Watching CNN at a hotel in Beijing, I noticed an advertisement for an Aeroflot flight from Moscow to Beijing. This was unthinkable a couple of decades ago, when the Cold War still raged. Today, the Nokia cellphone’s ringtone in Urumqi, Xigatse and New Delhi is the same. There’s Kentucky Fried Chicken in Xinin, Motorola and Sony Ericsson jostle for space in Lhasa, and Buick LaCrosse is advertised on the barely-used highway outside the Kumbum Monastery. Urumqi, in faraway Xingiang, shows off its 35-storeyed buildings, which house Carrefour supermarkets and L’Oreal stores. Globalisation thrives.
Beijing has to be visited to be believed, even if one has read all that there is to read and imagined the rest. From the moment one lands at the huge, gleaming airport and takes the smooth drive along the highway into the city, one senses the feeling of economic power and assurance. From the window of Jianguo Garden Hotel, not far from the Forbidden City, one can see at least 15 giant construction cranes operating as new high-rises soar. There is no evidence of anguished debates on preserving the old. All bleeding hearts have been silenced/co-opted/satisfied.
Beijing’s five ring roads with their intricate interchanges make New Delhi’s pride, the Dhaula Kuan flyover, look puny and crowded. Changan Avenue, in the heart of the city, with its eight-lane traffic, two side lanes and designer shops and chrome and glass structures, says it all. The country’s infrastructure — roads, highways, airports, train stations, telephone systems, housing estates and schools — all built for the future, seem empty or underused. It shows China’s ability to think big.
Our infrastructure is built for the past — overcrowded and inadequate from day one. Beijing has no damaged cars, no dirty buses and no blowing horns. Honda Accords, BMWs and Audis cruise past with hardly any traffic police in sight. Officialdom favours black limousines.
There was an old lady cycling down Changan Avenue. She would stop every 50 metres, pick up cigarette stubs and plastic wrappers with her tongs from the pavement and ride on. But while dust has been banished in Beijing and the streets are washed, pollution is still a problem — by afternoon, a haze settles over the city.
The Chinese have a wonderful way of adapting to circumstances. The local girls at the hotel front office answered to Yvonne or June, and not to their Chinese names. It was more convenient for the visitor. At the bookstore, Harry Potter was Hali Bota, since it was more convenient for the locals. There was no moral police checking on young couples in parks, but perhaps somewhere, there must have been the thought police.
Beijing is readying for the Olympics next year. The Olympic Games City will be China’s pride, for which, we are told, people willingly gave their land. For the present, the worry is about possible terrorist threats and not whether the facilities will be in place by the time of opening — 8 p.m., August 8, 2008.
Beijing may be the centre of power for China, but it is no longer a centre for Communist ideals. There is only one portrait of Mao in the city — at Tiananmen Square. Mao badges are now available in Silk Street’s curio shops, along with portraits of Lenin and Marx. During the fortnight I was there, I saw only two persons wearing Mao suits — at the Kumbum Monastery in Qinghai Province. The rise of the hemline is now directly proportional to prosperity.
It is ironic that there are more policemen on duty defending democracies than on the streets of China, protecting a totalitarian regime. In fact, in China, there is no longer any need to defend the proletariat. People now pursue capitalism with greater zeal than they pursued communism. The Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolutions were horrible mistakes and embarrassments that few talk about and fewer try to justify. Today, everybody is a capitalist roader.
Source : The Hindustan Times , 1st August 2007
It was Frederick the Great of Prussia who said that he and his people had come to a mutually satisfactory agreement — they were free to say what they liked and he was free to do what he liked. Frederick obviously was an autocratic monarch who did not worry himself too much about the opinion of his subjects.
Present-day governments can hardly afford not to appear to care, so they do the next best thing. They mould opinions and perceptions, as do toothpaste sellers, fashion designers, car manufacturers or anyone else who can sell anything at profit. By doing this, governments try to ensure their perpetuity while the manufacturer does it for profit. Perception management by governments is called propaganda and psychological warfare (psy-war), while the private entrepreneur calls it advertising.
Psy-war is as old as history and an essential ingredient of Statecraft. It is the fourth arm of combat, usable all the time. Kautilya’s Arthashastra and Sun Tzu’s Art of War refer to this. The Nazis had their Lord Haw Haw trying to undermine the morale of the British forces, while in the 1965 India-Pak conflict we had the popular ‘Radio Jhoothistan’. The Iraqis had someone who the invading Americans called Baghdad Bob, as he tried to boost the morale of his people in 2003.
