Mayank Chhaya Daily

Appelez-moi quelque chose, mais un clown

Last week, Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi called French President Nicolas Sarkozy a “clown”. This week Sarkozy responded by sending French fighter jets to bomb Qaddafi’s prized assets.I suppose that’s how personal affronts are settled in international diplomacy these days.

To be fair, who would like to be called a clown by Qaddafi? The man has built his entire career by changing outfits. Confession: I think he actually rocks most of them. I would not mind some of them myself. If only the Parisian haute couture would have let him join their ranks in the 1960s, we would not have to bomb Libya today. And the world would have been gifted a quirky fashion designer.

Apart from the colonel calling him a clown, his son Saif-al-Islam alleged that Libya had partly financed Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential campaign, something quickly denied by the French president’s office. Saif offered no evidence, of course. In the world of the Qaddafis things such as evidence are superfluous. That they are saying it is expected to be treated as evidence. I am thinking though that one needs no evidence to call someone a clown.

From all accounts Sarkozy’s Libyan campaign could not have come at a better time for him to lift his sagging political fortunes. There is a presidential election next year and there are those who say that he would have lost it. However, the Libyan military campaign could turn things around for him. Privately, Sarkozy should send Qaddafi some French silk pie if he wins next year.

Note: If my French and Arabic translations are inaccurate, get in touch with Google.

The Taliban Shuffle

I met Kim Barker in 2004 just as she was preparing to relocate to India as the South Asia bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune. As part of her familiarization drill she was talking to anyone with a significant connection with the region. Since I had reported out of South Asia for close to two decades, she probably thought I might have some useful insights.

Seven years hence I have come across a strong review of Kim’s book ‘The Taliban Shuffle— Strange days in Afghanistan and Pakistan’ by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. Going by the review, I think I will have to visit Kim for some useful insights into the region I once called home. Kakutani calls Kim’s account “hilarious and harrowing, witty and illuminating, all at the same time.”

It is always gratifying when fellow journalists write books simply because writing books requires a great deal of discipline and high tolerance for coercive solitude. Readers see only the final product but are not privy to the sheer tedium of sitting in front of one’s computer and hammering away at the keys. It is amazing how physical the process of writing really is.

Kakutani says the book has “a bit of Evelyn Waugh-esque satiric verve”. That alone is enough to draw me in. That I had a faint acquaintance with Kim is a bonus.

Sarah Palin goes to India

Sarah Palin (Pic: http://www.facebook.com/sarahpalin)

I can only hope that The Guardian is being tongue-in-cheek when it says that Sarah Palin is “touring” India as part of her effort to build up her foreign policy credentials. This is in the event that she runs for president of the United States in 2012. Palin is on a five-day trip to India and Israel. In fact, she is in New Delhi as I write.

She is in New Delhi because the India Today group has, according to the Guardian, paid her a six-figure fee to speak at the group’s much marketed annual conference. This time the theme is ‘The Changing Balance of Power.’ The theme Palin will speak on tonight India time is ‘My Vision of America.’ I could be wrong about this but how is traveling to India for about a day and speaking about her vision of America useful in strengthening her foreign policy experience? And that too to the kind of people who only notionally live in India.

It is useful to remember that if you pay her a six-figure fee and request her to speak on ‘My Vision of America’, the former Alaska governor and would-be US president would show up just about anywhere on the planet except within a 50 mile radius around the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant in Japan. And if she happens to share her ardent acolyte Ann Coulter’s view that radiation is good for your health then she might even wave that restriction. I exaggerate but you get my drift.

Other than confirming to her that India actually physically exists and that there are people in it who look reasonably well-fed and well-educated, what can a day or two in the country do to bolster her foreign policy knowledge?

With my bile and derision out of the way, I think that her brief interaction with India and Indians can at the very least give a her a whiff of the world outside her comfort zone of people who lap up everything that she says. Notwithstanding that one cannot begin to even get a measure of a measure of any country in 24 hours, let alone one as complex and profoundly rich as India, the visit is likely to do Palin a world of good by exposing her to something that she may not have imagined.

