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US clears sale of latest Patriot anti-missile system to India

Shishir Gupta

NEW DELHI, JUNE 14 Signalling that it’s ready for intensifying defence ties with New Delhi, Washington has cleared the sale of the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) anti-missile defence system to India on the eve of Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee’s visit to the US this month.
Government sources said that the possible sale offer has been conveyed through diplomatic channels to the highest levels including the Defence Ministry.
Though New Delhi has just been informed of the offer, Washington has given a green signal to the PAC-3 manufacturers, Lockheed Martin, to give a technical presentation to India on the state-of-the-art anti-missile defence system. The PAC-3 system is a big step beyond Washington’s earlier offer for sale of PAC-2.

US offers India F-16 co-production WASHINGTON: The US has offered to sell to India F-16 fighter aircraft and its advanced versions besides entering into a co-production agreement for the warplanes, US Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca said here on Tuesday. The offer of co-production ‘‘is a big step’’ and shows that USA’s relations with India are becoming ‘‘ever closer’’, Rocca told the house international relations subcommittee for Asia and the Pacific.­ PTI

This February, a US team, headed by Edward Ross from the Defence Security Cooperation Agency, had briefed South Block on technical details of PAC-2.
Unlike previous Patriots, which operate by getting close to targets and blasting them out of the sky, PAC-3 interceptors have no explosives, relying instead on kinetic energy (hit to kill concept) to eliminate short and medium-range missiles carrying nuclear, biological or chemical warheads.
A PAC-3 system carries smaller but four times more missiles than PAC-2 (16 vs 4) and has a longer range (150 km vs 70 km). Until last year, 175 PAC-3 systems were inducted into the US Army. Sources said the PAC-3 offer, along with possible sale of F-16 and F-18 fighters to India, is going to be discussed during Mukherjee’s trip to the US beginning June 27. Accompanied by Defence Secretary Ajai Vikram Singh, he will meet US Vice President Dick Cheney and visit the National Aerospace Command Centre at Colorado Springs.

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India: Untoo, the police and the press

Mukul Dube

A report in the Pioneer of 26 February 2005 begins, "Delhi Police have arrested a former Kashmiri militant and a Pakistani agent, Mohammed Ahsun Untoo, from Church Road in Cantonment Area on charges of spying." Note that the staff reporter describes Untoo thus, implicitly accepting the claims of the police as fact.
Here is how subsequent paragraphs of the report begin: "Police have recovered..."; "Deputy Commissioner of Police (south-west district) Dependra Pathak said..."; "Sources said..."; "The special staff got a tip-off...". Clearly an energetic and mobile reporter.
The report says that Untoo was paid Rs 6 lakh by the Pakistan High Commission for handing over "defence secrets". One of the documents "recovered" was a schedule of patrolling drawn up in the late 1950s, which just happens to be available to anyone for the asking. Untoo was charged under two sections of the Official Secrets Act. He was arrested on 12 February, and "on the basis of information received from him", his "associate" Gulam Nabi Nagar was arrested in Srinagar on 17 February. [All spelling errors in the published report have been reproduced faithfully.]
The Asian Age of the same date calls these inDIViduals Mohammed Ahsun Untoo and Gulam Nabi Najar. Untoo is described as "the former launching commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist group" and the other man is "his militant operator", the place of his arrest having changed to Baramulla. The list of "recovered" documents is much the same, but mobile phones "operating from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir", "fake identity cards" and "fake curfew passes" make their appearance.
The report in the Hindu of the same date tries to play half-safe but falls on its face. It describes Untoo as "a self-proclaimed human rights activist" but says that he was arrested for "allegedly passing on sensitive information...." A little later we have, "Untoo, a former Hizb-ul-Mujahideen militant, had joined the human rights DIVision of the APHC in 1994." It is not clear whether this DIVision of the APHC consists only of self-proclaimed human rights activists or if Untoo is the lone one who sneaked in.
This report also contains this fascinating information: "[Untoo] had been arrested ... for being in possession of AK-57 assault rifles. But, he was later acquitted." I call it fascinating because it is the mother of all Rubik's Cubes. What was Untoo doing with rifles (note the plural)? Was he a gun-smith licensed to stock, sell and repair unlicensed fire-arms? Had the security forces set up a museum of captured weapons and employed Untoo as its curator? We are not told of the charge or charges of which he was acquitted. Why, above all, did the staff reporter of the newspaper put in this singularly meaningless morsel? I can think of no reason other than the opportunity it gave to speak of an arrest and of weapons. Untoo's acquittal was an unfortunate but necessary footnote.
Only one report published on that date, that which appeared in the Times of India, is almost entirely consistent in speaking of statements and claims made by the police. That is, it does not apply the stamp of truth to that which it does not know to be the truth. The first three reports give the date of Untoo's arrest as 12 February, all speak of Delhi's south-west police district, the first speaks of the cantonment area and the second speaks of Srinagesh Garden, which is in the cantonment.
These reports were published in English newspapers. Of the three reports I have seen which appeared in Hindi newspapers, I shall speak only of the remarkable piece of work which the Dainik Bhaskar had put out some days earlier, on 12 February 2005. [The translation is mine.]
"The Crime Branch Joint Commissioner, Ranjit Narain, said that solid clues about the attackers had been found, and they would soon be arrested. He said their links extended to Jammu and Kashmir." We should pay attention to three things here. The first is that "attackers" (plural) were spoken of. The second is that, as this very report said, "Even today, the police could not record Geelani's statement. They spent the whole day wandering about the hospital."
When the police were finally allowed to meet Geelani - they had been held back not by Geelani himself or by cruel fate, as they and the newspapers constantly suggested, but by the doctors treating him - he spoke unambiguously of a lone attacker. How could the Joint Commissioner have said what he did? That is the third thing to which we should pay attention: the dates on which things happened or were said to have happened. We shall now look at claims that Untoo had already been in the custody of the police - but had not been formally arrested - for some days when Shri Ranjit Narain spoke to the Dainik Bhaskar.
The Statesman of 17 May 2005 reported that S.A.R. Geelani's lawyer Nandita Haksar told members of the press that Untoo had in fact been illegally picked up by the Special Cell of the Delhi Police from the Priya Guest House in Paharganj on 9 February. She said he was being tortured so that he would confess falsely to having attempted to murder Geelani.
The Asian Age of the same date says that Untoo was "allegedly beaten, tortured and sodomised in police custody." It goes on, "Untoo's lawyer N.D. Pancholi has filed an application on his behalf seeking protection of his life and enquiry into the torture by the police." Nandita Haksar is reported to have announced that a letter from Untoo, in which he had described the treatment meted out to him by the police, had reached the All-India Defence Committee for Syed Abdul Rehman Geelani. Sampat Prakash, state president of the All Jammu and Kashmir Trade Union Centre, is reported to have said, "Untoo is a well known human rights activist and is the chairman of the Human Rights Forum in J&K." It is not known if he said that that Forum was a bogus organisation which issued fake identity cards to non-existent members.
The Hindu of the same date reported that "social activists from various organisations ... demanded that Mohammad Ahsan Untoo ... be immediately released." His lawyer, N.D. Pancholi, was reported to have said at a press conference, "He has told us that he was picked up by the police on February 9. But the FIR against him has only been lodged on February 12. Why this gap? And he was tortured and sodomised." The report says also that Untoo was "compelled to sign on blank pieces of paper."
The Indian Express of 16 May had given Daryaganj, not Paharganj, as the location of the Priya Guest House. It had also said that Untoo's letter had been smuggled out. It had reported that the police had described Haksar's claim as false, given that the FIR in the case had been registered at the Delhi Cantonment police station. It had not, however, reported Haksar or Pancholi as having said that the FIR had been filed in Visakhapatnam. They had said that Untoo had been in illegal detention for three days. Assuming that the FIR was filed three days late, what was to prevent its being filed several miles away from the place where he had been picked up? If space can be changed, so can time.
The police version may be true, of course: after all, there is an official document to show that it is true. Anyone who claims that it contains lies must prove that. If such a person presents an alternative document, the truth of that document - not an official one - must be established. The advantage always lies with those who have the majesty of the Indian State behind them.
12 February, which is the day on which the police claim to have arrested Untoo, was a Saturday. He was therefore produced before the duty magistrate the next day, a Sunday. Apparently this procedure has become routine in such cases. The accused, being surrounded by policemen who may well have been physically unpleasant to him or her, is usually too frightened to say anything to the magistrate, who therefore records only what the police say. It is part of the job of a magistrate to ask after the condition and welfare of the person being produced: but it appears that in this instance, the duty magistrate did not do this. Untoo could not say to the representative of Justice what appears in the next paragraph.
The application mentioned in the Asian Age of 17 May (see above) was either not filed or else not heard. It contains these complaints: that Untoo was stripped and beaten; that a scavenger was made to sodomise him; that alcohol was forced down Untoo's throat and he was compelled to sign blank pieces of paper; that the magistrate before whom Untoo was produced on 13 February "did not give an opportunity to [him] to complain about the torture"; that the police denied him access to a lawyer as well as medical assistance; and that there had been reports in newspapers which said that Untoo had been arrested in connection with the attempt on S.A.R. Geelani's life.
Despite the efforts of the police, though, Untoo did not "confess" to having made an attempt on Geelani's life. Possibly because setting him free could have created all manner of problems, the Delhi Police put together an assortment of papers - unless it keeps such things ready for such situations - and booked him under the Official Secrets Act.
Untoo's lawyer, N.D. Pancholi, had spoken to the press. This is evident from the fact that at least one newspaper knew about and mentioned the "Application for protection of life ..." just described. Geelani's lawyer, Nandita Haksar, had spoken to the press. Sampat Prakash had spoken to the press. Why, then, were the complaints listed above buried by all but a few newspapers? Why is it that no one from the press appears to have attempted to get more information than was given out to all who attended the briefings? Did any newspaper ask its people in Kashmir to make enquiries about anything connected with this case?
Was Untoo really "masquerading" as a human rights activist? Were identity cards really "recovered" from him, and were they really "fake"? What of the "large number of secret military documents, maps", etc., also "recovered"? Was Untoo carrying them on microfilm or on compact disks? In half a dozen suitcases on the back of a camel secretly brought in from across the border, perhaps?
If indeed the police did any of the things which are listed in N.D. Pancholi's application, it is a serious matter in a country which calls itself a democracy. If indeed the magistrate before whom Untoo was produced failed to do his or her duty, that is a considerably more serious matter, since it reflects on our judiciary, to which was given both an independent place and great power in 1947 and in 1950.
I do not know if the press is unaware of these matters. I do not know if the press considers these matters inconsequential. I do know, though, that in either eventuality, the press must be called, at the very least, irresponsible. It could be given a good many worse names. So far as I can see, it took the easy route: don't think, just swallow and regurgitate. Practise your vaunted "investigative journalism" only where unimportant, expendable people are not involved. Go where the gold is.
Many have been saying, and for long - the press statement released on 16 May by Sampat Prakash was hardly the first example - that it has become the policy of the Indian State to "catch and frame" or "catch and kill" Kashmiris. It is legitimate to ask if there has been no change in the attitudes and biases - or the policy - of the Indian State despite the change of government at the Centre a year ago.
The press cannot claim that it is not involved here. Does it not see Kashmiris as Indians and, for that reason, people to be respected and cared for by the Indian State? Is it the same press which, three years ago, roundly castigated Modi, Gujarat and the Sangh Parivar for having committed crimes against humanity in their own country? Is it now so obsessed with the stock market, fashion, motor cars and the shenanigans of political leaders who have no discernible ideology, that it has decided that such ideals as truth and justice are archaic and no longer of any consequence?

