index
The Indian capital of New Delhi was hit Saturday
with three simultaneous bombs in marketplaces
filled with citizens belonging to the middle and
lower middle classes, killing 58 and injuring
hundreds. In every incident the explosives were
said to have been placed in a rickshaw or a
motorcycle. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has
denounced the terrorism, thankfully without any
reference to Pakistan; and Pakistan has denounced
it in the strongest, and thankfully most
unequivocal, terms. Even the BJP opposition in
parliament, while blaming the government for
ignoring earlier signs of terrorism, has
abstained from naming any organisation in
Pakistan. Experts in New Delhi have pointed the
finger at non-Pakistani organisations active in
India's northeast and in Held Kashmir that are
opposed to the Indo-Pak normalisation process.
Meanwhile, in Islamabad, after some anxious hours
of deliberation, the two countries went ahead and
agreed to open five points on the Line of Control
to facilitate relief operations in the areas of
Azad Kashmir devastated by the October 8
earthquake.
That the two sides are not jumping to conclusions
and have decided to wait and see what kind of
evidence emerges is a good sign. New Delhi
clearly wants to finish questioning the suspects
it has caught before "guessing" at whodunnit.
Pakistan has most vehemently condemned the
bombings and said they are an attempt to sabotage
the peace process, a process that has stayed the
hands of formerly rash alarmists in India. The
formerly defiant All Parties Hurriyat Conference
(APHC), for example, has engaged in dialogue with
the Indian prime minister and been allowed freer
travel in and out of Kashmir than in the past.
There is also a clearer understanding in both
countries about elements on both sides that find
it against their self-interest that the two
countries should start patching up and settling
their old, deadlocked disputes. So, despite there
being much to jerk the two back into the old rut
of accusations and counter accusations, the
process continues.
Terrorism experts have already looked at the
pattern of near-simultaneous explosions adopted
as a technique by Islamist terrorists in Iraq,
Pakistan and Indonesia and opined that it could
be the same elements once again. Pakistan itself
experienced similar near-simultaneous bombings in
Lahore only last month. On September 22 "bicycle"
blasts at two markets in Lahore killed seven and
wounded many. The police arrested two men and a
couple, which "may lead the police to the
bombers". The two men were arrested in Sadiqabad
in southern Punjab with explosives and other
bomb-making material, and on their information, a
man and a woman were arrested from Lahore. The
couple were originally from Jacobabad in Sindh
and had been living near Lahore's Data Darbar
shrine in a rented house. Police also seized Rs
200,000 in cash and found some "important"
telephone numbers on them. The first reflex was
to see the hand of the Indian RAW in the
bombings, but there was also a doubt that
organisations opposed to the Indo-Pak
normalisation and provoked by Pakistan's contacts
with Israel could have done it. Finally, there
were some members of the "militant groups" among
the 35 arrested who are being questioned by the
police.
In the past, India and Pakistan have not tried to
understand the true dimensions of terrorism and
have blamed each other for acts performed by
organisations not controlled by any state.
India's position has been that even the
"out-of-control" groups were somehow Pakistan's
responsibility. This meant ignoring the
importance of cooperating with Pakistan to get
rid of them. For example, the 2001 attack on the
Indian parliament was finally discovered to have
been the work of a defiant group of terrorists
that had got out of hand in Pakistan. But the
incident led to a period of extreme tension
between Pakistan and India, with both amassing
troops on the border. Pakistan's denial of
complicity was held unacceptable by India,
although most Pakistanis were not ready to
believe that any Pakistan-based group had done
it. In 2003, however, the true dimension of what
the two countries were faced with began to become
clear after President Pervez Musharraf was
attacked by the very organisations accused of the
New Delhi attack. In 2004, President Musharraf
and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz were both
attacked again, not by RAW but by the jihadists
working for Al Qaeda.
After the leaders of India and Pakistan began to
lower the bilateral temperature in 2003, a better
understanding of the nature of terrorism began to
dawn on both sides. We now learn that there is no
uproar about the pending sentence that a Delhi
court is about to deliver to seven terrorists
(one of them allegedly Pakistani) who had
attacked the Red Fort in 2000. The men under
trial are all Muslims and may be connected to the
extremist organisations that have been forming in
India. Apart from extremist elements in Held
Kashmir, most Indian Muslims have by and large
held aloof from terrorism. Indeed, now that New
Delhi has started talking to the APHC, the
chances are that the dangerous fringe
organisations may become isolated to such an
extent that acts of terrorism will no longer be
popular.
Meanwhile, as if forming a backdrop to what is
happening in the east in India, Pakistan's
south-western province of Balochistan continues
to languish in the grip of terrorism. On
Saturday, as Islamabad condemned the New Delhi
attacks, the gas pipeline serving the capital
city of Quetta was blown up for the second time.
Needless to say, it is advisable not to start
accusing RAW and the Indian consulates in
Afghanistan just because it looks plausible. This
"plausibility" game has muddied the waters in the
past. Both sides must avoid this reflex if the
process of normalisation is to be saved.
FINE, OK, I get it. I'm obsessed with Kashmir.
Viewers, television critics, policy-makers, col
leagues and competitors, have all bemoaned my
insatiable appetite for tracking which way the chinar
falls.
But this fortnight the chinar, quite literally, fell
to the resounding sound of silence. The emotional
indifference to the earthquake across much of India
left me stunned. Almost as if when the earth moved in
the Valley, the rest of us were unmoved, looking on
with the same weariness, that same glazed _expression
that we wear when thousands die in some
unpronounceable part of China, or Africa. Far away.
Somewhere else. Not our own.
As journalists, you often look for the one face that
captures the hidden depths of a tragedy; that one
narrative that breaks down the wall of indifference
between the story and its audience. Usually, it's
children. Tracking the tsunami, I met a six-monthold
baby, born blind, to parents who had saved all year to
have him operated on -- their money and hopes had now
been swept ashore. But equally overwhelming was the
tidal wave of help, as people wrote out blank cheques,
doctors volunteered, hospitals waived fees and
families wanted to adopt Baby Sukumar. Many just wrote
to say they had wept.
This time in Srinagar, I met Ishfaq. A miracle rescue
of the quake, bright-eyed and precocious, he asked the
prime minister why he had come visiting without
chocolates. When the eight-year-old was airlifted into
the army hospital, his abdomen had been ripped apart,
his pulse was dead, and worse, there was no sign that
his parents had survived.
Doctors battled to drain two litres of blood from his
tiny frame to save a boy who had caught their
imagination. The day we met Ishfaq, he had
serendipitously been reunited with his father, an
ageing schoolteacher, who came to the hospital after
burying his other son in the village grave. Ishfaq
told us, he had always dreamt of being a doctor. It
was a compelling story, of heartbreak and hope, of
sadness and succour, one we hoped would register on a
different kind of Richter scale. It never quite
happened. Our emotionally seismic ride was essentially
our own, a lonely one.
I kept thinking, why was it that the desolation of
coastal fisherfolk in Tamil Nadu had managed to sear
through the thick wall of urban indifference, but here
in Kashmir, we were still struggling?
Kashmir's relentless violence and tragedy has, in a
sense, underlined its beauty, adding soul and pathos
to mere good looks. To make our way to the ravaged
township of Uri, we would drive down what's arguably
the most breathtaking stretch of road in the country;
the same one on which Shammi Kapoor courted Sharmila
Tagore, and countless other screen romances were
mapped.
But there were no film stars to be seen. No Vivek
Oberoi to adopt a village, no Rahul Bose to raise
money, no Shah Rukh Khan at the PM's residence. The
contrast with the reaction after the tsunami could not
have been more stark.
And it's a poorly-kept secret that apart from notable
worthies like Infosys, the PM had to personally nudge
and elbow Corporate India into action. Ajai Shriram
astutely pointed out that business houses had
responded with more alacrity after the Bhuj earthquake
because, after all, they had a presence in Gujarat,
unlike Kashmir, where, industry is still negligible.
I've heard the other theory. Disaster fatigue, said
most. Indians were simply spent. But was the truth
just a little more awkward? Is it simply, because it
was Kashmir?
Some of it makes sense. First, there's terrorism. Life
simply isn't worth risking for people who may be ready
to volunteer otherwise, as hundreds did in Tamil Nadu.
But there's another unspoken reason. Many people
privately argue that they just can't be bothered about
a people whose loyalty to India they question. The
more bigoted among them may go so far as to whisper,
"These Muslims..."
This is exactly the problem. We can't care about a
people, and fight four wars (counting Kargil) over
Kashmir. We can't go into a paroxysm of middle-class
rage over why the state has its own constitution and
flag, but passively flip the channel to Desperate
Housewives when we learn that two lakh people in
Kashmir are without a home and are sleeping out in the
open; we can't want the land, and disclaim
responsibility for a scarred relationship with its
people, and we can't want dividends, without being
stakeholders in Kashmir's future.
Equally, the ordinary Kashmiri who points at the
indifference of the rest of the country needs to look
inward. The domestic discourse in the Valley is still
dressed up in much hypocrisy. A people who have always
seen the army as the enemy now find themselves
entirely dependent on the military for earthquake
relief. Sure, extreme circumstances don't erase past
transgressions and viola tions by men in uniform. But
rehearsed conspiracy theories and irresponsible local
editorials against the military's role in earthquake
relief have a false, distasteful ring to them. Uri
exists alongside Chittisinghpora, in Kashmir's
complex, blood-soaked history. The lazy slotting of
victims and villains just doesn't hold in a shifting
society; truth lives in shades of grey.
It's also time for the Valley to be more vocal about
violence, to rip off the shroud of silence and let the
men who were beast enough to kill a firsttime
politician last week know that there is no
constituency for them.
The problem is sometimes you need emotional confidence
and a sense of belonging to speak up. Trapped between
the battlelines all these years, most Kashmiris have
been pummelled into a self-defeating passiveness.
Perhaps it comes from carrying the burden of a grief,
that is unique and thus isolating. In which other
state would an archaic rule that forbids direct
dialling from `our' Kashmir to `theirs' become one
more element of an unfolding tragedy.
Before the prime minister intervened to have phone
lines across the LoC operational, we connected divided
families via satellite, through a crackly audio line.
One man discovered on live television that his sister
in Muzaffarabad had died. I watched the lines on his
face change -- silent, in shock and, above all, so
alone. Would the pain of that moment make him more
assertive for his own future, or simply push him into
philosophical resignation?
