Posts Tagged ‘J. Sri Raman’

Sri Lanka Continues War on Media

September 4, 2009

Thursday 03 September 2009

by: J. Sri Raman, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

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In a statement, President Barack Obama said journalist J.S. Tissainayagam was “guilty of nothing more than a passion for truth and a tenacious belief that a free society depends on an informed citizenry.” (Photo: Reuters)

Colombo’s war on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam may have ended. But its war on media freedom is far from over. Unlike the army offensive in the northeast of Sri Lanka, this is a war waged in disregard of the island-state’s ethnic divide.

The latest illustration of this years-long offensive has come with the Colombo High Court sentencing a Sri Lankan journalist to a 20-year prison term, with “hard labor,” on August 31 for his published comments on the armed conflict. Forty-five-year-old Jayaprakash Sittampalam Tissainayagam is a Sri Lankan Tamil, but has never been known to function as a member of the LTTE.

Continues >>

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India’s Polls and South Asian Peace

April 17, 2009

By: J. Sri Raman, t r u t h o u t , April 16, 2009

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Women line up to vote in India’s national elections. (Photo: Ruth Fremson / The New York Times)

“Just as the winds of change have swept across the United States, I have no doubt that India too will witness change when the next parliamentary elections take place in a few months.”

Thus spoke, some time ago, Lal Krishna Advani, former deputy prime minister of India and the far right’s candidate for the country’s top political post. Seldom were more misleading words spoken.

India, indeed, embarks on an extensive democratic exercise on April 16, 2009. The general election – in which some 714 million people are scheduled to cast their votes in 543 constituencies across 35 States and smaller Union Territories in five phases until May 13 – cannot but have giant consequences. The epic event will lead to far more than the formation of a new Lok Sabha (the Lower House of India’s Parliament) and a new government (by the first week of June).

The election can unleash winds of change across not only India, but South Asia as well. But it can bring change of the kind Barack Obama represented for the American voter only if the people of India reject and rout Advani and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

History will pronounce its verdict on whether Obama lives up to the voters’ hopes. There never was any doubt, however, about the meaning of their mandate. Theirs was a vote against wars and one for an all-inclusive American identity. Advani, the “shadow prime minister” of the BJP, cannot cast himself as an Obama-like candidate of pro-changers merely through an imitative media and Internet campaign.

A vote for Advani and his party will be one for wannabe representatives of a religious majority with an agenda of rabid anti-minorityism. It will also be a vote for reversal of the peace processes and an escalation of the role of militarism in regional relations. A pro-BJP and a pro-Advani vote will mean this all the more for the particularly vicious campaign the party has chosen to pursue this time. It has been searching for a single wining issue, but in vain. No major corruption scandal, no manmade mega calamity of the kind that can lead to a landslide victory for a wily opposition has come its way. The BJP has made up for this lack by manufacturing a series of state-level issues of religious communalism aimed at the two major minorities – Muslims and Christians.

The party and the “‘parivar” (as the far-right “family” calls itself ) have combined their anti-minority violence with hate campaigns aimed at polarizing voters on religious lines and harvesting a Hindu vote that has never really been cast on a national scale. The far right is hitting a new low this time with speeches frothing with hate.

Young BJP leader Varun Gandhi (a nephew of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi) set a trend with a videotaped and widely circulated tirade, where he is heard threatening violence against “circumcised” traitors (with few nonparty takers for the theory about a “fake tape”). Narendra Modi, who presided over the infamous Gujarat pogrom of 2002, has been carrying the same divisive message across different parts of the country as a rabble-rouser with an elevated party role. Advani himself continues to insist on “cultural nationalism” as the true import of the party’s religious communalism, while strongly defending Varun and Modi against the diatribes of “pseudo-secularists.”

What is the likely fallout, in this context, of a far-right poll victory for South Asia?

Pakistan-India relations should be the area of primary concern on this count. Islamabad has repeatedly expressed the hope that the strains between the nuclear-armed neighbors after the Mumbai terrorist strike of November 2008 will start easing after the Indian general elections are over. New Delhi, for its part, even while denying any electoral politics behind its current toughness towards Pakistan on terrorism, has suggested revival of the India-Pakistan peace process after reassuring post-Mumbai action by Islamabad.

The BJP, however, is in no hurry to offer such a hope. In one of his recent election rallies, in fact, Modi has virtually threatened a Mumbai in Pakistan in India. “Response to terrorism should be given in the language of terrorism,” he declared. “Pakistan should be made to understand in Pakistani language.”