The very act of leaving one’s shore and meeting people who are unlike you is bound to leave a mark on anyone. To that extent it is a good thing that Palin has chosen to go to India and Israel. It is imperative for her to get to know, albeit ever so slightly, a country whose geopolitical importance can only grow in the coming decades. If Palin does indeed end up in the White House, her first visit to India would be greatly useful for her. As for India Today, they would probably land the first interview with her to any Indian media outfit.

Dr. Singh’s “firm rejection” and what it means

It is a universal rule of politics that when faced with allegations of corruption or egregious conduct, either reject them firmly or deny them strenuously. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has chosen to firmly reject the WikiLeaks revelations that a 2008 parliamentary trust vote over US-India nuclear vote was won by bribing millions of rupees to some Members of Parliament (MPs).

"The government rejects the allegation firmly. Nobody from the Congress or the government was involved in illegal act," Dr. Singh told the Lok Sabha, the lower chamber of Indian parliament on Friday.  He also described the US embassy diplomatic cables leaked by WikiLeaks as "speculative, unverified and unverifiable".

On the face of it, this is a categorical denial and should, in a world with less skullduggery than ours, settle the issue. Unfortunately, it is not that simple. Let me make a few points. The US embassy in India, which is the main player in this controversy if the allegations are true, is yet to issue a formal denial. No one can know better than the embassy whether the contents of the cables have any truth to them.

As a rule WikiLeaks revelations generally do not get contested for their accuracy, although they may have been condemned on other grounds such as their potential to compromise national security or seriously harm international relations. I am not for a moment suggesting that therefore these allegations ought to be accurate. Once the US embassy says that the cables as quoted by WikiLeaks are bogus, then one would have to look at them with greater suspicion. For now it is fair game to at least wonder what if.

Another point that strikes me is that since these are purportedly diplomatic cables they were written with a presumption that they would not be accessed publicly. Whoever wrote them would have done so fairly certain that they were confidential and did not run the risk of being exposed and used as an embarrassing political tool. Hence there was no harm in being candid.

Dr. Singh has used an interesting expression in rejecting the cables. He has called them “unverified and unverifiable.” They are unverified as of now but they need not remain unverifiable if the US mission chooses to verify them. Diplomatic cables, by their very definition, contain materials which are a mix of careful analyses, educated guesses, reasonable speculations and incontrovertible facts.

If for the sake of argument we accept that an unnamed US counselor was indeed told about the parliamentary vote what the WikiLeaks says he was told and shown large amounts of cash, then that is no longer an educated guess or an analysis or a speculation. He saw what he saw. His inference from what he was shown may have meant could be in the realm of analysis or speculation, but not what we was reportedly shown. Unless this counselor fabricated everything that the cables contain, he was witness to something.

The other way to look at this whole affair is to say that the cables are entirely bogus and U.S. Charge d'Affaires Steven White never sent them, nor did anyone from the mission meet any ruling party politician in connection with the trust vote over a seminal nuclear deal. In short, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange pulled them out of their arse. If that is the case, then Dr. Singh’s firm ejection is valid. But if the argument is that the cables are "speculative, unverified and unverifiable", then it still does leave some room to wonder.

Either let all concerned officially declare them to be a hoax and mount a class action suit against WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and The Hindu or …well.. I don’t know or what. May be accept that buying MPs is an acceptable moral hazard in a democracy.

When screwed, say screw you

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (Pic: www.http://pmindia.nic.in/)

For want of a more elegant expression, at least for now India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh seems screwed. On the face of it, WikiLeaks cables as quoted by The Hindu newspaper exposing large scale bribing to win a trust vote in parliament over the US-India nuclear deal in July, 2008, are quite damning.  

On the political Richter scale the WikiLeaks cables about the alleged bribing of Indian Members of Parliament  (MPs) to favorably vote on the civil nuclear deal  would measure at least 6.5. The timing of the publication in the midst of potentially the most damaging nuclear crisis in decades unfolding in Japan could not more ominous for the Singh government.

The Hindu newspaper has accessed a cable dated July 17, 2008 and sent by U.S. Charge d'Affaires Steven White who writes about what a political counselor from the US embassy found out. Here is what The Hindu reports:

“In a cable, dated July 17, 2008, sent to the State Department ( 162458: secret), accessed by The Hindu through WikiLeaks, U.S. Charge d'Affaires Steven White wrote about a visit the Embassy's Political Counselor paid to Satish Sharma, who is described as “a Congress Party MP in the Rajya Sabha ... and a close associate of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi considered to be a very close family friend of Sonia Gandhi.”

