force;
–that official school text books continue to be full of distortions of history and other myths and inaccuracies;
–that in contrast to a national average of 66%, only some 59% of rural children can read;
–that right-wing Hindutva groups may put up bill-boards anywhere proclaiming “Hindu Rashtra”;
And so on.
(see “Vibrant” Gujarat: Lies, Half-Truths and Illusions, The Gujarat Reality Today,” by Fr.Cedric Prakash, Director of Prashant, Ahmedabad based Jesuit Centre for Human Rights, Justice and Peace.)
Yet none of this figures in the calculations of the big-wigs who celebrate “vibrant” Gujarat.
V
True to this pattern of cutting-edge technological development nestling next to areas of abysmal social darkeness are neighbourhoods like Noida and Gurgaon in the National Capital Region.
These are areas that have some of the highest crime rates in the country, such as include daylight abductions, rapes, robberies, road-rage killings, honour killings of young women—and men—who dare defy the traditions laid down by caste groups and panchayats, and other forms of violence engendered by a culture of new affluence married to the prejudices of a feudal world-order.
A pattern entirely to the convenience of investors and industrialists who wish for great leaps in technological development but think any application of the scientific ways of thinking about social and cultural issues first a nuisance and then a potential threat to the flow of their operations.
As Marx had foreseen, the bourgeoisie may have, in Europe especially, made ruthless use of science in dethroning the regressive weltanshuuang of the feudal classes, but once in power, the last thing they desired was to see science carried further forward to scrutinize the weltanshuuang of their own class.
From about the end of the eighteenth century, science had to have but one use: the exploitation and mastering of natural resources for the ploughing of surpluses at whatever social cost. And the chief source of surplus being wage labour.
Gujarat under the Narendra Modi dispensation offers just about the most perfect scenario for so doing. It also boasts one of the lowest rates of wage labour!
What fitter candidate for India’s Prime Ministership?
________________________________________________________________
badri.raina@gmail.com
David Miliband comes under fire over Kashmir
January 22, 2009INDIA/PAKISTAN: Kashmir Jittery Over Prospect of War
January 20, 2009
By Athar Parvaiz | Inter Press Service
SRINAGAR, Jan 19 (IPS) – As war clouds hover over India and Pakistan, anxiety levels have risen in Kashmir, often described as the bone of contention between the South Asian neighbours
Bellicose posturing by the two countries, following the Nov. 26-29 terror strikes in Mumbai, has, according to analysts here, the potential of spiralling into yet another one of a series of wars fought over the territory by the two countries, created in 1947 following the decolonisation of the sub-continent.
”War between India and Pakistan appears to be a possibility given the course the two countries have taken,” Mohammad Sayeed Malik, a well-known, Srinagar-based political commentator told IPS. “If not checked, it may reach a point of no return and actual war would be impossible to avoid.”
The Mumbai attacks, which left 180 people dead, rudely interrupted the ‘composite dialogue,’ begun in February 2004 after the nuclear-armed neighbours restored diplomatic ties – downgraded in reaction to a similar armed attack on India’s parliament in December 2001.
Accusing Pakistan-based militant groups, Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), for staging the attack on Indian parliament, India massed troops along the border in the largest military mobilisation since the two countries went to war in 1971.
The LeT, set up to fight Indian rule in Kashmir, has now been implicated in the Mumbai attacks as well by India and by United States officials and analysts who have also linked it to Pakistan’s shadowy Inter-Services Intelligence.
In the aftermath of the 2001 attack, war between the neighbours was avoided by intense diplomatic activity led by the United States. But it took until February 2004 before the composite dialogue process – a serious effort aimed at confidence building, normalisation of bilateral relations and dispute resolution – could be put into place.
The peace process brought better diplomatic, trade and people-to-people contact across the 298-km, fenced and fortified Line of Control (LoC) that divides Indian Kashmir from the Pakistan-administered part of the territory and has served for decades as the de facto international border.
Most significantly, for people living along the LoC, the peace talks brought about a cessation of the constant exchange of artillery fire by the Indian and Pakistani armies across the border. Scores of civilians have been reported killed, maimed or displaced by the destructive exchanges.
“After the ceasefire, we had been living in a comfortable manner without any fear, but now we might again have go through the traumatic times before the ceasefire,” Rustum Gelani, a resident of the border town of Tangdar, told IPS over telephone.
Reports from the other towns near the LoC such as Uri and Poonch suggested that people were close to panic. “We would appeal the two countries to maintain the ceasefire,” said Abdul Gafoor, a resident of Poonch.