In the end, fuzzy as it sounds, it really is all about
dotting the lines on a battered drawing board.
Connecting people, not just across the LoC, but
bridging the great divide within.
With his mop of untidy curls, and his shy, but cheeky
smile, Qazi Tauqeer, the boy from Srinagar who made
the giant leap to national iconhood, is one such
example. Fifteen million Indians voted to make him the
winner of Sony TV's Fame Gurukul. He now must sing for
us all.
The US and India have recently come up with a deal so shamelessly dirty that everyone should know about it. It illustrates the naked self-interest of regimes that always do the opposite of what they say, and what really drives their foreign policy.
Earlier this year the current government of India signed a major contract with the Iranian regime to build a gas pipeline between the two countries. India's present government, led by the Congress Party and including two parties that falsely call themselves Marxist, held this up as proof that it is different than the slavishly pro-US flunkies previously in office. India is now a temporary UN Security Council member, and bidding for a permanent seat - supposedly as a representative of the third world. Some people hoped India would use its present Security Council position to block the US's attempts to use the UN to bring about regime change in Iran. But just the opposite happened.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited Washington in July and signed a 'strategic partnership' agreement with the US. In this context, President George W. Bush promised India access to American nuclear technology. In return, Singh agreed that India would support the US against Iran at the UN. In a reversal of what many people expected, on 24 September India supported a US resolution at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in favour of referring Iran to the UN Security Council for punishment if it refused to drop its nuclear programme. Right now US under secretary of state R. Nicholas Burns is in Delhi working out the details of just what the Indian regime will get as a reward. India is expected to vote with the US at a second vote in November. Most importantly, India's vote at the IAEA was a signal of the position it intends to take in the Security Council itself.
Bush's offer of nuclear technology to India came at exactly the same time as the US was pressing the IAEA to put Iran on the road to Security Council sanctions. Using a similar excuse about what turned out to be non-existent 'weapons of mass destruction', the US also used the Security Council-imposed economic embargo to weaken Saddam Hussein's regime. In the case of Iraq, this helped prepare the ground for an eventual invasion. Now the US is looking for any excuse it can find to overturn an Iranian regime that doesn't suit its present goals of more direct and open domination of the Middle East.
Let's look at the facts about Iran and India in relation to nukes. Iran is a signer of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Pact. Under international law it has every right to operate nuclear power plants and it invited UN inspectors to verify that it is not making bombs. India refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and, as the Maoists of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) (Naxalbari) put it, 'started an arms race in South Asia'. India held its first atomic test explosion in 1974 for what it claimed were 'peaceful purposes'. Then in 1998 it exploded another one, this time bragging that it had become a nuclear weapons state. Why does the US support India's right to nuclear weapons and oppose letting Iran even make electricity with uranium?
It is true that the nature of nuclear programmes is such that there is no wall between peaceful and warlike uses of the process of splitting atoms. The knowledge and technology developed in making nuclear power plants can be used to make bombs. That's one basic reason why the US and every imperialist country - those that openly have atomic weapons and those that don't - put so much emphasis on atomic energy plants. But stopping nuclear proliferation or reducing the chances of a horrendous nuclear war have nothing to do with the US's position or India's sudden apparent shift. The US claims the right - based on its military might - to reward and punish countries by telling some they can have atomic weapons and, in the case of others, using alleged efforts to attain such weapons as an excuse for imposing 'regime change'.
The US cut India off from American technology in the 1970s when India was in the orbit of the USSR. American law dating from that decade bans any US nuclear cooperation with India because of India's nuclear weapons. This makes Bush's promises to India illegal - a technicality he says he'll get around by having Congress change the law before anything is actually shipped. What the US is giving India now is not technology but its blessing - acceptance of India as a member of the nuclear club. The reason for this policy shift is that the US feels it can consolidate India as 'the new outpost of the US in South Asia', as the CPI(ML) (Naxalbari) said in a 14 September press release. 'This surrender is a logical culmination of the foreign policies adopted by the various governments in power at the Centre. If a total sell-out of the country to the US imperialists was effected during NDA [the previous government], a total surrender is now shamefully endorsed during the present UPA government.' 'There exists no such thing as non-alignment in a US-dominated unipolar world and India's foreign policy was always tied up to one or the other imperialist power,' Naxalbari continues. Putting 'India firmly in the US orbit', it said, 'serves Indian expansionism.'
The US's attitude toward Pakistan's nukes is another illustration of American motives. UN weapons inspectors had found traces of enriched uranium on nuclear centrifuges Iran had bought second-hand. The regime claimed it had not used them to obtain the advanced levels of enrichment necessary for making weapons. For many months the US used this as its main argument why Iran should be punished. But it turned out that the traces on the centrifuges came from Pakistan's use of them to make enriched uranium for bombs before they sold the centrifuges to Iran. Instead of criticising Pakistan for doing what the US forbids Iran to do, the US dropped the whole matter. Pakistan's Islamic military dictatorship is now also an important American ally, along with its rival India - and while the US has always encouraged that rivalry to facilitate its domination of both countries the US intends to keep both regimes in its pocket.
It should be noted that while supporting atomic weapons in India and Pakistan, the US also wants to forbid North Korea to have any capacity for self-sustaining nuclear energy. Also, all the UN Security Council members are engaged in a conspiracy of silence about one of the world's most dangerous nuclear-armed rogue regimes, Israel, with whom Pakistan is becoming closer and closer in parallel with its arrangements with the US.
While the US uses the 'nuclear card' to reward and punish regimes according to its imperialist interests, it remains by far the world's biggest holder of nukes, the only country ever to have used them and the only one that could imagine itself winning a nuclear war. In all of these cases, the goal of American policy is the same - world domination.
Well timed in the evening, targeting Eid and
Diwali shoppers for dramatic effect, the three
bomb blasts in Delhi’s three most populous and
popular areas on Oct.28 destroyed far more than
only 70 innocent lives and over 115 injured.
Whose purpose this wanton massacre served, how it
advanced a cause, whom the criminals sought to
avenge, whom they so brutally taught a lesson,
whether this is a prologue to the series of
blasts in gestation, and where and when next – we
will never know, because our law and order
machinery is unwilling and unable to probe it
all. As has been the practice thus far, glibly or
sagely it can all be laid at the doors of ISI,
Lashkar-e-Taiba, and, of course, the ubiquitous
monster Al Qaeda, which goes on getting invented
endlessly for a multiplicity of purposes and by a
slew of ever ready users.
First, the police alacrity post-blasts. The whole
city was covered with police patrol. Isn’t that
something the citizenry is expected to be
grateful for? Why the intelligence failed to
prime itself prior to the mayhem, or why it did
not consider posting patrols in the dense
shopping centres when it had received
intimations of such threats materializing soon,
which was what it could and should have done as
the most minimum required in the name of civil
safety, passes understanding. But, the
establishment will not admit it was careless or
clueless or incompetent.
The other, ancillary question, from just not the
usual run of skeptics. Why was this carnage timed
to burn and blacken the bonhomie increasingly
gathering strength and volume between the peoples
of Pakistan and India? Whoever did it must have a
vested interest in keeping the jihadi or
patriotic pot boiling. Not above suspicion are
the two nations’ institutional cabals of
warmongers who, with peace and normalcy
prospectively regnant, will be grievously bereft
of their vested interest, their venal cause.
These cabals can be political heavyweights,
political parties, and the entrenched
bureaucracies of the two nations who have to
upstage each other just for the fun of it-
grandstanding, keeping the other flustered and
short of breath are such pure fun in underhand
politicking!
One aspect that by some unwritten but suspicious
compact, always gets omitted from consideration,
both in the media and government circles, is the
Modi Factor. This is a small name for a large but
lethal enterprise. The enterprise is Hindutva :
liquidation of minorities in well-planned series
of massacres, seemingly random, localized, and
dressed up as “reaction”. This experiment of
ethnic cleansing has signally succeeded in
Gujarat. The plight of Gujarat Muslims ever since
the 2002 genocide has remained abysmal, if the
recent reports of Kuldip Nayar and Harsh Mander
are any guide.
No criminals were punished. Killers, rapists,
arsonists, thugs and assassins were lionized as
Hindu heroes. The saffronazi cult of crime and
the dagger-invested brotherhood of mobsters,
upgraded, the former as Hindu religion and the
latter as its exemplars, were admitted, without
any shame or apology or remorse, into national
polity as legitimate constituents. It is this
which on the one hand has led to a feeling of
helplessness and humiliation among the victims
and survivors, the state reduced in this
perception as complicit or co-sponsor of the
crimes of Hindu terrorists, and on the other a
very starkly demonstrable proof of a failed state
catering with determination to the interests of
fascist gangsters and theo-terrorists, which
cannot be confronted other than by its own
methods of terror and tyranny, indiscriminate,
endless, and unrelenting.
The continual murders of Christians all over and
their churches being vandalized and burnt, the
non-stop murders of Muslims, more grimly and
recurrently in western UP, the calls by Hindu
outfits on BJP aggressively to pursue the
Hindutva agenda, their main warlord Sudarshan’s
assertion that there are no minorities in India
except Parsis and Jews, and any slight concession
to justice or even a modicum of legalistic
equality in bourgeois terms is tantamount to
appeasement, none of them being arrested or
prosecuted for harboring killers and funding
criminals – all the mounting congeries of ever
swelling volume of violence and terror against
the minorities stresses the obvious repeatedly
that the state in India is mired in a big
failure, and that violence prevails both to
undermine the state constitutionally and to
indulge in ethnic cleansing with impunity.
Whether the government at the centre was BJP’s is
immaterial in so far as the constitutional
safeguards were concerned in the case of Gujarat.
There was a glaring case for the President to
dismiss the delinquent government of Vajpayee.
Then, the UPA government in New Delhi could have
remedied the situation by kicking out Modi
government. But, popular, “democratically
elected” government seemed to have held UPA’s
hand. There was no such compunction on the part
of Congress when it had sacked the Kerala
government of Namboodiripad on far trivial
excuses in the 1950s.
In the Hindutva book Red Indians are not a
minority because they belonged to the land. That
they were massacred in millions to render them
into a besieged minority is not a fact to bother
him. That 1 million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds
were killed in Turkey’s genocide by state
connivance and sponsorship in 1917 too would not
matter to him, despite the fact that both had
lived there for hundreds of years. He would
refuse to see they were the minorities singled
out for liquidation just as Hindutva has singled
out Christians and Muslims.
