An Unstable Neighbour

India and Pakistan are currently going through their usual mood cycle of some hope and more depression. The incidents on the LOC have crowded out other possibilities for the time being, one would say about a year before hope surges again. One talks of a year because it is by then we in India would have completed the formation of a new government which might by then begin dreaming new dreams. In Pakistan, the Prime Minister would have found his equation with the the new Army Chief - really the man who matters when decisions on Pakistan India relations have to be taken. 

Meanwhile, with only 45 days to go, Nawaz has not yet nominated his new Army Chief. He could give General Kayani one more extension, appoint the senior most Lt General Haroon Aslam, agree with General Kayani's choice which is Lt General Rashad Masood or go further down the list to select the much talked of Lt General Tariq Khan. General Kayani has assured the world he will not be seeking an extension but Nawaz has not spoken a word yet.

The Nawaz-ManmohanSingh  meeting in New York last month was always a non-starter, and Hamid Mir's studied indiscretion on TV ensured that there was no one-to-one session between the two Prime Ministers, something which the Pakistan Army echelons did not want to happen. The meeting was in the backdrop of increased LOC violations since June this year including the Keran incident which remains quite a bit of a mystery. There was a message for both Prime Ministers in these escalated intrusions making it difficult for them to discuss anything substantive.

Apart from showing Pakistani aggressiveness in recent months, the spate of intrusions also indicate that some portions of the LOC have become more porous which allow such incidents to occur. This is no longer a case of cross border intrusions. It is low intensity conflict just short of Kayani's possible departure. The reality in Pakistan is that no matter who is the Army Chief inPakistan, the mindset does not change. For India to keep merely blaming Pakistan for these intrusions is not enough as we are supposed to prevent them. Just as merely complaining to other leaders about Pakistani behaviour is not only not enough, it may even be avoidable.  As a major power with international pretensions, we are expected to look after our own security and other national interests and demonstrate this ability.

 It is fair to assume that by escalating tensions on the LOC, Pakistan is looking after its own interests, however much we may portray this to be misguided. It is not yet known exactly how many troops and what military apparatus the US will leave behind in Afghanistan after 2014. Whatever be that final number, the US and ISAF will be progressively less dependent on Pakistan for logistic support after 2014 for its military supplies and withdrawal. The US release of Coalition Support  Funds may be fulfillment of an earlier commitment but the timing, just before Nawaz Sharif lands is the US makes it appear to be an appeasement. The Coalition Support Funds will however, dwindle and the money tap will dry for Pakistan. So also will the US attention shift away to other problems and Pakistan will be less visible on its radar. The latest call by Nawaz Sharif seeking US intervention for solving Kashmir is typical GHQ speak which does not want discussions under the Shimla Agreement.

 Now is the time, therefore, in Pakistani calculations to begin to ratchet the tensions so that the US and others remain involved with the India-Pakistan question as nuclear weapons draw considerable traction in the US. This would keep Pakistan relevant in US calculations and there would not be a repeat of 1990 when the US lost interest in Pakistan. In these perceptions, tension between two nuclear powers has to be minimised, if not eliminated. Besides, the latest (October 7 2013) and detailed Heritage Foundation special report - A New View of Asia: 24 Charts That Show What's at Stake for America. The report speaks of Asia as America's 'New West' instead of the 'Far East'  and lists Pakistan as the second most unstable country in Asia (after Afghanistan). Any additional instability in Pakistan will continue to draw American attention. And hopefully, financial support and military sustenance. Pakistan can be expected not to deny this report but instead want to prove it !

 

20th October 2013

India shining or China? Investment plans say it all

 

Instead of creating opportunities for our teeming population and capitalising on our demographic dividend we have launched schemes that only create vested interests and are a premium for not working or making progress

In a burst of enthusiasm I for the country, or panic about the approaching elections, the government took a brave but unrealistic decision some six months ago to accelerate the clearance of pending infrastructure projects that had been lying around in various ministries. The last date for finalisation was fixed as August 15 for many of these seventeen projects.