Mr. Sharma told the U.S. diplomat that he and others in the party were working hard to ensure the government won the confidence vote on July 22. After describing the approaches the Congress leader said had been made to the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Akali Dal, Mr. White drops a bombshell of a revelation:

Sharma's political aide Nachiketa Kapur mentioned to an Embassy staff member in an aside on July 16 that Ajit Singh's RLD (Rashtriya Lok Dal party) had been paid Rupees 10 crore (about $2.27 million) for each of their four MPs to support the government. Kapur mentioned that money was not an issue at all, but the crucial thing was to ensure that those who took the money would vote for the government.”

In case, the counselor did not believe him, Kapur obligingly showed him two chests containing Rs. 500 million (about $11.3 million).

The Singh government’s response to the revelations has been a study in brazenness.

Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee made a statement in the Rajya Sabha or the upper house of parliament saying, "There is a diplomatic immunity to what a sovereign nation discusses with its mission abroad, no access can be made to them, government cannot confirm or deny it.”

"Every Lok Sabha (the lower house of parliament) is sovereign in its period; whatever happened in 14th Lok Sabha, cannot be dragged in 15th Lok Sabha. The 14th Lok Sabha has been dissolved," he said.

He also said the revelations were not admissible evidence in any court of law.

In short, ‘Screw you.’

The ghost writer

Roman Polanski’s smartly crafted political thriller ‘The Ghost Writer’ (I look nothing like Ewan McGregor, nor those who commissioned me like Pierce Brosnan)

I have recently turned a ghost writer. Spending inordinately long hours in the basement of my house has helped me prepare for the role. I still do not quite have an ashen face from which blood has unexpectedly drained. Fortunately, those who have commissioned me are more concerned about my writerly talents than my looks.

There is an unspoken rule of the profession that dictates that one should never reveal for whom one is ghosting. So you will never find out which magnum opus I have crafted. It is ironic that people do not even know about the two books which I have actually written. So in a sense I have also ghosted for myself. Using my own byline for my own books has turned out to be the ultimate camouflage.

My current assignment predates Roman Polanski’s eminently watchable political thriller ‘The Ghost Writer’ starring Pierce Brosnan and Ewan McGregor and it contains none of the movie’s intrigues and global ramifications. While McGregor’s ghost is paid $250,000 for a month’s work of refashioning the drab memoirs of a fictional British prime minister (wickedly compelling Brosnan), my rewards are closer to what a jobless hack should get paid. Also, the themes are not even remotely similar, nor are the places which McGregor and I had to visit to conduct our interviews. If there was a Kim Cattrall somewhere, I did not notice her.

For as long as I have been a professional journalist, which is now in its 30th year, I have known that I can be an excellent ghost writer. It is only now when the media assignments have totally dried up for me that I have decided to tap a talent I always knew I had. The good thing about ghosting is that it requires no convictions. At its heart it is a mercenary job. Of course, one very carefully ensures that the material is absolutely accurate and not incriminating in anyway whatsoever.

The current assignment is my second project in the past three years. The first one came out last year to strong reviews. I can tell you from experience that once you sidestep your own sense of self-worth, ghosting could be a deeply satisfying experience. McGregor likens the job of a ghost writer to that of a mistress who is never really fully introduced to the outside world. Since I am tasked to ghost something that my literary pretensions would not ideally permit me to, I have no problem being that mistress hovering on the fringe of respectability.

The most important thing about my new profession is that it makes it financially viable for me to pursue books to which I would happily lend my name. I have three of my own going on simultaneously.

We are what we stand on

The earthquake-tsunami-radiation triumvirate in Japan demonstrates just how profoundly we as a civilization are shaped by a stable terra firma. Everything that has happened on this planet, particularly in the past 250,000 years since the rise of homo sapiens-- speech, language, culture, religion, conflicts, triumphs, revolutions, genocides , politics, economy, cinema, technology, bigotry, altruism, compassion, orgasm, Internet, blogs, Muammar Qaddafi and iPad2—has happened because the terra firma has generally remained stable.