The BJP has not mentioned India’s other Muslim neighbor, Bangladesh, in connection with Mumbai, though Pakistan has done so. This, however, does not mean that the party has decided to pursue a policy of peace with Dhaka. The BJP has officially hailed the victory of Sheikh Hasina Wajed’s Awami League in the Bangladesh general elections and her government’s declared goal of a South Asian anti-terrorist task force. It has been left to Modi to revive talk of Bangladeshi “infiltrators” (never called either “migrants” or “refugees”) as part of the party’s election rhetoric.

It is not only the minority in India’s northeast, close to Bangladesh, that has been left quivering by Modi. Migrants in Mumbai and New Delhi, eking out a precarious existence in the most miserable of slums, also have reason to fear a recrudescence of attacks on them and their livelihood.

Hearts are not going to leap up with joy at any prospect of a BJP victory in the Himalayan state of Nepal as well. The BJP has not for a moment cared to conceal its disapproval of the dethronement of a hated monarch there and the advent of a democracy under Maoist leadership. The party is particularly upset at the re-born nation ceasing to be a Hindu kingdom and turning into a secular republic.

Alone among India’s political parties, the BJP described Nepal’s declaration as a “negative development.” Senior BJP leader and former External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh waxed emotional when he said, “As an Indian and a believer in ‘sanatan dharma’ [Hinduism], I feel diminished.” In the event of the BJP’s victory in the elections, the rulers in Kathmandu cannot look forward to a smooth revision of an old, unpopular and unequal Indo-Nepal treaty, as proposed some months ago.

Sri Lanka, another neighbor, cannot be sanguine about the prospect of a BJP return to power in New Delhi either. Officially, of course, the party takes the stand that it is for Colombo to deal with the terrorist problem of its own. Not many have noticed it at the national level, but the ethnic issue of the emerald island is becoming an electoral one for the party in one of the southern states.

In Tamilnadu, where the voters have a sense of ethnic solidarity with the suffering Tamil minority of Sri Lanka, the BJP is trying to include the issue in its ever-bloating religious-communal baggage. Recently, a party unit in the state staged a protest over the killings of “Tamil Hindus” in Sri Lanka and urged the Centre to take into consideration the deaths of “Hindus along with the Tamils” in that country. A local BJP leader said, “The BJP is taking it up as a Hindu problem, to which the whole nation will respond. The Central Government [in New Delhi] is not responding because they think of it as a Tamil problem alone.”

What the people of India, including common Hindus, can do in order to promote peace within India and with its neighbors is clear indeed. They can vote for this change by voting against the BJP.

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Dealing With the Indo-US Nuclear Deal

October 6, 2008

by: J. Sri Raman, t r u t h o u t | Perspective, October 3, 2008

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Activists shout slogans during a protest in New Delhi against the Indo-US nuclear deal. (Photo: Reuters)

India received a strange and darkly significant gift on a once-sacred day of its annual calendar. In the early morning of October 2, marking the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi of hallowed memory, the nation heard the news about the victory for the US-India nuclear deal in Washington.

We can leave it for historians to answer the deeper and larger question arising from this dramatic irony: how did the India of a nonviolent, anticolonial struggle end up as a nuclear-weapon state proudly entering into a pact of strategic partnership with a neocolonial superpower? We will deal here with a simpler question.

How did the deal come to be done, and with little difficulty? How did this happen despite presumed opposition to it from many quarters and predictions of its defeat at several stages? The answer may help us face and fight the after-effects better than the deal struck originally between President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Capitol Hill on July 18, 2005.

When the two leaders uttered the D word, the deal seemed an indefinite distance away. Opponents and independent observers of the move assumed the obstacles were too many to overcome easily. The chief obstacle was deemed to be democracy in both countries. The presumption has proven premature.

Bipartisan backing for the deal was considered extremely unlikely. The hurdle of political opposition in the USA did not even stop the first stage of the process – the Henry J. Hyde US-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act of December 2006, passed as enabling legislation for a bilateral agreement. Such an accord, the 123 Agreement as it is called, was signed in July 2007, just about two years after the Bush-Singh brainwave, despite the many differences that media depicted as almost unbridgeable.

Bipartisan support, of a hidden kind, helped Singh at home too. The main opposition, Bharatiya Janata Party, which in its term of power had set India on the path of strategic partnership with the US, had no basic objection to the Bush-Singh advance upon the idea. The objective took precedence over all else for the main political players in both countries. Little wonder, the Singh government won a trust vote in Parliament on July 22, 2008, on the deal without any difficulty that the numbers seemed to denote initially.

The next stage where the deal was expected to be stalled also proved smooth. On August 1, 2008. the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) approved the deal. India’s earlier votes against Iran in the IAEA were not the only reason, with more Iran-friendly states also helping to facilitate the deal. It was expected to meet its nemesis at the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). On September 8, 2008, however, the Bush administration succeeded in bullying and cajoling the NSG into a consensus in the deal’s favor.