It now turns out that nine of these projects have not even crossed the preliminary stage of request for qualification.

Some of these projects are the Eastern Peripheral Expressway and the M u m b a i V a d o d r a Expressway. The ultramega power projects in Orissa and Tamil Nadu too have missed the deadlines.
As expected, nodal officers in the ministries dealing with these projects had been appointed who were to report on a weekly basis.

Nothing happened, in true Indian tradition.

The writing was on the wall for quite some time and in its report released in June 2012 the RBI had commented that “envisaged investment in infrastructure declined by 52 per cent to `1 trillion from `2.2 trillion in 2012, with power and telecom accounting for most of this fall. Investment in telecom sector has dried-up, while that in roads, ports and airports has also decelerated sharply. This has had a ripple effect on the economy.” Compare this with some of the infrastructure projects the Chinese are pursuing. There is an old Chinese saying that if you want to be rich then you must build roads. Well, not just roads, but ports, bridges, tunnels, dams, nuclear power plants, gas and oil pipelines, airports, railway lines and stations.

All these one hundred odd mega infrastructure projects ranging from $102 million to $1 trillion that include ongoing, or completed projects both in China and in other countries, notably Africa.
They range from $2.2 billion Qinshan nuclear power plant, to $62 billion for a south to north water diversion project that is expected to divert 44.8 billion cubic metres of water
by 2050, to the $1 trillion on the Tianjin Binhai New Area Investment. The total worth of these and several other projects is nearly $4 trillion.

The Silk road along with pipelines from Central Asia to China and highways to Europe through Central Asia will have considerable Chinese investment.

China will soon be the prime economic power in Central Asia and therefore the most influential leaving the Russians and the Americans behind.

The Chinese have cultivated the Central Asian regimes assiduously since the time Li Peng first visited the region in 1994, followed by Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao in later years.

President Xi Jinping was the latest Chinese

President to visit four Central Asian republics.

Turkmen and Kazhak gas now flow into China. By 2020 about 65 billion cubic metres of gas will flow into China. We have nothing even vaguely similar at a much lower scale that indicates our determination to improve our infrastructure that would be the basis for our growth this century. Instead of creating opportunities for our teeming population and capitalising on our demographic dividend we have launched schemes that only create vested interests and are a premium for not working or making progress.

Thus while India will be spending its money on poverty alleviation through entitlements, China has sought to remove poverty through infrastructure projects that pay for working and not through merely the right to earn without having to work.

India boasts 600 universities and 35,000 colleges yet many of them do not make the grade by our own standards, not one of them figures in the top 200 list of world’s universities, not even our prestigious IITs and IIMs.

No wonder we spend $10 billion annually on educating our children abroad.

China has five in this list.

Fifteen Chinese universities figure in the top 100 list in Asia; we have two.

China’s declared military budget for 2012 crossed $100 billion marking an 11 per cent increase. In comparison, the Indian budget was $40 billion before the collapse of the rupee and this would hurt at a time when most of our capital expenditure is on imports.

China spent $296.8 billion on R&D in 2012 compared to a mere $36.1 billion we spent in 2011. China has established 500,000 vocational schools for mid level skills, we have only 11,000 and this is where real power lies -the power to keep a people employed and, possibly, happy . By some estimates, 500 million young will be in the skills and jobs market in the next decade in India -a huge figure by any calculation.  Our trade deficit with China is embarrassing and our industrial and manufacture base remains a mere 16 per cent of our GDP which prevents any major breakthrough. In the latest WEF Report for 2012, we fare poorly in all social infrastructure (health, education, social security) indicators, way below the Chinese.  On the one hand, we agonise about China’s plans to encircle us through Pakistan and other countries in the neighbourhood, but then let OVL and GAIL participate in the construction of a $4.3 billion oil and gas pipeline from Kyaukpyu in Burma to Yunnan to supply energy to China.

We might as well participate in the construction of similar pipelines in Pakistan or in the development of Gwadar for Chinese use.

When Sri Lanka sought our assistance to redevelop Hambantota we showed no interest but got alarmed when the Sri Lankans opted for Chinese assistance.

