Women in Politics - Beyond numbers

By Saleha Fatima

Recent reports in India indicating that many women politicians are finding it difficult to participate in politics, let alone equalize the gender gap that exists, point to an increasing need to analyse the role that women play in Indian politics. The latest elections, with its saga of violence and conflicting rhetoric, further support this need.

A recent "Times of India" report corroborates much of what has been discussed in this handbook: namely that "domestic responsibilities, lack of financial clout, rising criminalization of politics and the threat of character assassination" are making it increasingly difficult for women to be part of the political framework. Moreover, women politicians point out that even within the political parties, women are rarely found in leadership positions. In fact, "women candidates are usually fielded from 'losing' constituencies where the party does not want to 'waste' a male candidate".

In this section we examine the results of a study of women parliamentarians in India during the Twevlth Parliament. The discussion focuses on three main areas: the social profile of women parliamentarians; the routes they have taken to get to their political position; and the public policy areas in which they were involved.

The Indian Political System - Party System and Women's Representation
India is a bicameral parliamentary democracy, with a strong multi-party political system. The lower house is called the Lok Sabha (Peoples' Assembly) and has 545 members. The upper house is called the Rajya Sabha (States' Assembly) with 250 members. In 1991, women constituted 5.2 per cent of the membership of the Lok Sabha and 9.8 per cent of the membership of the Rajya Sabha.1 This was lower than the preceding 1989 parliament. The election results in 1996 showed a further decline in women's representation. This trend is worrying given the recent state-led initiatives to ensure women's representation in political institutions.

One of the reasons for this decline may be the strength of the party system itself, which can lead to the marginalization of issue-based politics, or to an expropriation of movements that are based on single issues. The women's movement in India has had to confront this issue. Indian political parties are, however, organizationally weak and dependant on local elites. This might be a second factor for the resistance to implementation of gender-sensitive political initiatives.

Women's Movement and the Issue of Representation
The demand for greater representation of women in political institutions in India was not taken up in a systematic way until the setting up of the Committee on the Status of Women in India (CSWI) which published its report in 1976. Before this the focus of the growing women's movement had been on improving women's socio-economic position. The CSWI report suggested that women's representation in political institutions, especially at the grass-roots level, needed to be increased through a policy of reservation of seats for women. In 1988, the National Perspective Plan for Women suggested that a 30 per cent quota for women be introduced at all levels of elective bodies. Women's groups insisted that reservation be restricted to the panchayat (village council) level to encourage grass-roots participation in politics. The consensus around this demand resulted in the adoption of the 73rd and 74th amendments to the Indian Constitution in 1993.

In 1995, the question of quotas was raised again, but this time the focus was women in parliament. Initially, most political parties agreed to this proposition. But soon doubts surfaced. When the bill addressing this issue was introduced in the Eleventh Parliament in 1997, several parties and groups raised objections. The objections focused around two main issues: first, the issue of overlapping quotas for women in general and those for women of the lower castes; second, the issue of elitism.

Most women's groups felt that the caste issue was a divisive one for women. Also, many felt uneasy about giving special privileges to elite women by ensuring seats for them in the parliament, while they had previously supported quotas for women at the grass-roots level of the panchayats. To date, the amendment has not been passed by parliament. However, the current government of the Hindu nationalist BJP has committed itself to introducing another quota bill for women in parliament.

The 39 women representatives in the 1991­1996 Indian Parliament were mostly middle-class, professional women, with little or no links to the women's movement. A significant number of them accessed politics through their families, some through student and civil rights movements, and some as a result of state initiatives aimed at increasing representation from the lower castes.

Gender and Caste in Parliament
Caste has been an important feature of Indian public and political life. Most of the women MPs in the Tenth Parliament were members of the higher castes. For example, there were six women from the Brahmin caste. This represents a sizeable 17.14 per cent of the women MPs, while Brahmins comprise only 5.52 per cent of the population. However, it is important to guard against making an easy correlation between caste and political representation. For example, of the six women who are Brahmins, two are MPs from the Communist Party of India. In both cases the caste factor is less important than their privileged class backgrounds. Further, both were products of political movements, the nationalist struggle and the anti-emergency movement.

The number of women who are able to avail of India's caste-based reservation system remains small. While 22 per cent of the parliamentary seats were reserved for the Scheduled Castes, women occupied only 4.1 per cent of the reserved seats. Two women MPs were from what are called the Scheduled Tribes. However, out of 39 women MPs in the Tenth Lok Sabha (representing seven per cent of the total), 14 per cent were from the Scheduled Castes. Two women MPs belonged to the "backward" castes and represented open constituencies. Caste, therefore, affects the profile, loyalties, and work of representatives in the Indian Parliament.

Out of the 39 women MPs in the 1991­1996 Lok Sabha, 32 had postgraduate qualifications; in the Rajya Sabha 14 out of the 17 women were graduates. The class position of these women is obviously more important to their educational levels than caste. Only one out of the seven lower caste women MPs was not a graduate, and the one Scheduled Caste woman MP in the Rajya Sabha had postgraduate education. The levels of education are also reflected in the professional profiles of these women. Thirty per cent of women MPs in the Rajya Sabha for example were lawyers, and 25 per cent in the Lok Sabha were either teachers or lecturers.

Most of the women MPs (about 65 per cent) were between their late 30s and 60s, and therefore did not have the responsibility of bringing up a young family. Given the almost universal marriage pattern that exists in India, the figure for unmarried MPs is extraordinarily high, and indicates the social pressures on women who join public life. For those who are married, the pressures of public life are eased a bit by their class situation. Most MPs are able to afford paid help in the home. In many cases the joint family system, or at least strong family support also helps. However, the constraints of family life continue to be real concerns even for privileged women.

Women have different strategies to cope with these constraints. If the family has accepted a woman's career in politics, she can negotiate with her family. This is more likely if the family is an elite political family with more than one member participating in politics. If the woman was already active in political life before she married, she can face tremendous pressures from her husband's family to conform to a traditional role that allows little scope for pursuing an active political career. A woman politician's options in this case are either to conform to the expectations of the family and retreat from public life, or to leave the family in pursuit of an uncertain future in party politics. In the latter case, the lack of family support and the stigma of divorce are a clear disadvantage for a woman in politics.