People living along the road leading to LoC in Tangdar, Uri and Poonch have reported seeing deployment of troops and equipment for several days now. “More military and machines are being stockpiled on the LoC… it looks like war is brewing up,” said Neik Mohammed, a resident.
Army officials have downplayed the activity as part of routine exercises, normally conducted at this time of the year. But one defence source said the moves were ”precautionary measures as our neighbour Pakistan is mobilising troops on its side of the border”.
Malik said that should war break out between India and Pakistan, Kashmiris would be the worst sufferers; socially, economically and politically. “It would wash away all the gains of the five-year-old peace process. The positive mood in the aftermath of the peaceful elections in Kashmir may vanish into thin air,” he said.
“During and after Gen. [Pervez] Musharraf’s rule, Pakistan had made quite a lot of progress in disengaging itself from active involvement in Kashmir… a war could reverse it,” Malik added.
Civil society and NGOs have been busy urging India and Pakistan to work towards de-escalating tension and peace-building. “We call upon India and Pakistan to sign the convention and treaty to ban production, stockpiling and use of cluster munitions and landmines,” said ActionAid’s Arjimand Talib, a peace activist.
”A war would seriously dent efforts at poverty eradication in the region and shift focus from development to further militarisation,” Talib added.
“After India felt that international pressure had started working on Pakistan, it has helped bring down tension levels. This should have been enough, but since India’s elections are just round the corner, one can’t be sure that the war hysteria will come down,” said Malik.
Tapan Bose, secretary general of the Pakistan India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy (PIPFPD), told IPS that public anger projected in the media carried the danger of precipitating war, forgetting that ordinary people would suffer the consequences most.
“We have been so overwhelmed by the war jingoism of the media and sections of the state and upper middle class [because they were hit by the Mumbai attacks] that we forget what the peace process means for thousands of ordinary people,” Bose said. ”Who speaks for them?”
India stages “martial law” elections in Kashmir
January 8, 2009By Deepal Jayasekera and Keith Jones | World Socialist Web Site, January 8, 2009
Omar Abdullah was sworn in as the chief minister of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir Monday, ending six months of central government or “president’s” rule.
India’s lone Muslim-majority state, Jammu and Kashmir has for two decades been convulsed by a popular insurgency against Indian rule.
Indian authorities recently reported that 47,000 people have died in the conflict, including 20,000 civilians and a like number of anti-Indian insurgents. The Coalition of Civil Society, a prominent Kashmiri-based human rights group, says the true death toll is in excess of 70,000.
Abdullah leads a coalition that was patched together after last month’s state assembly elections produced a fractured verdict. The coalition unites his National Conference, a Kashmiri regionalist party, with the Congress Party, the traditional governing party of the Indian bourgeoisie and the dominant partner in India’s United Progressive Alliance government.
The National Conference captured 28 assembly seats and the Congress 17, meaning that the coalition has only a bare majority in the 87-member state legislature.
Neither party improved its standing from the last election. The National Conference won the same number of seats as it secured in the 2002 election when it fell from power, while the Congress suffered a net loss of 3 seats.
The Kashmiri-based People’s Democratic Party (PDP), which co-governed the state with the Congress from 2002 till last June, won 21 seats, five more than in 2002, and thereby supplanted the Congress as the state’s second largest party. The Hindu communalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won 11 seats, all of them from the Hindu-majority Jammu region. Smaller parties took six seats and four were won by independents.
India’s political establishment and corporate media have proclaimed the staging of state assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir, the installation of a new coalition government, and the lifting of president’s rule a triumph for “democracy.”
The reality is that Jammu and Kashmir, especially the Kashmir Valley, remain under military occupation, with half a million security forces deployed in a state whose total population is little more than 10 million. Since 1990 the state has been under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which gives the military sweeping powers. These include the right to use deadly force and raid any premises without a warrant, as well as immunity from prosecution.
The elections were held in seven phases, stretching from November 17 to December 24 so as to maximize troop deployment in areas during and immediately before voting.
Curfews, declared and undeclared, were imposed by security forces so as to prevent anti-Indian government protests and those protests that were mounted were brutally suppressed. Several dozen prominent opponents of Indian rule were kept under house arrest throughout the election campaign, under the draconian Public Safety Act, which authorizes police to detain people for up to two years without trial.