Whether this violence was a plant or a vengeance
of the weak we will perhaps never know. But, if
we seek to have a grip on the situation, we will
have to look deeper, look farther. What our
police and military are capable of in terms of
cold blooded murder in the lock up or fake
encounters is public knowledge. Our army excelled
itself in Chattisinghpura in Kashmir by
slaughtering in cold blood 24 Sikhs and laying
the crime at the doors of the militants, the more
savagely to pursue them and win awards. Such
plants are endemic to the institutional
imperatives of a repressive state.
As to vengeance. Those guilty of the murders of
Christians, those guilty of the genocide in
Gujarat 2002, those killing Dalits and adivasis
in various urban and rural locations, must be
seen punished, or the state would seem to have
nullified itself. It is the frustration of the
victims which may be stirring, however blindly,
to resort to these wanton acts of terror. The
perpetrators may not even care if they are thus
helping the victims of state terror or inducing
the state to intensify its regime of unremitting
terrorism on the minorities. Did the shoppers in
Paharganj, Govindpuri, and Sarojini Nagar not
include Muslims?
Two issues that are not so apart must be broached
here. BJP has denounced Punjab government for the
statues of seven terrorists in Ludhiana. It
should have begun with denouncing itself for the
two statues raised in Gujarat to its own
terrorists. Two, have we not failed, as in
Gujarat, to validate our claims and honor the
constitutional guarantees in the case of Kashmir
pulverized by quake? Have we done enough, and
fast, and well to
reach people there the much needed help and
succor? Or, the Hindu “majority (a fiction) is
happy to get Kashmir, but cleansed by nature of
thousands of Muslims? These utterances are not
limited to a crazy fringe in India any more. And,
they unmask us both as a state and tarnish us a
society. The report of our national endeavor
there are not upbeat (Yogi Sikand:
countercurrents.org).
Rounding up of Muslim youths following each such
mayhem, torturing them, destroying their families
with violent meanness and reckless mendacity,
concluding even without any preliminary inquiry
of substance that it was Al Qaeda or
Lashkar-i-Tayyeba which caused the blasts, is, to
put it mildly, both to revel in dereliction of
duty, and promote terrorism for
establishmentarian ends.
This is a disaster that comes with the sting of
winter in its tail; a disaster that has no early
closure. The projections are dire and compelling.
Some 8,00,000 are without shelter in the high
mountains and are extremely unlikely to have an
effective roof over their heads before snow cuts
off the area. The fate of these millions -
babies, women, the elderly, the seriously injured
and handicapped - are at best tenuous; at worst,
sealed.
We cannot of course choose where a disaster
should strike. But there cannot be any dispute
that the October 8 earthquake - said to cover
20,000 square kilometers, stretching from
Afghanistan to India -- marked one of the worst
sites on the face of the earth to manifest
itself. Much of the affected region is ensconced
within the treacherous folds of the
Hindukush-Karakoram ranges. Unlike the December
26 tsunami, which hit tourist-friendly regions
and therefore rang alarm bells in every capital
of the world, these are inhospitable heights
inaccessible to all but the most intrepid
journalist and relief organisation.
But greatly more unfortunate than its geographic
location is its location on the political map of
the region. Large swathes of the affected area
comprise one of the most bitterly contested
regions in the world, the site of bloody wars and
unrelenting militancy. It is a terrain that best
resembles a freezing tundra. Nothing grows on
these icy wastes of supposed national interest
but a constantly renewable harvest of outdated
policy formulations, static posturing, and
television soundbites which carry the ubiquitous
stench of mutual hostility.
In the first flush of the surprise and horror
engendered by the earthquake, there were some
words exchanged between India and Pakistan which
gave rise to the hope that the unfortunate
calamity would perhaps have some mitigating
consequences. That it would actually forge a
shared bond of cooperation, a shared sense of
purpose; that there would be an escape for at
least a short spell from the prison house of the
past. Those expectations were quickly belied, as
each side reverted to type and official lips
unleashed words like "sensitivities" and
"realities". There are sensitivities to consider,
observes Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf; it
is a question of reality, no room for
romanticism, pronounces Indian Defence Minister
Pranab Mukherjee, even as both natter on in the
same breath about the need to provide "urgent
help" to the "hapless victims". Every move that
each side proposes is carefully weighed in the
scales of precedent, scrupulously jotted down in
the debit and credit columns of each nation's
balance sheet.
Indian helicopters are welcomed by Pakistan but
without Indian army personnel piloting them; or
Pakistan's proposal for five relief centres along
the LoC must necessarily be pared down to three
by India. Meanwhile we continue to turn the
screws, each on the other. Rhetoric over F-16s,
A.Q. Khan, Gilgit, lace the air and is in
imminent threat of degenerating into
confrontationist positions. Our army bunkers may
not be quake proof. Not so the adamantine matrix
of Indo-Pak diplomacy. It is built to withstand
the shifts and eddies of the passing decades,
reinforced brick by verbal brick, on an
58-year-old blueprint based on mistrust and
equivalence. At its centre, lies the unfortunate
region of Kashmir.
There is another aspect to this exchange that
Smruti S. Pattanaik, a scholar in international
relations, highlighted in her study, /Elite
Perceptions in Foreign Policy/ - that is, the
essentially elitist nature of the official
Indo-Pak discourse. As Pattanaik observed:
"Policy arises out of elite discourse.
Perceptional biases have created a stereotype
image of each other, within which the expectation
of each other are formulated. This has rendered a
certain rigidity to the articulated stands of
both countries on various issues. Each concession
weighted purely in terms of 'gains' and 'losses'
within the prism of the two-nation theory. In a
relationship characterised by emotionalism, gains
tend to get interpreted as strength, and
compromise is equated with weakness." Pattanaik's
book deals with the period between 1989 and 1999,
but nothing has changed in essentials despite the
much bruited "peace talks". Indeed, if the "peace
talks" were a living thing, it would have been
reflected in an animated joint response of both
countries to the horrific natural calamity in
their respective backyards. The sterile response
to the earthquake can only be read as a
reflection of the innate sterility of the
on-going peace process.
International codes of conduct during times of
human suffering on a mass scale are based on the
imperative that the right to receive humanitarian
assistance and to offer it is a fundamental
humanitarian principle. Such offers cannot,
should not, be framed or presented as partisan
acts, or denied to people on the basis of race,
class, religion or nationality. Further, the
nature and extent of this assistance is based on
one criterion alone -- the actual requirements of
the affected population. This also means that the
need to reach the affected populations is
paramount. The process cannot be allowed to be
impeded by political or other extraneous -- and
often erroneous -- considerations, like national
pride and prestige. In fact, as some have argued,
it behooves a nation to privilege humanity and
concern, rather than false pride and prestige in
situations when its people are facing a great
distress that demands an urgent response.
Hurricane Katrina highlighted what had been
suspected all along -- that Black America has
fallen off Washington's radar, that the American
establishment neither cared about nor understood
its plight in its darkest hour. Will the October
8 earthquake hold a similar lesson for the
subcontinent? Will it reveal that neither India
nor Pakistan really cares about the Kashmiri,
only about a territory called Kashmir?
The clock is ticking. India and Pakistan do not
have much time left to choose whether they want
to be recorded by history as nations that could
rise above their situation and respond with
efficacy and magnanimity to the earthquake, or as
nations that allowed their narrow conceptions of
self-esteem to blind them and strap them into a
criminal lack of adequate and effective action.
Last Monday, India's Foreign Secretary Shyam
Saran made an important speech on nuclear weapons
and world security to the Institute for Defence
Studies and Analyses. The salient point of the
lecture was not, as emphasised in much of the
Pakistani media, a hardening of India's stance on
Iran's nuclear activities, nor even the demand
for a 'clarification' of the role of 'the
Pakistan-based A.Q. Khan network' in it. It was
the enunciation of a doctrinal shift in India's
nuclear posture.
Put simply, Saran announced a decisive departure
from India's traditional advocacy of global
nuclear disarmament. Instead, India has embraced
the one-sided agenda of selective nuclear
non-proliferation favoured by the nuclear
weapons-states (NWSs). From now on, India, long
an apostle of peace and nuclear weapons-free
world, will behave like a 'responsible' NWS,
which will prevent other countries from acquiring
nuclear weapons, while keeping and expanding its
own atomic arsenal.
Saran's speech, made just two days after the
India visit of US under-secretary Nicholas Burns,
marks the end of a 60 year-long era, in much of
which India took the moral high ground in
promoting international peace and arguing against
bloc rivalry and the use of force to resolve
conflicts.
This is a shameful break not just with India's
long-standing policy, but also the solemn pledge,
made last year in the United Progressive
Alliance's National Common Minimum Programme, to
take 'leadership' in fighting for a nuclear
weapons-free world.
Precisely because this policy shift is so radical
and massive, India wants to deny it. Saran claims
"continuity and consistency" in India's approach.
He rationalises this by falsifying India's record
on nuclear disarmament and the lead it took since
the 1950s in demanding a nuclear weapons-free
world. Thus, Saran says, India "can truly claim
to be among the founding fathers" of
non-proliferation. He invokes Nehru as its
apostle. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Nehru campaigned for nuclear disarmament, not
non-proliferation.
There's a sharp, clear difference between the two
terms. Non-proliferation is about preventing the
spread of nuclear weapons, both horizontally (to
countries other than the NWSs), and vertically
(through the expansion and refinement of existing
arsenals). Disarmament is about eliminating all
nuclear bombs from the world.
Non-proliferation accepts the legitimacy of the
possession of these weapons of mass annihilation
by a handful of states, while denying it to
others. The disarmament perspective regards them
as an unmitigated evil, which must be abolished
everywhere. That's because nuclear weapons don't
give security. They aren't legitimate instruments
of war. They are the ultimate instruments of
terror.
Nuclear weapons are often regarded as a sign of
strength. But their possession doesn't ensure
strategic superiority or military victory. Or
else, the US wouldn't have lost in Vietnam and
the USSR wouldn't have had to quit Afghanistan in
ignominy. Nor would threats by powerful NWSs to
weaker states have repeatedly failed.
There is of course a link between the complete
elimination of nuclear weapons and their
step-by-step reduction. It's in that spirit that
Nehru proposed a 'standstill' agreement or a
Comprehensive Test Ban in 1954, while renouncing
nuclear weapons. India continued to link nuclear
restraint to disarmament until recently. Now,
that link has snapped. This is a betrayal of the
Nehruvian legacy and India's traditional advocacy
of nuclear abolition.