We forget that we exist the way we do precisely because the ground beneath us has not slipped too much and too often. For over three decades I have thought about this theme. Some day I would like to write in detail about how the fact that we live on solid ground has so overwhelmingly created and defined the human race. What if we were a strictly water-based civilization? I am quite sure our brains would have been wired very differently  and we then would have created a radically different civilization. Can you imagine territorially defined nation-states if the whole planet was just water? And how do you define boundaries in a medium that is never steady?

For some strange reason we treat our incidental geological reality as our natural right and build a whole lot of mythologies around it. It is true that as a species humans are extraordinarily adaptable and flexible. One can say with a fair degree of certainty that we would have created a civilization in response to our geological conditions, however different they might have been.

The problem is that we have come so far as a solid ground-based species that we would find it practically impossible to survive if the earth were to fundamentally reshape its contours suddenly. Of course, in terms of its overall planetary impact the Japanese quake-tsunami cannot be considered even significant, but it is big enough to make us all wonder what if the earth’s crustal plates were to suddenly go into a global subduction mode.

Perhaps this short post comes across as weird and disjointed but I think it is worth examining how much of what we are is a result of what we stand on.

“One man rule is both anachronistic and undesirable”

The Dalai Lama (Pic: www.dalailama.com)

Those who were taken by surprise at the Dalai Lama’s announcement to give up all his formal political authority do not seem to realize that he has enjoyed it for nearly 60 years. He was barely 16 when he had to assume that responsibility even though he “lacked a thorough understanding of Tibet’s own political system, let alone international affairs.”

“No system of governance can ensure stability and progress if it depends solely on one person without the support and participation of the people in the political process. One man rule is both anachronistic and undesirable. We have made great efforts to strengthen our democratic institutions to serve the long-term interests of the six million Tibetans, not out of a wish to copy others, but because democracy is the most representative system of governance,” the Dalai Lama said in his message to the 14th assembly of the Tibetan people’s deputies that began today in McLeod Ganj, India.

I know for a fact that he had long been uncomfortable with the idea that so much formal political authority had been vested in one person. He once joked with me during the course of an interview for my book Man Monk Mystic in 1997, “Too much power, I don’t like it. It can cause a stomach ache.”

It is true that as political power goes, the Dalai Lama’s is largely notional given that the extent of its influence is limited to a miniscule Tibetan community in exile. However, what gave it the weight well beyond its formal influence was that it kept him as the sole political figure to factor in any future settlement of the Tibetan question.

Of course, his decision to devolve his formal political authority to a new prime minister scheduled to be elected on March 20 has been troubling a lot of Tibetans who perhaps mistakenly believe that he is taking himself out of the equation. Being the Dalai Lama has its own innate political, cultural and spiritual gravity that cannot be undermined by giving up some well defined political responsibilities.

Here is how he put it in his message: “If we have to remain in exile for several more decades, a time will inevitably come when I will no longer be able to provide leadership. Therefore, it is necessary that we establish a sound system of governance while I remain able and healthy, in order that the exile Tibetan administration can become self-reliant rather than being dependent on the Dalai Lama. If we are able to implement such a system from this time onwards, I will still be able to help resolve problems if called upon to do so. But, if the implementation of such a system is delayed and a day comes when my leadership is suddenly unavailable, the consequent uncertainty might present an overwhelming challenge. Therefore, it is the duty of all Tibetans to make every effort to prevent such an eventuality.”

Now is not a good time for nuclear power

Japanese officials checking for signs of radiation on children rescued from areas around the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. Reuters photo by Kim Kyung-Hoon.(Note: I do not have the permission to use the picture but I have done so in good faith and in the larger interest of society.)

If you are working in the nuclear power industry, my advice to you would be to say you are a painter or a dancer or a gangsta rapper for the foreseeable future. You might even say you work in solar power because unless the sun turns a red giant in the next couple of weeks you would have to answer for no downsides. And if the sun does turn a red giant tomorrow morning, then I suppose we will have a slightly greater crisis to contend with. So now is not a good time to be a proponent of nuclear power.

It is like when the Deep Water Horizon, BP’s semisubmersible offshore rig, exploded and caused a huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April last year. For the nuclear power industry it could be a million times worse because of the likely meltdown of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, 170 miles north of Tokyo,after the massive earthquake and the tsunami that followed.

