Mayank Chhaya Daily

Obama's subtle hint to India

President Barack Obama’s subtle but clear message to India during his primetime news conference on Wednesday was to tell New Delhi not to make Pakistan feel threatened as it goes about the task of taking on the Taliban-Al Qaeda combined in its northwest territory. 

Answering a question about whether the United States can secure Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and prevent it from falling into the hands of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, Obama also made a reference to India.

“On the military side you are starting to see the recognition in the last few days that the obsession with India as the mortal threat to Pakistan has been misguided, that there biggest threat right now comes internally. You are starting to see the Pakistani military see the armed threat from the militant extremists more seriously. We want to continue to encourage Pakistan to move in that direction,” Obama said.

In saying that India is not the mortal threat to Pakistan, Obama was equally telling India not to wield that threat at a time when the U.S. is encouraging to neutralize the Islamist threat not just to the region but to Washington’s strategic interests there. In a question about Pakistan and the Taliban and Al Qaeda this is as close as a judicious president can get to telling India to be mindful of its neighbor’s anxieties.

While the eventual ability of the Taliban to overrun the Pakistani state may have been seriously overstated as it walked into Buner district, which is just about 60 miles from Islamabad,  that was the closest came to being the nightmare scenario that Washington has feared for a while. I personally thought that at some point the Pakistan army’s self-preservation instinct would come alive and prompt it to let the Taliban known who the boss is. Unless Pakistan’s army has been so fundamentally influenced by the ideology championed by the Taliban, there is no way that it would let the Taliban establish its primacy in the country.

I am very interested to find out what it is that inhibited the Pakistani army for as long as it did while the Taliban practically showed up at the capital’s doorstep. There are only two possible explanations—either it was making a point to all concerned about what lay in store for the country without the army putting its foot down or its internal erosion by those who share the Taliban ideology within the rank and file is more serious than what the world has realized. The second scenario is truly nightmarish.

My reading of the situation based on a deeply cultural understanding of the region is that self-preservation and the need to perpetuate its own hold on the Pakistani society will trump everything, including any ideological considerations, and propel the Pakistani army to take on the Taliban to the extent that the latter does not begin to have illusions about its own reach.

Terrorist's BO

Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab, the lone surviving gunman of last year’s Mumbai terror strikes, wants toothpaste, “perfumes” and an Urdu newspaper as he awaits his trial. I understand the toothpaste and newspaper part but “perfumes” mystifies me. Body odor is the least of Kasab’s problems, I think.

Kasab is lodged in the Arthur Road Central Jail in Mumbai, a place I am familiar with from my younger days while reporting on the city’s underworld. One needs more than perfumes to get by in a jail cell there cooked by the city’s oppressively humid climate. Someone might have forgotten to inform the young man that he is in there to answer charges running into thousands of pages and not on a business trip to Mumbai from Karachi in a hotel where the room service staff forgot to stock up his toiletries.

There is something amusing about Kasab’s request for perfumes because he obviously thinks it will be taken seriously. I think his request should be seen in the context of another request to be allowed a walk in the prison’s courtyard. When he does so, he is likely to sweat causing an unpleasant body odor for the fellow prisoners. It is out of this humanitarian concern that he wants what he wants. Or perhaps he is motivated by the likelihood that he may end spending the rest of his life there. So he might as well make it comfortable.

Brilliantly inept timing

Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrocchi on the cover of India Today magazine

In a brilliantly inept decision India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has breathed fresh life into a 22-year-old bribery scandal in the midst of rancorous national elections. The CBI’s decision to remove a 12-year Interpol Red Corner Notice, or lookout notice, against Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrocchi is inevitably causing a political earthquake.

Quattrocchi has been a central figure in the investigation into a 640 million Bofors gun bribery scandal, which destroyed the political reputation of India’s then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Quattrocchi was once consider a close family friend of the Gandhis, especially from Sonia Gandhi’s side. He was widely perceived to have played a key role in the sale of the Swedish howitzer guns to India in the mid 1980s. Despite their strenuous denials and no clearly established involvement, the accusations of bribery amounting to Rs 640 million have persisted.

In the mid-80s the Bofors gun payoff scandal was the biggest story in India, featuring an extraordinary diversity of people, including an international arms dealer, a hustler masquerading as a religious guru, Quattrocchi and others. Since it exploded in 1987 it has remained unresolved.

The Italian businessman has managed to avoid being interrogated by Indian investigators. In February 2007 Quattrocchi was detained in Argentina on the basis of an Interpol warrant but the CBI’s poor handling of the case resulted in Quattrocchi getting away.