The state of siege was intensified following the commando-style terrorist attack on Mumbai in late November. BBC correspondent Chris Morris, reporting from Srinagar on the eve of polling in the state’s largest city, said, “Every 50 meters or so, on every main street, stand several men (or very occasionally women) armed with assault rifles and—more often than not—big sticks.”
Indian authorities continue to adamantly oppose any serious investigation of the horrific human rights abuses, including torture and summary executions, perpetrated by security forces—some of them former insurgents who have been coerced into becoming police “auxiliaries”—in Indian-controlled Kashmir. The “disappeared” number in the thousands, if not tens of thousands.
Much has been made of an increase in the election turnout from the 2002 state election. Although the advocates of union with Pakistan or an independent Kashmir called for an election boycott, 61.5 percent of the electorate voted as compared with just 43 percent in 2002. In the Kashmir Valley, the state’s most populous region, and the center of both its Muslim population and the opposition to Indian rule, half or more of the electorate voted.
The increased voter turnout came as a welcome relief to the Indian elite. Indeed, in announcing last fall that the Jammu and Kashmir state elections would be held on schedule, the head of India’s election commission conceded it was a calculated risk.
In June, the PDP had withdrawn from its coalition with the Congress, forcing the imposition of president’s rule, after popular protests broke out against a state government decision to cede 100 acres of Kashmir Valley land to a Hindu shrine. The shrine has become a major pilgrimage site in recent years, at least in part because of the efforts of Hindu supremacist organizations who view its veneration as a means of asserting Indian/Hindu control over the valley. The protests quickly mushroomed into a mass popular movement against the police-military occupation of the state and to a considerable degree Indian rule itself. State authorities brutally suppressed the protests, killing dozens of people. Meanwhile the Hindu right, with the connivance of local Congress leaders, whipped up a Hindu communal counter-agitation. (See: Indian government mounts brutal campaign of repression in Kashmir)
More astute and less-biased observers concede that the increased turnout in the 2008 election is not indicative of any new-found enthusiasm for the repressive rule of the Indian state among Kashmir’s Muslim majority. Rather, the populace seized on the elections as a means of trying to influence government decisions concerning economic development. “In their approach to the elections,” wrote The Hindu‘s Siddharth Varadarajan, “it is apparent that the people in the valley made a distinction between the ‘masla-e-kashmir,’ or the problem of Kashmir, and ‘kashmiriyon ke masail,’ or the problems of Kashmiris.”
A second factor in the widespread spurning of the anti-Indian opposition’s boycott call is increasing popular disaffection with the insurgency. Not only do the insurgents advance no progressive program to address poverty and economic backwardness, they have become ever-more explicitly communalist and Islamic fundamentalist in program and orientation. Pakistan, it should be noted, played an important part in this process, as it viewed Islamicist elements as the most malleable in its efforts to exploit the grievances of the Kashmiri people to serve its own predatory ends.
The National Conference, which favors increased autonomy for Kashmir within the Indian Union, placed economic issues at the center of its election campaign, promising to improve the state’s dilapidated or non-existent infrastructure and create jobs. “If voted to power, National Conference will usher an era of unparalleled development in the state and open new avenues of employment,” declared Farooq Abdullah, Omar Abdullah’s father, and himself a four-time Jammu and Kashmir chief minister.
The central theme of the PDP election manifesto was “Make Self-Rule Happen.” In a 2006 address to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think-tank, Mufti Mohammad Syed, the father of PDP head Mehbooba Mufti, and the party’s official “patron,” argued that autonomy for Jammu and Kashmir and the development of cross-border ties with Pakistan-controlled Azad Kashmir, would allow the state to become the hub of a thriving Indo-Pakistani capitalist trade.
The Kashmiri regional parties speak for rival sections of the local elite. Their autonomy demands and maneuvers with New Delhi—the National Conference was aligned with the Hindu supremacist BJP from 1998 to 2002—have nothing to do with meeting the socio-economic needs and fulfilling the genuine democratic aspirations of the people of Jammu and Kashmir, be they Hindu, Muslim, or Buddhist.
Neither of them challenge the reactionary 1947 communal partition of the subcontinent. Imposed by the Congress and Muslim League in connivance with British imperialism, Partition is at the root of the ordeal of the Kashmiri people, on both sides of the Line of Control that divides Indian- and Pakistani held Kashmir, and of the geo-political rivalry between India and Pakistan—a rivalry that has repeatedly erupted in war.