Class also mediates the influence of religion. With only one woman Muslim MP in the Rajya Sabha and one in the Lok Sabha, Muslim women are significantly under-represented. Dr. Najma Heptullah, who was also the Deputy Speaker of the Rajya Sabha, is from an elite class and educational background, and enjoys support for her work from both her natal and marital family. Margaret Alva, a Christian, and then Minister of State, and Founder Chair of the National Commission for Women of India, is from a similar background. In both cases the families were involved in the national movement, were influenced by liberal ideology, and were highly educated.

Thus, the majority of women in the Indian Parliament are elite women. While their public role challenges some stereotypes, their class position often allows them far greater range of options than are available to poorer women.

Surprisingly, active participation in the women's movement has not been one of the entry routes into formal party politics for women MPs.

Kinship or more?
"Male equivalence" has been a dominant explanation for how women access political life. The assumption here is that women access political life with the support, backing and contacts of the family, in particular that of the husband. In the sample of 15 women surveyed, 1/3 of the women MPs, for example, have "family support" in the background. However, in a well-argued critique of this theory, Carol Wolkowitz points out that "male equivalence" is an inadequate conceptual framework. First, because it is the public sphere (e.g. state institutions, press, and political discourse) that has to be negotiated if the family decision to put forward a woman in politics is to succeed; it is not a private, but a public matter.

Second, in many cases the husbands do not support the candidature of the wife at all. It is the pressure of party political bosses that forces the issue in many cases. The centralized system of distribution of seats in mass political parties helps in this context. A party's concern with levels of representation of certain groups within its ranks, and consequences for legitimacy of the party among the under-represented groups might be the motive for including women.

Social and Political Movements
Together with "kinship link" and state initiatives, an important factor impacting on women's access to political life seems to be social and political movements. These movements have created windows of opportunity and some women have been able to take advantage of these opportunities to access political life.

For example, the national movement was an important mobilizer of women. Gandhi's contribution to bringing women into politics is well-documented; the left movement also mobilized women. Women's organizations were constituted under the umbrella and control of the party ­ the Mahila Congress and the All India Women's Federation (CPI). However, none of the women interviewed in this survey had strong links with the women's wing of their party prior to their entry into parliamentary politics.

The civil rights and anti-emergency movement led by Jaiprakash Narayan (JP) in 1975­1977 was an important political movement that brought students to the forefront of national politics. Many women, both on the right and on the left wing, joined this movement and continued on in politics. Finally, in the context of current politics in India, fundamentalist and communal parties are mobilizing women. One of the most charismatic woman MP's is Uma Bharti, the product of the rise of Hindu militancy in Indian politics. She is the member of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a mobilizational wing of the BJP and a "preacher" of Hindu texts by profession. She was in the forefront of the movement that brought down the Babri Mosque in Ayodhyaya.

The influence of individual national leaders is also an important factor that militates against the "male equivalence" theory. While Indira Gandhi, for example, did little to promote women's representation in politics, Rajiv Gandhi accepted the principle of reservation of seats for women. He initiated measures that had a direct impact on the inclusion of women in politics, e.g., the 1993 provision for reservation of 33 per cent of elected seats on village panchayats for women. As we have mentioned, who is able to take advantage of such reservations is mediated by class, ethnicity and caste.

However, the support of the state and state / political leaders can be important to women who want to access the political system. Quotas for women as a strategy for accessing the political arena has growing support among women MPs, despite the fact that very few have accessed the system through that route, and are firm believers in the meritocratic argument. Most women MPs have supported the 81st Amendment, which would ensure a 33 per cent quota for women in parliament, even though party discipline has not allowed them to vote for this. This issue highlights the constraints that the party system poses for women politicians.

Gender and Public Power: What do Women MPs do ?
Out of the 20 Congress women MPs in the 1991­1996 Lok Sabha, none was a Cabinet minister; two were Ministers of State; and two were Deputy Ministers of State. In the Rajya Sabha, out of seven Congress women MPs, one is a Minister of State. The portfolios of these Ministers included, Human Resource Development, Civil Aviation and Tourism, Health and Family Welfare, and Personnel and Public Grievances. All these are generally regarded as "soft portfolios"; this does not, however, take away from the responsibility that these women ministers have. One Congress woman MP is the Deputy Chairperson of the Rajya Sabha. At the level of the party, one MP was on the disciplinary committee of the party, and one was the President of the Mahila Congress. Among BJP women, the one Rajya Sabha member was the spokesperson on the economy and general political line of the party. Of the 10 members of the Lok Sabha, one was one of the vice-presidents of the party, and two were on the National Executive Committee of their party.

The system of institutional incentives and disincentives at the level of the party and parliament impact on the issues that women espouse in parliament. Most women MPs interviewed did not have women's issues high on their list of interests. Rather, they wanted to be on committees relating to economy, international relations, and trade. As ambitious women these MPs want to be where power and influence converge.

The Accountability Question
One of the important issues for any discussion on gender and representation has to deal with the constituency that women represent. As there are no "women's only" constituencies, women MPs are not accountable to women as women. And yet, when issues regarding women are raised in the parliament, these women are expected to, and do participate in the debates. Issues such as the welfare of women and violence against women are particularly important in uniting women MPs.

These issues are discussed in the "ladies room" in the parliament. However, as all the MPs questioned made clear, they are "party women first"; party whip is rarely flouted.

Some women MPs are also asked by the party leadership to get involved in the women's wing of the party. While the women MPs do not necessarily see this role as an enhancement of their status within the party, some have made a success of this role and as a result gained influence with the leadership of the party.

As "party women" with political ambitions, women MPs respond to the institutional incentives and disincentives that are placed on them. All these factors limit the potential of these women MPs representing the interests of Indian women across a range of issues. As a result there seems to be little regular contact between women's groups and women MPs. The exception here is of course the women's wing of political parties that do liaise with women MPs. This does allow the possibility of women MPs becoming conduits between the party's leadership and its women members. They are also consulted from time to time by the party leadership on issues regarding the family, and women's rights. But non-party women's groups do not seem to approach women MPs.