Now that he has been officially dropped from the list of those wanted in the Bofors case has entered a folklorish realm. What is baffling is that the CBI should have chosen this time to remove the red corner notice. Those handling the case ought to have been aware of the incendiary timing of this decision. While the Sonia Gandhi’s ruling Congress Party has denied that it pressured the CBI to act, it is impossible to escape that impression during a time fraught with political susceptibilities.

Quite predictably the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party is jumping all over the decision and attributing sinister motives to the government. It is possible that in the final analysis the decision may not influence of the electoral outcome but India’s politics have been known to hang on something far more tenuous in the past.

Rediscovering sovereignty in Pakistan

Now that Pakistan has taken the fight to the Taliban, one wonders why it did not so earlier. The country’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik has been quoted as saying of the Taliban, “We will not tolerate them anymore.” The resolve in that assertion ought to make the international community happy.

He also said something that should have been the guiding principle of the government from the get-go. "No one will be allowed to challenge the writ of the government," Malik said. The writ of the government was not just challenged by the Taliban when it took over the Swat Valley, it was ridiculed when it walked into Buner District unmolested.

A major military offensive was launched in the Lower Dir area, which is about 170 kilometers northwest of the capital Islamabad. So far some 70 militants have been killed in the action which is likely to continue. North West Frontier Province (NWFP) Information Minister Iftikhar Hussain repeated Malik’s comment when he said, "The government needed to deploy security forces in Buner because the militants were challenging its writ.”

Pakistan has to be aware that this is not a fight it can leave halfway in the hope that the military has made its point. The Taliban has been known to be both persistent because it sees its fight as an eternal one. Their goals and those of Al-Qaeda are so nebulous that it is hard for any military force trained to understand and deal with a conflict in terms of its beginning and end to effectively deal with the Taliban-Al Qaeda combine.

It is some consolation that Islamabad was propelled into action by the mounting criticism of its handling of the crisis around the world, particularly in Washington. Unless the Pakistanis see this fight as a battle for their own survival and create enough pressure on the country’s military and political institutions it is unlikely that the campaign against the Taliban will be sustained.

In this context one has to mention the highly mature role played by some of the country’s leading newspapers in reminding the government as well as the military that their focus should be the Taliban’s immediate threat rather than obsessing over what India might or might not do. "At this juncture, we know that we have the army strong in numbers and strength to take care of the Taliban, but we first must convince it that the threat from India is only relative while that of the Taliban is absolute,” The Daily Times said in an editorial.

This distinction must be at the center of any policy shift in Pakistan vis-à-vis India. There is no serious constituency in India that is even remotely interested in engaging in any military adventurism in Pakistan. The major demographic shift in India in the past two decades, which has led to a population of 550 million people below the age of 25, is bound to cause a fundamental policy shift as well. Young Indians, like young people anywhere in the world, are no longer interested in settling historic scores. Slow but surely India’s political classes have begun to understand this important development.

Feroz Khan, 1939-2009

Feroz Khan in 'Dharmatma'

Tangential memories are as crucial as core memories. Actor, director and producer Feroz Khan, who died in Bangalore at 70, is a crucial part of my tangential memories at age nine. As a Boy Scout in 1970 I made my first independent trip without my mother. That’s when I first saw Feroz Khan.

An ill-stitched pair of khaki shorts, a shirt two sizes too big, a red and blue neckerchief, a maroon cap, knee length socks, and maroon canvas shoes barely clinging on to my scrawny body together created an image that was at once laughable and pitiable. I remember feeling reassured that I was not the only one who looked ridiculous. Mafat Patel, the accompanying teacher, looked equally so in his uniform. The man who otherwise projected the image of a learned, tough and distant teacher dwelling the stratosphere was at once brought down to the terra firma to be among the lesser mortals.

As part of the Boy Scout trip experience we were shown a movie called “Oonche Log” starring Ashok Kumar, Raaj Kumar and Feroz Khan. Raaj Kumar and Feroz Khan played Ashok Kumar’s two sons, the former an obedient and upright police officer Srikant and the latter (Khan), a bit of a pleasure-seeking goofball called Rajnikant. The point of showing that film, as I discovered in retrospect many years later, was to hammer into our impressionable minds the idea of regimental discipline that Ashok Kumar’s character Major Chandrakant represented.

I distinctly remember the scene towards the end of the film where Major Chandrakant, who resolved all challenging situations of life by caning whoever was nearby, decides to lash his police officer son Srikant (See the accompanying scene; cue at 3.02). There was nothing subliminal or subtle about showing this movie to a bunch of Boy Scouts. We were being told without any nuance whatsoever that those who stray will be whipped. This predated the Taliban by 44 years (the movie was made in 1965 although I saw it in 1970.)