The Congress and National Conference have had a tumultuous, decades-long association, involving periods of partnership and confrontation. The founder of the National Conference, Omar Abdullah’s grandfather, Sheikh Abdullah, supported the accession of the princely state of Kashmir to India and became the Indian state’s first chief minister. He was jailed by the Congress from 1953 to 1964, after he balked at declaring the state an integral part of the Indian Union.
In 1984, a Congress central government through the centrally-appointed state governor maneuvered to dismiss a National Conference ministry, only to prod the National Conference into an electoral alliance three years later. The joint efforts of the Congress and National Conference to rig the 1987 elections did much to discredit the Indian state and fuel the eruption two years later of mass protests against Indian rule.
If the Congress has rushed to forge a new governmental coalition with the National Conference, agreeing that Abdullah will serve as chief minister for the government’s full prospective six-year term, it is because it is anxious to give the state the appearance of a stable, democratic government. It is leery of the PDP’s more assertive position on autonomy, what many in the press have termed “soft separatism.”
More importantly, it and the Indian elite as a whole have been rattled by last summer’s sudden eruption of mass protests and want to ensure that there is a democratic fig leaf for the continuation of its two decades-long campaign to stamp out opposition, whether in the form of an armed insurgency or civil unrest, to Indian rule.
At the same time, New Delhi, with the full support of the official opposition BJP, has seized on the recent Mumbai terrorist atrocity to push through even more draconian “anti-terrorism” legislation and to ratchet up pressure on Pakistan to end its political and logistical support for the anti-Indian insurgency in Kashmir.
Several factors account for this belligerence. India’s military-security establishment and the Hindu right have long been pressing for a more belligerent stance against Pakistan and various national-ethnic and Naxalite (Maoist) insurgencies within India. With national elections looming, the Congress is anxious to counter any attempt by the BJP to cast it as “soft” on terrorism. The campaign against Pakistan also serves to divert attention from, and channel in a reactionary direction mounting frustration over, the deepening economic crisis.
That said, the Indian government’s attempt to cast Pakistan as a nexus of international terrorism is also clearly aimed at preempting any attempt by the incoming US administration of Barack Obama to take a greater role in the Indo-Pakistani dispute over Kashmir. A number of Obama aides have suggested that as a quid pro quo for Islamabad intensifying its efforts to eradicate support within Pakistan for the insurgency against the US-installed government in Afghanistan, Washington would facilitate a settlement of the Kashmir dispute. Obama himself told Time magazine last October that he wants to “devote serious diplomatic resources” to the Kashmir dispute, including getting “a special envoy in there, to figure out a plausible approach.”
India has long opposed any outside intervention in the Kashmir dispute, since it believes that bilaterally its economic and military power far outweighs that of Pakistan. Obama’s suggestion was, consequently, pilloried in the Indian press and quietly but firmly rejected by Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee.
The strength of the reaction from India has been duly noted by members of Washington’s geo-political establishment. Speaking Tuesday, Selig Harrison, a longtime US think-tank specialist on South Asia declared, “A US Kashmir initiative, however veiled, would poison relations between New Delhi and Washington.”
Gaza and India
January 6, 2009A View From Pakistan
By FAHEEM HUSSAIN | Counterpunch, January 5, 2009
The horror and the massacres continue in Gaza. The scenes of carnage being broadcast by Al-Jazeera are unbearably painful. Police stations, schools, universities, ministries, houses, crowded mosques, ambulances, paramedics, etc. were and are being targeted by the Israeli air force and now ground troops have entered to “finish the job” as the Israelis call it. Hundreds of innocents have been killed and thousands injured and there seems to be no end in sight. This is not a war but a massacre of a population that has been deprived of everything for more than 18 months by the Israeli embargo and is now being bombed to oblivion. The nearest equivalent is the massacre of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto in 1944. The world watches without lifting a finger to stop this genocide. Arab leaders are either collaborating with this massacre or are totally helpless in front of this brutality. The vast majority of the people of the world are horrified and disgusted with what is going on but are unable to do anything to help the suffering people of Gaza.
The response of Western leaders was expected. Obama’s silence is stunning. They more or less explicitly backed the Israeli attack and the hypocrisy was so evident. When the Mumbai tragedy took place everybody was quite rightly quick to condemn the attackers and to call for action against them and had sympathy with the Indian people. But there is no condemnation of Israeli terrorism that is on an even larger scale than that perpetrated in Mumbai. Obama was quick to offer sympathy to India and to condemn the Mumbai terrorists but when it comes to Israel he is keeping a silence that makes him an accomplice to the crimes being committed there. It is as if everything is permitted to Israel and Arabs are considered no more than “cockroaches”, the term used by Sharon to describe them.