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US offers India F-16 fighter jet deal

Washington, 14 June: The US has offered to sell to India F-16 fighter aircraft and its advanced versions as also entering into a co-production agreement for the warplanes, US Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca said on Tuesday [14 June]. The offer of co-production "is a big step", and shows that US relations with India are becoming "ever closer", Rocca told the house International Relations Subcommittee for Asia and the Pacific.
She said the US reserves the co-production agreement for our close allies. Terming 2005 as "a watershed year in US-India relations," she said "we are accelerating the transformation of our relationship with India, with a number of new initiatives. We are engaging in a new strategic dialogue on global issues, and on defence and expanded advanced technology cooperation."
"Since Secretary (of State Condoleezza) Rice's trip to New Delhi in March, a series of visits by senior officials from both countries, including Minister of External Affairs Natwar Singh, have underscored the importance of our developing stronger ties. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will be coming to the United States in July and President George W Bush has said he hopes to visit India soon," Rocca told the sub-committee.
"India and the US have begun a high-level dialogue on energy security, to include nuclear safety, and a working group to strengthen space cooperation. Our defence relationship is expanding and we are revitalizing our economic dialogue. The US relationship with India and our commitment to develop even deeper political, economic, commercial and security ties have never been stronger," she said.

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Advani's political doosra gets called

L.K. Advani's troubles are not all about Jinnah. Nor are they over with his return as president of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

L.K. ADVANI is back. But on terms approved by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The "remarks-were-taken-out-of-context" campaign is in full swing. And, ahem, Jinnah led a communal movement that resulted in Pakistan. And whatever may have been his vision, Pakistan is now anti-secular. So if this much was agreed on, what was all the fuss about?
One favoured theory is that some deep and well-thought-out strategy underlay Mr. Advani's statements on Jinnah in Pakistan. His remarks were in pursuit of a subtle patriotic plan the rest of us fail to perceive.
Note that the BJP now trumpets a temple angle (How clever of him to have made his remarks while he took part in a function to restore old Hindu temples in Muslim Pakistan.) Some columnists have focussed on the same point but differently. Here, they contend, was the scourge of Babri Masjid reviving temples in Pakistan. It was a big push for the peace process. More hidden aspects of this grand design have begun to surface. The BJP now calls Mr. Advani's Pakistan trip a success. He raised the far more important issue of terrorism. Jinnah can rest in pieces.
This notion of Mr. Advani having pushed a shrewd strategy conflicts a wee bit with reports of the leader's deeply wounded feelings. A result of his party's failure to stand by him. But perhaps that is part of the plan, too. Obviously the strategy has to be a complex one. Asking the Sangh Parivar to re-assess Jinnah is urging Tyrannosaurus Rex to go vegan. Both roads lead to the same end result. Extinction. However, an evolutionary compromise seems to have been arrived at.
Perhaps the most candid - and profound - assessment of what happened comes from BJP leader Kalraj Mishra. Advaniji, he points out innocently, was speaking to a Pakistani audience after all. For Mr. Mishra, that explains everything. He was selling in another market. Different audiences, different propaganda.
The truth is that Mr. Advani and his old colleague, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, have done this for decades. Both often say the opposite of what they did just days earlier. Editorial writers have often termed this `statesmanship.' The less charitable call it doublespeak. (Jyoti Basu, for instance, says Mr. Advani reminds him of Jinnah. The deeds of both, he feels, suggest they were men who lacked firm convictions. He must feels vindicated by Mr. Advani's latest volte face. In the late 1980s, Mr. Basu pleaded in vain with today's peacemaker to spare the country the savagery of the Ayodhya stir.)

Old story

For the street, Mr. Advani presented the rath yatra, its blood, guts and gore. Put him before another class of audience and December 6, 1992, becomes "the saddest day of my life." He's done it all before. Mr. Vajpayee shed copious tears on that date. But calmly expressed very different sentiments when speaking to his storm troopers at other times.
Both have been bowling political doosras for years. The doosra is the `second' or `other' delivery. It looks like a regular off-break. But just when you think it's spinning towards the bat, it goes the other way, like a leg-break. Just when you think Mr. Advani is turning one way, he spins the other. And here he is doing it once again. No wonder the party's second line leadership consists of so many spin doctors. They've spent years at the nets, training at the feet of the master.
The wrecked yatra to Pakistan was very important. But Mr. Advani's troubles are not all about Jinnah. Nor are they over with his return as BJP president. The present farce takes away in some sense from the internal - non-Jinnah - turmoil of the BJP and the Sangh Parivar. The resignation show may be over. The larger drama isn't. Take the sacking of Venkaiah Naidu. Or the Uma Bharati soap opera (episode 3). Or the ritual humiliation of Mr. Vajpayee (denounced by the RSS as one of the "weakest" leaders of the country).
The party's growing crisis has been on display for a while. More frustrating, no external `conspiracies' can be found to explain it. The rout of the BJP in the recent by-elections adds another dimension to this. In by-polls to 16 Assembly and two Lok Sabha seats across the country, it won just one. In only two did its vote cross 25 per cent. In seven Assembly and two Lok Sabha seats, it fell below a pathetic five per cent.
In Goa, it lost four of the five seats it contested. Haryana was a humiliating rout for the BJP. Uttar Pradesh an embarrassment. In Kerala, it sat out the race. The BJP had made the arrest of the Shankaracharya of Kanchi a national issue. Yet, it did not dare to contest the Kancheepuram seat in Tamil Nadu. The Hindu Mahasabha candidate its cadres supported lost his deposit.
If the United Progressive Alliance gets its act together in Bihar, it will be a rough ride for the National Democratic Alliance in that State. In West Bengal and Kerala next year, the BJP isn't in the picture. In Tamil Nadu, where it has broken with its old ally the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, it faces total eclipse.
Meanwhile, in Madhya Pradesh where it won the last Assembly polls massively, it has been plagued by factional feuds. In Gujarat, rival groups challenge Narendra Modi openly. Mr. Modi himself has been at the centre of one embarrassing controversy or another. The UPA's first year has been a poor one. Yet, with its silly boycott of parliament, the BJP has been unable to pin its rival on the back foot. Its whiz kids are out of fizz and its spin doctors don't like their own medicine. Out of power, its leaders find their followers no longer give them the deference they got while in office. Another time, another era, Mr. Advani's "image makeover" might have gone unchallenged. This was not that time.

Crucial mistake

One crucial mistake was playing on Pakistani soil. A bad pitch. The fans at home didn't like it. And Nagpur, home of the political doosra, called his action. He has to now work with the bio-mechanic experts of the RSS to correct his action. When in power, Mr. Advani might have even survived making his Jinnah remarks in India. The larger public is far more tolerant than the saffron mob. And there would have been the captive columnists in a largely sycophantic press to add spin to his words. This time, even the `second-rung' of BJP leaders, never too busy to show up at the nearest TV studio to sneer at their rivals, have been cameraphobic and soundbite shy. Another error was in not understanding how much the political situation has changed. How demoralised his party is. How little it needed to spark off more internal political bloodletting. A third problem was in thinking that you can just switch off all the hatred you have nurtured as the basis of your politics. That might work to some degree, and for a while, when you're in power. Not so easy when you're out.
The doosra is too deeply embedded in the parivar's politics to end it. Remember the dramatic turnaround on swadeshi, to take just one instance. The complete reversal of stand on neo-liberal policies. The hypocrisy on the charge sheeted ministers' issue is a more recent example. Still more striking is the multiple spin on Gujarat. Mr. Vajpayee once said it would have been better if Mr. Modi had stepped down. Then followed a staunch defence of Mr. Modi - by Mr. Vajpayee, amongst others. Next, Mr. Advani claimed Gujarat was just about the best-run Atate in the country. Now Pramod Mahajan `regrets' what happened in that State. It all defied the laws of political gravity and had to hit the ground at some point.

Standard stuff

This is standard stuff with the Sangh Parivar and its political arm. Given the right audience, it even tries to appropriate Gandhi. Indeed, its various arms are set up on that principle. Different consumers, different salesmen. The BJP is the political arm of the RSS. But it can't capture all markets. So you have the VHP, which is the BJP on steroids. And the Bajrang Dal, which is the VHP on more dangerous banned substances.
Even now, a battery of bowlers can be seen turning their arms over at the doosra. Mr. Togadia calls Mr. Advani a traitor. Another VHP hit man denies he said this. The BJP scolds the VHP. But remains silent on the rebukes of the RSS. Yashwant Sinha says Mr. Advani was wrong in what he said about Jinnah. The next day, he changes his run up and bowls from wide off the crease.
The RSS is more honest. All this is an internal matter of the BJP, it says. And since the BJP is an internal matter of the RSS, we'll do what we need to about it. And they have. The dons of the doosra have spun and enforced a new resolution. It's business as usual. Until things spin out of control again.

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Partition in parivar?