What caused unintended hilarity in those days during the open air screening of movies was that sound and video occasionally went out of sync. The particular clip I have attached here is the one where sound went out of sync with the video. The result was that the lashing happened first and the sound of that lashing was delayed a second or so. We felt the character’s pain only when we heard the sound by which time Raaj Kumar had an unrelated expression.

The reason why I remember Feroz Khan’s character Rajnikant is because he was the nonconformist son who sang songs and wore natty clothes. As a boy growing up in a provincial town I saw possibilities in Khan’s portrayal. Over the years I realized that Feroz Khan’s innate talent was devoured by his equally innate flamboyance. Style seemed to trump substance in his career. Blessed with debonair good looks because of his mixed Afghani-Iranian heritage, Khan’s career was more about being slick than being talented even though he clearly had a remarkable screen presence. In his last movie ‘Welcome’ and many others that preceded Khan gave the impression that he was mocking himself and saw the medium of cinema as a platform to indulge his own colorful, non-serious view of himself.

Contrary to what his body of work might generally suggest Khan had recognizable acting skills that did break through his flamboyance once in a while. Interestingly his last film ‘Welcome’, where he played a caricaturized underworld boss RDX, did justice to the persona that Khan had created for himself. His death may not prompt scholarly appraisal of his career but he was in many ways a unique presence in the self-absorbed world of Hindi cinema.

Taliban and adultery

This is how the Taliban deals with adultery.

Can India choose a communist prime minister?

India’s quirky parliamentary elections offer many possibilities, including a potential Marxist prime minister. The idea that the world’s largest democracy can have an avowedly communist prime minister could a send a nervous wave around many Western capitals and not just bafflement.

India is perhaps the only democracy where the communists contest elections, both at the state legislative as well as parliamentary levels, and actually win a fairly good number of seats. For instance, the outgoing 14^th parliament has 42 members from the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM) out of a total of 489. Then there is the Communist Party of India (CPI) which has 10 members. That makes the CPM the third largest party after the Congress Party with 148 members and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with 111 members. Together the communists account for 52 members, a hugely influential number in the country’s coalition politics.

In the past two decades India’s political scene has become so splintered that it has become possible for any leader to harbor secret or open ambitions to become the country’s prime minister. These parliamentary elections are no different. There are numerous wannabe prime ministers, including those who deny any such ambitions or specially those who deny any such ambitions.

Two veteran Marxist leaders whose names are being mentioned in the event that the CPM emerges as a significant force post-elections are Prakash Karat, who is the general secretary of the party, and West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee. If one presumes that the communists manage to hold on to all their current seats, they will come back with 52 members. In case predominant parties such as the Congress and the BJP fail to cobble together alliances to stake a claim to forming a government, there is at least a theoretical chance that the CPM could float Karat or Bhattacharjee.

To the average American the idea of a communist leading the world’s largest democracy after legitimately winning a fair election may seem just too complicated to process but in the Indian context it would be merely reflective of the diversity of political opinions that has existed in the country for so long. Whether a communist prime minister will be bad or good is a separate and involved debate. However, it is safe to assume that a party with 50 odd members will not be able to pursue any significant ideological agenda without running the risk of being toppled by those who might support it.

Even if the leftist parties do not form the next government, in case they retain their current tally of seats they will once again emerge as a powerful pressure group that can significantly impact not just India-US relations, including the civilian nuclear deal, but the country’s economic agenda in the midst of a global meltdown as well its many other policies. There are those who believe, and perhaps rightly so, that the communists have really peaked with their 52 seats but there is nothing to predict that they cannot consolidate their gains in the future. India does not share the antipathies toward the communists that exist in many democracies, particularly the U.S. At the same time though the communists have not been able to extend their influence beyond West Bengal and Kerala, the two states known for their highly literate and politically non-conformist electorate.

Confusing electioneering with elections and elections with democracy

Two pieces, one in The New York Times by Anand Giridhardas and the other by Niraj Sheth in The Wall Street Journal, have prompted this post. It is pathetic that for someone who has reported on several parliamentary and state elections I have been reduced to responding to someone else’s reporting on a blog hardly read by anyone. With the ritualistic self-deprecation out of the way, let’s deal with a ritual called Indian elections.

Both Anand and Niraj seem to rue how bereft these elections are of substance and substantive issues. Let me offer an unsolicited perspective to both. In India, electioneering must not be confused with elections and elections must not be confused with democracy. All three run parallel, often one at the expense of the other two. Seen together they are one of a million rituals that Indian civilization has so meticulously confected. Only the uninitiated and the untrained will go to report Indian elections expecting to find cerebral discourses on issues of substance.