There have been disappointing, muted protests from Pakistan and India who are involved in their own problems. Pakistan has always been quite lukewarm on the Palestinian issue as it has been a staunch ally of the United States for more than fifty years and therefore cannot criticise let alone condemn Israel, the United States’ greatest ally in the region. But what is disappointing to many Pakistani leftists and progressives is the response of the Indian government. There was a time when we looked up to and admired Indian foreign policy which was independent, non-aligned and at times even anti-imperialist in contrast to Pakistan’s foreign policy which was always subservient to US interests. One recalls India’s principled opposition to the Vietnam War. At one time one of the few countries which Indians could not visit was Israel because of its refusal to recognise the rights of Palestinians. How times have changed. Now India vies with Pakistan in trying to demonstrate who is the more loyal subject and says good-bye to all principles. India sees it self now as a big power and no longer as a defender of the weak and the underdeveloped world. India’s economic interests are now closely tied with the US. It sees itself as the main partner of the US in the region.
But apart from its closeness to the USA, India has also developed a special relationship with Israel particularly in the sphere of defence. It is one of the biggest customers for Israeli weapons and Israeli defence chiefs have visited India in recent years to propose training in counterinsurgency for Indian troops in Kashmir, based on Israeli experience in occupied Palestine, especially Gaza. After we see Israeli actions in the West Bank and particularly now in Gaza we can expect the kind of advice which the Israeli military is offering India in Kashmir. Targeted assassinations, collective punishment, massive bombardment, etc. without addressing the fundamental political issues. India seems to be buying into the US’s view that Islamic fundamentalism is the greatest threat to world peace and that a long unending war against so-called “Islamic terrorists” is necessary. The terrorist attack in Mumbai has driven India to join what many view as the new axis of Washington-Tel Aviv-New Delhi that will attempt to decide the future of the region. Given these facts it was perhaps not surprising the muted response from New Delhi to the Israeli genocide in Gaza but nevertheless it was disappointing and confirmed our worst fears of where India is heading.
What is needed from both Pakistan and India is a vigorous denunciation of Israeli war crimes. Pakistan does not have diplomatic relations with Israel but India does. The least India can do is to recall its ambassador from Tel Aviv even if it cannot think of breaking diplomatic relations with Israel.
Faheem Hussain is Professor of Physics at the School of Science and Engineering, Lahore University of Management Sciences.
U.S. draws India into the Afghan war
December 27, 2008M.K. Bhadrakumar| The Hindu, India, Dec 25, 2008
| The time has come to carefully assess the U.S. motivations in widening the gyre of the Afghan war, which commenced seven years ago. |
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States armed forces, Admiral Mike Mullen, has lent his voice to the incipient idea of a “regional” approach to the Afghanistan problem. He said the over-arching strategy for success in Afghanistan must be regional in focus and include not just Afghanistan but also Pakistan and India. The three South Asian countries, he stressed, must figure a way to reduce tensions among them, which involves addressing &# 8220;long-standing problems that increase instability in the region.”
Adm. Mullen then referred to Kashmir as one such problem to underline that if India-Pakistan tensions decreased, it “allowed the Pakistani leadership to focus on the west [border with Afghanistan].” He regretted that the terror attack in Mumbai raised India-Pakistan tensions, and “in the near term, that might force the Pakistani leadership to lose interest in the west,” apart from the likelihood of a nuclear flashpoint. Interestingly, he gave credit to the Pakistani top brass for its recent cooperation in the tribal areas which, he said, has had a “positive impact” on the anti-Taliban operations.
The Pentagon’s number one soldier has legitimised an idea that was straining to be born — U.S. mediatory mission in South Asia. Adm. Mullen announced that the U.S. was doubling its force level in Afghanistan from the present strength of 32,000 troops. The Afghan war is about to intensify. All this comes in the wake of the recent hint by Senator John Kerry that the appointment of a U.S. special envoy for South Asia by the Obama administration is on the cards.
The time has indeed come to carefully assess the U.S. motivations in widening the gyre of the Afghan war, which commenced seven years ago as a vengeful hunt for Osama bin Laden and metamorphosed into a “war on terror.” What is in it for India? It is very obvious that the U.S. thought process on a “regional approach” to the Afghan problem and the appointment of a South Asia envoy go hand in hand. The U.S. design confronts India with a three-fold challenge: it insists that India is a protagonist in the U.S.-led war; India-Pakistan relationship is a crucial factor of regional security and stability which directly affects the U.S. interests and, therefore, necessitates an institutionalised American mediatory role; and, it asserts a U.S. obligation to be involved in “nation-building” in South Asia on a long-term footing.