Conclusion
Women's representation in the parliament, while important on the grounds of social justice and legitimacy of the political system, does not easily translate into improved representation of women's various interests.

While we cannot assume that more women in public offices would mean a better deal for women in general, there are important reasons for demanding greater representation of women in political life. First is the intuitive one ­ the greater the number of women in public office, articulating interests, and seen to be wielding power, the more the gender hierarchy in public life could become disrupted. Without sufficiently visible, if not proportionate, presence in the political system ­ "threshold representation"11 ­ a group's ability to influence either policy-making, or indeed the political culture framing the representative system, is limited. This fact is confirmed by the various other contributions in this volume. Further, the fact that these women are largely elite women might mean that the impact that they have on public consciousness might be disproportionately larger than their numbers would suggest.

Second, and more important, we could explore the strategies that women employ to access the public sphere in the context of a patriarchal socio-political system. These women have been successful in subverting the boundaries of gender, and in operating in a very aggressive male-dominated sphere. Could other women learn from this example? The problem here is, of course, precisely that these women are an elite. The class from which most of these women come is perhaps the most important factor in their successful inclusion into the political system. We can, however, examine whether socio-political movements provide opportunities for women to use certain strategies that might be able to subvert the gender hierarchy in politics. Finally, we can explore the dynamics between institutional and grass-roots politics. As this study demonstrates, the "politicization of gender" in the Indian political system is due largely to the success of the women's movement.

Women representatives have thus benefited from this success of the women's movement. However, there has been limited interaction between women representatives and the women's movement ­ one of the important areas of weakness behind both the effectiveness of women MPs as well as that of the women's movement. This is, perhaps, the issue that the women's movement needs to address as part of its expanding agenda for the 1990s.

Hyderabad Elections 2009 - Women Psyche

By Samiya Anwar

From the public lavatory to lanes, at every passage and wall we find the big pictures of bade bade neta, their posters with symbols of palm, flower, etc. Off course the rallies of Praja Rajyam not to forget is a part of every ones breakfast table with a hot cuppa of tea early morning. Well known today’s aam janta everyone is talking about the forthcoming elections, it is been more than sixty years of independence India is a free country. First it was poor and underdeveloped. Now it is counted as a developing country. We have traveled a long way. And it won’t be anonymous to say government builds the road we are traveling. The government will always affect our lives.

An election means a call upon to elect a new government. It is no joke. Election is a serious stuff, not fluffy and downy. The rich have been harvesting the benefits of progress, while the gigantic mass is in the dumps into poverty and hunger. It is every one’s primary right to exercise vote if he/she has attained the age of 18 or above. But how many of them actually do it. There is less percentage of people who is enjoying this right in reality.

For some women when it comes to elections it is very different to get the head around, like my mother always voted the person my dad opted. Why the question is always troubled me. When I turned 18, I felt an adult. I thought I am grown and can vote to any person of my choice. My parents and I had a different person to choose. They want me to vote for the candidate they wish. It was not only with me but also to most of my friends. There parents want them to vote accordingly. With the passage of time, things changed when I realized the power of vote

With the present elections in the state there are many women who dare not talk about elections at all. What we are seeing is deeply worrying. But they are confused and disoriented because the aspirations of the people remain unfulfilled after elections. The bag-full of promises seems to be nothing today in their eyes. Should Naidu be given a second chance is the question of many. As we see that the current government failed to maintain the quality of all that Chandrababu Naidu has done for the city and has done nothing for the urban population strongly feels some women in Hyderabad.

As election race shifts further women find it a brutal joke .it is like multiple choice questions for many to answer the best of the option given. It is a number game to many. Whosoever comes into power there is less development than what is being promised to them. It is no mindful decision, some vote blindly and some don’t, especially rural women. They need active encouragement to be dragged to the polls

It is no same mind frame of all women. A recent study shows that women are on par with men while excising voting rights. According to 2009 electoral polls women voters are in majority in six states namely Andhra Pradesh, Meghalaya, kerala, Manipur, mizoram, puducherry. Andhra has 2.86 crore women voters as opposed to 2.80 crore men. It has been witnessing a steady increase in the number of women voters

Today’s women are independent and free like India, our country. They are not dependent on men in decision and voice their opinion openly. The urban women run their life on their own. The traditional India has transformed to more advanced and globalize country going the west way. Women play a decisive role in the polls. They exercise it in much greater numbers and greater percentages than men. The vote of women - individually and collectively - can make or break elections, candidates, and outcomes.

Women walk the talk while men just talk and walk away. Women are the ultimate decision makers. They are doing great in every field. It is women who know a lot about what their families and their communities need. They have equal power to men in taking political decisions. As election fever has gripped the city. Who better tell the government what does community needs than women? How do you expect things around you to change when you don't cast your valuable vote thinks Manisha, my friend and a call center employee?

There are more women issues than men to be addressed. Isn’t it? First, it is the safety of women in society she dwells in. many women in the Old City do not trust police. They go through domestic and physical violence and don’t complain. We need a system where women can approach cops fearlessly. The issues like water shortage, frequent power cuts, road accidents and physical abuse of women at workplace should be given first thought.

The self-realization and self-confidence are absolutely essential. Education and work will bring real freedom to the rural woman and Child labor and kids begging at traffic signals are serious issues. The price increase of several commodities and economic slowdown has affected many families. The young college graduates have no job openings and the rest working is fired at any moment. There is no security and safety. What does the future hold for the children is worrisome by women.

The college students especially women are trying to spread awareness about the election campaigns held in Hydrabad and important of “one vote” to save the life of many. Every vote is a precious. We are the tax-payers and only our vote decides the party coming into power. Women’s vote is for the betterment of family and community. So we should think twice before casting vote. Our vote is valuable and so should be our decision.

Nevertheless the world needs more cool brains than hot heads. We need to have a collective effort to select the right candidate. The woman in Hyderabad expects very responsive governance from the future government. Women HOPE for a change.

Globocop versus the TermiNATO

By M H Ahssan

The people of Strasbourg have voted in their apartment balconies for the French-German co-production of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's 60th birthday this Saturday. Thousands of "No to NATO" banners, alongside "Peace" banners, sprung up all around town until forcibly removed by French police.