In the Cold War’s early days, psy-war and propaganda were used to keep communism at bay. Saving Europe from Stalin’s depredations was the rallying call for America. Noel Coward, Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, the Rockefellers and the Henry Fords were part of an endless list of an American Who’s Who involved in this. Eminent Europeans also joined the enterprise. The CIA led this multi-million dollar campaign operating on the principle of plausible deniability. For 17 years, a CIA officer, Michael Josselson, managed the campaign with almost fanatical zeal. At its height, this programme of cultural propaganda had spread to 35 countries under the umbrella of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The Congress funded magazines, held art exhibitions, organised philharmonic orchestras, ran a radio station from Germany, which quickly acquired 29 other stations, and ran the Encounter magazine.
Sometimes, things do get out of hand leading to spine-chilling realities. The 1960s film, The Manchurian Candidate, was about an American soldier captured by the Soviets and taken to Manchuria for brainwashing into an assassin. While the film was a box-office sellout, the Americans did have their very own controversial project — MK-Ultra — for mind control. There were experiments on unwitting human guinea pigs to assess the effect of mind-altering drugs like LSD — all in the name of protecting freedom. Earlier, the Nazis had similarly experimented and so had the Russians. This was a quest for dominance at its sinister best, showing excessive zeal born of arrogance. The results of these experiments are still shrouded in secrecy.
The Cold War was won not just through ‘Star Wars’, military alliances, friendly dictators, proxy wars and the Afghan jehad that overstretched the Soviet empire. The Berlin Wall came down as much through sustained efforts of the cultural cold warriors who had prevented an exhausted post-war Europe from succumbing to communism. The 1980s Afghan jehad was as much a case of perception management as a campaign on the ground; so was the 1991 Iraq war when instant global TV came of age as did Indian TV during the 1999 Kargil war.
It is more a case of managing perceptions or creating images in peacetime. The more innocuous ones are the larger-than-life images of a minimally clad Lord Greystroke a.k.a. Tarzan swinging from tree to tree in the jungles of Africa saving the British empire from cousin Kaiser Wilhelm, or Superman saving the world from evil.
These days ‘spin doctors’ are an essential component of governance and indulge in George Orwell’s doublethink — the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, accepting them and being able to tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them. The current American concept of preemptive war really means that while war is undesirable, a war to prevent even a remotely perceived war is desirable.
Effective psy-war is to put forward and defend an idea or offer a better way of life. The ultimate test for a successful psy-war is when it appears not to have been carried out at all. The favoured tactic could be the ‘necessary lie’ based on some basic truth for it to be acceptable. It was this absence of any truth in the allegations that Saddam Hussein had acquired WMDs and was in cahoots with al-Qaeda that led to a catastrophic campaign.
In the Indian context, conducting a long-term psy-war campaign during peacetime requires unusual tenacity and hard work. We are dealing with an implacable foe, whose long-term objectives are at variance from current overt declarations, who cheats his benefactor habitually and connives at selling atomic secrets for ideological reasons. Under US pressure, Pakistan has made tactical adjustments without any change of heart. Benazir Bhutto’s disclosures in the revised edition of her autobiography, Daughter of the East, confirm this.
Besides, terrorists use modern communication systems for effective anti-State propaganda. Al-Qaeda leaders have used this from their hideouts in Waziristan. The ISI-backed Lashkar-e-Tayyeba has not only thousands of well-trained fighters, it has a huge propaganda network. Its main publication, Al Dawat, sells more than 80,000 copies at major bookshops across Pakistan.
The net has become the new medium for propaganda by terrorists or insurgent organisations. Easy and unregulated access and anonymity of communication has enabled organisations like the Lashkar, Hizbul Mujahideen and the LTTE to run websites. Nothing helps the terrorist more than having the media show mangled bodies and chaos that follow a terrorist attack. This is striking terror in the hearts of the people at no cost to the terrorist.
Since perception-building is a long haul, relying solely on the transient bureaucrat equipped with opinion but without expertise can leave the system stultified, dogmatic and even totalitarian. It is important for the credibility of such ventures that they are not required to support government policy in all aspects. It has become necessary to involve private entrepreneurs because they have the skills to act.
The Indian challenge is to make our presence felt abroad without this being seen as another boring government endeavour. A country that aspires to greater glory must have a credible voice. Image-building can be a collective national enterprise. Psy-war does not have to be a sinister venture. It is more about spreading the country’s soft power and its voice and influence, at least up to the range of Agni-III
Source : Hindustan Times 18th April 2007
The media, hungry for Breaking News & exposés, grow vacuous by the
Day
MUSHROOMING TELEVISION-TRAINING academies, which churn out TV journal ists with shaky credentials, are rather like the kerb-side ‘speedily speaking English teaching’ schools whose alumni speak Inzamam-ul-Haq’s English. That is why one hears of young enthusiastic journalists that BBC’s Paul Donahar spoke about some years ago. Donahar described a young journalist chasing the former Home Minister, Indrajit Gupta and when he did catch up with Gupta, the first question was “Sir, would you say something?” And the second question was, “And, sir, who are you?” This was when TV was not what it is today.