This advocacy was in evidence even in the 1990s,
until the CTBT debate vitiated the climate. Only
a decade ago, India pleaded before the
International Court of Justice that nuclear
weapons be declared incompatible with
international law.
In 1996, India's Foreign Secretary (Salman
Haider) told the Conference on Disarmament at
Geneva: "We don't believe that the acquisition of
nuclear weapons is essential for national
security. We are also convinced that the
existence of nuclear weapons diminishes
international security. We, therefore, seek their
complete elimination. These are fundamental
precepts."
The ICJ, the world's highest authority on
international law, ruled in 1996 that the use or
threat of use of nuclear weapons is generally
illegal and contravenes international law.
Two years later, India exploded five bombs and
joined the very global order, which it had
condemned as "Atomic Apartheid". There was no
security rationale for this shift. The Vajpayee
government didn't conduct the strategic defence
review it had promised. It merely fulfilled the
nuclear obsession of the Hindutva current. The
decision was hidden even from the Defence
Minister. The Cabinet was not party to it. But
the RSS was.
Pakistan's blasts duly followed India's. A year
after the tests, the two fought the world's most
serious conventional conflict ever between any
two NWSs. Today, millions of their citizens have
become vulnerable to attacks by nuclear missiles
which take only minutes to hit each other's
cities.
India's military spending has more than doubled
since 1998. And Pakistan's has ballooned too. The
consequences are potentially ruinous for our
economies and societies, including the rise of
bellicose nuclear nationalism.
India made a great blunder in initiating nuclear
rivalry in South Asia. Pakistan has followed
India's lead in a knee-jerk manner. Now, India is
compounding its blunder by joining the US as a
junior nuclear partner. Pakistan shouldn't be
tempted to emulate India's bad bargain.
India has put such high stakes on the July
nuclear deal that it can be blackmailed into
making all kinds of compromises to save it --
including pressures on energy policy, Iran, on
trade negotiations on agriculture and services,
on patents, on anything.
Saran's speech has already prepared the ground
for the next Iran vote at the IAEA by saying
India won't accept "pursuit of clandestine
activities in respect to WMD-related
technologies". This sounds tough, but it reflects
caving in to US pressure.
By jumping on the non-proliferation bandwagon,
India risks becoming the laughing stock of the
world. India has moved from being a force for
peace to a force for hegemony. India's
capitulation to the US even while it pays lip
service to a multi-polar world will earn it
ridicule.
Powerful states don't respect client-nations.
Even weak states don't. Why should the King of
Nepal talk seriously to India if New Delhi's
Nepal policy is determined in "coordination" with
Washington? India's nuclear posturing lacks
credibility given its miserable rank of 127 in
the UN Human Development Index, which places it
squarely among the bottom one-fourth of the
world's nations.
India earned the world's respect when it was
poorer -- because of its democracy, its moral
clarity on certain issues, its secularist ideals,
and its effort at making the world a better
place. The new policy turn robs India of all this.
In his speech, Saran cites a version of the
"Third Class Railway Compartment" syndrome. This
means that when you are outside the coach, you
try to barge your way in. Once you are inside,
you forcibly keep all potential entrants out.
This is what Saran had in mind when he said "the
international community also needs to ask whether
the global non-proliferation regime is better
with India inside the tent or outside".
This statement is marked by double standards and
blatant inconsistency. It demeans India's stature
while sacrificing her policy independence. One
can only hope Pakistan doesn't follow India's
lead here.
(The writer, a former newspaper editor, is a
researcher and peace and human-rights activist
based in Delhi)
Why has the Kashmir Earthquake of 8 October been
termed the 'Southasia Quake' by the international
media, including the all-powerful, real-time
satellite television networks? Southasia is a
vast region and the ground trembled beneath one
corner of it, well known to the world as Kashmir,
on two sides of the 'line of control'. Somehow,
it does injustice to the suffering of the living
and memory of the dead to call the disaster by
the name of the larger region when a local name
is available.
Meanwhile, the UN has declared the Kashmir
catastrophe more devastating than last year's
tsunami. Three to four million people are
suddenly without homes on the edge of winter. The
result of an underground quake, the tsunami of
12/26/04 struck the southern beaches of
Southasia, while the earthquake of 8/10/05 hit
the northwestern mountain fastness. Because it
was such an unusual event and also because many
holidaying westerners died tragically, the
coverage of the tsunami attracted emergency
support on a massive scale. Not so with the
Kashmir quake of 8/10. To date the world is not
even close to matching the $11 billion gathered
for post-tsunami relief.
In the face of an earthquake that knows neither
borders nor LoCs, of course we must utilise the
opportunity of the disaster to ease Kashmir
tensions between India and Pakistan. But
geopolitical certitude in the two capitals will
surely require something more than a shifting of
geological plates to undo. What we need is for
national establishments in both countries to
learn to take the Kashmiris themselves into
confidence, as well as find a way to fuzz the
frontiers and sanction dual identities. For that,
we need a shake-up of the mind, not the ground.
The immediate challenge in Muzaffarabad, in Uri,
in Hazara, in Tangdhar, is to help those without
shelter and means of livelihood to make it
through the winter of 2005-06. But thereafter, we
are looking at many years of rehabilitation.
Given the sharp drop that we can expect in
humanitarian concerns as soon as the television
cameras stop broadcasting live, the
intelligentsia of Pakistan, India and Southasia
as a whole have a responsibility not to turn
their backs on this quake and its living victims.
They have to stay with the Kashmiris for the long
haul and keep the governments on their toes.
This year, nature chose Kashmir to sound a
warning to the rest of Southasia-most
importantly, to those who live along the
Himalayan-Hindukush rimland. The geologists are
not sitting easy and neither should the rest of
us. The prospect looms of a horrendous earth
shaking in what is known as the Central Himalayan
Gap, which covers all of Nepal and more. There
has not necessarily been enough release of
'cumulative elastic energy' in the rubbing of
plates beneath Nepal and the nearby regions to
the north, west and south. A huge swath of
territory is therefore dramatically overdue for a
devastating quake. The suffering of Kashmiris
must at least inform those who are in a position
to save lives when the earthquake hits the
Central Himalaya.
The newly adopted building material all over the
Himalaya-Hindukush is concrete. Heavy-set
buildings were the death traps of Kashmir as
testified by numerous pictures of the tragedy.
Kathmandu, the largest urban concentration in the
Himalaya, will become a 'valley of death' when
the Big One comes, for its buildings are now
nearly all of concrete using 'pillar system'
construction. And what of rescue? In Kathmandu
and elsewhere, there will not be the military
helicopters and ground transport available in
militarised Kashmir.
To die under rubble while awaiting a rescue that
never comes is a gruesome way to go, as happened
to many on and after 8/10. Kashmir will have to
be helped back on its feet, while we look ahead
to the next Big One-and prepare.
Pakistan's resource base is under pressure from
the October 8 earthquake. The government says
that $5-10 billion will eventually be needed to
rehabilitate and rebuild the lives and homes of
the quake victims. The United Nations is asking
the world to contribute half a billion dollars
for relief work immediately but has had little
success so far in meeting its target. Some money
has come from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other
Muslim countries. But international donors have
not been as forthcoming as hoped. Indeed, it does
seem that while the Western countries are
agreeable to sending men and materials to
Pakistan they are still leery of forking over
cash to Islamabad. Is the fact at the back of
their minds that Pakistan is about to spend $1.5
billion on a first batch of F-16 fighter bombers
when that money could be better spent on
alleviating the hardships of the people of
Pakistan? Countries in the EU, like France, which
have yet to decide to give any kind of aid, could
conceivably balk at the seeming contradiction
between Pakistan's needs and its military's
desires.
The good news from Washington is that Pakistan's
military leadership might be "reconsidering" the
F-16 deal. The Bush administration is expected to
formally notify the US Congress next week of
plans to sell the planes. The order is for 55 new
Lockheed Martin planes, 25 used aircraft as well
as so-called "mid-life" upgrades that would
significantly improve the capability of another
32 jets in the Pakistani Air Force's inventory.
The price of all this will go into billions of
dollars. This is a stupendous amount, given the
fact that Pakistan's GDP is not even worth $100
billion and at least $5 billion will be needed
for quake relief in the short and medium term.
Given Pakistan's conflictual-mode defence
strategy vis a vis India, its air force (PAF) has
been under pressure for some time now in view of
its depleting armour. Its current fleet of 32
F-16s is not fully operational due to the lack of
spares. Indeed, the PAF has had to cannibalise a
few aircraft to keep the rest operational. But
all said and done, the truth is that even after
getting the 24 new F-16s (after shelling out $1.5
million) the value of the new aircraft
acquisitions by Pakistan in the Indo-Pakistan
weapons calculus will remain only symbolic. It
may serve to improve the PAF's morale but it will
not bring commensurate strength. On the other
hand, it might conceivably further hone the
instinct in the Pakistani strategic elite to
engage India in a conventional arms race. That
raises the question: Isn't it inhumane at this
tragic point in our national life to think of
avoiding war with India by rearming ourselves?
Unfortunately, there is another lethal aspect to
this trend which must be kept in mind.
India can actually lead us to our perdition by
playing on our imitative military instinct. The
US offer to Pakistan is accompanied with a much
bigger offer of technology transfer to India. New
Delhi will be offered top-of-the-line fighter
aircraft, such as the F-18, or the Joint Strike
Fighter, with the additional advantage of
licensed production in India. The US is also
thinking of transferring to India some of its
anti-ballistic missile systems and dual-use
technology. Given the foremost reflex in Pakistan
to match India weapon for weapon, this gives
India an advantage over us, which is more lethal
than its military superiority. Last year, India
led the developing world in arms purchases,
signing agreements totalling $15.7 billion
between 1997 and 2004. The size of its economy
gives it the leeway to spend more on arms than
Pakistan at all times. Its edge over Pakistan in
technology sharpens this advantage further. It
can force us to spend ourselves into insolvency.
The world sees the folly of an Indo-Pakistan arms
race. It wants the two to normalise relations and
become economically interdependent neighbours.
Since 2003, the two are actually involved in a
process of normalisation that is popular in both
India and Pakistan. Instead of focusing on the
weapons calculus, more and more opinion-makers in
South Asia are thinking of alleviating poverty in
the region and exploring the synergies concealed
in a cooperative Indo-Pakistan equation. Now that
the mother of all cataclysms has happened - which
the world insists on calling "the South Asian
earthquake" - there is a need in Pakistan to
shift from the conflictual paradigm and think of
peace as a struggle against the "external threat"
from an overly strained environment and economy.