THE seismic shocks delivered to the Sangh Parivar by L K Advani's pronouncements, which very nearly glorified Pakistan's founding father Mohammed Ali Jinnah, are unlikely to subside soon. Whatever happens to the Bharatiya Janata Party's fraught relationship with the RSS, and even if Advani returns as party president, it's certain that the Parivar cannot endorse his adulation for Jinnah without questioning and severely revising the RSS's core-ideology, and the 'bauddhik' or compulsory "educational" diet on which generations of Hindu nationalist activists have been brought up, including most of the BJP's top leaders.
At the centre of that ideology are hatred of Islam and demonisation of Indian Muslims as Pakistan's "Fifth Column" who partitioned the country and continue to undermine its unity. Hindutva is inseparable from Islamophobia. No wonder the BJP leadership is badly convulsed by Advani's remarks.
Its crisis management isn't made any the easier by the lack of general popular sympathy in India for Jinnah and the original idea of Pakistan. A recent opinion poll says 76 per cent of respondents don't think Jinnah was secular; 72 per cent believe he was the main cause of Partition. More important, 56 per cent think Advani betrayed his followers by praising Jinnah and only 22 per cent think he has become "moderate" as a result!
What impelled Advani to call Jinnah a "great man", a "rare individual" who creates "history", and quote his famous speech of August 11, 1947 in which he promised equal rights to all citizens irrespective of faith? Advani's remarks were not isolated observations, but part of a series of statements made during his Pakistan visit, all in the same spirit.
According to sources close to Advani, quoted in the media, they represent his frustration at the BJP's defeat in the 2004 elections. He appears to have concluded that even by repeating the Ayodhya agitation in the Hindi heartland, the BJP won't be able to return to power - so sharp are caste divisions in the Gangetic belt. To broaden its appeal, religious minorities must be "neutralised" and "secularists" and "liberals" won over.
Advani chose his Jinnah comments as "shock therapy" for the party. He wanted to confront the RSS and VHP who have of late repeatedly targeted him for attack. The choice of such a blunt instrument appears maladroit, even tactless, given the negative public perception of the events that led to Partition. Even within the BJP, Advani has succeeded in dividing, not uniting, senior leaders.
Three issues arise. Was Jinnah really secular? If so, what were his essential differences with Gandhi and Nehru? And is the two-nation theory at all compatible with secularism?
Jinnah was a man of many parts-a suave, modern, highly Westernised person (who proudly owned some 200 Saville Row suits), a brilliant lawyer and Constitutionalist, but someone who was never pious or interested in religious instruction. Yet, his politics was shaped by issues of minority representation, and eventually, the demand for a separate state for India's Muslims.
Jinnah's life went through many phases. In the early stages, he was secretary to Gokhale, the great independence leader and liberal, and admired Dadabhoy Nowroji and Pherozeshah Mehta. In the 1920s, when the young Raja of Mahmudabad described himself as a "Muslim first," Jinnah corrected him: "My boy, no, you are an Indian first and then a Muslim." But by the late 1930s, he had despaired of working jointly with the Congress. A frustrated Jinnah then emerged as the "sole spokesman" of the Muslims.
Jinnah probably genuinely believed in some ways in the ideal of a state that's secular insofar as it doesn't discriminate against citizens on grounds of faith. But his practice, his basic project, his life's greatest mission, was based on the rejection of secularism and promoting Muslim-separatist politics, which culminated in Pakistan. Jinnah worked under enormous compulsions of historical forces, including a relatively conservative Muslim League, British policy on separate electorates and representation, and the intervention of World War-II. He ended up with a moth-eaten, denominational Islamic state - perhaps against his own grain.
Advani reduces a complex political personality and movement to a few statements and thus trivialises secularism itself. This also minimises the importance of the fundamentally inclusive, humane and liberal secularism of Gandhi and Nehru, who strove right till the end to give the freedom movement a secular-pluralist content, which repelled Jinnah.
Once you say Jinnah and Gandhi were more or less equally secular, you abolish critical distinctions between secularism and communalism. You can then shrink a giant like Nehru into a political pygmy like Deen Dayal Upadhyay. That can only serve to legitimise the sangh's venomous ideology.
Advani says he wants "a debate" on the issue of Jinnah's "secular" strivings and the two-nation theory. This is welcome. But if he's honest, Advani will discover that the originators of the theory were not Jinnah or Iqbal. Rather, they were Bhai Permanand, Lala Lajpat Rai and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. Parmanand advocated a division of India, with the "territory beyond Sindh" united with Afghanistan and North-West Frontier Province into "a great Musulman Kingdom. The Hindus of the region should come away ...''
Rai also posited a "Hindu nation" separate from the Muslim-dominated areas of Punjab and the NWFP. Savarkar elevated this to a proper theory in 1923 by distinguishing between two nations, one based on "indigenous" religions, and the other on "foreign" ones.
Yet, these figures, and their acolytes like Golwalkar, are the greatest icons of Hindutva or "cultural nationalism". Their views on nationhood cannot be separated from the RSS-BJP's core-politics. Is the BJP, leave alone the VHP or RSS, prepared to jettison such views? Is Advani, even Vajpayee, prepared to make such a conceptual break? Are they prepared for a virtual revolt against their own progenitor, the Sangh? The answer is, "unlikely".
Praful Bidwai is an eminent Indian journalist and commentator

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The Great Metamorphosis - 'Iron Man' As 'Straw Man'

"Just as a Vaishya ( prostitute) changes her clothes and appearance, a politician changes his stand"

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L K Advani's Pakistan Yatra - Historical Revisionism

Saying sorry is often an act of great courage. It is a recorded fact, impossible to efface, that shortly after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Lal Krishna Advani described the day as the 'saddest' of his life. Yet to be sad does not mean necessarily being sorry. Sadness suggests victimhood; to be sorry implies the admission of responsibility in what has transpired and a genuine sense of contrition at its consequences.
On his recent visit to Pakistan, Advani revisited the pathos and anguish he had felt the day the Babri Masjid fell. This still did not quite amount to an apology, though it was construed as such by outraged elements within the larger Hindutva fraternity. Leading the charge were the extreme elements: Ashok Singhal, president of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, denouncing his "betrayal" of the cause of the Hindus, and debunking his fervent wish to forge peace with a country that had been conducting a sustained war of attrition against India.

Overture to Middle Ground

Was it merely the location that Advani had chosen that called forth Singhal's ire? Does it make a substantive difference that Advani chose in 1992 to express his sorrow through the columns of an Indian newspaper and in 2005, to do likewise at a public forum in Pakistan's capital city? The case is rather difficult to sift through, since Advani in 1992 had followed his expression of regret - which was quite transparently an overture towards the middle ground in Indian politics - with an equally clear gesture of appeasement towards his core constituency in the Hindutva fringe.
This subtle manoeuvre came within a month of the Babri Masjid demolition, in the form of a rather bizarre analogy that only the political genius of an Advani could have devised. Yes, he said, the Ayodhya event had indeed been a ghastly act that he deeply regretted. But his social conscience was obviously far ahead of its milieu, since the larger public shared little of this anguish. Indeed, suggested Advani, the reaction at the popular level resembled the public attitude towards the blinding of under-trial prisoners, by custodians of the law at Bhagalpur in Bihar in 1980. There was a widespread sense of horror at the heinousness of the crime, but little sympathy for the victims.¹ The victims, indeed, had forfeited all rights to public sympathy by their wilful criminality and their disregard for the law. When due processes of law proved inadequate in calling them to account, they were visited with a horrible retribution that left them maimed for life. The dark deed at Ayodhya on December 6, 1992, was analogously, a cathartic act of vengeance against a political order that had for too long denied the people of India their rightful national patrimony.
It is entirely likely that by not appending the Bhagalpur revelation to his remarks in Pakistan, Advani tilted too strongly against his ideological fraternity, provoking Singhal's fury. But there is still some ambivalence about why he chose to do so. Was it a genuine change of heart, a genuine process of learning that has led to the analogy being discarded as bogus? Or is the more mundane truth merely that Advani is an adept at tailoring his public statements to the mood of his audience?

Irony and Symbolism

The day after his expression of regret in Islamabad, Advani partook of the inaugural ceremony of a programme to rebuild what are believed to be the oldest Hindu temples in Pakistan. Elaborate with irony and symbolism, the occasion seemed to bring forth a number of questions: what for instance, would be the practical consequence of Advani's remorse for the demolition of the Babri Masjid? Would it mean that he would cooperate in the process of holding the culprits to account? Would it mean that he would uphold the principle of lawful restitution and lend his authority to a programme to rebuild the monument?
There is no way of knowing until Advani himself comes forth with a detailed exegeses of his thought processes since he crafted the Ayodhya strategy of the BJP, couching it in the high phraseology of nationalist resurgence. This was an idiom that portrayed the many years that had been spent in pursuit of a secular idiom of governance as just so many wasted years. Because it denied the original ethos of the Indian nation and pandered quite unabashedly to the cultural exclusivity of the religious minorities, the Congress had never quite been able to achieve a true brand of secularism. In contrast to the 'pseudo-secularism' that the country had suffered for years, the BJP would enshrine the true variant, whose essential premises were resoundingly captured in the slogan: "justice for all, appeasement of none."
Given this pronounced ambivalence, it is worthwhile asking which of the two notions Advani had in mind when shortly after incurring Singhal's wrath, he visited the Mohammad Ali Jinnah mausoleum in Karachi and made out a glowing entry in the visitor's book, extolling the founder of the Pakistani state for his commitment to secularism. The following day, he returned to the theme in the course of an address to the Karachi Council on Foreign Relations. Referring to Jinnah's speech of August 11, 1947, before the Pakistan Constituent Assembly, he said: "What has been stated in this speech - namely, equality of all citizens in the eyes of the state and freedom of faith for all citizens - is what we in India call a secular or a non-theocratic state. There is no place for bigotry, hatred, intolerance and discrimination in the name of religion in such a state. And there can be no place, much less state protection, for religious extremism and terrorism in such a state."
As with much else that happened during Advani's journey of discovery in Pakistan, these words raised a political firestorm in India. Praveen Togadia, Singhal's even more disagreeable understudy in the VHP, denounced him for his "treason" in eulogising the man singularly responsible for the vivisection of the sacred topography of India. But once the lunatic fringe is taken out of the picture, Advani's remarks seemed to raise a host of deeply interesting possibilities.
A few hundred miles to the east of Karachi lies Gujarat's capital Gandhinagar, a constituency which Advani himself represents in the Indian parliament. Could in the course of his political campaigning in this city, Advani have brought himself to quote from any one of Mahatma Gandhi's many speeches and writings on religious tolerance and the neutrality of the State? If so, would anybody from his audience have been wrong in inferring that he was issuing a veiled but stern rebuke to his party's chief minister in Gujarat, Narendra Modi, who serves by most objective criteria as the single most egregious example of bigotry and intolerance being rewarded in a competitive electoral system?

Undelivered Admonition

That admonition to the delinquent chief minister of course remains undelivered. But to place the story of Advani's political conscience and its occasional stirrings in proper context, it bears recalling that during a visit to the UK in August 2002, he did come perilously close to issuing an apology for the Gujarat riots that Modi presided over. Confronted with protesters outside the Indian High Commission in London, he spoke his mind about the events that had traumatised all of India just six months before: "It is indefensible. I can't defend it. I feel sorry that this happened."²
This was more than sadness, it was an actual expression of regret and contrition. But then, the subsequent record of Advani's political activities speaks for itself: his failure as union home minister and then deputy prime minister, to institute any process of accountability for the ghastly riots, his energetic participation in the December 2002 election campaign in Gujarat, and his scarcely concealed exultation that Modi was returned to power with an enhanced majority.³

Unalterable Realities

Similar doubts surround his assertion before the Karachi gathering that India and Pakistan were "unalterable realities" of history. Strobe Talbott, the US diplomat who conducted a high-profile (but deeply secretive) set of negotiations with the BJP-led coalition government after the nuclear tests of May 1998, has spoken of an "unnerving" meeting he had with Advani in 2000, when the latter "mused aloud about the happy days when India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Myanmar would be reunited in a single South Asian 'confederation'". Coming from "India's highest ranking hard line Hindu nationalist", this seemed to Talbott, little else than a vision of Indian pre-eminence, which would have been "truly frightening to all (India's) neighbours, most of all Pakistan."⁴
Simply put, Advani has in the course of his momentous five days in Pakistan, departed too radically from his established political persona to convince those who would like to believe that he has acted in good faith. And for those who believed that he was a committed ideological ally, his utterances smack of little less than perfidy. There have been unexpected political dividends of course. Advani's is the first high-profile political resignation (June 7) occasioned by conflicting readings of history. In this sense, it limits the potentiality of history being a quarry from which prejudices can be mined for political advantage. It is likely to provoke a re-examination of the 'Good Queen Bess and Bad King John' school of historiography that has long dominated pedagogy in the subject. And to the extent that the past is not dead - indeed not even past - it could trigger a reconstruction of a common history for the people of south Asia that allows room for reconciliation in the future.