The peace movement in India and the world campaigned against the deal all through, with indisputable persistence and determination. If the campaign still failed, the main cause should not be far to seek. It fought the deal, above all, as a dire threat to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and sought to undo the deal through an appeal to pro-NPT states. Founded on a false hope, perhaps, the campaign was bound to fail.

The illusions entertained about the NPT never really helped the cause of nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament in India or elsewhere. The discriminatory and hypocritical treaty, which allows five nuclear powers to preserve formidable arsenals and prescribes nuclear abstinence for the rest of the world, does not deserve any credit for any decrease in the global stock of these weapons due to other factors. The much-hyped Article VI of the treaty – a polite plea to the P5 to proceed towards nuclear disarmament “in good faith” – does not detract from the global terror posed by the self-appointed guardians of non-proliferation.

Not only in the US of Bush, but also its allies swearing uncompromising commitment to the non-proliferation cause have lent powerful support to the pact for the sake of larger strategic and corporate interests.

Prominent sections of the peace movement have proceeded on the assumption that the NPT represents the strongest weapon in its hands. Experience, however, makes it eminently clear that the treaty, in fact, places the strongest weapon in the hands of nuclear hawks in nations like India. They have only to turn to their people and tell them of patent discrimination in the NPT’s provisions to peddle their nuclear-weapons programs.

Sections of the peace movement in India and elsewhere have also played into the hands of these hawks by stressing the issue of sovereignty while talking of the NPT and the deal. The absurd argument that national sovereignty can be asserted by producing nuclear weapons cannot defeat either devotees of the treaty or advocates of the deal. It is egregiously erroneous to see the deal as damaging to the NPT or “the current world non-proliferation regime” as it is incorrectly described. The deal, on the contrary, must be viewed as one of the results of the faith placed in a fundamentally flawed and false treaty.

There is increasing recognition in the world peace movement of the need to replace the NPT with a UN convention to ban nuclear weapons. The movement, however, must beware of attempts by nuclear hawks in India and similar other states to extend hypocritical support to the effort. The government of India, for example, has already named former National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra, intimately associated with the initiation of the “strategic partnership” as its representative in an international commission for nuclear disarmament set up by Australia and Japan!

The deal could have been stalled only through democracy. Only the people of India and the US could have done so by declining a mandate for nuclear militarism. Only democracy of this kind can combat the consequences of the deal, too.

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A freelance journalist and a peace activist in India, J. Sri Raman is the author of “Flashpoint” (Common Courage Press, USA). He is a regular contributor to Truthout.

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Danger in South Asia

September 13, 2008

Conn Hallinan | Foreign Policy In Focus, September 10, 2008

If most Americans think Iran and Georgia are the two most volatile flashpoints in the world, one can hardly blame them. The possibility that the Bush administration might strike at Tehran’s nuclear facilities has been hinted about for the past two years, and the White House’s pronouncements on Russia seem like Cold War déjà vu.

But accelerating tensions between India and Pakistan, coupled with Washington’s increasing focus on Afghanistan, might just make South Asia the most dangerous place in the world right now, a region where entirely too many people are thinking the unthinkable.

Pakistan in the Middle

At the heart of this crisis is a beleaguered Pakistan, wracked internally by economic crisis and deep political divisions. Islamabad is simultaneously fearful of New Dehli’s burgeoning military power and pressured by Washington’s growing alarm over the deteriorating situation in Kabul.

When the Indian government accused Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) of being behind the recent bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul, it revealed what journalist J. Sri Raman calls a “secret war” between the two nations’ intelligence agencies. The Indians charge the ISI with being behind a string of bombings in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, and Jaipur, while the Pakistanis accuse India’s intelligence agency, the Research and Intelligence Wing (RAW), of encouraging a separatist movement in Baluchistan and undermining Pakistan’s influence in Afghanistan.

The two countries have fought three wars since the 1947 partition, and came perilously close to going nuclear during the Kargil incident in 1999. In the latter flare-up, separatist guerrillas backed by the Pakistani Army attacked Indian troops in Kashmir, leading to a bitter 11-week war.

Elements in both countries have long considered “the unthinkable” — nuclear war — quite thinkable. When Pakistan-sponsored Kashmiri separatists attacked the Indian parliament in December 2001, it set off a round of Armageddon saber-rattling.

Pakistan’s General Mirza Aslam Beg, former Pakistani army chief, said that Pakistan “can make a first strike, and a second strike, or even a third.”