Prime "liberal democracy" repression tactics were inevitably on show - just as in the much-hyped "we had 275 minutes to save the world and all we could come up with was half-a-trillion dollars for the International Monetary Fund" Group of 20 summit in London. Protesters were tear-gassed as terrorists. Downtown was cordoned off. Residents were forced to wear badges. Demonstrations got banished to the suburbs.

Then there's the musical metaphor. When NATO was created in Washington on April 4, 1949, the soundtrack was Gershwin's It Ain't Necessarily So. When seven countries from the former Warsaw Pact were admitted in 2004, the soundtrack came from the ghastly Titanic blockbuster. For the 60th birthday bash in Baden-Baden - with the Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel trio attending - it's Georges Bizet's Carmen.

As much as Carmen is a gypsy who believes a fortune-teller and ends up dead, NATO is a global traveler who may end up dead by believing fortune-teller Washington.

Sultans of swing
NATO certainly has plenty to celebrate. France, under adrenalin junkie Sarkozy - known in NATOland as the "Sultan of Bruni", in reference to his smashing wife Carla - is back to NATO. Obama is presenting his new, comprehensive Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy to NATO. NATO "secures the peace" in Mafia-ridden Kosovo (an entity not recognized even by NATO members such as Spain and Greece). NATO, in full "war on terror" mode, acts like a supercop in the Mediterranean. NATO patrols the Horn of Africa looking for pirates. NATO trains Iraqi security forces. For a body of 60, NATO is fully fit.

Physically, NATO is a bureaucratic nightmare occupying a huge, horrid building on Blvd Leopold III in Mons, outside of Brussels, employing 5,200 civilians divided into 320 committees sharing an annual budget of $2.7 billion. These committees manage 60,000 combat troops scattered all around the world.

NATO should have been dead immediately after the fall of the enemy it was created to fight - the Soviet Union. Instead, NATO had a ball during the 1990s, when Russia was down and out and Russian president Boris Yeltsin spent more time filling up his vodka glass than worrying about geopolitics.

In 1999 - to the delight of weapons makers in the US industrial-military complex - NATO expanded to the Balkans via its devastating air war on Russian ally Serbia, sold to world public opinion by then US president Bill Clinton on humanitarian grounds when it was, in fact, humanitarian imperialism.

To say that NATO - a North Atlantic body - is overextended is an understatement. Members Romania and Bulgaria are nowhere near the Atlantic Ocean. Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia are landlocked. In Central Asia, Afghanistan (or at least the non-Taliban-controlled parts of it) is de facto occupied by NATO. Mega-bases such as Ramstein (Germany), Aviano (Italy) and Incirlik (Turkey) now have a counterpart halfway around the world in Bagram (Afghanistan).

Decades after the British Empire, "Europe" tries to (re)occupy the Hindu Kush. Afghanistan is NATO's first war outside Europe and first ground war ever. It involves all 26 members (now 28; Albania and Croatia were finally admitted) plus 12 "partners", including five European nations that used to be neutral: Austria, Finland, Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland. All of them are bound by NATO's first-ever invocation of Article 5 of its charter, which determines mutual military assistance.

In a mix of reading the writing on the wall (this is an unwinnable war) and appeasing the fury of their pacifist public opinions, most European governments will never relent to Obama's appeal - as charm offensive-laden as it may be - for more troops in Afghanistan. Opposition to the Afghan war in Germany, for instance, is around 70% (humanitarian aid is a different story).

Many countries, including the most powerful, will shun Obama's demands based on secret "national provisos". As lawyers in Berlin told NATO, for example, German soldiers are prohibited from launching a pre-emptive, on-the-ground attack on the Taliban.

That utterly misleading acronym, ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) used to be in charge of the Western occupation of Afghanistan starting in December 2001 - until, Transformer-style, it became a huge counter-insurgency (COIN) drive expanding all over the country all the way to western Pakistan. The management of this COIN is obviously American - first and foremost because it totally bypasses NATO's very complex political voting mechanisms.

There's nothing "international" about ISAF. ISAF is NATO. And with swarms of combat troops and air strikes there’s nothing "assistance" about it either.

ISAF/NATO is headquartered in Kabul, in a former riding club on renamed Great Masoud Road which was rebuilt into a veritable fortress. The buck stops with - what else is new - not an European, but an American, four-star General David McKiernan. As much as his personal mission in the 1970s was to prevent the Warsaw Pact from infiltrating West Germany, his mission nowadays is to prevent al-Qaeda from, in his words, "infiltrating Europe or the United States".

By the way, if anybody had any doubts, this whole thing still falls under ongoing "Operation Enduring Freedom", according to the Pentagon. This really "enduring" freedom applies to no less than Afghanistan, Pakistan, Cuba (because of Guantanamo), Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, the Philippines, Seychelles, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Yemen.

McKiernan's big thing had to be the upcoming Obama Afghan surge - which will be executed by American, not NATO soldiers. After all, hardcore combat has nothing to do with ISAF's original mandate. But the problem is in the fog of war and ISAF/NATO has become a TermiNATO - ensnared as much as the Americans in a peace-by-Predator logic. Call it the coalition of the unwilling. No wonder European public opinion is horrified.

And that leads to the breakdown of Obama lecturing NATO on his "AfPak" war, which needed, according to him, a "more comprehensive strategy, a more focused strategy, a more disciplined strategy". In the end, Obama is reduced to hitting up the Europeans for more money.

The ISAF/NATO commander for all of southern Afghanistan, Dutch Major-General Mart de Kruif, believes the surge is the right thing - as US troops will go to "where they are most needed: to Kandahar and Helmand provinces", where Taliban commanders "are capable of launching major operations". As he told Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad, "we need more boots on the ground" and "we will also be able to transport more men and material via air transport".

But when De Kruif talked about Petraeus' Iraq-surge-replay plan of arming local militias, he at least let it be known how hard it will be. "If you're going to arm local militia you need to make sure that they mirror the local power structure," he said. "Also, the local police has to be effective enough to guide and control the militia. You don't want some vague commander running the militia. You need to give the militia members the prospect of a job in the police force. And you need to have an exit strategy, a way to disband the militia again without having all those weapons disappear."