Notes
¹ The theme was reiterated while Advani was home minister, in the course of his deposition before the Liberhan Commission of Inquiry into the Babri Masjid demolition. The bare details are available at: http://www1.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-37242505,prtpage-1.cms.
² The report is available at the time of writing at: http://www.thehindu.com/2002/08/24/stories/2002082404130100.htm.
³ Anecdotally, from this writer's personal experience, it is worth recalling that Advani gently taunted journalists who had gathered at the BJP headquarters in Delhi the day the results were announced, suggesting that some of them would likely be wearing black badges in mourning that day, clearly hinting that the media had been rather partisan in its attitude. This was curious, since the media had done little other than record that the Gujarat riots were "outrageous and indefensible" - the precise characterisation that Advani had bestowed upon them from faraway London.
⁴ Strobe Talbott, Engaging India, Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb, Viking/Penguin, Delhi, 2004, p 101.

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Future defence deals to contain no-bribe clause

NEW DELHI, India, June 10 -- AMIDST CHARGES of corruption in defence deals, Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee on Thursday announced a new arms procurement policy which makes an integrity pact mandatory for purchases of over Rs 300 crore.
"The integrity pact is intended to prevent unfair trade practices. It will place obligations on both sides to ensure that unethical practices are not used (to swing defence deals)," Mukherjee said while releasing the revised Defence Procurement Procedure Manual, 2005, for capital purchases.
Another significant provision in the defence procurement policy is that of a 30 per cent offset in every deal worth over Rs 300 crore with a foreign arms supplier. This means all major foreign armament companies winnings contracts worth more than Rs 300 crores will have to invest 30 per cent of the amount in the country as direct offsets.
"The offset clause has been inserted to leverage our high purchasing power to benefit the domestic industry," Mukherjee said. The manual reflects the government's intention to make the defence procurement procedure transparent, quick and rule-based, the minister said. The budget had allocated Rs 34,375 crore for capital expenditure for defence in 2005-2006.
Last month, Mukherjee had released a Defence Procurement Manual to codify guidelines for revenue purchases aggregating over Rs 27,000 crore.
The new manual for capital purchases is intended to discourage single-vendor situations. Some mega deals concluded or negotiated by the previous NDA government involved single-vendor situations.
Among these deals on which decisions are still pending include the acquisition of Scorpene submarines from France and self-propelled artillery, for which Denel of South Africa was finalised.
Mukherjee said that depending on the stage of the acquisition process, the new policy would be applied to deals under negotiation. For the first time, the manual incorporates a sense of deadlines for acquisitions by indicating timeframes in which decisions must be made.
The manual also provides for joint services quality requirements for procurement of equipment common to all three services. A standard contract document aims at ensuring transparency and uniformity in procedure.

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Big shopper Delhi fuels arms race

New Delhi, June 9: India’s dramatic hike in defence allocations has made South Asia the region where military expenditure increased most in 2004, according to data compiled by a respected watchdog of arms transfers and conflicts.
New Delhi today signalled it was buying more. Defence minister Pranab Mukherjee released a manual that revises the policy to procure big-ticket items and said he was going to ask for supplementary grants to cover defence expenditure.
The cornerstone of the new policy ­ drafted in the wake of allegations of corruption in defence deals ­ is that it will require defence contractors entering into negotiations with India to sign an “integrity pact”, an oath that they will not employ unfair trade practices.
“South Asia, where India strongly increased its defence budget, was the region where military expenditure increased most in 2004,” the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri) has said in its just released yearbook for 2005.
Finance minister P. Chidambaram granted a hike of more than Rs 11,000 crore, taking defence allocations in 2004-2005 to Rs 77,000 crore. For the current year, the allocation is Rs 6,000 crore more. In the first quarter of the year itself, the defence minister said, he was toying with the idea of asking for a supplementary grant.
The huge military expenditure through last year and this year is accompanied at the same time with talks for peace with Pakistan and China, from whom India has threat perceptions. The confidence that such peace talks should inspire is not reflected in the military expenditure that New Delhi is incurring.
Sipri is pointing out that India’s military expenditure was contributing to an arms race in South Asia.
Major conventional weapons under delivery to Pakistan include, for instance, 150 JF-17 fighter aircraft from China, Agosta 90B submarines from France, helicopters worth $82 million from Russia and air surveillance radars worth $255 million from the US.
Multi-billion-dollar deals that India has contracted or is negotiating are 66 Advanced Jet Trainers from the UK, six Scorpene submarines from a Franco-Spanish concern, 126 multi-role combat aircraft, and an aircraft carrier from Russia.
Mukherjee said the government was still deciding if the “integrity pact” that has been prescribed in the new policy will apply to all these deals.
Even if the arms race in South Asia makes it the most militarised region in the world, in value terms military expenditure is still a fraction of the US’s. The Sipri report says world military expenditure exceeded $1 trillion in 2004 and the US alone accounted for 47 per cent of this spending. The $1-trillion-plus figure is slightly lower than the 1987-1988 cold war peak.
China’s spending had slowed in 2004 and was lower in real terms than its average spending in 1995-2003.
Central America and western Europe were the only regions where regional military expenditure reduced in 2004. Combined sales of the top 100 manufacturers in 2003 were 25 per cent higher than in 2002.

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Nepal floats global tender to buy arms

IANS Kathmandu June 7: With hopes receding of India resuming supply of arms to Nepal's new regime headed by King Gyanendra, the government has floated a global tender to procure weapons and other equipment from foreign manufacturers.
On May 19, the home ministry issued an advertisement inviting "interested and reputed foreign manufacturers or authorised distributors" to approach the government for sale of arms and equipment.
Nepal's security services comprise the army, armed police and police. The current search is for weapons and equipment for the Armed Police Force that was created recently, causing the government to double its security spending from 1.5 per cent of the GDP in 2000.
Nepal is scouting for arms, ammunition, machinery, spare parts, equipment for crowd control, communication, disaster relief and rescue operations as well as for explosives.
It intends to procure the materials for the fiscal year 2005-06. Last year, the Indian government largely equipped the Armed Police Force.
New Delhi directly gave the force an unspecified number of 7.62 self-loading rifles, bearing 70 per cent of the cost.
It also contributed indirectly by arming the Royal Nepalese Army with its indigenously manufactured INSAS rifles, bayonets and other arms in the same family, which led made the army to pass on the SLRs it was using earlier on to the Armed Police Force.
The latest advertisement points to a deepening rift between India and Nepal over military supplies. New Delhi suspended military supplies to the kingdom after King Gyanendra took over the reins of the government in February.
Though India was the first to publicly announce that it would release the non-lethal weapons supplies, nearly two months after the Indian Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh's assurance to King Gyanendra in Jakarta, Nepal has not received "a single pin" yet, defence sources said.
Now, Nepal is looking elsewhere to arm its security personnel.
The army bought night vision and communication equipment from the United States recently, with the shipments reportedly arriving last week. The new search for weapons will put an additional burden on the state exchequer since the government will also have to dole out a sizeable amount on commissions for local agents.
Defence sources said Nepal could be also looking at manufacturing of ammunition and not just an outright sale. The foreign manufacturers might also be asked to collaborate to help make the needed material in the kingdom.
Earlier, the army had the capability to manufacture some of its ammunition and uniform accessories at home. However, it says the factories closed operation during the rule of the political parties.

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‘Review’ tag stays on Nepal arms lock

New Delhi, June 6: Defence minister Pranab Mukherjee today told Nepali Congress leader Girija Prasad Koirala that arms supplies “were under constant review” after the head of the seven-party coalition against the monarchy in the Himalayan kingdom urged Delhi to suspend supplies to the Royal Nepal Army.
Mukherjee restated the Indian position that was first articulated by foreign secretary Shyam Saran after King Gyanendra dismissed the Deuba government in February. But since then, India had decided to resume supplies that were contracted for by the RNA late last year.
India’s position on resumption of fresh supplies of weapons and munitions ­ the RNA is understood to have asked for ammunition, rifles, bullet-proof gear and vehicles ­ continues to be ambivalent. Though the army and the defence ministry has, within the security establishment, argued the case for resuming supplies, the official position of the Indian government has not been articulated.
India and Nepal are signatories to an Arms Assistance Treaty under which Nepal can import arms from a third country only with Delhi’s nod. A bulk of the RNA’s arsenal is of Indian origin.
Koirala had a 45-minute meeting with the defence minister this afternoon. He is expected to meet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress chief Sonia Gandhi during his visit this week. Koirala is ostensibly here for medical treatment.
Defence ministry sources said Mukherjee told Koirala that India was worried about the situation in Nepal because of the open border it shares. He said Delhi was urging a political settlement that should be evolved with the parliamentary parties and the monarchy.