NEW DELHI, OCT 25 (PTI)
Comparatively a newcomer in the international arms sales arena, India may
be on the brink of concluding its biggest ever weapons platform deal to
sell 12 Advance Light Helicopters(ALH) to Chile.
The deal, estimated to be worth Rs 200 crores (USD 44 million), according
to Defence Ministry sources here may be clinched during the official visit
to Santiago by Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee at the head of a high
level delegation. He leaves here tonight on a five day visit to the South
American country.
"The visit assumes special significance as Chile has shown heightened
interest in the Dhruv Advanced Light Helicopter" an official statement
said here asserting that HAL (Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd) had expressed
confidence of being in a position to meet the needs of the Chilean Armed
Forces and Security Services.
"Chile has also shown interest in a number of other armaments and defence
related stores" an official spokesman said.
Though India has sold a number of Dhruv ALH to Israel and neighbouring
countries like Nepal, the deal with Chile would be the first major bulk
sales of the helicopters, which have been making waves during recent
international aviation shows including the prestigious ones in Paris and
Faranborough in England.
For the Chilean order, Dhruv was pitted against some of the frontline
helicopters being manufactured by major weastern nations including the
Eurocopter and American choppers. The Chilean deal would be culmination of
almost three years of hard negotiations between the two countries.
In 2003, the then Chief of Air Staff Air Chief Marshal S Krishnaswamy led
a high level HAL and IAF delegation during which the Indian Advanced Light
Helicopter went through tough user trials over the Andes.
During the trials, the IAF lone helicopter Aerobatic team, Sarang put up
performance for the Chilean armed forces.
During his visit Mukherjee, officials said, would call on the Chilean
President Ricardo Lagos Escobar and hold delegation-level talks with his
counterpart Jaime Ravinet.
New Delhi, Oct. 24: Nearly five years after terrorists stormed the Red
Fort here killing two jawans and a civilian, a Delhi court on Monday
convicted Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Tayyaba militant Mohammad Arif, alias
Ashfaq, and six others while acquitting four accused. The quantum of the
punishment will be pronounced on October 29. Ashfaq and his key Indian
conspirators, Nazir Ahmed Qasid and his son Farooq Ahmad Qasid, have been
found guilty of waging war against the state which can attract a death
sentence. Delivering the verdict in a packed courtroom, additional
sessions judge O.P. Saini, also held Ashfaq guilty of murder, criminal
conspiracy, cheating, forgery and illegal possession of arms and
ammunition. The Pakistani national was also convicted for illegally
entering and staying in India under the Foreigners Act. Nazir and Farooq
have also been convicted for criminal conspiracy. The lone woman accused
in the attack on December 22, 2000, and Ashfaq’s Indian wife Rahamana
Yousuf Farooqui was found guilty under Section 216 of the IPC (harbouring
an offender) and 218 of the IPC (trying to save a person from punishment)
for providing shelter to the LeT militant. However, the court acquitted
her of the charges of waging war against the country and the conspiracy to
attack the 17th-century Mughal monument.
Civilization is on a mission from God to free the
world from the evil of tyranny and bring
democracy and human rights to all peoples of the
planet. Presumably, there is human concern and
compassion behind such a quest, more grand than
any conceived in the long and glorious past of
humanity. It is worth contemplating however, the
shape in which this compassion appears. If the
early signs in the twenty-first century are
anything to go by, the coming decades look
devastatingly ominous. Let us look at some
examples.
Consider this. Four years ago, in October 2001,
Western civilization thought nothing of starving
over 7 million poor innocents (themselves victims
of the Islamic fundamentalists) in Afghanistan in
order to exact revenge for 9/11 (and for failed
oil negotiations) on the Taliban. These people
relied on food delivered by aid agencies who were
ordered to suspend operations by Washington in
order to put their delivery vehicles out of the
line of fire and make the bombing possible. At
the time, Noam Chomsky described what was
beginning to happen as a "silent genocide", for
which the West and its democratic citizens were
morally responsible. Fortunately the bombing
campaign ended soon enough, food deliveries could
be restored quickly and Western societies and
their governments were relieved of a potentially
colossal "embarrasment" (though the faithful
corporate media would have ensured that nothing
was heard about any genocide this side of the
Suez). Fortunately, compassion did not come into
question (except of course in the case of about
4000 civilian deaths, caused by US bombing).
In March 2003 the US, the UK and their string of
credulous cronies launched the morally
unconscionable and legally criminal invasion of
Iraq on false pretexts, putting at the mercy of
their dreadful "Shock and Awe" campaign the lives
of millions of people who had already suffered
for well over a decade the effect of the
murderous UN sanctions which had led to the
deaths of a million people, half of them children
(according to UNICEF). This habit of
civilization, whereby it employs starvation as a
means of warfare has hardly ended in Iraq. BBC
reports UN human rights investigator, Jean
Ziegler, as having accused the US and British
forces in Iraq of breaching international law by
depriving civilians of food and water in besieged
cities. "A drama is taking place in total silence
in Iraq, where the coalition's occupying forces
are using hunger and deprivation of water as a
weapon of war against the civilian population,"
Ziegler told a news briefing in Geneva a few days
ago.
Since the war on terrorism was launched by
Washington, 49 months of the most hectic manhunt
in history by the most powerful and wealthy state
known to man have not yielded Osama Bin Laden
(something that truly makes one wonder whether
there was ever a clear intention to get him in
the first place!). Meanwhile, taking both the
Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns into account,
somewhere between 110,000 and 130,000 people (we
cannot know exactly how many since it appears,
after Katrina, that Washington barely keeps track
even of its own dead), who had nothing to do with
terrorism have been killed, hundreds of thousands
have been wounded or maimed for life and the
everyday lives of 50 million people subjected to
hardship and hoplessness. As has been said
repeatedly by commentators across the political
spectrum, this has led predictably to an
exacerbation, rather than an alleviation, of
terrorism.
Compassion?
Iraq had been named in Bush's "Axis of Evil"
speech in January, 2002. So had been Iran. Since
the time when the first phase of the war on Iraq
had been completed, Iran has repeatedly been
brought up as Washington's next target, once
again on grounds as suspect as those on which the
Iraq invasion was launched. After getting
promising support from IAEA members, the US
Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has recently
been jetting around the world trying to convince
global powers why an invasion of Iran is
necessary to make the rogue state behave itself
in nuclear matters.
The Western media has made the world forget that
Iran suffered a massive earthquake in December,
2003. Over 25,000 people died and hundreds of
thousands were rendered homeless. Six months
later there was another major earthquake which
led to the loss of almost a thousand human lives.
None of this, however, has prevented the West
from seriously contemplating "action" against
Iran. Britain, France and Germany have all
succumbed to Washington in applying pressure on a
country that has suffered natural disasters so
recently, other than having to bear the burden of
economic sanctions led by the US.
In October 2005 it has been Pakistan's turn to
endure nature's cruel fury. In the recent
earthquake over 50,000 people have died and at
least 2 million rendered homeless. There was an
urgent request made to rich countries by
President Musharraf for helicopters to deliver
relief and supplies to Kashmir. The US could only
spare eight from their obviously more important
operations in Afghanistan. Britain could spare
none. (Only some minibuses were sent!) Aid
pledges made by both governments are
embarrasingly insignificant and are exceeded by
private collections which are already being sent.
Meanwhile, just yesterday (October 17), The
Independent reported that Tony Blair has ordered
a new generation of nuclear weapons to replace
the existing Trident fleet at a cost of billions
of pounds. Blair had also made a peace-making
visit to India and Pakistan a few years back
(just before the two countries had engaged in the
Kargil conflict in Kashmir) and returned after
selling over a billion pounds of weapons to both
sides (an old empire tradition, welcomed by
ruling elites in the poor countries, and good for
the world economy).
Did compassion guide the deals?
Finally, take the case of Darfurs in Sudan, where
the ruling Islamic fundamentalists have been busy
overseeing a genocide in which upto half a
million black African farmers and their families
might have already been killed over the past two
years in order to clear their farming land for
drilling oil and setting up pipelines. British,
Chinese, Indian and Japanese oil companies are
already in the fray. US companies want their
share of the booty, though a law passed under
Clinton (remember he ordered the bombing of the
pharmaceutical factory in 1998) prohibits trade
with Sudan. This situation is changing since
Condoleeza Rice took over the office of Secretary
of State this year and US oil companies are
beginning to do business in Sudan. So, even if
Rice's predecessor, Colin Powell (under pressure
from Christian and African-American groups in the
US) had designated what has been happening in
Darfurs as a "genocide", no military intevention
has been forthcoming from the Western powers
(just like in Rwanda) to stop it. Compassion
somehow always gives way to oil pressure!
As their leaders scrape the depleted barrels of
their humanity, citizens of democratic societies
in the West urgently need to ask themselves why
they tolerate such open hypocrisies from their
elected representatives. At present it is mostly
the inhabitants of poor countries who pay the
price for these mass-deceits. But the time is
hardly far when citizens of Western democracies
will be footing increasing portions of the bill
too. In fact, this is already happening, if one
takes into reckoning the growing burden of war
taxes, lives lost to war and terrorism, the
pressure of immigrants from regions of the world
impacted by war, poverty and tyranny, a rapid
erosion of democratic rights (in the form, among
other things, of anti-terror legislation and the
muzzled media, not to speak of the various forms
of thought control exercised on and within the
academy) and, not the least important, the
corrosion of the moral sense which, two world
wars notwithstanding, has thus far sustained
these societies in the past.
It is a matter of unspeakable astonishment that
when so much stands to be lost in the West, most
people are numbly going about their daily
business, not paying much heed to the happenings
of the world. The alternative to a serious
internal reckoning by the West is the mounting
nihilism and narcissism of consumer society
which, in a world as interconnected as ours (in
which, for instance, the availability of products
ranging from lipsticks to Jaguars relies on an
on-going supply of cheap oil and resources from
other countries) is not merely solipsistic
thoughtlessness about the sufferings that
billions go through in order for the posh and
privileged to go on with their indulgent ways. It
is ultimately a recipe for catastrophe. This is
no time for compassion fatigue. Even vaguely
enlightened self-interest should suggest
large-scale collective action to re-democratize
the democracies.