India Awaits Green Light for Raids on Pakistan
December 27, 2008
By Usman Khalid | Information Clearing House, Dec 26, 2008
The Pentagon has announced that the US would withdraw troops from Iraq to reinforce Afghanistan sending one brigade soon after the New Year and another three in spring 2009. This has the approval of President Elect Barack Obama. It is believed that the objective is a ‘surge’ in Afghanistan on the lines General Petreus had in Iraq. But President Hamid Karazai would like the additional troops to supplement the clandestine operations by RAW (India’a CIA) on Pakistan’s border. It now appears that President Zardari of Pakistan is just as eager for India and America to shift focus to his country. His reason: he wants the ISI and the Army to be tamed. It seems that Pakistan has the reincarnation of the Sheikh Mujib as a leader. And it was Mujibs’s treachery that precipitated the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war and Pakistan’s defeat.
The grim anniversary of the fall of Dhaka on 16 December 1971 is commemorated every year in Pakistan but this year it had more poignancy than ever before. Pakistan appears to be living through similar trauma all over again. The war clouds gather after ‘free and fair’ elections. In 1971, an indicted RAW Agent – Sheikh Mujib – secured the most seats in Pakistan’s parliament. Despite having contested the elections on the basis of Six Points that sought to make Pakistan a confederation, President Yahya Khan decided to honour the verdict of the people. He met Sheikh Mujib in Dhaka and asked him to assume the office of the Prime Minister. Sheikh Mujib accepted the offer and the press were briefed accordingly. Three days later, he informed the President that he had to decline the offer under pressure from his party colleagues. Now we know (from the chapter written by Dr Mu’min Chowdhury of Bangladesh in ‘Authentic Voices of South Asia’) why? Sheikh Mujib had asked for confirmation directly from India Prime Minster Indira Gandhi that India would invade East Pakistan if he made UDI – Unilateral Declaration of Independence. When he met President Yahya Khan, that confirmation had not been received. When he got the confirmation he declined the offer to become the Prime Minister and preferred to become a prisoner instead. That shows the dilemma of traitors. Once Sheikh Mujib agreed to work for RAW, he was a pawn; he had to do the bidding of his agent handlers. A maverick like him was more valuable in a Pakistani jail to give substance to the propaganda that Pakistanis would never transfer power to a Bengali as Prime Minister. The fact that most of the Prime Ministers of united Pakistan belonged to East Pakistan did not matter. Propaganda is more credible than the truth in the hands of the disciples of Kautaliya.
Peace and Justice Post 
Neo-Liberal Terrorism in India: The Largest Wave of Suicides in History
February 13, 2009By P. Sainath | Counterpunch, Feb 12, 2009
The number of farmers who have committed suicide in India between 1997 and 2007 now stands at a staggering 182,936. Close to two-thirds of these suicides have occurred in five states (India has 28 states and seven union territories). The Big 5 – Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh– account for just about a third of the country’s population but two-thirds of farmers’ suicides. The rate at which farmers are killing themselves in these states is far higher than suicide rates among non-farmers. Farm suicides have also been rising in some other states of the country.
It is significant that the count of farmers taking their lives is rising even as the numbers of farmers diminishes, that is, on a shrinking farmer base. As many as 8 million people quit farming between the two censuses of 1991 and 2001. The rate of people leaving farming has only risen since then, but we’ll only have the updated figure of farmers in the census of 2011.
These suicide data are official and tend to be huge underestimates, but they’re bad enough. Suicide data in India are collated by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), a wing of the Ministry of Home Affairs, government of India. The NCRB itself seems to do little harm to the data. But the states where these are gathered leave out thousands from the definition of “farmer” and, thus, massage the numbers downward. For instance, women farmers are not normally accepted as farmers (by custom, land is almost never in their names). They do the bulk of work in agriculture – but are just “farmers’ wives.” This classification enables governments to exclude countless women farmer suicides. They will be recorded as suicide deaths – but not as “farmers’ suicides.” Likewise, many other groups, too, have been excluded from that list.