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Advani conquered many rightwing hearts in Pakistan

[Karachi June 7, 2005]
Lal Krishna Advani, President of the Bharatya Janata Party, came to Pakistan, saw a lot of people and conquered many stalwart rightwing hearts. On his arrival in India he said that he cannot forget this week that he spent in Pakistan. It was a very special experience for him. He certainly made waves here. One of his undoubted contributions can be that he tried to strengthen the peace process between India and Pakistan.
But Advani is not an ordinary Indian. He had an image of a Strongman of the Hindu Nationalists. He has been presiding over the party of what was called Hindu Nationalism. Here was of a person whose Rath Yatra in early 1990s paved the way for the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Many hold him directly responsible for it in India. Advani expressed sorrow over the Babri Masjid incident and has said that it was a very sad day for him. He not only virtually disassociated himself from the demotion of the Babri Masjid, he also had many other things to say. He not merely visited Jinnah's mausoleum but called him a secular leader who wanted Pakistan to be a secular state. Jinnah was above communalism and at one time he was the Ambassador of Hindu Muslim unity. He also said that the concept of Akhand Bharat no longer exists. He was all for Peace Process between India and Pakistan, claiming the credit for having started it.
What impact his observations in Pakistan will make in India was not wholly clear until Mr. Advani tendered his resignation from the Presidentship of BJP on his return. What he did say here was out of character from his previous image and record. But he is also a consummate politician, not given to being carried away by transient emotions. Many did wonder how will his erstwhile supporters in RSS, Shiv Sena, VHP, Bajrang Dal et al will react. Some had already criticized him and asked for his resignation from BJP. It remains to be seen how deep seated is this opposition from BJP's hardliners. But the matter deserves speculation: Why did he make such startling statements in Pakistan, occupying the position he did and the image he had.
It may bode a significant change in Indian politics. Was he trying to reorient BJP? Was he out to win back the Muslim vote in India? As a practical politician, he must know that the base of his power cannot be strengthened unless BJP wins back UP and Bihar. It so happens that Muslim votes in these provinces plus the vote of enlightened Hindu liberals can make a difference. Doubtless, the hard Hindu vote remains with the BJP. But that is no longer a majority in the socalled Hindi belt itself. New lower caste parties, mainly the middle ones, have deserted the BJP. The middle and lower castes plus the Muslims paint the Hindi belt into an entirely different political colour. Mulayam Singh and Laloo Prashad are the new politicians who have sent Congress as well as BJP packing. Was Advani manoeuvring to steal the political clothes of Mulayam Singh and Laloo Prashad?
A word here about a curious phenomenon in Pakistan. And it is not new. When Mr. Atal Behari Vajpyee, Foreign Minister in Morarji Desai government, he visited Islamabad, he too saw and conquered many rightwing hearts. After that there has been an eventful flirtation between the Islamic ideology-spewing politicians and the Hindu Nationalist leadership. At one stage, Pakistan Foreign Minister Agha Shahi did not pointedly attend a reception given by Mrs. Indira Gandhi and spent that time with Mr. Vajpayee. Mr. Advani was lionized and feted with effusive verbiage to an extent that he felt overwhelmed. This coming together of two extremes is an interesting phenomenon. Given half a chance, the establishment in Pakistan would somehow prefer a hardline Hindu regime in Delhi. This preference can be seen by that one has scratching the surface.
Coming back to Mr. Advani he has apparently disturbed a hornet's nest on the Indian rightwing. Does he wish to become another Atal Behari Vapayee who had won the confidence of Pakistani hardliners? That may help in domestic politics. Speculation is also in order over the future of the BJP. Can it move out of the shadows of RSS Parivar? Can it in fact adopt a quasi-Nehruvian Indian nationalism that gives a somewhat more definite place to Indian Muslims? For, without assuming that concept this departure from earlier ideology cannot be explained.
One thing is certain. Advani has no suicidal tendencies; he would not utter a word that would, in his opinion, not be in the long-term interest of his party. How precisely would he tackle the strong ideological prepossessions of the Sangh Parivar? It is a matter that Sangh Parivar has also to solve. Either the Parivar will have to accept another Atal Behari-like BJP President or, if it wants to stay wholly unchanged. In the latter case, it will disown Advani.
Whether or not the turmoil in BJP will actually promote the Peace Process between India and Pakistan, the Advani gamble would long be remembered. Its consequences are sure to start flowing immediately. Here in Pakistan, most of those who lionized Advani would carefully watch how things develop in India. There is no doubt that most Muslim Leaguers and the other right wingers did go out of their way to shower affection and respect on Advani. On the whole, the calculation of the establishment probably has been that it will impact favourably on the Peace Process. One hopes it is right.

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U.S. to give Pakistan 150 mln dollars arms aid

The US is to give Pakistan 150 million dollars as arms aid under the foreign military financing programme.
This aid is believed to come out of the 82 billion dollars supplemental aid approved by the U.S. House of Representatives. Although the House voted 368-58 for and against it, the Senate is expected to adopt the act next week.
Also with the approval of the 82 billion dollars, the amount of money spent for providing aid in the fight against terrorism is expected to exceed 300 billion dollars.
The US has also decided to provide an aid of 100 million dollars to Jordan under the programme, the Daily Times reported.
The bill is also expected to provide funding for the military, reconstruction and international food aid.
The report states that the bulk of the money, as much as 75.9 billion dollar is carved out for US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, with 4.2 billion dollars for foreign aid and other international relations programmes worldwide.
The Bush administrations plan for providing aid to Pakistan for helping Islamabad in the global fight against terrorism has come in for lot of debate in the U.S. itself, with many saying that Washington is arming Islamabad with arsenal not required for fighting terrorism, namely F-16 fighter jets and other sophisticated weaponry.
In July-August 2003, President George W. Bush asked the U.S.Congress to approve a five-year three billion dollar security and development aid package to Pakistan, half of which would go to defense matters.
Bush had earlier announced his Pakistan arms aid plan while meeting with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf at Camp David June 24, 2003.
Prior to September 11, 2001, U.S. aid to Pakistan had shriveled considerably in response to Islamabads development of nuclear weapons. Yet, since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the White House has elevated Pakistan to the status of a key U.S. ally in the war on terror, leading to a significant increase in both military and economic aid to the South Asian nation.
That he is seen as a key ally of Washington can be gleaned from the fact that Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf has already made seven visits to the United States since September 11, 2001.
On March 25 this year, Washington announced that it would be delivering 24 new F-16s to Pakistan, 15 years after blocking sales of 28 F-16s to the same country due to its nuclear weapons program. The aircraft are rumored to be Block 52 models and were seen as an explicit reward for Musharraf's support in the war on terror. Washington has said that these new F-16s will be a part of the three billion assitance package.
In 1990, the U.S. halted the production of a third & fourth batch of F-16s ordered by Pakistan, due to Pakistan's nuclear weapons program. 40 F-16A/B aircraft had been delivered under the Peace Gate I and II programs, however none of the Peace Gate III and IV aircraft were delivered.
Twenty-eight F-16A/B Block 15OCU aircraft that had already been built were embargoed and were stored at the AMARC at Davis Monthan Air Force Base. Attempts to sell these aircraft to other countries such as New Zealand were not successful, and finally these aircraft were split between the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy and used in the aggressor role.
The F-16s are rumored to be Block 52 aircraft, and the number of aircraft (currently stated as 24) could still change. The Pakistan Air Force hopes, eventually, to procure 71 new Block 52 F-16s. The total desire is to have 111 F-16s in its inventory in the next 10 years.
Furthermore, the U.S. has agreed to give the current PAF Block 15 F-16s the Mid-Life Update (MLU), which is expected to commence in 2006. (ANI)

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Voices of reason

A purposeful visit across the dividing line

The visit of the leaders of the All Parties Hurriet Conference and other leaders like JKLF chief Yasin Malik, who spearheaded the ongoing struggle for azadi in Kashmir, to Pak-administered Kashmir (PaK) and Pakistan has vindicated the stand of those who were advocating a peaceful, just and democratic solution to the vexed Kashmir problem and involvement of the people of the troubled state in the ongoing peace process between India and Pakistan. Though belated, the purposeful visit not only gives a sense of participation to the leaders of Kashmir in finding a lasting solution to a problem that has been the major cause of bedevilling the relations of the two neighbouring countries for over five decades but also sets in motion a process of intra-Jammu and Kashmir dialogue for evolving a concensus on the vexed problem. Needless to add that with divergent aspirations within the State the process will have to be carried forward at various levels to involve the people in all the areas and regions in Jammu and Kashmir belonging to various religious and ethnic communities. True, the visiting leaders do not represent all sections of the people but they admittedly represent the feelings and sentiments of the vast majority of the people of Jammu and Kashmir who do not accept the status-quo and the vivisection of the State and favour a democratic solution of the problem to the satisfaction of the aspirations of the people. It may be somewhat disappointing for the Pak authorities that the fiesty Geelani and his group have stayed away from this team of visitors. They would have certainly welcomed Geelani to be on board endorsing the Pak initiative for peace and Musharraf's advice to seek a peaceful and negotiated settlement step by step. Happily, the visiting leaders while in the PaK and on the Pakistani soil have favoured a peaceful solution to the Kashmir problem by involving the leaders of Jammu and Kashmir in the process - a solution that not only satisfies both India and Pakistan but also satisfies to a great extent the genuine political aspirations of the people of the State. Pakistan by inviting these leaders for joining the process of dialogue and India by allowing them, after initial hesitation, have conceded that the people of Jammu and Kashmir are the most important party to the Kashmir dispute and their involvement is not only essential but will also push forward the peace process.
During their visit to PaK and Pakistan the visiting leaders have made it clear that they support the ongoing peace process and are in search of a peaceful solution of the Kashmir problem in accordance with the wishes of the people of the state and for that purpose they wanted the involvement of the people's representatives in the process. Another important point that they made was that though "Kashmiris have a just cause mere justness of it is not enough and time has come to evolve a consensus among themselves". As Mirwaiz Omar Farooq succinctly put it "Kashmiris must be taken into confidence, as peace talks cannot succeed without their participation." Yasin malik was more forthright when speaking at the session of PaK legislature he said that a "romantic aura" created by the PaK leadership about militancy had attracted very talented Kashmiri youth who later lost their lives" implying that their sacrifices should not go in vain. Asserting that he had supported the peace process (in fact he was the first leader to advocate peaceful struggle to pursue their objective) and talked about flexibility, Yasin blamed the Kashmiri leaders on both sides for being hypocritical in toeing the line of Indian and Pakistani governments." Ridiculing the leaders he wanted to know if any one of them was taken into confidence by the governments of India and Pakistan when the two countries started the peace process. As authentic voice of the struggling people of J&K he contended that the "paid servants cannot change the situation, emphasising that no solution can be imposed without consulting the Kashmiris." The crux of the utterances of the visiting leaders was that it was time to put an end to violence, killings and human rights abuses and to find a peaceful solution to the Kashmir problem through a process of dialogue and in accordance with the wishes of the people. As Prof. Abdul Ghani summed up "we want to end the human rights abuses in Kashmir. We want the killings to stop at the earliest. We have to hold dialogue with people holding the guns and ask them to give peace a chance. We want to end violence, insurgency, indignity, humiliation and submission. We want to end them as quickly as possible". These were the voices of reason, sanity and justice. The voices that cannot and should not be ignored by India and Pakistan and by the hawks in the two countries as also within the troubled state who have developed a vested interest in perpetuating violence and maintaining the status-quo. For peace process to succeed and for ushering into a new era of peace and mutual cooperation in the region these voices must be heard and understood in the right perspective.