Nobel-prize winning Indian poet Rabindranath
Tagore had written in 1916, in the midst of World
War I: "the West must not make herself a curse to
the world by using her power for her own selfish
needs." However, he also wrote that "in the
so-called free countries the majority of the
people are not free, they are driven by the
minority to a goal which is not even known to
them." By the time he was on his death-bed in
1940, in the midst of World War II, more evidence
had appeared of the declining human condition in
the West. Tagore then wrote that "the failure of
humanity in the West to preserve the worth of
their civilization and the dignity of man which
they had taken centuries to build up, weighs like
a nightmare on my mind." The holocaust in Germany
and the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
fours years after Tagore's death, made the
nightmare visible to the world.
If the US instigates an invasion of Iran - either
by using a staged attack on Israel as a trigger
or by blaming Iran for its self-created mounting
mess in Iraq or by simply aiming to stall its
nuclear programme, and all, in the end, only to
regain control over Iran's oilfields that the
1979 revolution took away - then all bets are
off. Whether the world stands or falls after that
is anyone's guess.
Of one thing one can be sure. They who claim the
guardianship of civilization today are its worst
traitors and can know nothing about compassion.
For that they have to achieve the impossible feat
of humbling themselves to the level of those two
school-teachers in Muzaffarabad, Kashmir who,
when the earth below them was trembling with rage
ten days ago, stood in the way of a falling wall
and sacrificed their lives to save the many
children who would otherwise all be dead today.
Aseem Shrivastava is a free-lance writer.
Saab on Oct. 18 signed a provisional $1.1 billion contract with Pakistan
to deliver an airborne early warning (AEW) surveillance system comprising
Saab 2000 turboprop planes equipped with the Erieye airborne radar. Saab
refused to specify the number of AEW systems contained in the preliminary
contract. The Swedish company said a number of outstanding issues remained
before the contract can be finalized. “We are not disclosing what exactly
these issues are,” said Saab spokesman Peter Larsson. “What we can say
right now is that we do not expect to execute delivery for several years.
All of the integration work attaching to the contract will be carried out
in Sweden.”
The AEW systems to be supplied to Pakistan are to be primarily used for
continuous surveillance of the air territory, borders and the sea, Saab
Chief Executive Åke Svensson said at the company’s quarterly results
meeting in Stockholm Oct. 21. “We have been actively negotiating this
contract with Pakistan for two to three years,” said Svensson. Initial
leaks from Saab’s negotiations with Pakistan suggested that a final order
could entail delivery of up to 14 Saab 2000s for the Pakistan Air Force to
replace aging F-27 Fokker planes. Defense industry analysts in Sweden
suggest that the final number of AEW systems delivered to Pakistan could
range between six and eight. Of the total contract value, two-thirds of
the final amount will go to Saab and one-third to Ericsson Microwave
Systems, which makes the Erieye radar, Saab said. “As Saab is not
manufacturing Saab 2000s any more, we will need to source the turboprop
aircraft we need from the civilian market in Scandinavia and globally.
There are a lot of aircraft of this type with low-flying hours and which
are in near-mint condition. We will have no difficulty sourcing the Saab
2000s we need in the numbers required to fulfill our contract with
Pakistan,” said Larsson. Powered by two Allison/Rolls-Royce AE2100
engines, the Saab 2000 can remain airborne for nine hours at 30,000 feet.
Ericsson’s Erieye is the first long-range, high-performance airborne early
warning and control system to be customized to operate on small- to
medium-sized commercial and military turboprop planes. The Erieye can
effectively spot a fighter-sized target about 330 kilometers away.
Seaborne targets can be detected 320 kilometers away when the aircraft is
at optimum cruising height.
New Delhi: Concern for quake victims finally got the better of
geopolitics, with Pakistan matching India's decision to open the Line of
Control to offer succour to calamity-hit Kashmiris. In near-simultaneous
moves which followed international con cern about Pakistan's continued
reluctance to help Kashmiris cross the LoC before harsh weather claims
more lives, the two countries decided to open five points, three of which
are common to both lists, on the LoC. India decided not to wait for
Pakistan to overcome its hesitation to make formal proposals to help
quake-ravaged Kashmiris. On Saturday, it went ahead uni-laterally and
opened three relief camps on its side of the LoC for quake victims from
PoK. As part of the move, announced by the ME A on Saturday evening,
relief and rehabilitation camps are to be opened at Kaman near Aman Setu
in Uri, Tithwal in Tangdhar and Chakan Da Bagh in Poonch. The MEA
spokesperson said these centres would provide medical facilities to people
from across the LoC. India's decision was conveyed to the Pakistan High
Commission on Saturday afternoon and, in Islamabad, to the foreign office
by Indian high commissioner Shiv Shankar Menon. The proposals coincided
with Pakistan coming up with five of its own points on the LoC for India
to assist in relief. This was given to the Indian High Commission in
Islamabad, the Pakistan foreign office spokesman said.
NEW DELHI, Oct. 20 (UPI) -- Indian Navy chief Adm. Arun Prakash said that
the Indian Navy was "keenly examining" a Pentagon offer to sell it a large
troop transport ship. Critics, however, charge that the USS Trenton is
outdated and not suitable for India's military modernization program.
New Kerala news agency reported that the Pentagon, under its Foreign
Military Sales program, has offered India the USS Trenton.
The USS Trenton is a landing platform dock (LPD) used for long-range
transport of large numbers of troops.
Prakash said that the Indian Navy was evaluating the American offer as the
Navy strives to strengthen its ability to transport relief materials
following natural disasters.
"One of the major lessons learnt after the December 2004 tsunami was the
requirement to augment sealift capability to enable relief materials (to)
reach the affected areas. This calls for the services of a large
amphibious vessel and the navy is keenly examining the offer for an LPD by
the U.S. Navy under the FMS program," he said.
Some naval specialists counter that the USS Trenton was commissioned in
1971 and with age the vessel has deteriorated.
Critics added that the U.S. Marine Corps, which also uses LPDs, has
complained about problems with the ships.
New Delhi: The Manmohan Singh government is expected by the United States
to fulfil its commitments under the civilian nuclear energy agreement by
early next year so that President George W. Bush can move Congress to make
the necessary changes to put the agreement into effect before he visits
India in early 2006. US undersecretary for political affairs R. Nicholas
Burns is arriving here on Thursday to work out the implementation schedule
and ensure adherence to the commitments by both governments. In an address
to the Asia Society on the eve of his departure, Mr Burns indicated the
above time table, adding, "India will be working to develop a way to
segregate its civil and military nuclear sectors and develop an
appropriate safeguards regime of the sort envisaged in our July 18 (2005)
agreement." The Indian government, which has so far refused to spell out
the agenda for discussion, has been upstaged by Mr Burns, who had no
hesitation in pointing out that the last was a "necessary step" to
implement the agreement. He will insist during his interactions with top
Indian officials to firm up a schedule for the implementation of the
commitments which, for India, range from the separation of military and
civilian nuclear facilities to signing the additional protocol allowing
intrusive IAEA inspections of its military nuclear facilities. Mr Burns
said, virtually linking the vote on Iran to the civil nuclear energy
agreement, that "India’s vote to find Iran in non-compliance with IAEA
standards was an even more dramatic example of where it stands on the
critical effort to prevent a theocratic Iran from acquiring nuclear
weapons capability." The strong assertion made it apparent that the Bush
administration does not expect a re-think from the Manmohan Singh
government on this issue.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said Oct. 20 the government could allocate
about 3 percent of India’s gross domestic product for its defense needs if
the economy grows at 8 percent annually. “If our economy grows at 8
percent per annum it will not be difficult for us to allocate about 3
percent of our gross domestic product for our national defense,” Singh
said. “This should provide for a handsome defense budget,” he said in
comments to an annual meeting of India’s armed forces commanders. “Our
priority is to pursue policies to generate faster economic growth and
mobilize more resources,” he added. In February, Indian Finance Minister
Palaniappan Chidambaram announced a 7.8 percent hike in its defense budget
to 830 billion rupees ($19 billion) or 2.6 percent of GDP while laying out
the national budget for 2005-2006. India’s defense budget for the year
2004-2005 was $770 billion. Military experts say India’s aging military —
the world’s fourth largest — is badly in need of modernization. India, one
of the world’s biggest arms buyers with one million-plus troops, is
looking for 126 new jet fighters to replace an accident-prone fleet of
Russian-built MiGs, new submarines from France, an anti-missile system
from the United States and rocket launchers from Russia. Defense analyst
Commodore C.U. Bhaskar, deputy head of the Institute of Defense Studies
and Analyses, said India’s defense budget, which averaged between 2.3 and
2.6 percent of GDP for almost a decade, has been “insufficient for
modernization and new acquisitions of military hardware required to be
relevant to changing times”. “So I think it’s a very welcome development
that for the first time a prime minister has made a commitment of giving
three percent of GDP to defense, even if it is linked to eight percent
economic growth,” he said. Bhaskar recalled that India had allocated three
percent of its GDP for defense in the mid-1980s. India has fought three
wars with arch-rival Pakistan and came close to a fourth in 2002. New
Delhi and Islamabad are currently in the midst of a tentative peace
process that was launched in January 2004. India and China too had a
brief, bitter border conflict in 1962 but are also engaged in peace talks.
India’s economy is expected to grow at seven percent in the fiscal year
ending March 2006.
SRINAGAR, India Oct 20
The devastating October 8 earthquake may have shifted thousands of
landmines planted by Indian and Pakistani troops along their disputed
Kashmir border, a group warned Thursday.
"We are very much concerned," said Shafat Hussain of Global Green Peace, a
non-government organisation that has worked since 1998 to persuade India
and Pakistan to demine the region.
"There are thousands of mines out there threatening to take human lives."
Hussain said areas along the de facto border, the Line of Control (LoC),
are "heavily mined" on both the sides.
"As the earthquake triggered massive landslides along the Line of Control,
it must have surely relocated these mines," said Hussain.
"We are told that respective armies do keep a proper map of the planted
mines, but those maps will not help, given the devastation."
Army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Vijay Batra played down the risk.
"Landmines have been planted along the LoC and army posts some 58 years
ago. No civilian area is involved," he told AFP.
"Wherever a little bit of damage has taken place to the minefields due to
the landslides, it is not affecting the civilians as no mines have drifted
or shifted towards the civilian areas."
The Red Cross says that in the heat of war, mines are often not mapped or
monitored and can shift depending on the weather and soil type, sometimes
travelling kilometers if washed out by heavy rain.