There are over 350 TV channels in India today, a far cry from the single channel 20 years ago. India has become the third largest television market in the world. Along with Bollywood, radio, the newspapers and magazines, India is set to become one of the largest entertainment markets in the world. The global entertainment industry is expected to grow to $ 1.8 trillion by 2015 and India’s share will be $ 200 billion. There are 36 TV news channels in India and growing with the channels tying up with Bollywood films. News is likely to mutate into entertainment and the hunt for ‘Breaking News’ and ratings will most definitely bring down credibility. Serious journalism will suffer. In fact, one can see early signs of this when news gets sensational and unverified reports are pushed on to the screen, taken off the next day and forgotten. Even the responsible and staid mainstream print media, one of the best in the world, showed signs of succumbing to this temptation when they put out full-page hatchet jobs on individuals.
It is perhaps this pressure that leads to the great media hype about breach of security at the PM’s residence by three young persons who probably did it for a dare rather than for any other purpose. Surely, our sense of proportion demanded that we first find out what happened and then go to town with this one. In the end, it was an exercise that probably led to tightening of restrictions and the unfortunate dismissal of the two air-hostesses.
Another channel swung into action and we had the story of the three Hizbul Mujahideen terrorists in the CRPF guarding the PM with graphics to show how dangerous it had been for the PM. Again, mass hysteria followed on TV — only for the discovery made that this was an old story that the CRPF knew three years ago and that the three men had faked their credentials as reformed terrorists to find employment. The bigger story was that one has to fake credentials as reformed terrorists to get employment while the others do not get a chance. Quota raj with a difference. But no one followed this one. Then we had the great spy story of the IB man caught in an attempt to flee the country. Whether or not he was a spy is not established simply because he was foolish enough to try and escape from India for what he considered a better life. From the story given out, the man appears to have been guilty of a gross violation of rules. It seems we are doing stories on the run — literally like one-night stands.
Then there was the story of Prince, the boy who fell into an abandoned tube-well. True, it was traumatic for the boy and his parents. But his rescue was possible only because the army was close-by and had the equipment. The endless ‘live coverage’, for 60 hours or more, had glassy eyed and bored viewers merely flipping channels. A clear case of overkill. Rescue over, every one packed up and left but no one wanted to find out how that tube-well was left uncovered. Who was responsible? Is he going to pay the government compensation for negligence and the cost of the equipment and manpower deployed for the rescue, the trauma of the boy and his family? Instead, some compensation was hastily sanctioned for the boy’s parents and everyone went home. How many more such accidents take place every day in India that go unreported?
Some years ago there were reports about young children in Sivakasi being trundled off 15-20 kilometres everyday for 11-hour shifts to work in the fireworks factories for two rupees a day. This was no story till the factories caught fire and the children died. Today, the Kareena-Shahid or the Mika-Rakhi Sawant stories are better headline news. Our liberal media has paid inadequate attention to the Surat floods probably because it is in Modi territory.
Cynics even remark that the extensive coverage of Hindu festivals on TV in recent weeks was because most channels expected ‘something’ to happen. Why do we not instead have documentaries of the kind that we see on National Geographic, Animal Planet or Discovery? Why not a documentary on the Naxal problem, on the effects of poor governance, water shortage in the country or whatever else that will make us a better civil society? Or that India is becoming a dumping ground for the world’s ‘e-waste’? The media needs an Erin Brokovich. It is no longer the media’s business just to inform but also to reform. Criticism or alternative opinion is necessary and desirable in a free society. It is even enjoyable as some of the spoofs on TV are these days. But exposés and sting operations are dangerous trends and half-baked exposés can be a disaster not just for the individual and, ultimately, for all of us but there will be nothing left — to praise or run down. Exposés on the run can be as oppressive to individual liberties and privacy as the midnight-knock is in totalitarian societies. A sting operation must serve a public purpose to expose corruption, harassment or other wrong-doing. But setting up a sting merely for the sake of entrapment will make the media a loose cannon — armed and dangerous.
It is not what we report but how we report that is important. This is particularly important for us in India so long as we are prone to vicious terrorist attacks. American psychologist Jessica Hamblen had recently conducted a study of the effects of media coverage of terrorist attacks on viewers. Her findings were not unexpected. Those who watched coverage of the September 11, 2001, attacks for about eight hours had more substantial stress reactions than those who did not. It had the same effect on children after three hours.