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The nukes' seventh anniversary IV

South Asia's misfortunes

South Asia's future has been jeopardized by the Indian and Pakistani nukes, politically and possibly physically, depending upon whether there will be a nuclear war between the two. India and Pakistan's neighbours have no option but to helplessly wait for what will happen. Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Maldives and Bhutan resent being adversely affected whether there is a war or not.
The misfortunes non-nuclear countries continue to face, even if there is no war, have to do with the function of mistrust between India and Pakistan. The current deluge of protocol goodwill and fomenting a feel good factor by the two governments -- under American prodding -- has not removed their mistrust. Which South Asian country can ignore it? Their worry is reasonable.
Pakistani nuclear missiles are ready to be fired at Indian targets. If they are fired, a few cities in India will be incinerated. And it will take only a few minutes to destroy Pakistan if the Indian nukes are fired in this direction. Neither side will have the time for defensives measures. During the east-west cold war, there were 27 minutes available for decisions. Both sides could read blips on their radars as missiles or geese or some debris. In South Asia, a missile's flying time to its target is 3 to 5 minutes. No government can react in this timeframe and the scope for misunderstanding, wrong calculations and unauthorized launches by power-hungry groups or terrorists in both countries cannot be ignored.
Even if there is no war between the two adversaries and the present no-peace-no-war situation continues, South Asians' future remains compromised -- because the Indo-Pakistan mistrust pre-empts optimal regional cooperation. The fact is India and Pakistan have to remain at hair-trigger alert. And if war does break out, some radioactivity is bound to fall on neighbours, who will suffer for no fault of their own. For non-nuclear South Asians, both sets of nukes are a misfortune, requiring efforts to destroy them.
Some argue that EU is an example of regional cooperation and integration to follow. Two EU members are nuclear powers, France and Britain. What is the rationale for the French and British nukes? Apart from national grandeur or the desire to sit at the high table, the French and the British nukes are a strategic insurance policy against the resurrection of German power. The Anglo-French nukes only make sense if Germany's aggressive instincts are assumed a priori.
Modern Germany accepts this Anglo-French apprehension and has chosen against ever becoming a nationalist or isolationist power. It has consciously anchored its revival in European entity -- away from pan-Germanic ideas that led to three aggressions uptil 1939. Germany is happy to stay non-nuclear; Germans see their future in peace and look upon French and British nukes with part-unconcern and part-curiosity. So the EU example clearly does not apply to South Asia.
Here, unlike Europe, the two nuclear powers look upon each other as bitter adversaries. About India there may still be a few illusions that once it becomes a world power with American support: it may still promote peace in Asia by cultivating Russia, China and other Central Asians simultaneously. Insofar as Pakistan is concerned, it has yoked itself irretrievably to the USA. It will do what America wants, without ifs and buts. Since both countries listen to the USA with respect, they will be able to put in place many more confidence building measures (CBMs), while the main disputes may remain unresolved. Such a situation is fundamentally unstable: some public relations-oriented cultural exchanges may coexist with no basic change of orientation.
Other South Asians need to exhibit their preference for peace: one that promotes rapprochement between India and Pakistan, based on a resolution of disputes -- Kashmir, nukes and dams. Without resolving disputes, the resumption of hostile propaganda is just waiting to happen. Both are capable of resuming confrontation. India and Pakistan being differently oriented, how can South Asians read the deepening of détente by CBMs as making Pakistan and India lasting friends? Why does a true Indo-Pakistan rapprochement look difficult? Obviously what stands in the way, are serious disputes.
This exposes the current peace process as shallow. Why? Because it leaves out basic and highly emotional disputes. Thus fears of a possible war are not unwarranted in the rest of South Asia. It is for the Indians and Pakistanis to prove that there would be no war. They have to show this by the success of their Peace Process. And while one could assert that Kashmir is likely to be left aside, and eventually disregarded, this will not happen to the nukes. They cannot be ignored. The very presence of nukes in India is an incentive to Pakistan to remain nuclear. If Pakistan remains nuclear, India's nuclear disarmament is impossible. Both also want to utilise nukes for their advancement: one wants permanent membership of the UNSC and the other wants to be a leader of Islamic countries.
The question of questions is what sort of Peace Process will, or can, succeed between India and Pakistan? There are forces in both societies that favour a lasting peace. Both governments have recognised popular pressures for peace. Both have called this peace process irreversible. But it is not, though it should be made so. Hitherto both bureaucracies have kept the peace process under strict control. Not one step has been taken that can enable popular aspirations and yearnings to reduce that control. The Establishments running both states refuse to permit socio-economic realities free play. The Establishments importantly include local versions of industrial-military complexes that require hostility between India and Pakistan.
The two contending forces are the entrenched establishments in both countries and common popular yearnings to be friends and ensuring peace and cooperation between the two countries. Which will succeed and when? Possibly, the popular sentiments will someday overwhelm the two establishments to make up and do the right thing about their nukes.
The democratic and peace lobby has to clear the road to nuclear disarmament to make South Asia a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone. But when will popular forces overwhelm the establishments? It is not likely to be soon. The peace process is rather unsteady, due to entrenched vested interests in both countries. So far the two bureaucracies have had the last laugh; the visa regime is still restricted. Real concessions continue to elude us.
South Asians do not deserve this Democle's sword over their heads. They are peace loving and cannot be accused of doing anything to disturb international peace. If there is an India-Pakistan war, it is sure to affect them adversely, as well as their ecology and climate, including radioactive rains and other long term consequences.
Even the present no-war-no-peace between India and Pakistan is adversely affecting South Asians -- because so long as India-Pakistan confrontation lasts, there will be no real regional cooperation and eventual integration.
South Asians need regional grids of communications, power, oil and gas, weather forecasting, investments and free trade, more cultural exchanges, regional arrangements to watch over human rights violations and maybe regional courts to enforce human rights and so forth. Regarding the starry-eyed idealism of today, power brokers in India and Pakistan will say is unrealistic. The Establishments have to preserve conditions in which they enjoy large budgets, respect and autonomy. That promises advancement and riches to powerbrokers. Other South Asians must get involved and help the embattled peace lobbies of Pakistan and India in the common cause of peace and progress for the sake of their people.

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Advani Praises Jinnah:
Or How Hindu and Muslim Communalists Make Perfect Bedfellows