The ritual of electioneering is an end in itself. It is not devised to raise the level of national discourse. Most election speeches are lip-deep rhetoric of fairly poor quality and devoid of cogency. Think of Indian elections as the biggest folk theater or public spectacle, whose primary purpose is to distract the unsuspecting voter from the ennui bred by five years of poor governance by any party. Candidates are like gladiators who have descended on India’s political coliseum. The resultant entertainment is the objective and not what those voted to power would accomplish.

Other than ensuring national security, conducting a sophisticated foreign policy and creating some level of infrastructure there isn’t much that a government can do. For over 40 years it did try to run hotels, airlines and steel companies but did not do a particularly good job of it. Somewhere along the line some smart politicians realized that rather than actually governing they would be better off creating an impression of governing. They also understood that the best way to deal with the famous Indian individualism is not to stand in its way. One of the reasons why India has been booming for the past decade and half is because the government has chosen to meddle a whole lot less than ever before. In such a model of development career politicians do not really have much to do other than perpetuating the myth that they do a lot. One most effective way to perpetuate that myth is to hold massive rallies where they can assault ennui-laden electorate with vacuous rhetoric.

Even at a time when India’s people are so motivated and its economy is doing so well, one still does not get the sense that its rulers are working according to a grand plan. For some reason one comes back with the impression that things happen organically, a six-lane highway sprouts here and a power plant pops up there. Of course, it cannot be that an economy which has grown at over eight percent annually for more than a decade could have done so without a well conceived blueprint.  And yet the predominant inference still is that India has grown irrespective of its government and not because of it.

Coming back to the question of electioneering, elections and democracy, it is best to see them as unrelated. There is only one common theme to the three—politicians who work their dhotis off to make it seem that the three form a continuum.

Read Giridhardas’s piece here http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/world/asia/24iht-letter.html?scp=1&sq=Anand%20Giridharadas&st=cse

Read Sheth’s piece here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124054728015452231.html

What's up with Asif Ali Zardari?

Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari

I look at Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari and wonder what it is that he is doing. His so-called peace deal with the Taliban in Malakand division turned out to be an invitation to the Islamists to covet the rest of Pakistan. And for some intriguing reasons the Pakistan army chose the path of least resistance until things came to a stage where the wolves would have been snarling at the door of some top generals in Islamabad and Rawalpindi. I hope Army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani was not giving Zardari a long rope as he went about mishandling the whole problem.

The Pakistan army has now decided to assert its authority and take on those who might be threatening the very sovereignty of the country. The peace deal and the subsequent end of hostilities gave the Islamists an opportunity to extend their reach beyond Swat Valley and practically show up at Islamabad’s doorstep. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s choice of words calling the Pakistani government’s response as “abdicating” to the Taliban was rather extraordinary.

Zardari has seemed rather weak in the face of the grave challenge rising to his own authority from the mountains and valleys of the northwest. While the Taliban may have been held off for now, it is anybody’s guess whether their sights are not firmly fixed on Islamabad. Pakistan’s historic worries about India are understandable but its response to a systematic effort to chip away at its sovereignty from within its own territory is so remarkably weak-kneed. Notwithstanding the strikingly different geographies of the two countries, I wonder whether any Indian government would have allowed groups challenging the state’s writ to reach within 60 miles of New Delhi.

No time for equivocation in Pakistan

A scene from Buner as on www.buner.com

Islamabad has begun reasserting its sovereignty in the aftermath of a remarkably easy takeover of Buner district. The Taliban have now officially agreed to retreat even as the Pakistani army is reportedly preparing to commence some action in the region.

The Taliban withdrawal comes in the wake of a what Pakistan is calling a major breakthrough during talks between their representative Syed Mohammed Javed and Sufi Mohammed, the radical cleric who had originally brokered a peace deal on February 16 to impose the Sharia laws in Swat Valley. Under that February 16 deal, viewed in many quarters as Islamabad ceding its control over the picturesque valley, the Taliban was supposed to disarm, a part of the bargain they did not keep. Instead they extended their influence to Buner.

It is unclear whether any army action in Buner would unravel the peace deal. The return of the Taliban to their Swat headquarters is good news but only in a limited sense because they are still able to impose Sharia on Buner and five other districts of the North West Frontier Province apart from Swat. That the Taliban has a larger plan than just imposing Sharia in a few districts became obvious when it walked into Buner.

Islamabad stands at a crossroads where it must decide whether it wants to dilute its sovereignty or reclaim its writ over the whole of Pakistan. Surely that decision is infinitely harder than writing a post on a sketchily read blog like this. Nevertheless, it does not take away from the fact that Pakistan is battling for its own existence and any equivocation could be disastrous.