The spate of farm suicides – the largest sustained wave of such deaths recorded in history – accompanies India’s embrace of the brave new world of neoliberalism. Many reports on that process and how it has affected agriculture have been featured right here, on the Counterpunch site. The rate of farmers’ suicides has worsened particularly after 2001, by which time India was well down the WTO garden path in agriculture. The number of farmers’ suicides in the five years – 1997-2001 – was 78,737 (or 15,747 a year on average). The same figure for the five years 2002-06 was 87,567 (or 17,513 a year on average). That is, in the next five years after 2001, one farmer took his or her life every 30 minutes on average. The 2007 figures (detailed below) place that year, too, in the higher trend.
What do the farm suicides have in common? Those who have taken their lives were deep in debt – peasant households in debt doubled in the first decade of the neoliberal “economic reforms,” from 26 per cent of farm households to 48.6 per cent. We know that from National Sample Survey data. But in the worst states, the percentage of such households is far higher. For instance, 82 per cent of all farm households in Andhra Pradesh were in debt by 2001-02. Those who killed themselves were overwhelmingly cash crop farmers – growers of cotton, coffee, sugarcane, groundnut, pepper, vanilla. (Suicides are fewer among food crop farmers – that is, growers of rice, wheat, maize, pulses.) The brave new world philosophy mandated countless millions of Third World farmers forced to move from food crop cultivation to cash crop (the mantra of “export-led growth”). For millions of subsistence farmers in India, this meant much higher cultivation costs, far greater loans, much higher debt, and being locked into the volatility of global commodity prices. That’s a sector dominated by a handful of multinational corporations. The extent to which the switch to cash crops impacts on the farmer can be seen in this: it used to cost Rs.8,000 ?($165 today) roughly to grow an acre of paddy in Kerala. When many switched to vanilla, the cost per acre was (in 2003-04) almost Rs.150,000 ($3,000) an acre. (The dollar equals about 50 rupees.)
With giant seed companies displacing cheap hybrids and far cheaper and hardier traditional varieties with their own products, a cotton farmer in Monsanto’s net would be paying far more for seed than he or she ever dreamed they would. Local varieties and hybrids were squeezed out with enthusiastic state support. In 1991, you could buy a kilogram of local seed for as little as Rs.7 or Rs.9 in today’s worst affected region of Vidarbha. By 2003, you would pay Rs.350 — ($7) — for a bag with 450 grams of hybrid seed. By 2004, Monsanto’s partners in India were marketing a bag of 450 grams of Bt cotton seed for between Rs.1,650 and Rs.1,800 ($33 to $36). This price was brought down dramatically overnight due to strong governmental intervention in Andhra Pradesh, where the government changed after the 2004 elections. The price fell to around Rs.900 ($18) – still many times higher than 1991 or even 2003.
Meanwhile, inequality was the great man-eater among?the “Emerging Tiger” nations of the developing world. The predatory commercialization of the countryside devastated all other aspects of life for peasant farmer and landless workers. Health costs, for instance, skyrocketed. Many thousands of youngsters dropped out of both school and college to work on their parents’ farms (including many on scholarships). The average monthly per capita expenditure of the Indian farm household was just Rs.503 (ten dollars) by early this decade. Of that, 60 per cent roughly was spent on food and another 18 per cent on fuel, clothing and footwear.
Farmers, spending so much on food? To begin with, millions of small and marginal Indian farmers are net purchasers of food grain. They cannot produce enough to feed their families and have to work on the fields of others and elsewhere to meet the gap. Having to buy some of the grain they need on the market, they are profoundly affected by hikes in food prices, as has happened since 1991, and particularly sharply earlier this year. Hunger among those who produce food is a very real thing. Add to this the fact that the “per capita net availability” of food grain has fallen dramatically among Indians since the “reforms” began: from 510 grams per Indian in 1991, to 422 grams by 2005. (That’s not a drop of 88 grams. It’s a fall of 88 multiplied by 365 and then by one billion Indians.) As prof. Utsa Patnaik, India’s top economist on agriculture, has been constantly pointing out, the average poor family has about 100 kg less today than it did just ten years ago – while the elite eat like it’s going out of style. For many, the shift from food crop to cash crop makes it worse. At the end of the day, you can still eat your paddy. It’s tough, digesting cotton. Meanwhile, even the food crop sector is coming steadily under corporate price-rigging control. Speculation in the futures markets pushed up grain prices across the globe earlier this year.
Meanwhile, the neoliberal model that pushed growth through one kind of consumption also meant re-directing huge amounts of money away from rural credit to fuel the lifestyles of the aspiring elites of the cities (and countryside, too). Thousands of rural bank branches shut down during the 15 years from 1993-2007.