As Japan struggles to cool down the core at the plant to avoid a nuclear meltdown, the debate over the safety of nuclear energy can only heat up. All such crises have a way of expressing themselves in that one telling news photo. For the meltdown crisis in Japan, that one picture is what you see above by Reuters photographer Kim Kyung-Hoon. The child in the front of the picture is impossibly cute and has an expression which, when he grows up, could be interpreted as WTF? I am sorry I digressed but then this whole blog is a digression.

Coming back to the debate over nuclear energy which has already started. I am also thinking about the US-India civilian nuclear deal and how those on either side of the divide might view the Japan crisis in the Indian context. Sarwar Kashani of the IANS has a story out today which talks specifically about the Jaitapur nuclear power plant in Maharashtra.

Kashani reports, “Anti-nuclear activists have been questioning the safety of the Jaitapur plant, which according to the earthquake hazard zoning of India, comes under Zone III - a moderate risk zone - on the scale of I to V. But this is disputed.

Activists arguing against the project say the Geological Survey of India, in a reply to a Right to Information (RTI) application, revealed that the site and the surrounding area experienced 91 tremors between 1985 and 2005, ranging from 2.9 to 6.3 on the Richter Scale and the area falls in Zone IV.”

The story also quotes S.K. Malhotra, who heads the public awareness division of the Department of Atomic Energy, as saying that the Indian plants "are designed to operate safely, even in the unlikely event of any accident".

Someone please tell Mr. Malhotra not to paraphrase what airline cabin crews announce at the start of any flight. I have never really understood this phrase “in the unlikely event of any accident.” What does that really mean? An accident is by definition an unlikely event. If it can be anticipated, it ceases to be an accident. To say that accidents are unlikely to happen is like saying earthquakes are unlikely to happen or followed by tsunamis. I am sorry I digress again.

"It is so strong that the plants can even withstand a missile strike. All modern nuclear reactors, including those in India, are designed and built strong enough so that the fuel inside the reactor does not spill out,” Malhotra said. What about a nuclear missile strike?

“He said that in case of an accident or a disaster, the design of the plants is made such "that the reactor automatically goes into safe mode, switches itself off but continues cooling the plant". This prevents leakage, he said.” It is hard to imagine that the technology-obsessed Japanese did not know about this technology.

Excuse the poor pun but the core issue in this debate is how much we as a civilization are willing to push the limits of modernization.

Living on a planet that is forever shaking

The earthquake-tsunami crisis in Japan requires no more editorializing other than reminding ourselves that we live on a fundamentally unstable planet. Only those who are in the midst of the devastation can experience and describe the full force of the disaster. The rest of us can merely offer help and compassion.

When I say a fundamentally unstable planet what I mean is it is a planet that is continuously shaking somewhere or the other. According to the data maintained by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), between February 10 and March 4 alone over 360 earthquakes were recorded worldwide, the smallest measuring 2.1 on the Richter scale and the biggest being 6.6. Most earthquakes happened in the average between 4.5 to 4.7. In 2011 so far 18 “significant” earthquakes, including the one in Japan, have struck so far, according to the USGS.

It is a planet whose crusts are constantly making adjustments with themselves. Given the enormity of these crusts we mostly do not feel the movements. But make no mistake the earth is nowhere close to as settled as we seem to think.

There are primordial forces that constantly act and counteract beneath our feet. Not that they should prevent us from leading a normal life the best we can but, equally, they should also not be disregarded. Those forces take no prisoners. They just do what they are supposed to do—make and remake the planet.

On a separate note, since we live in the great broadcast media age watching disasters as they unfold we often forget the evocative power of a particularly observant news agency correspondent. I just found a dispatch from Jay Alabaster of the Associated Press (AP) writing from Sendai, Japan.

“Miles from the ocean's edge, weary, mud-spattered survivors wandered streets strewn with fallen trees, crumpled cars, even small airplanes. Relics of lives now destroyed were everywhere - half a piano, a textbook, a soiled red sleeping bag.” That cinematic intro effectively sums the scene at this northern Japanese town just 80 miles from the earthquake’s epicenter.