L.K Advani's recent utterances during his visit to Pakistan have created considerable consternation in the Hindutva camp. His statement recognizing Pakistan as an 'unalterable reality of history' has been received with shock and horror by his fellow Hindutva-walas, who have been taught to believe, by leaders such as Advani himself, that the ultimate cause that they are struggling for is Akhand Bharat, stretching from Iran to Myanmar. Further aggravating his Hindutva sympathizers, Advani made so bold as to visit to the mausoleum of the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the bete noire of the Hindutva brigade. He even went so far as to lay a wreath at Jinnah's, paying what he called his 'respectful homage' to Jinnah. In his comments in the visitors' book at the mausoleum he described Jinnah as the 'Qaidñe Azam' or 'great leader', a 'great man', an ardent 'secularist', and as one of those rare men who 'actually create history'.
Critics might argue that Advani's latest antics are a typical example of fork-tongued Hindutva in action. Hindutva ideologues speak in different many voices as the occasion demands. To expect them to be logical and consistent is, therefore, obviously asking for too much. This, however, is only a partial explanation for Advani's remarks that appear, on the face of it, to cut at the very roots of the cause that he and his fellow Hindutva-walas claim to espouse. In actual fact, and contrary to what some of his fellow Hindutva critics insist, Advani's comments are entirely in line with the logic of Hindutva itself, rather than constituting a cruel betrayal of its supposed ideals.
Hindu and Muslim chauvinists, while claiming to be arch-enemies, are actually the greatest allies of each other. Hindu and Muslim communalism share a common conceptual universe. Both are predicated on the notion of a religiously defined community that transcends internal boundaries of class, caste, sect, gender and ethnicity. Both desperately need an 'enemy' to shore up the imagined monolith that they claim to represent. Hence, the notion of the monstrous religious 'other', constructed in equally monolithic terms, occupies a central place in their discourse. Hindu and Muslim communalism, therefore, cannot survive without each other. Ironically, their visceral hatred for each other necessitates not just the existence but even the flourishing of the 'other' in order for them to claim to be the defenders of the community and religion that they claim to represent. Further underlining this symbiotic relationship between Hindu and Muslim communalism is the fact that both are united by what they regard as common threats, such as secularism, democracy, and, above all, communism.
All this, then, clearly suggests that Advani's recent controversial noises in praise of Jinnah do not constitute in any way a betrayal of the Hindutva cause. Nor, for that matter, did the enthusiasm with which a range of militantly anti-India Islamist groups in Pakistan responded when the BJP first came to power in India mean that they had suddenly abandoned their irrepressible hatred for India and the Hindus. Muslim communalists and Islamic fundamentalists are just the allies that Hindu chauvinists crave for in order to whip up Hindu sentiments and press their claims to leadership of the imagined Hindu community. And vice versa. Hindu communalists would willingly accord Muslim communalists the position of sole spokesmen of the Muslims if by doing so this gesture is reciprocated, in turn, by them. Muslim communalists would act identically. In this seemingly fierce, but actually rather friendly, competition between Hindu and Muslim extremists, Hindus and Muslims who seek to challenge the politics of communalism come to be jointly branded as 'pseudo secular', 'anti-national', 'enemies of religion' and so on. It is truly amazing that what unites Hindu and Muslim chauvinists so overwhelmingly overshadows their apparent differences. And this, once again, makes Advani's recent utterances appear all that less inexplicable.
The common discursive framework that Hindu and Muslim chauvinists share is predicated on the notion of Hindus and Muslims as two separate nations. In this sense, Advani's praise of Jinnah should come as no surprise. In actual fact, although Hindutva-walas would hate to admit it, Hindutva ideologues can claim the dubious distinction of inventing the notorious 'two nation' theoryóof Indian Muslims and Hindus being two separate, irreconcilable nationsówell before Jinnah and the League stole it from them to use it to spearhead the cause of a separate Muslim state of Pakistan.
The Hindutva invention of the two-nation theory is a carefully guarded secret. Hindutva-walas are, of course, understandably reluctant to broach the subject as it would expose the hollowness of their patriotic claims. The notion of Hindus and Muslims being separate, antagonistic, nations was central to the Hindu 'nationalist' discourse articulated by 'upper' caste, principally Brahmin, ideologues in late nineteenth century Bengal and Maharashtra. It was these ideologues who laid the basis of Hindutva as the full-blown ideology of Brahminical fascism in later years. Advocates of this discourse of Hindu supremacy sought to create the notion of what they called a single Hindu 'nation' out of a bewildering number of castes and sects by setting them up against an imagined monolithic Muslim 'other' that was branded with all that the 'Hindu' was not meant to be: violent, iconoclastic, lascivious, murderous, and, above all, an 'enemy' of 'Mother India'. Muslims, they insisted, could not coexist comfortably with the Hindu 'nation'. Accordingly, the nationalism that these ideologues of Hindu racism devised made no provision for Muslims to exist on terms of equality. Muslims were given three unenviable choices: migration to some other country; conversion to Hinduism, or else acceptance of second-class citizenship, being forever at the mercy of the Hindus [read Brahmins and other 'upper' castes].
In pre-Independence years the principal organization representing Hindu communalism was the Hindu Mahasabha. The Mahasabha was essentially an 'upper' caste outfit, representing as it did 'upper' caste interests while at the same time claiming to champion the rights of 'Hindu nation'. A number of RSS leaders were schooled in the Mahasabhite tradition of Hindu 'nationalism'. As Jinnah and his Muslim League were to later go on to do, from its very inception the Mahasabha spoke in terms of Hindus and Muslims being two separate and antagonistic 'nations'. In fact, Hindu supremacists associated with the Mahasabha were peddling the 'two nation' theory at a time when Jinnah was still being hailed as the 'Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity'.
The Maharsahtrian Brahmin V.D. Savarkar, inventor of the term and concept of 'Hindutva, also spoke of the Hindus and Muslims of India as two separate 'nations'. He served as the President of the Mahasabha for six years, from 1937 to 1942. Addressing the Ahmedabad session of the Mahasabha in 1937, he declared, '[T]here are two nations in the main, the Hindus and the Muslims, in India'. The official biography of the Hindu Mahasabha extols Savarkar's commitment to the 'two nation' theory in the following words: 'To Veer Savarkar [Ö] goes the credit of creating the ideology which is popular by the name of Hindu Rashtravad. It is Veer Savarkar who gave the national soul to Bharat and asserted that Hindus are a nation by themselves'.
In actual fact, then, it could be said, Hindu supremacists, and not Jinnah and his ilk, were the founders of the pernicious 'two-nation' theory. Although earlier ideologues of Hindu supremacy did speak of Hindus and Muslims as two separate 'nations', none of them went so far as to suggest that a possible solution to the Hindu-Muslim question was geographical separation or the partition of India. The credit for that goes not to Jinnah, as is generally believed, but to leading Hindutva ideologues. One of the first to suggest this drastic measure was a certain Bhai Parmanand, a major Hindutva icon and one-time President of the Hindu Mahasabha. Shortly after the British government announced the division of Bengal in 1905, Parmanand was provoked to demand that 'the territory beyond Sindh should be united with Afghanistan and North-West Frontier Province into a great Musulman Kingdom. The Hindus of the region should come away, while at the same time the Musulmans in the rest of the country should go and settle in this territory'. Parmanand's suggestion for the Partition of India, it should be noted, preceded the Muslim League's Pakistan Resolution by over three decades.
Parmanand's proposal was not a mere personal whim. Rather, it seems to have reflected a considerably important shade of Hindutva opinion for the official biography of the Hindu Mahasabha, published in 1966, mentions that 'very few understood the Hindu-Muslim problem better than Bhai-ji (Parmanand)'. The obscure Bhai Parmanand, not Jinnah, then, could well be said to be the ideological founder of Pakistan! Advani's visit to Jinnah's mausoleum may not be that inexplicable after all, although some might be distressed that, given Hindutva-walas' remarkable penchant for claiming a Hindu origin for just about everything, from the Taj Mahal to the Ka'aba in Mecca to the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, Advani did not make so bold as to declare that the credit for establishing Pakistan should go to the Hindu Mahasabha and not to the Muslim League!
Another pioneering proponent of the 'two nation' theory and Partition was Lala Lajpat Rai, hailed in Hindutva circles as a great advocate of the Hindu 'nation'. Pandit Sunderlal, a close friend of Gandhi, and for six years Lajpat Rai's personal secretary, claimed in an article published almost four decades ago that 'The idea of Partition of India into a Hindu India and a Muslim India for solving the Hindu-Muslim problem occurred first to the mind of the late Lala Lajpat Rai'. Well before Jinnah came up with his demand for Partition, Rai had suggested that the Frontier Province and the Muslim-dominated parts of Punjab 'should be separate from the rest of India and allowed under exclusive Muslim administration', while the rest of India should 'remain Hindu India'. Sunderlal adds that 'the majority of Indian Muslim leaders of that day not only pooh-poohed the suggestion but even called it a device to exclude the Muslims from the country'.
The Maharashtrian Brahmin M.S.Golwalkar, the second RSS supremo, was yet another of the early Hindutva advocates of the 'two nation' theory. He fiercely condemned that the 'composite' or 'territorial' nationalism propounded by groups such as the Congress that sought to build an Indian identity that transcended religious differences. He insisted that Hindus were a 'nation' by themselves and that India belonged to them alone. Muslims and Christians, he argued, were not part of the Hindu or Indian 'nation', using these two terms interchangeably. In contrast to Parmanand and Lajpat Rai, he did not envisage Partition as a means for resolving the problem of the 'two nation' theory. Instead, he held out to Muslims the bone-chilling choice between death, conversion to Hinduism or complete capitulation to Hindu (read 'upper' caste) tyranny. 'The non-Hindu peoples in Hindusthan', Golwalkar pronounced, 'must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must entertain no ideas but the glorification of the Hindu race and religionÖor may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatmentónot even citizens' rights'. If Muslims and other non-Hindus refused to accept this, he warned, they would be treated in exactly the same way as Hitler treated the Jews.
Hindutva-walas and Islamic fundamentalists make the most comfortable ideological bedfellows. There is little to distinguish the ranting of Hindutva ideologues from the likes of the Muslim League or even Islamists like the Lashkar-e Tayyeba and the Jama'at-i Islami on the question of 'authentic' religious, communal and national identity. Looking at the world through the same conceptual lens and speaking essentially the same discourse of exclusivism and exclusion, they desperately need each other to survive and thrive. Advani's recent utterances, should, therefore, come as no surprise. Contrary to what some in the Hindutva camp insist, far from constituting a betrayal of the ideology of Hindutva they actually amount to an enthusiastic endorsement of it.

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A Prodigal Returns to Pakistan

Can a hawk play a convincing dove? India's former deputy prime minister Lal Krishna Advani, now in Pakistan, is striving to suggest an answer in the affirmative.
Advani, president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has the well-earned reputation of a 'hardliner' in the parliamentary echelons of the far right. He led the movement that culminated with the demolition of the Babri Mosque in December 1992 with disastrous consequences for the country. He has always been in the vanguard of the virulent far-right campaign against any semblance of friendship with Pakistan.
Advani is currently on a 'peace mission' in Pakistan, on an invitation from President Pervez Musharraf extended during the latter's visit to New Delhi this April. Eyebrows were raised, not so much at the invitation as at its acceptance by Advani with alacrity.
For those who did not credit him with a paramount concern for peace, the question was about the politics of his move. For BJP watchers, the leader's metamorphosis seemed to have more to do with a power struggle within his party than with the India-Pakistan 'peace process'." (Not many attributed his instant acceptance of the invitation to an overpowering nostalgia - Advani had been born and brought in pre-Partition Karachi, now a seat of serious ethnic and sectarian unrest in Pakistan.)
The invitation came at a time when an image-mending exercise seemed mandatory for the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha (Lower House of India's parliament).
When Advani replaced former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee as the formal and real chief of the BJP, the development seemed to run to a familiar script. Advani had ever been the chosen leader when the party was out of power and plotting to return with the support of its 'core constituency' of religious-communal fascism. Vajpayee, on the other hand, was the party's talisman in its times of triumph, when it needed to cobble up a power-sharing coalition.
The times, however, have changed. The period since its loss of parliamentary elections and federal power last May has convinced major sections in the party of the constraints imposed by its 'core constituency'. The state assembly elections since then have confirmed the party's continued need for allies and a broadly acceptable image.
Advani, too, acknowledges the need. The 'Iron Man' (as adoring followers call him), who has been asking the party not to be "ashamed of its ideology", has of late been anxious to stress the need for it to appear "inclusive". The image makeover efforts may have earned him enemies within the 'parivar' (the far-right 'family'), but the political objective has made him persist in the thus far unconvincing performance.
Advani's mission to Pakistan has made man-bites-dog kind of news for the media. Even a tongue-in-cheek Vajpayee marveled in public about a leader of Advani's long-stuck label undertaking such a mission.
In Pakistan, Advani has been at pains to disown his own political past - especially on two counts. He has been repeatedly asserting that he deplored the Babri demolition. And he has been disclaiming any role in the sabotage of the Musharaff-Vajpayee summit in Agra, the city of India's Taj Mahal, in July 2001.
The crocodile tears over the Babri tragedy won't convince anyone who remembers the many spot reports and pictures of the incident. Photographs of Advani and his colleagues greeting the mosque collapse with broad smiles were then widely circulated. Former BBC correspondent Ruchira Gupta testified that the BJP leader hailed the vandalism as "historic". The party, with its peculiar sense of history, went on to compare the crime with the storming of Bastille.
The correspondent as well as police officer Anju Gupta vouched that Advani voiced concern only when the mosque's dome was about to collapse, with the BJP's volunteers precariously perched on it. Reports record that saffron-clad Uma Bharati, now a member of the BJP national executive, hugged Advani in heavenly ecstasy as the historic monument was reduced to rubble.
As for the Agra summit, again, the role of Advani and a BJP coterie in preventing the emergence of a joint declaration has been reported in some detail, despite official denials. The sabotage, party cadres were persuaded, saved India from making an impermissible compromise on Kashmir.
Advani's statements on a Kashmir solution now, obviously, will be seen as an impermissible compromise by many in his party, and even more in the 'parivar'. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), which prides itself on delivering the deadliest blows to the Babri mosque, provides an example.
VHP leader Acharya Giriraj Kishore has described the Advani mission as no more than an 'old boy's meeting' (the BJP luminary and General Musharraf hailing from the same St. Patrick's School of Karachi). The Acharya has gone on to reiterate that there is nothing to discuss on Kashmir except the return of 'Pak Occupied Kashmir (PoK)' to India.
The Pakistan visit is going to make no dramatic difference to Advani's political profile. Nor is it likely to make the India-Pakistan 'peace process' irreversible by assuring it of all-round political support in this country.
Advani returns to India on June 6. Doubtless, many a public reception awaits him where he will be hailed by the BJP flock as a new prophet of south Asian peace. The already scowling 'parivar', however, can be counted upon to make sure that the party and the patriarch return soon to their familiar, far right ways.
A freelance journalist and a peace activist of India, J. Sri Raman is the author of Flashpoint (Common Courage Press, USA). He is a regular contributor to t r u t h o u t.