Two hundred and thirty-seven Israelis were divided into two groups, one group made to see terrorist related clips while the other shown ordinary news. The former came out of it showing far greater signs of anxiety. The media have a very important role in the aftermath of any disaster. It has a role to provide information, make announcements, convey instructions about services available to victims and their families. It can be a great source of strength and hope to the community. But unremitting coverage of a carnage and mutilated bodies has a negative impact and, further, hands a victory to the terrorist.
It is always better to exercise freedom with restraint before that freedom is taken away. And if that freedom is taken away, we will all lose. Our future also depends on our past. But unless we improve our present, we will keep repeating the past. Maybe the media managers need to step back for a while and introspect.
The writer is former Secretary, Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW)
Source : Hindustan Times 30th August 2006
Agriculture is in deep trouble globally. The world’s population will increase by about 1.7 billion in the next 20 years – mostly in the Asian and Pacific regions. It will have to be fed but the agricultural innovations of the late 20th century have peaked. Along with declining productivity, the supply of gas for fertilisers and pesticides, and oil required for machinery and transport is becoming more difficult to obtain and more expensive. Water is fast approaching critical scarcity in the main food-producing regions of the world. Soil fertility is declining because of the heavy usage by industrialised agriculture that tends to neglect rotations and care needed to nurture soil. In fact the small farmer has been wiped out in countries like USA where the total farming population is less than half the population of New York, and all of it in penury. GM (Genetically Modified) foods and GM seeds, products of modern bio-technology, are touted as the cure for world hunger.
This may be one way to fight world hunger, but is contested by several activist groups and scientists globally. An American Anti-War group on its web site has calculated that the money spent on the Iraq war was enough to feed the world’s hungry for five years. Governments, anxious to avoid droughts and crop failures and farmer suicides, tend to see the GM revolution as a short-term answer to the problem.
Mankind has over centuries developed its food habits and food. Traditional biotechnology was discovered early when bread was made, or yogurt, wine or cheese. They were all ultimately a result of manipulating micro-organisms to start the fermenting process – that is how scientists would describe the exquisite Bordeaux or the full Bourgogne. No gene modification is involved.
Modern bio-technology, is however, different and still the subject of debate and even controversy among scientists, environment activists, sociologists and the big business houses that want to sell the new GM food and seeds. This has involved new techniques as tissue culture, cell culture and embryo culture. Its application in agriculture has led to GM food claimed to be as good as natural food and GM seeds that are supposed to have several advantages over traditional seeds. In the USA, where by the end of 1999, two-thirds of all processed food had GM ingredients, no distinction is made between GM food and organic food.
The Europeans have been insisting that GM foods be labeled before the products are put on their supermarket shelves. USA, Canada and Argentina – the main producers of GM food see this as an unfair trade barrier and US companies like Monsanto which have invested massive sums in this technology and totally dominate the GM seed market, have tried to recover their losses by transferring their products elsewhere.
Bio technology has a lot to offer but all this is not unmitigated benign technology. Many scientists have doubted this and warned of the dangers that lie ahead and it is not just the fear of the unknown.
In his research paper, “Biotechnology Briefing - A technology we do not need”, David Fleming even argues that GM organisms are not even necessary for agriculture, while Nathan Batalion warns that this is the most potent technology the world has ever known – and more powerful than even atomic energy. Batalion lists 50 harmful effects of GM foods affecting health, environment, farming, and the economic, political and social threats. Scientists will debate and argue on the effects on health – about the various viruses and bacteria and allergies that could become rampant, and the morality of tinkering with nature and it would require many lengthy articles to discuss these fully.
In 1994 the US FDA had approved Monsanto’s rBGH, a genetically produced growth hormone for injection into dairy cows even though scientists had warned that this was linked to 400-500% higher risks of breast, prostate, and colon cancer. It is possible that since then these and some other risks have been overcome. This is precisely one of the problems with GM foods – that one does not know enough about their after effects. Too much is happening too soon. Dr George Wald, Nobel Laureate in Medicine said in 1967 that restructuring nature was not part of the bargain and that “potentially it could breed new animal and plant diseases, new sources of cancer, novel epidemics”. Science must bring progress but do we need salmon that would grow six times faster and several times larger threatening the natural fish or do we need to cross animals with plants as part of an experiment?
It is not just a matter of what is grown but also how GM food and seeds are grown and marketed that should be worrying. Biotechnology has been one of the fastest growing sectors of the world economy in recent years, particularly in the USA. Up until 1992 very little area was under GM cultivation, but in the ten years that followed, more than 52 million hectares were under GM cultivation, and 99% was in USA, Argentina, Canada and China. GM soybean accounted for nearly two thirds of the crop, followed by corn, cotton and rapeseed. Five companies - Pharmacia, Dupont, Syngentia, Dow and Aventis owning 71% or 973 of the agro-biotechnology patents – dominated technology ownership globally in 2001.