Another Dutchman, pro-Iraq war Bush "poodle" Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, has been NATO's secretary general since January 2004 (he leaves next July). At least he's now admitting - to German weekly Der Spiegel - that the Afghan war "can't be won militarily". Instead, he believes success lies in capturing the "hearts and minds of the people". Certainly not by accumulating bomb-a-wedding "collateral damage". ("We must be careful to avoid civilian casualties while battling the insurgents," he says.) Scheffer is also forced to admit that "cooperation with Iran" in Afghanistan is essential.

Time for PATO?
Key NATO powers France and Germany simply can't afford to antagonize Russia. Germany is a virtual energy hostage of Gazprom. Unlike irresponsible Eastern Europeans, no French or German government would even contemplate being a hostage of a New Cold War between Russia and the US (one of the key reasons why NATO membership for Georgia and the Ukraine is now virtually dead in the water). Paris and Berlin know Moscow could easily station missiles in Kaliningrad or in Russian-friendly Belarus pointed towards them.

Russia's colorful ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin has the definitive take on NATO's spy-versus-spy obsession of encircling Russia. As he told Der Spiegel, "The closer their bases get to us, the easier it is for us to strike them. We would have needed missiles in the past. Today, machine guns are sufficient." As for Georgia and Ukraine as NATO members, Rogozin adds, why not invite "Hitler, Saddam Hussein and [Georgian president Mikhail] Saakashvili."

Russia, Rogozin told French daily Le Monde, expects NATO to become "a modern political and military alliance", not a "globocop" (as Der Spiegel dubs it). Russia expects a partnership - not encirclement. Rogozin could not be more explicit on the Russian position regarding Afghanistan: "We want to prevent the virus of extremism from crossing the borders of Afghanistan and take over other states in the region such as Pakistan. If NATO failed, it would be Russia and her partners that would have to fight against the extremists in Afghanistan."

The NATO-Russia Council is bound to meet again. Moscow's official view is of a security order stretching "from Vancouver to Vladivostok". Something even more ambitious than NATO: "Perhaps NATO could develop into PATO, a Pacific-Atlantic alliance. We just cannot allow troublemakers to deter us."

Messing with Russia, anyway, was never a good idea - except for history and geography deprived neo-conservatives. In 2008 alone, no less than 120,000 US and NATO troops transited through Manas airbase in Kyrgyzstan (the base will be closed this year). This, along with the neo-Taliban bombing of NATO's supply routes in the Khyber Pass, has forced Petraeus to turn to the Caucasus (Georgia and Azerbaijan) as alternative military transit routes, and beg Kazakhstan and Tajikistan in Central Asia for help; this will only materialize if Russia says "yes". Magnanimously, meanwhile, Russia has opened its territory for the transit of NATO supply convoys.

What is NATO for?
As much as Palestine is an invaluable test lab for the Israeli Defense Forces, Afghanistan, and now AfPak, is a lab for both the US and NATO for test driving weapons systems and variations of Petraeus' COIN.

On the other hand, NATO incompetence has been more than evident in the drug front. Afghanistan under NATO occupation was back to being the world's number one producer and exporter of opium. And that, in turn, led to the current US/NATO drug war.

So AfPak has really been a true Transformer war - from the hunt for Osama bin Laden to war against that portmanteau word "the Taliban" and to a Colombia-on-steroids drug war. And all this leaves aside the eternally invisible Pipelineistan angle - centered on the $7.6 billion Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline which the Bill Clinton administration wanted to go ahead with via an (aborted) deal with ... the Taliban, who were in power in the second half of the 1990s.

Watching Obama's actions so far, and considering the Pentagon mindset, there's no evidence to support the possibility that Washington and NATO would abandon crucially strategic Afghanistan, which happens to be a stone's throw from the heart of Eurasia.

Just ask China, Russia and observer member Iran of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The SCO was founded in June 2001, at first to fight transnational drug smuggling and Islamic fundamentalists and then started to promote all sorts of cooperation on energy, transportation, trade and infrastructure.

Both the US and NATO have totally ignored one of the SCO's aims: to find a regional, non-weaponized solution for the enduring Afghan tragedy. The US and NATO's intransigence during the Bush era is much to blame for the process of the SCO turning into Asia's NATO. In Asian and Russian eyes, NATO has nothing to do with "nation-building", peacekeeping or "humanitarian assistance". And Afghanistan proves it. Asians don't need a globocop - much less a TermiNATO.

Obama, McKiernan, Scheffer, no one will admit it - but many in Washington and Brussels would actually love NATO to really be a borderless TermiNATO, bypassing the UN to perform humanitarian imperialism all over the globe, taking out "al-Qaeda" and "terrorists" anywhere, protecting Pipelineistan and pipeline lands for Western interests in all directions.

The US, supported by NATO, was the midwife of a new incarnation of "Islamic fundamentalism" which should, as it did, get rid of the Soviets in Afghanistan and in the former, energy-rich Soviet republics. The fact that, millions of dead and millions of displaced people later, NATO is now asking for Russian help so as not be stranded in Afghanistan is just another bitter irony of AfPak history, and certainly not the last.

India split over terror trial

By M H Ahssan

In the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attack last November in which nearly 200 people were killed and property worth millions of dollars destroyed, intense public debate has erupted over the fate of the lone surviving terrorist. Opinion is sharply divided over whether Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab should be given a fair trial, and whether - given the magnitude of his crime - Kasab can rightfully claim legal help.

Kasab's trial is set to start on April 6 in Mumbai, and a few vital points need to be raised. These include India's international obligations, its human-rights stand and the constitutional rights guaranteed to every citizen - Indian or foreign - in this regard.

Firstly, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ratified by India, protects the "presumption of innocence until proven guilty in a court of law at which the defendant has had all the guarantees necessary for his defense". So, failing to provide legal support to Kasab would sully India's reputation as a democracy - the world's largest - rooted in the principles of justice and social equity.