The talk on the Indian side was no less hair-raising. George Fernandes, India’s defense minister at the time, said that “India can survive a nuclear attack, but Pakistan cannot.”
A U.S. intelligence analysis of a war between India and Pakistan found it would kill up to 12 million people immediately and injure seven million more.

Deal, No Deal

The Bush administration has ratcheted up the tension with its proposed nuclear deal with India. Under the so-called 1-2-3 Agreement, the United States would supply India with nuclear fuel for its civilian program, although India refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The deal would allow India to divert its own meager domestic uranium supplies to its nuclear weapons industry. Although civilian factories in this industry will be open to inspections, the ones that India deems “military” would remain off-limits.

In a July letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency and the 45-member Nuclear Suppliers Group, Pakistan warned that the 1-2-3 Agreement “threatens to increase the chances of a nuclear arms race in the subcontinent.” It would also likely unravel the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

India has a “no first-use” policy. But Pakistan refuses to sign such a pledge, in large part due to the superiority of the Indian military, a superiority that grows day by day. India will import over $30 billion in arms over the next five years, including modern fighter planes, helicopters, tanks, and warships. The Indian air force is currently the world’s fourth largest.

Pakistan simply can’t match those figures. Its economy is smaller, and it has been hard hit by rising fuel and food prices.

Afghan Challenge

Pakistan’s newly elected and deeply divided government is also confronting intense U.S. pressure to halt the cross-border movement of Taliban fighters into Afghanistan.

“The situation on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border presents a clear and present danger to Afghanistan, Pakistan, the West in general, and the United States in particular,” U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Director Michael Hayden told Congress in March.

But Islamabad has been increasingly unwilling to play spear-carrier for the Bush administration’s “war on terror.” Former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif told the Guardian that it is “unacceptable that while giving peace to the world we make our own country into a killing field.”

The United States has sent dozens of armed robots across the Pakistan border to attack Taliban leaders, many times killing civilians in the process. According to Pakistani officials, U.S. helicopter-borne commandos crossed the border on September 3 and killed up to 20 people.
The current Pakistani government was elected on a platform of making peace with the Taliban, and, in any case, attempts by the Pakistani army to occupy the frontier have failed disastrously. That is hardly surprising. As British General Andrew Skeen noted during the colonial period, “When planning a military expedition into Pashtun tribal areas, the first thing you must plan is your retreat.”

Even Washington’s allies recognize that the increasingly strident calls by Washington and the Afghan government to close off infiltration from Pakistan are impossible. “You cannot seal borders,” says British Defense Minister Des Browne. “We could not seal 26 miles of border between the north and south of Ireland with 40,000 troops.” The border between Pakistan and Afghanistan is over 1,000 miles, much of it consisting of formidable mountains.

While the White House and NATO are pushing for a military solution in Afghanistan, a recent study by the RAND Corporation, a think tank associated with the U.S. Navy, found “There is no battlefield solution to terrorism. Military force usually has the opposite effect from what is intended.”

Some in Pakistan’s current government seem to have reached the same conclusion. “We have to talk to the Taliban,” says Asif Ahmed, a member of parliament from the secular Pakistan People’s Party, the largest vote getter in the last election. “There is no peace in Pakistan or Afghanistan without it.”

Many Pakistanis worry that war in the tribal areas could ignite a movement among Pashtuns on both sides of the border for an independent “Pashtunistan.” Pashtuns make up 15%-20% of Pakistan’s 165 million people.

Islamabad also worries about increasing Indian influence among Afghanistan’s non-Pashtun groups, and the possibility that Pakistan could lose its “strategic depth” in the region, a place to fall back to if they are overwhelmed by an Indian conventional attack.

Kashmir Flashpoint

The United States has long tried to rope India into its efforts to offset growing Chinese power in Asia. Washington has stepped up arms sales to New Delhi, increased joint military training, and is willing to help India increase its stockpile of nuclear weapons. But an India powerful enough to help offset China looks very threatening from Islamabad’s point of view.

The most immediate flashpoint is Kashmir, where Indian troops have killed more than two dozen people and injured hundreds. A miscalculation by either side could be disastrous. The flight time for nuclear-armed missiles between the two countries is from three to five minutes.

Every few years the U.S. military conducts “war games” that play out a war between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. Every game ends the same: nuclear war. “It is a scary scenario,” Col. Mike Pasquarett, who runs the games at the U.S. War College, told the Wall Street Journal.

Rather than escalating another war, arming India, and pressuring Pakistan, the United States should be pushing for the de-nuclearization of South Asia, peace talks with the Taliban, and a stand-down in Afghanistan.

Conn Hallinan is a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist.

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