Companies like Monsanto also patent their seeds. Farmers who buy seeds have had to sign a contract which prohibits saving, reselling or exchanging seed. Family owned farms in poorer countries depend on saved seed for survival but biotech companies not only have patented other people’s seeds – basmati rice and neem, they have also introduced technology to protect their seed patents and markets through terminator and traitor seed technology. A terminator seed will grow but the seeds it produces are sterile; so the farmer has to purchase them afresh each season. Traitor technology controls the stages or life cycles of plants, -- in other words, when a plant will leaf, flower, and bear fruit. Pollen spreads GM genes very fast and wide, destroying natural seeds. Winds can carry tree pollen as far as 600 kilometres, apart from that spread naturally by birds, fungi, bacteria and rain. All this means creating an economic dependence. According to Fleming, it is no longer possible to grow GM-free crops of maize, oil seed rape and soya any where in Canada.
Large private collectives would suit USA and Canada but in India with 70% rural population one wonders what would happen to the small farmer here if he decides to follow this pattern. Local intelligence, local seeds, local experience and local knowledge will get wiped out in time. And should the GM experiment fail, there will be no going back to old techniques because these simply would have been forgotten by then.
Thousands years of sustainable agriculture on this globe is now sought to be changed in a matter of a few decades. And not every one is convinced even in the West that the change is for the better. Oil production and distribution is increasingly controlled in one part of the world, so is technology for the manufacture of weapons both conventional and non-conventional; financial control is exercised by three or four institutions in the West, and if what food is to be grown and consumed is also controlled by one part of the world, then the rest of the world is staring at total subservience.
There has to be an open and transparent debate in this country to discuss the economic, political and social impact of this rapid change in the way India has to live and eat.
Source : Hindustan Times 27th Dec 2004
In a few days Americans will vote to elect their next President after one of the most divisive and bitter election campaigns. The last time this happened was in 1876, but that was said to be the aftermath of the Civil War. The 2004 elections come in the background of an acrimonious election four years ago and many Americans are still not sure whether Al Gore lost or the US Supreme Court handed the prize to George W. Bush with a 5 to 4 decision and a lead of 537 votes in Florida. It was that close.
This time around, there are no holds barred. There is an air of desperation, as the world will wait with baited breath for the outcome. And the combatants have got their legal aides primed for action in all the states to take the battle to different grounds at the first sign of electoral irregularity. The Church too has been invoked. Allegations of booth-capturing or stuffing ballot boxes or fudging results could abound.
There is a possibility then that the election results may take weeks to be announced and the irony of it is that this appears more similar to the presidential election results in Afghanistan. It could be warlords battling it out in Afghanistan and different kinds of barons fighting against each other in the US. Only the battlegrounds are different, the aims are similar: the power to rule.
A mega-event like US elections evokes large audience and reader interest. Recent writings from America have been heady stuff. This gives one hope that the symbol of America will still be the Statue of Liberty and not the hooded and wired Iraqi standing on that soap box in Abu Ghraib.
Take, for instance, Craig Unger’s House of Bush, House of Saud, breathtaking in its revelations and one of those ‘unputdownables’. Unger takes the reader through the conspiracies and intrigue at high places and how members of the bin Laden family and other Saudi worthies including some Saudi princes cavorting in the US escaped to Saudi Arabia within days of 9/11 without being questioned. Truth is stranger than fiction. Unger’s book is freely available in the US and Europe, but strangely, not in Britain, for fear perhaps that Saudi sentiments would be hurt. The title of James Bamford’s book A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies says it all and says it well.
Bamford takes the reader through the paces of the neo-con policy formulation which began much before Bush became President and sort of led to the famous ‘Rumsfeld decision’ on September 11, 2001, within hours of the destruction of the Twin Towers: that he wanted the best information, he wanted it fast to see if Saddam Hussein could be hit at the same time along with ‘UBL’ (Usama bin Laden); “go massive,” he is believed to have said according to one of his aides taking notes; “sweep it all up. Things related or not”.
There is one thing that jars though — when Bamford refers to Srinagar as being part of Pakistan. Paul Krugman wrote (The Great Unravelling) about the economic deeds and misdeeds of the administration and the elasticity with truth. Ron Suskind describes the high conspiracies in Washington to get rid of the Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill, in his book, The Price of Loyalty.