Instead of setting our house in order and taking advantage of the free world, we locked ourselves in and for nearly 50 years did nothing, absolutely nothing to develop our infrastructure and the economy in the north east for fear that we would be run over again by the Chinese.

When the opportunities came our way, a blurred vision and diffidence held us back and we have not much time left.

The external balance is changing fast with new equations being worked out we need to set our house in order — refurbish our political apparatus, rebuild the crumbling state of our institutions and reorient and revamp our governance capacities.

Above all, we need to provide skills and high-end education.


Source : Asian Age , 18th OCtober 2013

Why Malala did not get the Nobel

The Nobel Peace Prize is not so much about achievement or ideals of peace, but is also about making a political statement.Thus it is about timing and is unlike other Nobel acknowledgements for physics, chemistry or literature.

Mahatma Gandhi, the world’s foremost apostle of peace, was never awarded this prize and many believe there was not a man more worthy of this acknowledgement.

To others it would have been highly imprudent to honour this ‘naked fakir’ and create a role model for other colonies soon after the Second War and the start of the Cold War. The Quakers got the prize in 1947 and there was no prize in 1948. A war weary world could not find a worthy recipient that year.

Overlooked: Malala’s achievement need not be measured in terms of the award she did not get but in the awakening she can continue to create. Pic/AFP

 

The political context to the peace prize is not meant to undermine in any way the role of two great personalities on the world stage but consider the timing. HH Dalai Lama was awarded this prize in 1989, a few months after Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing in June that year. Aung San Suu Kyi who led the movement against the Myanmar junta from 1988, received the award in 1991 for ‘her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights’.

Both these awards were timed to exert pressure on the two regimes. It is another matter that the Chinese regime has not changed its attitude towards Tibetans, if anything has hardened over time. The Myanmar Generals took more than a decade to relent to Suu Kyi. The former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was given this award in 1990 soon after the break-up of the Soviet Union ‘for his leading role in the peace process which today characterises important parts of the international community’. This was a reward to Mikhail.

So what about young Malala Yousafzai? Many of my Pakistani friends were campaigning for her. For them and others in Pakistan and indeed on the subcontinent, Malala signified a new hope. They saw the possibility of a prize as recognition of her dreams and their hopes for a liberal Pakistan. But for some cynics, who would rather call themselves realists, this award was not going to happen.
Look at the timing -- it is just short of the Year of the Pullout. A Nobel Peace Prize to a young Pushtun girl from SWAT would inflame passions as the bigoted Taliban would surely resort to renewed violence against women and young girls, attack the education system or anyone or anything else they consider opposed to their obscurantist beliefs and violent tactics.

So if 10 or 20 Pakistani students, teachers, women or girls or God knows how many more were killed by these self-appointed soldiers of Islam in retaliation, how was the state expected to respond, beleaguered as it is with other forms of countrywide terror. It was in March this year that suspected Taliban shot and crippled 11-year-old Atiya Arshad in a Karachi school but she is not an international heroine. The anger would also be directed against the ‘foreign forces’ which is something that is surely not required, especially in 2014. Nobody wants additional problems at this stage.
Besides, it is not just that Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf Party that has a bizarre attitude towards the Taliban, terror and democracy. The Nawaz Sharif government has its own pressures and inclinations. It was Nawaz who ensured passage of the Islamic Qisas and Diyat Law in 1997 and this was about blood money and retribution.

It was possible to release General Musharraf on bail despite charges of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and Nawab Bugti,but he was immediately locked up for the attack on Lal Masjid,a mosque whose activities and congregation have come to epitomise the growing radicalism in Pakistani society. At one level, a country that has difficulty acknowledging its Nobel Laureates like Dr Abdus Salam would surely have had similar problems with Malala, on grounds of religious beliefs, must seriously introspect about its future. Most of all, Pakistan will have to find a way to stop the seemingly unstoppable Taliban instead of wanting to negotiate with retrogression.