Hussain said if mines have been displaced they will put the lives of
quake-hit villagers living along the LoC at risk.
Scores of people have died in landmine explosions over the years in Uri
district, one of the regions in Indian Kashmir worst hit by the quake.
It took the Indian army weeks to demine a three-kilometer (two mile)
stretch of road in Uri that is part of a route opened in April for a bus
service between the Indian and Pakistani Kashmir capitals Srinagar and
Muzaffarabad.
The quake killed 1,300 in Indian Kashmir and tens of thousands on the
Pakistan side.
SRINAGAR: Jammu and Kashmir Minister of State for Education Ghulam Nabi
Lone was shot dead by a militant, while CPI (M) State secretary M.Y.
Tarigami escaped unhurt in a similar bid in the high-security Tulsi Bagh
area here on Tuesday. Two security guards and a civilian were also killed
in the incidents, for which the Islamic Front and Al-Mansoorein have
claimed responsibility. Two militants, believed to be a suicide squad,
sneaked into the colony, where the houses of Ministers and legislators are
located. According to one account, one militant, along with some visitors,
entered Dr. Lone's house and fired at Central Reserve Police Force guard
Sonu Prakash, killing him on the spot. He then entered the room of the
Minister, who was talking to members of the public. Police sources,
however, said the panicked visitors ran out soon after the guard was shot.
The militant then opened fire, leaving Dr. Lone and two civilians in a
pool of blood. At the same time, the other militant attacked Mr.
Tarigami's house after he was denied entry. On being challenged by
security guard Abdur Rasheed, the militant hurled a grenade and fired
indiscriminately, killing him. Other security personnel retaliated and
engaged the militant until he was killed. Dr. Lone was taken to the S.K.
Institute of Medical Sciences here, where doctors declared him brought
dead. An injured civilian, Mohammad Siddique, died there later.
Congressional leaders crucial to the fate of a controversial U.S.-India
nuclear deal are pressing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to consult
them before proposing legislation to implement the agreement. The leaders
make their case in a letter that congressional aides said reflects deep
unease about the deal's consequences and the way the administration
secretly negotiated it, without input from lawmakers who must approve it.
"We firmly believe that such consultations will be crucial to the
successful consideration of the final agreement or agreements by our
committees and the Congress as a whole," they wrote in the letter, which
was obtained by Reuters.
Many members of Bush's Republican Party, which controls Congress, and also
many Democrats fear the deal excessively benefits India and undermines
international efforts to halt the spread of nuclear weapons. The letter
was signed by Republican Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois, chairman of the
House International Relations Committee; Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of
Indiana, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and the
panels' top Democrats, Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware and Rep. Tom Lantos
of California. For nearly 30 years the United States led the global fight
to deny India access to nuclear technology because it has developed
nuclear weapons and tested them. But President George W. Bush jettisoned
this approach with a July 18 agreement that would permit nuclear
cooperation between the two democracies. He is seeking changes in U.S. law
and international regulations to allow India to obtain restricted items,
including nuclear fuel. Undersecretary of State R. Nicholas Burns, in a
telephone interview with Reuters on Oct. 18 before flying to Paris and New
Delhi, said Rice intends to privately brief lawmakers on South Asia
policy, including India, later this month. The administration hopes to
propose legislation to implement the nuclear deal early in 2006, after
India drafts a plan for separating its civilian and military nuclear
facilities, he said. The separation plan is at the heart of the nuclear
deal because it is meant to ensure any U.S. or international cooperation
with India advances only the South Asian nation's civilian energy program,
not weapons development. Burns said the separation issue will be central
to his talks in New Delhi this week but it would probably take a month or
two for the plan to be drawn up. Once a clear separation plan is offered
by India, it will be easier to ask the U.S. Congress for the necessary
changes, he said. Burns has said the nuclear deal is among the
administration's top legislative priorities and he is confident Congress
will approve it before a U.S.-India summit in New Delhi in early 2006. But
his optimism runs counter to the views of many in Congress. India is a
nuclear power but not a signatory of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
"I think this is going to be a very tough deal" to get approved,
especially in time for the planned U.S.-India summit, said one Republican
congressional aide. A second Republican adviser told Reuters: "It's very
dangerous to assume we'd be predisposed to act quickly." "No one believes
the Indians will do that (separation) as quickly as implied in that
(Burns) statement. This is just a plan. Why should the United States
change its laws before India implements the plan," he said. Burns insisted
officials are in touch with Congress. "There are concerns out there but I
think we're beginning to answer them. The important thing is to get the
agreement done and in the right way," he said. The administration
considers India a democratic ally and rising global power that will be
central to promoting peace, stability and prosperity in the decades ahead.
Fear of revealing nuclear testing and the refusal
to sign the test ban treaty delay the exchange of
seismic data.
BOMBAY - In the wake of the recent earthquake
that devastated Kashmir, some Indian officials
are reevaluating the government's refusal to
share real-time online seismology data with the
international community.
India has balked at putting seismic data online
because it could provide evidence of underground
nuclear testing. The country's refusal to sign
the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty also excludes
it from exchanging data with the International
Monitoring System, a global network of
seismological sensors operated by treaty
signatories.
Seismologists can more rapidly and accurately
pinpoint the location and power of an earthquake
when real-time data can be triangulated against a
wide network of sensors. A delay of even seconds
in reporting data induces errors in the exact
location and could set back relief efforts in
their crucial early stages, prompting some
scientists here to argue against data hoarding.
"In India, the nuclear issue is a sensitive one.
But now the question is about saving lives. The
policy certainly needs a review," says Sushil
Gupta from the Stress Analysis and Seismology
Department at the Nuclear Power Corporation of
India in Bombay.
Meanwhile, relief efforts continue in regions of
India and Pakistan affected by the Oct. 8 quake
that has claimed an estimated 54,000 lives. Some
injured people still await transport to hospitals
by helicopter, an effort hindered in recent days
by torrential rain and snow. The chief minister
of India's Jammu-Kashmir state called on Delhi
Monday to restore telephone links, cut since
1990, between his state and Pakistan so that
people could find out what happened to relatives
across the border.
As for the value of sharing seismic data in the
event of a future earthquake, some
decision-makers in Delhi have yet to get the
message. "Share data? What for?" asked an
official from the Ministry of Science, sounding
nonplussed when questioned about India's policy
to not make real-time data available via
broadband.
"Effectively reporting seismic hazards
considerably reduces vulnerability to it, if not
totally eliminates it," says David Booth from the
British Geological Survey. He notes that at
international meetings seismologists have
frequently deplored the absence of free seismic
data exchange with India, but to little effect.
"Open-data sharing in seismology over the past
century ... has been of enormous importance in
reporting of earthquakes and studies of global
and regional earthquakes," says Shane Ingate,
director of operations at the Incorporated
Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) in
Washington, the world's repository for data from
most seismic networks around the globe. "It is
regrettable that India ... imposes restriction on
the open and rapid access of these important
data."
Though India is free to contribute to and draw
from IRIS's data, the country does neither. "All
Indian data contributed to the IRIS would then
become free and openly accessible to anyone that
requests it. India is probably wary of that,"
says Mr. Ingate.
Seismology can provide national maps of
earthquake shaking hazards which yield
information essential to building codes in
regions of known earthquake activity, explains
Ingate. Such "shake maps" can also predict the
intensity of shaking due to an earthquake, he
says. "Then, when an earthquake occurs, given
accurate location and magnitude determination,
these shake maps allow first responders to
develop a coordinated response to move directly
and precisely to the areas with the most societal
impact."
This kind of information, Ingate says, becomes
less accurate along the edges, or outside a
seismic network, as when one country does not
share its in-country network data with those
in-country networks in surrounding regions.
On request, India does share a kind of data
called "phase data," which helps in detailed
analysis of earthquakes. But there's a time lapse
associated with it. "Delays of even minutes to
seconds can severely impede the ability to
provide rapid and accurate reporting of
earthquakes," says Ingate.
Kapil Sibal, the minister of science and
technology, acknowledged to reporters in Delhi
last week that "India surely needs to network
with the rest of the global earthquake community.
It needs to re-think on all old issues."
"That's a big policy decision made at high levels
within the Indian government," says Rajendra
Kumar Chadha, a scientist at the National
Geophysical Research Institute in Hyderabad. He
advocates that all stations in the Himalayan
network be well connected to speedily transmit
real-time online data to the Indian
Meteorological Department in Delhi, and to the
rest of the globe. "Considering how rigid we are
about nuclear issues, acknowledging we need to
review the policy is a big step forward."
BEFORE THE earthquake of October 8, the disputed
region of Jammu and Kashmir was widely seen as
the likeliest flashpoint for a nuclear disaster.
After the quake it has become 'Ground Zero' for
unprecedented human misery.
As luck would have it, in most disaster-stricken
situations in India and Pakistan as well as in
Kashmir, as is now evident, it is not the state,
the army or the so-called ordinary people who
become the fulcrum of rescue and relief
operations. In India, it is the rightwing Hindu
organizations such as the RSS and Shiv Sena that
reach the sites of disasters before anyone else.
In Azad Kashmir and the Frontier, religious
parties like Jamaat-i-Islami and the JUI are
reported to be quiet active in organizing and
delivering aid and rescue.
Also, as irony would have it, all these groups
are votaries of the atom bomb. The RSS and Shiv
Sena, spurred by their hatred for Pakistan,
advocated and got their government to carry out
the 1998 nuclear tests. In Pakistan, the
Jamaat-i-Islami is one of the heady campaigners
for the country's nuclear prowess. In the trauma
of the Latur earthquake that destroyed vast
tracts of Maharashtra in September 1993, I saw
volunteers of the RSS and the Shiv Sena removing
dead bodies with bare hands.
It is a tragic thought that these people, with
their immense resources and zeal for voluntary
work, will be completely pulverized in a nuclear
war. That is the way the nuclear cookie crumbles.
The tragic deaths and devastation of Azad Kashmir
would be a pin-prick before the calamity which
the zealots on both sides have not even thought
of but seem cavalier enough to want to bring
about.
Earthquakes and natural disasters have exposed
the vulnerability of the mighty United States.
The pun unintended, disasters are a great
leveller. Indians and Pakistanis may boast of
their superior camaraderie and self-help groups
that help cushion and repulse catastrophes,
unlike hurricane Katrina that laid bare the
hollow innards of the American society. But all
these good feelings would vaporize in a nuclear
mushroom if one is triggered either by accident
or in a fit of rage, or out of palpable
insecurity of a government.