Bush’s critics have referred to the reversed Robin Hood tactics of robbing the poor to pay the rich by giving tax cuts to the wealthy and reneging on promises on social security. They have referred to crony capitalism of the Establishment and Unger refers to the access capitalism of the kind practised by the Saudis — access to the House of Bush. And how 9/11 was the perfect Pearl Harbour for the neo-cons of the 21st century who had been working on plans to oust Saddam Hussein and provided the target of opportunity in Iraq.
Then there is the irrepressible Noam Chomsky with his Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, who’s dismissed by the neo-cons as ‘that linguist’ (just as they dismiss Susan Sontag, the other critic of the Bush doctrine and practice as ‘that radical chic’). In an establishment which views even liberalism as blasphemy, this is indeed harsh criticism. There are several other similar books on the shelves of bookstores in the US if only one had the time to read them.
The New York Times in its full page editorial on October 17, ‘John Kerry for President’, says rather royally, “We like what we have seen.” The edit says, “We look back on the past four years with hearts nearly breaking, both for the lives unnecessarily lost and for the opportunities so casually wasted. Time and again, history invited George Bush to play a heroic role and time and again he chose the wrong course. We believe that with John Kerry as President, the nation can do better.” It is almost as if God has pronounced for John Kerry. It has been a long time since an incumbent President had such a bad press. The last time this happened was during Richard Nixon’s second term. Even Bill Clinton got away better.
It could appear that Kerry has it all sown up. It isn’t so. Most Americans form their opinions from what they see on TV — or what they perceive they have seen — and less from the newspapers, and even fewer read books that ought to be read. It is this medium, the television, which sways minds most effectively. And the Bush campaign has its masterly spin-doctors. Assisted by some mega-corporations in the media world, it has also bought off all the time on many of the local TV stations in the key undecided states and then laid down the rules of the game in favour of the Republican candidate.
The campaign on these TV channels is vicious, personalised and scary. It will leave its lingering after- effects after the vote has been counted. The result is expected — feared — to be close. Many Democrats still feel they were robbed of a victory in 2000 and that Bush became President despite having got fewer electoral votes. This has been one of the causes of the bitterness in the campaign this time and there is fear that there could be trouble at many of the 200,000 polling stations. If that happens again, there could even be serious calls for a change in the manner Americans elect their Presidents. Many scholars in the US fear that another disputed election will divide the country perhaps irreparably.
Admittedly, it is for Americans to decide how and by whom they wish to be ruled. But if Americans are to be so closely involved in the affairs of other countries, if they choose to right all the world’s wrongs even if some have to be bludgeoned into submission, then the Americans are obliged to vote with both their hearts and minds. This self-arrogated authority to decide the fate of the world must be accompanied by an imposed responsibility. For they owe it to the rest of the world.
It mustn’t be, as Maureen Dowd has said in her recent, scintillating and, at times, irreverent book, Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk, “It’s their reality. We just live and die in it.”
(The writer is a former secretary to the Government of India)
Source : Hindustan Times 31st oct 2004
Three-quarters of the earth’s surface is covered with water but most of it is saline. If the entire water were to be put in a gallon jerry can, then the fresh water available — in rivers, in lakes, and beneath the earth’s surface — would just fill a tablespoon. Most of this ‘tablespoon’ is in the rich West and the remainder, quite a bit polluted, in the poor, over-populated underdeveloped East. Now imagine if someone were careless and allowed some of the water from the ‘tablespoon’ to spill over. This loss is permanent and there is no substitute for water. A person can live without food for a month, but only a week without water. Nothing will quench thirst the way water can. Only water can irrigate farms and give life. Unfortunately, mankind has grossly misused and abused this precious life-giver.
Environmentalists and scientists believe that the biggest potential destabilisers in the world are water scarcity and global warming. Boutros Boutros-Ghali had warned in the Eighties that future wars could be fought over water. His successor Kofi Annan was also worried about fierce national competition over water resources that contained the seeds of violent conflict. Ismael Serageldin, vice-president, World Bank, had predicted in 1995 that “if wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water”.
Egypt, which is dependent on the Nile for 98 per cent of its needs, has threatened war if Ethiopia carried through its plans to divert water from the Blue Nile. Across the Suez, water scarcity is becoming acute in the Jordan river shared by Israel, Jordan, the West Bank and parts of Syria. Israel is the main water consumer in the region consuming four to six times more water than the Palestinians and the Arab neighbours.
Environmental activists believe that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is partly linked to the scarcity of water in the Palestinian areas. If Turkey constructs two more dams on the Euphrates and the Tigris, it would deprive Syria and Iraq of their main sources of water. By 2025, 18 countries in the region will be water scarce according to UN studies. Muslim fundamentalists, active in the region, have now begun to include the water issue in their radical literature as another weapon in their conflict with Israel.