Even as incomes of the farmers crashed, so did the price they got for their cash crops, thanks to obscene subsidies to corporate and rich farmers in the West, from the U.S. and EU. Their battle over cotton subsidies alone (worth billions of dollars) destroyed cotton farmers not merely in India but in African nations such as Burkina Faso, Benin, Mali, and Chad. Meanwhile, all along, India kept reducing investment in agriculture (standard neoliberal procedure). Life was being made more and more impossible for small farmers.
As costs rose, credit dried up. Debt went out of control. Subsidies destroyed their prices. Starving agriculture of investment (worth billions of dollars each year) smashed the countryside. India even cut most of the few, pathetic life supports she had for her farmers. The mess was complete. From the late-’90s, the suicides began to occur at what then seemed a brisk rate.
In fact, India’s agrarian crisis can be summed up in five words (call it Ag Crisis 101): the drive toward corporate farming. The route (in five words): predatory commercialization of the countryside. The result: The biggest displacement in our history.
Corporations do not as yet have direct control of Indian farming land and do not carry out day-to-day operations directly. But they have sewn up every other sector, inputs, outlets, marketing, prices, and are heading for control of water as well (which states in India are busy privatizing in one guise or another).
The largest number of farm suicides is in the state of Maharashtra, home to the Mumbai Stock Exchange and with its capital Mumbai being home to 21 of India’s 51 dollar billionaires and over a fourth of the country’s 100,000 dollar millionaires. Mumbai shot to global attention when terrorists massacred 180 people in the city in a grisly strike in November. In the state of which Mumbai is capital, there have been 40,666 farmers’ suicides since 1995, with very little media attention.
Farmers’ suicides in Maharashtra crossed the 4,000-mark again in 2007, for the third time in four years, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. As many as 4,238 farmers took their lives in the state that year, the latest for which data are available,?accounting?for a fourth of all the 16,632 farmers’ suicides in the country. That national total represents a slight fall from the 17,060 farm suicides of 2006. But the broad trends of the past decade seem unshaken. Farm suicides in the country since 1997 now total 182,936.
To repeat, the five worst affected states?– Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh?– account for two-thirds of all farmers’ suicides in India. Together, they saw 11,026 in 2007. Of these, Maharashtra alone accounted for?over 38 per cent. Of the Big 5, Andhra Pradesh saw a decline of 810 suicides against its 2006 total. Karnataka saw a rise of 415 over the same period. Madhya Pradesh (1,375) posted a decline of 112. But Chattisgarh’s 1,593 farm suicides mean an increase of 110 over 2006. Specific factors in these states nourish the problem. These are zones of highly diversified, commercialized agriculture where cash crops dominate. Water stress has been a common feature, and gets worse with the use of technologies such as Bt seed that demand huge amounts of water. High external inputs and input costs are also common, as also the use of chemicals and pesticides. Mindless deregulation dug a lot of graves, lit a lot of pyres.
Maharashtra registered a fall of 215 farm suicides in 2007. However, no other state even touches the 3,000 mark. And AP (with 1,797) and Karnataka (2,135) – the next two worst hit states – together do not cross Maharashtra’s 4,000-plus mark. A one-year dip of 221 occurred in 2005 too, in Maharashtra, only to be followed by an all-time high of 4,453 suicides in 2006. The state’s trend shows no turnaround and remains dismal.
Maharashtra’s 2007 figure of 4,238 follows one and a half years of farm “relief packages” worth around Rs.5,000 crore ($1 billion) and a prime ministerial visit in mid-2006 to the distressed Vidharbha region. The state has also seen a plethora of official reports, studies and commissions of inquiry over 2005-07, aimed at tackling the problem. However, the 12,617 farm suicides in the same years is its worst ever total for any three-year period since the state began recording such data in 1995. Indeed, farm suicides in Maharashtra since that year have crossed the 40,000 mark. The structural causes of that crisis seem untouched.
Nationally, farmers’ suicides between 2002-07 were worse than for the years 1997-2001. NCRB data for the whole country now exists from 1997-2007. In the five years till 2001, there were 15,747 farmers’ suicides a year on average. For the six years from 2002, that average is 17,366 farmers’ suicides each year. The increase is distressingly higher in the main crisis states.
P. Sainath is the rural affairs editor of The Hindu and is the author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought. A regular contributor to CounterPunch, he can be reached at psainath@vsnl.com.
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Tags:agrarian crisis, farmers, National Crime Records Bureau, neoliberalism, P. Sainath, suicides in India
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