Secondly, the Indian constitution guarantees a right to legal aid and representation and ensures that every individual get a "fair, just and equitable procedure" in court for any defendant, "regardless of his nationality". The right to life guaranteed under Article 21 of the constitution includes the right to legal aid. Similarly, Article 39A mandates equal justice and free legal aid. Section 303 and section 304 of the Criminal Procedure Code mention the right of an accused to be "defended by a lawyer and the state's duty to provide legal aid".

Even the Supreme Court states, "Free legal assistance at state cost is a fundamental right of a person accused of an offence which may involve jeopardy to his life or personal liberty." This in short is the essence of the country's criminal justice system. As Home Minister Pranab Mukherjee told the media recently, "Every person in India who is accused or prosecuted is entitled to have a fair trial and the Indian judiciary is known for its transparency and for its fair deal."

However, while the law is unequivocal about Kasab's right to fair representation, a section of the Indian public has expressed severe displeasure over this prospect. This segment feels a fair trial for Kasab is "unpatriotic". After all, they argue, how can a criminal - who has been caught on camera unleashing terror in a city and mercilessly killing innocent people - lay claim to justice? Kasab was captured by the security forces outside Chatrapati Shivaji railway terminus, from where he was heading to other targets.

The groundswell of public anger against Kasab is enormous. And unfortunately, undesirable elements are taking advantage of the situation by giving the case a political spin. Maharashtra-based political parties like Shiv Sena, for instance, are demanding that Kasab be executed at the same terminus where he and his accomplices killed several innocent people.

To carry forward its moral policing agenda further, the Sena has even threatened Indian defense lawyers who agreed to represent Kasab in court. Senior lawyer Anjali Waghmare, a government legal aid panel lawyer and wife of a city cop, who has now agreed to defend Kasab, albeit under a heavy security cover. She had earlier withdrawn from the case following a violent protest outside her home in Mumbai by hundreds of Shiv Sainiks.

On Monday, over 300 Sainiks pelted stones at Waghmare's house and forced her to sign a statement promising she would drop the case. This senior lawyer is the perfect choice for the Kasab's defense, as she has appeared in many high-profile crime and corruption cases and has been a member of the governmental legal aid panel for the past 12 years. Despite the harassment, she confirmed on Wednesday that she will continue as Kasab's lawyer.

Waghmare is not the first lawyer to have faced Shiv Sena's ire. In December, a local lawyer, Dinesh Mota, was selected to represent Kasab but withdrew at the last minute, citing personal ethics. As legal experts point out, the protestors are missing a vital point: if Kasab doesn't get a lawyer, the case will not even proceed. He may even be acquitted. Clearly, this crucial case can't be decided by the pressures of mob rule or a kangaroo court but by a constitutionally appointed court of law.

Kasab has been under detention and interrogation since being captured. The mayhem unleashed by him and his militant colleagues has earned worldwide condemnation in the strongest possible terms. The international community has also been exerting pressure on Pakistan to act swiftly on terror and fulfill its promises to curb terrorism.

However, Islamabad is still reluctant to accept the fact that the attackers were Pakistani nationals and were specially trained for the purpose by militant outfits. On the same grounds, Pakistan has also refused any legal aid to Kasab.

It was against this backdrop that the Indian government stepped in to offer legal assistance. However, a major twist in the case came when the Mumbai Bar Association unanimously passed a resolution telling its members not to defend Kasab in a court of law. Expressing solidarity with other like-minded groups, the association said that Kasab should be tried on circumstantial evidence and no legal aid should be provided to him in view of the gravity of his crime.

The association ignored the fact that not representing Kasab would be a gross violation of the Indian constitution and is against the principles of natural justice. It is beyond a shadow of doubt that Kasab deserves stringent punishment for his crime, but his conviction should come in a dignified and just manner, supported by the rule of law. By providing legal aid to Kasab, India has nothing to lose as sentencing in this case looks inevitable. By giving a fair trial to the terrorist, India will also gain an edge over Pakistan.

Diplomatically too, Indian can then leverage this opportunity to showcase its impartiality in the global arena and apply indirect pressure on Pakistan to curb the menace of terrorism. The country can also be seen as upholding its respect for human rights. Simultaneously, Kasab's case can also demonstrate to the world that India has incontrovertible evidence that the Mumbai massacre was the handiwork of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba.

The G-20 piles folly on folly

By M H Ahssan

A combination of anarchists, nutcases, attention-seekers, the grossly unemployed and assorted victims of the credit crunch have descended on the Bank of England, gathering up a tsunami of protests linked to the London summit of the Group of 20 countries - a tidal wave of civil disagreement with authority that began barely a moment after I had secured an elusive macchiato from the local Starbucks.

The barista recommended that I stayed inside the shop when they boarded it up, fearing that anti-globalization protests would be directed against all symbols of America however far removed from the world of finance. Instead, I took my coffee and walked out into the beautiful London day, waiting to be asked a cogent question on the future of capitalism. As luck would have it, most of the folks in the crowd merely wanted to find out where to score drugs, while a few did enquire about where I had managed to find the coffee.

After we were all "locked" up inside a strange pattern of streets next to the headquarters of a large German bank that shall go unnamed, it soon became clear that the kids who had asked about drugs earlier were on to something. There was much trading in cannabis, right under the watchful eye of the London police, who only cared if anyone wished to lob a stone at the nearest bank.

Before all that though, drifting along with a crowd into Threadneedle Street, home to the Bank of England, was amusing. For one thing, the whole of the Bank intersection had been taken over by protestors ranging from anti-capitalists to environmentalists. Amongst the first acts of physical damage of the day was the trampling of spring daffodils outside the Royal Exchange; I observed that those doing the trampling were carrying the "End Carbon Emissions" placards. You really couldn't make this stuff up.

It was when the force of the crowd turned me the wrong way around, towards Bank Station that I found myself confronting a motley crew calling themselves the "G20 Meltdown" and who had helpfully brought along one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. For a while, I thought the solitary horse was explained by their inability to afford all four, being idiotic communists, but as it turned out they had planned to get three other horses through other underground-railway stations. I only managed to spot one other horse during the day, and even that could well have been a mirage.

Anyway, this was a more charismatic group; which is to say that the ringleaders all looked like they had never held down a day's job in their entire lives except perhaps in one of Her Majesty's prisons. Alongside the horsemen, the group included a coalition known as "Class War" - i targets landowners and assorted capitalists.