Some of the world’s largest cities, including Beijing, Buenos Aires, Dhaka and Mexico City, depend heavily on ground water for their water supply. Drawing water from underground resources, instead of relying on rainfall and surface water, is like sipping water from a glass yet hoping that the water level will not go down. In South Asia, the water table is dropping by about two to three metres a year.
In China, the lower estuaries of the Yellow River are now dry two-thirds of the year, the water table is falling by 1.5 metres a year and a third of Beijing’s wells have dried up. China wants to construct two more dams equal to the size of the massive Three Gorges Project on the Yangtse. China is also planning a series of giant dams across the Mekong, the Salween and Brahmaputra rivers whose waters are vital to all the downstream countries.
By 2025, all of West Asia, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Singapore and South Africa and parts of India and China will face absolute water scarcity — defined as less than 1,000 cubic metres of water per person per year. These countries would not be able to meet their needs for irrigated agriculture, or for domestic, industrial and environmental purposes. Water will have to be transferred out of agriculture to other needs, making these countries increasingly dependent on imported food.
If there is no water, then there is no food either. The ecological cycle having been broken we could get into an endless cycle of droughts, famines, floods and cyclones. The poorer countries will be left with no alternative but to import not only food but also water and oil. The pity is that this could happen to those who are self-sufficient in food today and with better water management even ward off the perils of 2025. But the possibility that the same transnational company could be controlling supply of oil, water and food only means the return of the East India Company in another incarnation.
Potential conflicts are likely where rivers and lakes are shared by more than one country. The Nile, the Jordan, the Indus, the Ganga, the Brahmaputra and the Mekong are some of these. In times of water stress and shortages, regions will face water refugees from one region to the other within the country or between two countries.
There could be wars for the control of water supplies; or water resources or systems used as a weapon during a military conflict; or used for a political goal; terrorists could threaten using water sources as a weapon of coercion. Water systems themselves could be targets of military action. Then, with multinational giants having entered the business of supplying water privately, for profit, there could be wars for entrepreneurial control. Inequitable pricing and monopolistic practices have already caused distress in Latin America and South Africa. The most dangerous is naturally the one fought with weapons.
Pakistanis fear that India, as the upper riparian, could one day choke off the Indus waters with disastrous consequences to Pakistani Punjab. Kashmir is thus a matter of life and death. Should the rivers that flow into Pakistan begin to lose their flow because of natural reasons, the Indus Waters Treaty between India and Pakistan will come under stress.
Sindhi nationalists in Pakistan have accused the Punjabi-dominated establishment of signing away Sindh’s needs by accepting the Indus Waters Treaty which ignored their needs from the waters of the Sutlej, Ravi and Beas — whose waters flows to Sindh. They also accuse Punjab of diverting more than its share of the Indus waters and regard plans to construct the Kalabagh Dam upstream as another way of depriving Sindh of water. The distributaries of the Indus Delta are dying and the salt water from the sea is creeping up to destroy the mangroves of Sindh.
If better water management and all that goes with it is not put in place quickly enough, it is possible that one day reservoirs like the Nagarjuna Sagar or the Nangal or the Mangla Dam could run dry. It is difficult to imagine a situation where the mighty rivers of South Asia become rivulets unable to reach the sea. As the taps run dry and the crops wither away, there would be upheavals — mixed as they would be with regional, caste, sectarian and communal colour. All this may be difficult to imagine, but this is a calamity waiting to happen. It is a nightmare about to come true.
The future of this planet will be determined by the decisions mankind takes now and how it implements them in the next few years. If there is no change in our pattern of consumption and wastage and pollution, if there is no effort to change our way of life, then that day is not far off when this planet will become a dustbowl. Only sustained early action can prevent this country from becoming a 21st century Mohenjo Daro. India must not wait for the rest of the world. A beginning has to be made here and now; we must learn to worship and conserve water like our ancestors did.
The writer was Secretary, R&AW, before retiring last year
Source : Hindustan Times 30th July 2004
A few weeks ago the media were running out of print space and airtime covering the Rahul Mahajan story. Rahul's sole claim to fame is that he is the son of a slain ex-minister; his own activities made no difference to most of us then or now. Yet in the midst of innumerable health and other bulletins about this 'celebrity', one of the channels had a constitutional expert voicing his opinion on the episode.
The expert said that the other three 'suspects' in the case had done the right thing by going to a TV channel to make their statements rather than going to the police. The reasoning was that once these statements had been made publicly, the police would not be able to manipulate them the way they are known to do. This comment is a reflection on the loss of confidence in the instruments of the State - its inability to protect the innocent and its ability to protect the guilty.