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Peace dividend? Forget it

PAKISTAN having all but abandoned its traditional stance on Kashmir, and confidence-building gimmicks all the rage between India and Pakistan, you might think the time had come to cut defence spending and divert resources to social needs. But you would be wrong. For even as Pakistan gives peace a dubious facelift by making it look like appeasement, nothing on the horizon suggests we are about to enter the age of miracles. If anything, the military's appetite for shining hardware remains as strong as ever. The navy has a long list of equipment it wants from the US. The army has its own needs. But to beat everything is the PAF's proposed shopping list of 75 F-16s - each at about forty million dollars. Multiply 75 by 40 and the answer is three billion dollars. Cool, as any teenager might say. Barely able to suppress his delight (the photo with the interview in a national newspaper says it all) Air Chief Marshal Kaleem Saadat declares this would give the air force "deterrence value". Against whom? One is tempted to ask. Not India, surely, with whom we are frantically building more flaky bridges of peace than we can safely handle. Afghanistan, Iran, the republic of Uzbekistan?
"Deterrence value" makes sense when counterpoised against a target, or a clear threat. Pakistan having decided that the essence of its India policy should be turning the other cheek regardless of Indian filibustering on Baglihar, Kishanganga, Siachen, Sir Creek and Kashmir, against which likely intruders will our F-16s take to the skies? Or are we talking of "deterrence" for its own sake, for no definable purpose, just to spread a feel-good mood in the air force?
Sure, we flirt with the notion of being a beleaguered republic. Fine, apart from anything else, it plays to our sense of self-importance. Even gives us a martyr complex. But for the picture to be convincing, it should be accompanied by some idea of the hordes at the gate: beleaguered by what or whom?
President Musharraf, however, has chucked the doctrine of external threat overboard, insisting, as he has more than once, that the enemy lies within. By which he presumably means Al Qaeda, religious extremism, the MMA when it is not cooperative (when it is, it is taken off the list), and all those political elements not under the umbrella of the Q League. External threats, he says, no longer exist because of his successful foreign policy. How do F-16s strike at the enemy within?
Indian rigidity can still rekindle Pakistani scepticism. If the 'composite dialogue' leads to no progress on the dispute over the Baglihar Dam, the Kishanganga water project or the standoff at Siachen - the world's highest battlefield the scene of the world's most stupid conflict - the mood in Pakistan could turn sour.
Even so, war is no longer a theme taken seriously by anyone in Pakistan. Not after Kargil, the high command's last temptation, the fatal outcome of which serves as permanent damper on military adventurism. Not after September 11 when, in line with American priorities, the military had to shift focus from east to west, from the Indian to the Afghan border.
Nor should one forget the 'cultural revolution' sweeping the armed forces whereby real estate prices and prospects of life after retirement provide more engaging fields of study than, say, the theories of Karl von Clausewitz. War has no place in this mental landscape.
As for India, it need not contemplate the grim prospect of war when all its expectations of Pakistan are being met gratis, free of cost and free of effort, Gen Musharraf's one-sided peace offensive surpassing Indian hopes and calculations. No wonder, from vilified hawk and the butt of tasteless jokes (as in Narendra Modi's "Mian Musharraf"), he is today India's favourite Pakistani.
Which only makes the question more insistent: why the F-16s, to guard against which threat? China, vying for superpower status, has no F-16s in its inventory. Iran, threatened by the United States and Israel, doesn't have them. Poland and the UAE, to name but two countries feeding the US military-industrial complex, do. Fine company we are in.
Is Poland threatened by a fresh German invasion? As for the UAE, F-16s are of no use to it when its security is guaranteed by America's unwritten pact with the Arab world: Arab oil in return for American protection against internal revolt and external aggression. The Arab countries are incapable of defending themselves against anything, least of all Israel, the dagger planted in their midst. Expensive military hardware is only a sop to Arab vanity, serving no military purpose whatsoever.
The Arabs at least have the money to service their vanity (although it is useful to remember that their wealth is not what it used to be in the 1970s and 1980s). We don't have the same luxury. Putting some money into the health and education of the nation will do more for national security than so many F-16s.
Don't we remember why we went down the nuclear path? We said the A-bomb would make national security foolproof, arming us against all eventualities. Well, since we have the bomb, why is defence expenditure still so high? Why are the social sectors starved? Why is talk of "poverty alleviation" such a joke?
The peace warriors of the bhangra brigade who are convinced real peace cannot break out unless a touch of Bollywood is brought to Indo-Pak relations - startling love songs and rain-drenched dance sequences - base their position on a fallacy: that soft borders, by undercutting the rationale for a huge military, will curb the spirit of Pakistani militarism, loosen the military's grip on power and, in time, lead to the strengthening of democracy.
The fallacy lies in this: the military no longer looms large in Pakistan because of Kashmir or India; it does so in response to the need to safeguard its privileged position in national life.
A reduction in the number of two- and three- star generals, no civilian jobs for the "boys", brigadiers and major-generals twiddling their thumbs after retirement, Fauji Foundation going out of business and ceasing to be the behemoth it is, defence housing authorities ceasing to multiply? Grim possibilities scarcely to be contemplated, let alone endured.
So like any bureaucratic organism, existence and expansion for their own sake, unrelated to any objective need or external threat. The quest for F-16s merely proves this point.
Nor is this an isolated phenomenon.
Power-grabbing oligarchies wherever found have a life of their own. What are the defining characteristics of Egypt, Nigeria and Indonesia, three pillars of the world of Islam? Corrupt, authoritarian and dominated, in one way or the other, by the apparatus of national security. None of these countries faces any external threat. Egypt did once upon a time but that was before the era of appeasement.
We can have chocolate borders with India tomorrow but this won't for a moment stop the military from appropriating the bulk of national resources. So let's bury this illusion once and for all that soft borders will lead to a peace dividend, money for schools and hospitals, butter before guns. Not on your life.
Indeed, free from the distraction of having to worry about India, or carry the burden of Kashmir, Pakistan's permanent ruling class will have all the time in the world to play the game it relishes and at which, by now, it has come to excel: preserving its power as the supreme arbiter of national life and, towards this end, making idiots of the political parties.

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Musharraf is losing his grip

LAHORE, Pakistan
When Pakistan announced the arrest of a senior Al Qaeda operative last month, it was another feather in the cap of President Pervez Musharraf, with President George W. Bush describing the capture as "a critical victory in the war on terror." Musharraf's peace overtures toward India and criticism of Islamic extremism have also won high praise abroad, especially in Washington, which in March awarded him with a supply of F-16 fighter jets. But Musharraf's growing international standing is at odds with his faltering position at home.
His government is unraveling under the twin pressures of Islamic fundamentalists whom he refuses to resist and political opponents whom he harasses and jails. In April, thousands of members of the Pakistan People's Party were arrested to prevent big rallies for one of the party's leaders, Asif Ali Zardari. The Pakistan People's Party has been effectively sidelined since Musharraf took over in a military coup in 1999. Zardari - here for a visit from Dubai, where he lives in exile with his wife, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto - says he wants to test Musharraf's promises to restore genuine democracy.
The crackdown on the party is in sharp contrast to the extent to which the government has bowed to the demands of a coalition of six Islamic fundamentalist parties, even though many of these same fundamentalists consider Musharraf too secular and demand his resignation. The government has recently accepted the fundamentalists' demands that it stop men and women from running marathons together, and that it delay reform of the Islamic schools called madrassas, as well as efforts to amend laws on blasphemy and to curb honor killings.
Meanwhile, the civilian government brought to power by the military in 2002 after what many international monitors considered to be a rigged election has failed to deliver what Musharraf desired - a coherent and effective civilian facade for the military, which actually runs the country. Instead, the ruling party, the Pakistan Muslim League, is riven by factionalism, and Parliament is often forced to suspend business because it lacks a quorum.
Shaukat Aziz, the third prime minister since 2002, is a former finance minister who has no political experience and is too beholden to the army to be an effective political leader. Challenged by its own ineptitude and by those parties demanding democracy, the Muslim League finds it convenient to pander to the fundamentalists, who are strong enough to keep the democrats at bay.
Musharraf's problems are compounded by insurgencies in the provinces. In Baluchistan, separatists are demanding greater autonomy and control over their natural resources. For the past three months the country's largest gas fields have been besieged by the separatists.
In North-West Frontier Province, a neo-Taliban resistance against the army continues with the return of Afghan and Pakistani Taliban who have been recently trained in Iraq. In the southern province of Sind there is growing alienation because of interethnic strife, increased criminality and corruption and tensions between the majority Sindhis and the central government. The only answer to the domestic problems now tearing the country apart is more democracy - in particular a free and fair election in which the political elements that have been disenfranchised since 1999 get a political stake in determining the country's future. The next few months will be crunch time for the army, the Americans, the mullahs and the political parties. All the major players know that the present political situation under Musharraf is unsustainable.
It is time that the world sat up and took notice of events in Pakistan, because with 160 million people, nuclear weapons and a myriad of Islamic extremist groups still operating openly, Pakistan remains critical to regional and global stability.
(Ahmed Rashid is the author of "Taliban" and, most recently, "Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia".)

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Pakistan To Hike Defense Outlay But Also Tackle Poverty

Pakistan plans to increase defense spending in the new budget being unveiled next week but will also divert funds to stem growing poverty, which afflicts a third of its population, officials said.
Officials would not give a figure for the hike in military spending, set to be announced June 6 in Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz’s 2005-2006 budget.
However Pakistan’s defense expenditure often comes under severe criticism as it consumes a large chunk of resources in a country where more than 30 percent of its 150 million people live below the poverty line.
“A considerable increase in defense budget is imminent,” a senior official told Agence France-Presse on condition of anonymity, without specifying the amount. “For the past few years the defense budget has not been increased in real terms.”
The total outlay in the budget would be more than 1,000 billion rupees ($16.7 billion), compared with 801 billion rupees in the current fiscal year, officials said.
Defense spending this year stood at 194 billion rupees against 181 billion rupees in 2003-2004, as the military remained locked in operations against al-Qaida suspects in the rugged tribal region on the Afghan border.
Since independence in 1947, Pakistan has spent huge amounts on defense to keep up with rival India, against whom it has fought three wars.
The nuclear-armed neighbors last year launched a peace dialogue to improve relations, after they came close to a fourth war in 2002 over the Himalayan state of Kashmir, which both claim as theirs.
Pakistan Minister of State for Finance Omar Ayub Khan, who is expected to present the budget, refused to confirm the figures but added: “We will not compromise our defense capabilities and national interests.”
At present, the country’s economic managers are on a high after Pakistan’s gross domestic product grew at a rate of 8.3 percent against a target of 6.6 percent this year.
But in a pre-budget review, the central State Bank of Pakistan warned last week that rising inflation posed a serious challenge to the economy. Inflation passed 11 percent in 2004-2005, compared with 4.2 percent last year.
Aziz said recently his government would increase efforts to tackle Pakistan’s weak social and physical infrastructure and promised to give the nation “a pro-growth budget.”
The government has approved 300 billion rupees this year for development — 48 percent higher than in 2004-2005 — aimed at creating 300,000 new jobs, increasing technical education and rural credit facility as well as the supply of clean drinking water, the premier said.
Critics, however, doubt whether the development funds can actually be used efficiently.
“The real problem is utilization of development funds, and in Pakistan this rate is abysmally low. Therefore this higher development budget becomes meaningless,” Masood Qazi, associate professor at the Institute of Business Administration, told Agence France-Presse.

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Landelijke India Werkgroep - 27 juni 2005