This grouping was incredibly popular with the ranks of the unemployed: with more than 2 million jobs already lost, the UK clearly had more than sufficient supplies of people to join this group, never mind that they were protesting for a return of the status quo ante rather than an overthrow of the establishment.

All along, the crowds had been increasing to the point where the London police started applying mini-quarantine areas; the idea being to isolate any group that looked like they may actually be troublesome into a small square and disallow entry or exit. Things quickly turned nasty after that at a location that wasn't previously closed off; a branch of RBS was vandalized by protestors throwing computer screens at the glass window.

In effect that act brought up the old broken glass conundrum into sharp focus: if someone throws a brick through a window, classical economists would consider the event economically accretive: given that the homeowner would have to buy glass, pay someone to fix it and so forth. In more rigorous schools of economics (such as the Austrian) though, the act would be economically destructive: while the act of replacing the glass would increase gross domestic product, it would always substitute another act (such as the person paying for curtains or buying himself a new toaster oven). More importantly, the act of breaking the glass pane diminishes one's view of safety, thereby causing more useless, defensive spending such as buying home insurance and the like.

The reason for that moral question was the events of the next day when world leaders actually met.

April 2, 2009
Quite tired by the overnight ordeal of being trapped with a bunch of nubile 20-year olds (no, I am not making that up), I met the dawn of April 2 to the cacophony of UK newspapers blaring about the failure of the summit before it had even started. Despite having been in the main square of the protests, even I couldn't recognize the vituperative commentary being spewed by news columnists who with a single voice proclaimed a day of chaos, intrigue and whatever else caught their fancy.

That it had simply been a rough day made worse by the actions of the London police was of course beyond the grasp of the newspaper columnists. Those that didn't report on the "riots" focused on the state dinner: right-wing newspapers highlighted the supposed snub given by Queen Elizabeth's consort, Prince Philip, to US President Barack Obama; while other newspapers pointed to the sheer scandal of the First Lady placing her arms around the sainted monarch.

As it happened, audiovisual evidence indicated that the prince had misheard the president's remarks and made one of his characteristic gaffes, while the queen had actually initiated the extraordinary gesture by placing her arm behind the First Lady's back. Given the facts, it was clear that the prejudice of the UK media stood very much against Obama, something explained not so much by his actions since becoming president but by the simple act of supposed solidarity being shown with the extremely unpopular Prime Minister Gordon Brown in the UK. Brown is considered in the UK press as a bit of a buffoon, variously derided for being a bore and more recently for crash-burning the UK economy by his extraordinary series of borrowings during the good years for the economy; money that had been wastefully spent by the Labour government.

After the newspapers, the next chore was to actually get to the place where the G-20 meeting [1] was being held: in something called the Excel Centre in the eastern part of London. I had been warned to stick to public transport and duly complied.

Here is a slight digression for Asian readers who are used to the comfort of metropolitan train journeys within cities like Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong. If you are one such person and are asked to travel on London's tube, or underground rail, network, here is a simple one-word recommendation: Don't. Unlike the train systems in Asian cities, allegedly built or bequeathed by the British, the London tube system is a mess of delays and accidents. Inside the carriages, conditions are virtually unbearable even on a beautiful spring day, while outside in the train stations, expect to see failing escalators, overcrowding and what have you.

Anyway, my journey was interrupted along the way, and I had to finally take a cab. While expensive, the road journey did offer a stunning view of the Millennium Dome, a vanity project of former UK prime minister Tony Blair that offers a wonderful economic lesson all on its own. Initially conceived by its design rather than its purpose, the Dome was meant to represent a new generation of "cool" people that inhabited the British Isles.

It proved to be the proverbial albatross and was soon dumped by the government; eventually picked up by the private sector at a fraction of the price, the Dome was renamed the O2 (after a telecom company) and now houses the largest indoor concerts in Europe, all at a profit derived from the sheer scale of events relative to the cost of buying (not building) the place.

This object lesson in economics, along with the previous day's broken glass paradox, was completely lost on the assembled leaders in the Excel Centre. By the way, this center was another eyesore, apparently built by the British government to encourage business tourism; that it hasn't failed in the same proportion of the Millennium Dome is only because some businesses actually ended up hosting large trade shows in the venue as they fled the crowded confines of London.

The statement
As with the previous rounds of G-20 meetings, I actually did try to read the final, official statement [2] from the gathering. Unfortunately the assembled brainpower completely lost me on the fifth point:

The agreements we have reached today, to treble resources available to the IMF to US$750 billion, to support a new SDR [the special drawing rights, or currency, of the International Monetary Fund] allocation of $250 billion, to support at least $100 billion of additional lending by the MDBs [multilateral development banks], to ensure $250 billion of support for trade finance, and to use the additional resources from agreed IMF gold sales for concessional finance for the poorest countries, constitute an additional $1.1 trillion programme of support to restore credit, growth and jobs in the world economy. Together with the measures we have each taken nationally, this constitutes a global plan for recovery on an unprecedented scale. (Japan, the European Union and China will provide the first $250 billion of the increase in IMF rescue funds to $750 billion, with the $250 billion balance to come from as yet unidentified countries, Bloomberg reported. The G-20 said they would couple the financing moves with steps to give emerging economic powerhouses such as China, India and Brazil a greater say in how the IMF is run, the report said.)

In effect, the only tangible result of the G-20 meeting - the tripling of IMF resources - is astounding. The same people who drove the Latin American economy into dust and were responsible for widespread poverty in Asia in the aftermath of the Asian crisis; the very people who encouraged the idiotic accumulation of market-return independent foreign exchange reserves by Asian countries that subsequently caused the asset bubbles of the US and Europe; the very people who had no clue about the impending bubble burst up until the beginning of 2008, are now supposed to gather up the foresight and skills required to end an economic crisis whose only recent historic parallel was the 1929 depression in the United States; an event that took place a good 16 years before the IMF was itself created.