The Mahajan episodes bring out two things - the declining image of the State as represented by its various arms and the rising power of the media. The two are not connected and have occurred independently. If the rich and the powerful can go to the media and make their confessional statements or whatever we may call them, where does the common man go? Those who have the right connections are recognised as instant story-material, but where do those who are not deemed worth a headline go?
This is precisely something a media-savvy crook could try to do - go public with his proclaimed innocence and let the rest be conveniently branded as manipulation by the police. How long will it be before the media begin to play God too? The more fundamental issue is that when a crime has been committed or people need protection, we have no confidence to go to the police and instead seek connections and influences before going to any authority to sort out our problems.
Over time, those of us who can afford it and are tired of not being able to get what we feel is legitimately ours have resorted to self-help. If the State does not promise regular supply of electricity, we buy inverters and generators. The State does not give us water, so we dig our own illegal tube-wells. The State is unable to provide security or redress, so we outsource.
Increasingly, the State is being seen as an uncaring entity that has begun to wither away in a very negative sort of way. The most decrepit building in a district is usually the primary school and the primary health centre where teachers do not teach, and doctors and nurses do not come. Substandard drugs, obtained at 'rate contracts', are the magic potions.
Water, electricity, security, education and health are a citizen's everyday requirements, and this is where the State has failed. It is no use shedding tears and providing quotas at higher levels when 90 per cent of the children from this section of society drop out of school before they reach Class 12. This is happening in a country that prides itself as the future knowledge base of the world and is increasingly the flavour of the West. Images and perceptions are important, but need to be sustained.
The average Indian associates law and order with the traffic cop, the man he runs into every day. But there is the long arm of the law in Dundahera, ruminating under a peepal tree as he eyes that young one in fluorescent pink drifting by, quite oblivious to the traffic mayhem around him. Try paying the government the money you owe it and you will be sent on a runaround. We have Chief Ministers who hurtle down national highways in 16-car motorcades - in a country that imports 70 per cent of its petroleum requirements, and at exorbitant prices. But who pays for this majestic munificence? Presumably it is R.K. Laxman's Babuji, who basks in political sunshine just short of elections. All this and much more, is the embodiment of an uncaring State.
Leaders no longer lead and followers do not know what or who to follow. These are early symptoms of a general malaise of the weakening instrumentalities of State, and will one day become an epidemic.
The rise of the Indian media and Bollywood in recent years, informing and entertaining the public while providing the glue for unity, has been exhilarating. They are the new image-makers and iconoclasts, creators of perceptions and kings of entertainment. Live TV reportage is a comparatively new phenomenon. It has the exuberance of youth and the susceptibility to peer pressure unlike the more mature and usually staid print media. Sometimes trivial pursuits in search of better ratings actually lead to viewer ennui. In this age of instant news conveyed by sound bites and images, it is the images that linger. The spoken or written word is sometimes forgotten.
With this immense power comes a corresponding responsibility, for everyone cannot be as lucky as our Leftist comrades who are currently in power without having to shoulder any responsibility. Autocracies give some people the freedom to do what they please. Not so in a democracy, where the power and liberty to inform are automatically curtailed by the other man's freedom, rights and beliefs. The wise also understand that there is sometimes very little difference between supporting a cause and inflaming passions.
Our TV reportage of the Kargil war was excellent. But as the IC-814 hijack drama unfolded on our TV screens, we saw grieving relatives and friends with their sit-ins and dharnas. This excessive exposure ultimately forced the government to accept a weak bargain while the terrorists got free publicity. Similarly, it will always be debatable whether live and extensive TV coverage of the ghastly Gujarat riots was an exposé that helped control the massacre or was a provocation. Of course, not reporting is not the answer. In situations like this, the perennial dilemma will always be - what to report, when and how.
Bollywood is the other powerful medium that influences as it entertains. In a recent blockbuster, the main character is shown as noble and endearing and so much the boy-next-door that by the intermission, the audience is in love with him. Post-intermission, he turns out to be a vicious terrorist and resorts to killing dozens of Indian soldiers, proclaiming that his mission is to ensure that Indians and Pakistanis vacate Kashmir. The audience does not wince; it has already got the Stockholm Syndrome. Terrorism has been made respectable, even glorious.
The answer is not to Talibanise the country by having a thought police - we have enough varieties of the khaki kind - nor is it to privatise instruments of the State. The media have the power to inform but not the power to implement. This lies, and will always lie, with the State. But the instruments need to be revamped, taken away from the whims of the politician and given a security of tenure at the district level. Then the young man or woman should be fully equipped to deliver, with a performance audit.
Only then will responsive authority percolate downwards, without being oppressive or venal. We must give the civil service its soul, straighten its back and put steel into its frame if India has to keep its tryst with destiny.
Source: Hindustan Times, July 5, 2006