When people mourn their dead in Azad Kashmir and
their friends and sympathizers from far and near
rush in with instant warmth and selfless help
they pay tribute to the innate humanity that is
part of our people. It hardly stands to reason
then that people who are grieved by the loss of
40,000 fellow humans and are distraught at the
uprooting of the lives of another million or two
can advocate a nuclear exchange as a means to
settle scores from history.
It is all very well to exhort a vulnerable people
to be prepared to eat grass for a thousand years,
if that is what it takes to build a bomb. But in
what is left of Muzaffarabad today, people are
scrounging for food, shelter, medicines, not for
a plateful of grass.
During a visit to the United States in May 2002,
at the height of the India-Pakistan nuclear
standoff, I picked up the just published copy of
the Doomsday Scenario, written by the United
States government during the Cold War to prepare
for a multi-pronged Soviet missile attack. That
the document became public was partly due to a
clerical error at a restricted library and partly
the grit of the person who put it together for
the general public -- L. Douglas Keeney.
In the aftermath of the faltering and seriously
deficient relief efforts in Azad Kashmir and on
the Indian side of the Line of Control too,
lessons from the Doomsday Scenario look all the
more relevant. Someone should consider making it
a mandatory reading for everyone in South Asia
who advocates the use of nuclear weapons whether
as a first strike option or as a second strike
retaliatory weapon.
The first and the most important lesson from the
book that came out of the years of painstaking
research by all branches of military and civil
administration, according to Keeney, was that
most of the preparedness for a nuclear strike was
quite useless when it came to practise. The
jammed motorways in the aftermath of 9/11, the
complete chaos that ruled the country for days
after the attack, when even the whereabouts of
the president of the United States were not
disclosed to the people should remain etched in
our collective memory.
"The medical care requirements are overwhelming,"
says a passage from the Doomsday Scenario. Is it
similar to refrain we are faced with, albeit on a
much smaller scale since last week? "In addition
to 25,000,000 dead or dying, there are 25,000,000
surviving casualties who require emergency
medical care," the American scenario says. "Of
this number, one-half (12,500,000) are suffering
from blast and thermal injuries and have
immediate and evident need of treatment. Of the
25,000,000 radiation casualties, 12,500,000 have
received lethal dosages and have died or will die
regardless of treatment. Of the 12,500,000
remaining one-half will require hospitalization
during the period of 12 weeks."
The ordinary Indian and Pakistani have not been
taken into confidence, much less briefed about
the do's and don'ts to survive a nuclear
catastrophe. By contrast, the United States spent
more than $45 billion to protect both senior
government officials and at least some members of
the general public in the event of a nuclear
attack.
This funding supported everything from production
and distribution of films and pamphlets
instructing citizens how to mitigate the effects
of a nuclear blast and fallout to the secret
construction of massive underground facilities to
allow the government to continue to operate
during and after a nuclear war.
And yet it is still appropriate to ask, says the
publisher's note in the Doomsday Scenario: "With
so much attention, and money, devoted to
safeguarding government leaders and so little to
protecting the public, would there be anyone or
anything left to govern in the event of a truly
catastrophic large-scale attack upon the United
States?" That is pretty much the question people
in India and Pakistan should be asking of their
governments. Coping with the ravages of nature is
quite enough. There is hardly any room left to
take on any man-made catastrophe.
THE October 8 earthquake that devastated scores
of towns and hundreds of villages in Pakistan and
India and caused untold human suffering was a
quintessentially South Asian catastrophe. It
suddenly rendered India-Pakistan borders
meaningless. Like its geophysical origins, its
effects too cut across politically drawn
boundaries.
This, at the very least, warranted a South Asian
response. For instance, both topography and the
destruction of road links logically dictated that
Pakistan should have accessed its part of Kashmir
through the Indian segment of Kashmir. The two
governments could have cooperated in a hundred
different ways to rescue people and provide them
food, shelter and clothing in time.
Yet, India and Pakistan failed to summon up a
joint subcontinental response to the earthquake.
That's their second tragedy. The causes of the
first lay in natural causes-in plate tectonics
and the release of enormous amounts of energy
through rifts and fissures in rocks. The causes
of the second are entirely man-made and political.
In fact, disaster management and post-disaster
relief has long been politicised in the
subcontinent. This became glaringly obvious with
the tsunami last December, when India was more
anxious to project its power in the neighbourhood
by dispatching relief teams than to being succour
to its own citizens in the South and the
Andamans. (In keeping with power considerations,
India also offered the United States $5 million
in assistance after Hurricane Katrina - a weird
thing to do for a state that cannot look after
its own poor people.)
What's new about today's politics of disaster
management is that it's taking place about two
years after the India-Pakistan peace process
began. This speaks to the relative fragility of
the process. That's not all. The two governments
swear by Kashmir. And yet, they have failed to
respond to ardent appeals by Kashmiri leaders
from both sides of the Line of Control for joint
rescue and relief operations. This won't endear
either of them to the people of Kashmir.
Pakistan has cited domestic "sensitivities" while
refusing India's prompt offer of aid and joint
relief efforts. In plain English, this spells
Islamabad's fear that accepting substantial aid
from India would be seen as a sign of weakness
- the opposite of "national pride". This
replicates India's own repeated recent rejection
of aid offers, including during the Bhuj
earthquake and the tsunami. Pakistan even spurned
a loan of light helicopters to airlift people
trapped in remote villages. Evidently, false
notions of prestige matter more to the
subcontinent's governments than saving citizens'
lives.
India generously offered relief material to
Pakistan. But it has refused to share seismic
data with Pakistan for fear that the data would
be used to detect the precise location of any
future nuclear experiments (including
non-explosive tests called hydronuclear tests).
In reality, such locations are known to the
entire international science establishment
through thousands of seismographs placed all over
the globe.
The real reason for India's refusal lies in its
nuclear ambitions and its opposition to the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The CTBT remains a
dead letter because powerful states, including
the US, have refused to ratify it. But some
verification arrangements agreed under it have
become operational in another guise.
For instance, there is a network of 128
high-quality seismic stations maintained by the
Incorporated Research Institutions for
Seismology, Washington, a consortium created by
universities. India has refused to join IRIS.
Joining it would give India real-time access to
seismic data. Although this would still not allow
earthquake prediction, it could substantially cut
the response-time to earthquakes and save lives.
Such indifference towards human life is part of a
larger bureaucratic culture of apathy, which
results in appalling levels of disaster
preparedness, management and relief. Earthquakes
are a "normal" feature of India's geological
make-up. More than half of the country's land
area falls within the most seismically active
Zones 3 to 5.
Zone 5 is the most hazardous and includes certain
areas in the Kashmir Valley, the Chamba and
Kangra Valleys of Himachal, and parts of the
Northeast. The next riskiest zone (IV) includes
large parts of Punjab and Himachal. Pakistan has
almost exact parallels to these vulnerable areas,
including its part of Kashmir.
Particularly worrisome are sections of Zone 5 in
the Himalayan range, which has witnessed four
gigantic earthquakes in the past century, each of
a magnitude 8.5 or greater on the Richter scale,
and accompanied by 200-300 km-long fault slips or
ruptures of the detachment plane. This is the
great faultline where the Indian plate thrusts
against the Eurasian plate generating enormous
strain along some 2,400 km of mountains. The
energy accumulated in the rocks is suddenly
released in catastrophic earthquakes every few
hundred years.
And yet, India is building the large Tehri dam
along the great faultline, near the very location
where geophysicists the world over forecast
another monster earthquake of intensity 8.5 in
the next 50 to 100 years. This would release more
than 30 times the energy delivered by the
Muzaffarabad event, probably breaching the dam,
downstream of which live some 300 million people.
This is an invitation to a calamity of biblical
proportions. India and Pakistan's failure is
evident on a less catastrophic scale too. They
have done little by way of designing
earthquake-resistant structures, evolving a
building code, and enforcing it at least in the
most vulnerable areas. True, some Indian cities
(e.g. Delhi) now insist that new buildings comply
with some earthquake-resistant features. But
these are inadequate according to seismologists
and architects. Besides, builders often cheat on
these and obtain false certificates. Old
buildings are meant to be "retrofitted" with
modifications to make them earthquake-proof. But
these are based on obsolete and unsound
principles.
Official apathy is thus leaving millions of
people vulnerable to the next great earthquake,
which is due in the Central Himalayas, probably
between Dehradun in Garhwal and Kathmandu.
Nothing could be further from democratic
accountability. Nothing could be more lethally
irresponsible either.
Praful Bidwai is a senior Indian journalist,
political activist and widely published
commentator
New Delhi: Visiting Russian
Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov has said that Russia was ready to provide
India with the latest weapons technology.
He said that Moscow was willing to co-operate with New Delhi on
co-production of weapons systems and platforms like fifth generations
fighters, advanced warships and submarines.
Ivanov who arrived here on Saturday night on a three-day state visit also
expressed his hope that India and Russia would conclude an agreement on
military
Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) by the year-end.
He said that the pending pact on protection of military IPR between the
two countries for safeguarding technological know-how was also likely to
be reached by the year-end.
Ivanov's visit assumes significance as Russia has recently offered a
proposal for joint production and
investment
sharing in the development of a fifth generation fighter, a medium class
passenger-cum-cargo aircraft and opening the Amur class submarine assembly
line in India.
Ivanov who is being accompanied by the Commander in Chief of the Russian
Navy, besides holding talks with Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee, will
also witness the Indo-Russian Naval exercises at Vishakapatnam and the
first ever Indo-Russian joint land exercises at the Mahajan firing range
in Rajasthan.
India and Russia has over four decades of defence ties and Russia is
presently India's largest weapons supplier with export of Russian military
forming 40 per cent of Russian military sales worldwide.
India and Russia have jointly developed the Brahmos supersonic cruise
missiles. The Indian Air Force's (IAF's) fighter fleet is mostly of
Russian origin with the bulk comprising of the MiG - 21s, and other
variations like MiG 27s, MiG 29s. The Sukhoi multi combat aircraft (Su-30
and Su-30 MKI) developed by Russia is now being produced at Hindustan
Aeronautics Limited (HAL) under licence.
The T-72 tanks and the T-90 MBT that forms the core of the mechanised
corps of the Indian
Army are also
of Russian origin. India has also signed a 1.5-billion dollar deal with
Russia for Admiral Gorshkov that will be handed over to India by 2009
after a refit.
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Landelijke India Werkgroep - 15 maart 2007