At another level, Malala’s achievement need not be measured in terms of the award she did not get but in the awakening she can continue to create. For this, she and her kind, all over, need more than just periodic rewards. Sure these help, but what the Malalas of the world need is sustained support from the rest of us because the battle ahead is long and hard and will not bewon by a few medals but could be lost to a few or more bigots.

Source : Mid Day , 17th October 2013

Nawaz Sharif’s ‘Yo Blair’ moment

This was Nawaz Sharif’s Yo Blair moment. It was at the St Petersburg G8 Summit in 2006 when a microphone picked up George Bush beckoning Tony Blair, and which was later converted to mean Yeah Blair. Except that in Nawaz Sharif’s case it was not an inadvertent comment that a microphone picked up but a deliberate disclosure post event. The difference being that this was not live but reported after the event by one of Pakistan’s most well-known journalists.

Hamid Mir in his interview on Geo TV on Saturday night (September 28) following his breakfast meeting with Nawaz Sharif quite unequivocally and with considerable authority said that the Pakistani Prime Minister, in an off-the-record comment, had said that Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s complaints to Barack Obama were like those of a “dehati aurat”.

Hamid Mir went on to embellish this disclosure by analysing the prospects of the Prime Ministers’ meeting. He said that Nawaz Sharif was not very hopeful about the outcome of talks and he did not expect any breakthrough as the Indian Prime Minister was considerably weakened. It seemed that Nawaz Sharif would await the outcome of Indian elections before having serious negotiations with India.

No meeting between heads of Government of India and Pakistan is complete without high drama. These occasions are like any sub-continental wedding which is never complete without the usual tamasha where some aged aunt or uncle has to sulk. In this case Nawaz Sharif was sulking and Hamid Mir provided the band, baja and barat. This one was no different and the usual convoluted cover-up spin and gloss has followed, although with delay. By itself, the expression ‘village woman’ may not be derogatory but the context is relevant and if spoken in chaste Punjabi could be quite expressive. It is the sort of joke that only the narrator finds funny.

The Hamid Mir disclosure and subsequent commentary one saw on Twitter was a kind of a guerrilla psywar operation. The sort of comment that says it is off the record but is brought on record, discussed extensively with some amount of ill-concealed glee and then withdrawn. The message has been delivered, an embarrassment created. The tactic reminded one of the TV conference by subterfuge that Pervez Musharraf had organised at his breakfast meeting in 2001 in Agra where a number of our newspaper mighties were present. Some were caught on camera applauding Musharraf after he had delivered a scathing diatribe against India.

One thing is certain though. Hamid Mir did not concoct this out of thin air and there was that a time lag before damage control was sought to be rolled in. A senior journalist of the reputation of Hamid Mir would not disclose this unless this had actually happened and perhaps even had some clearance from somewhere, not necessarily from Nawaz Sharif himself.

Obviously, Nawaz Sharif did make this comment in some form or the other as he was conceivably upset with the discussions Manmohan Singh had with Barack Obama and the significant declaration about an India-US strategic and global partnership at the end of the talks. His own rant to the UN General Assembly notwithstanding, it must have hurt Nawaz Sharif’s ego when the Indian Prime Minister announced in advance that he did not expect much from his talks. Then, somewhat uncharacteristically, Manmohan Singh proceeded to name Pakistan as the epicentre of terrorism in his UN General Assembly speech.

This would certainly have not gone down well in Rawalpindi or in the various jihadi centres of Pakistan which function like retail chain stores. Nawaz Sharif had to play to the two important lobbies at home, the Army which is sufficiently Right wing and the jihadis who are extremely Right wing and anti-Indian, and his outburst against India comes to him easily as he himself is inclined towards the Islamic Right wing.

The issue then is that possibly an exasperated, frustrated, Nawaz Sharif stifled by an ever-watchful Army, may have had an impetuous outburst. Pakistani journalists, if they were interested in ensuring that this disclosure could remotely jeopardise the meeting, would have kept quiet. The outburst may have been involuntary but the disclosure was deliberate and intentional.

Source : Niti Central , 2nd October 2013