Reading that bit of the statement, I was reminded about a different bit of history from the same Britain, and pretty much from the opposite end of London. This event took place on September 30, 1938; the BBC reported then as follows:

The British prime minister has been hailed as bringing "peace to Europe" after signing a non-aggression pact with Germany. PM Neville Chamberlain arrived back in the UK today, holding an agreement signed by Adolf Hitler which stated the German leader's desire never to go to war with Britain again. The two men met at the Munich conference between Britain, Germany, Italy and France yesterday, convened to decide the future of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland. Mr Chamberlain declared the accord with the Germans signalled "peace for our time", after he had read it to a jubilant crowd gathered at Heston airport in west London. The German leader stated in the agreement: "We are determined to continue our efforts to remove possible sources of difference and thus to contribute to assure the peace of Europe."
I have the dread feeling that the G-20 declaration from April 2, 2009, will achieve similar notoriety in years to come.

‘In Time, Everyone Will Pick Up The Gun In India’

By Ajit Sahi

Rengam, a Naxal ‘commander’, speaks to HNN from his hideout in the forests of Bijapur

What’s your role in the Communist Party of India (Maoist)?
To fight the Salwa Judum and bring back the people they have displaced. To those who went to Salwa Judum camps, we say, “Come back to your villages, homes and fields. Raise your children here.”

Why have the people gone to the Salwa Judum camps?
[When the Salwa Judum began in 2005] the Naga battalion went from village to village, burning houses, raping women, slashing people’s throats. The people ran to the camps in fear.

So why aren’t they coming back from the camps?
The Special Police Officers (SPOs) tell them, “If you go back to your villages, we’ll come and kill you.”

You should know that the government and the media portray Naxals as bloodthirsty gun-wielding insurgents with no popular legitimacy.

That’s a wrong image. The people don’t have guns in their hands. The people are in abject poverty and in terrible distress. They have nothing to eat. They have no cattle for farming.

Chhattisgarh Home Minister Nanki Ram Kanwar told HNN that the government wants to bring development to Bastar, but the Naxals don’t allow government agencies in here.
Is that so? Then why haven’t they brought development to the villages and the towns along the roads? If they aren’t able to enter deep in the forests, no one is stopping them from bringing development to the accessible parts.

What exactly is the fight between you and the government?
The people elected [local Congress leader] Mahendra Karma as an MLA. But he began terrorising them. He would be paid off by village sarpanchs [council chief] from development money. The people opposed this and cut off the money to him. In retaliation, he raised the Salwa Judum against us, filling it with young boys and giving them guns, which were used against the villagers.

The government says the Naxals have killed more than four times policemen than the police have killed Naxals.
That’s false. In Bastar alone, more innocent people than policemen have been killed.

When I spoke to Varavara Rao, seen as an overground Naxal ideologue, he justified killings, calling it revolutionary violence. Do you to agree?
If the government doesn’t understand [what we want], then we have no option but to take to the gun. The people are totally ready to bring the Revolution.

Do you think you can defeat the Indian state with the gun?
We will win, because millions are poor and they are ready [for the Revolution].

One can appreciate the need for a revolution to bring relief to the poor. But those who picked up the gun in Punjab, Kashmir and the northeast were brutally put down. How can you win against the state?
If the people buckle under, then it would be the fault of the leadership and point to a lack of preparedness by the people.

The Chhattisgarh Government says the state’s natural natural resources should be harnessed for India’s benefit. What do you say?
The government should first answer for the Bailadila hills. When it began mining the iron ore there, it had promised to employ the locals. Did that happen? No. The iron ore is shipped from Bailadila to Vishakhapatnam, from where it is sent to Japan. The locals go far and wide for livelihood. Because of that experience, people elsewhere refuse to part with their lands.

A Jungle Warfare School has come up in Chhattisgarh where military officers are training SPOs to take you on. By contrast, you live in the forests and know little else. Do you fear they will finish you?
After all the training, they’re still humans, right? The Naga battalion had similarly been trained. The people fought and defeated them.

In the name of the people you kill policemen. Why?
The police are also poor; they are Adivasi boys and girls. But they take up the gun for the government and oppress the people. That’s why we kill them.

Would you respond if the government calls you for talks?
We have seen in Andhra Pradesh that the government deceived us in the names of talks. It cannot be trusted. We won’t meet it.

Why do you say that Salwa Judum was set up to protect the projects of the Tatas and Essar in Chhattisgarh?
How will the Tatas work here without police protection?

If the government winds up Salwa Judum, would you stop police killings?
Whether or not we stop killing the police is for later. The government must first let the people in the Salwa Judum camps go back to their villages. We killed them because they terrorised people, destroyed crops, and stole Rs 1 lakh from villages.

Dantewada SP Rahul Sharma says that the government will finish you off.
How does it matter what Rahul Sharma says? Can he come in here?

Gandhi won freedom by nonviolence. Bhagat Singh picked up the gun.
Bhagat Singh chose the right path. He was a revolutionary from childhood and had a great fervour to fight on behalf of the people. It was because Gandhi refused to take a stand that Bhagat was hanged.

The Taliban have picked up the gun.
Pakistan’s is a religious strife. Our struggle is class conflict.

If you have the people’s support, then why don’t you fight elections?
We don’t believe in elections. For so many years politicians have won elections. Did they bring any freedom to the people?

But you aren’t those politicians.
Once we sit on the chair, we will become like those politicians.

But when the Revolution comes, you will have to sit on the chair, right?
But that will be the people’s government.

Mao won in China with the gun. Will Indians really pick up the gun?
They will. It might take years. But everyone will pick up the gun in India.

Do you oppose schools and hospitals?
We are fine with schools. But the government builds a school block and uses it for the police. So the people don’t want schools. We want hospitals, too.

And electricity?
We don’t need electricity. We’ve never had it. The wood in the forest is good enough.

Development is seen as roads, electricity, jobs. How about you?
But electricity is not free. And the people don’t have money to pay.

Would you agree to an autonomous administrative unit?
No, we won’t accept any such thing.

Is Bastar a part of India?
Bastar has no connection with India.

Do you want independence for Bastar?
Not just Bastar. Slowly, all of India will become independent.

Is India free or subjugated — ghulam?
Ghulam

Bloodsport In The Jungles

By Ajit Sahi

They screamed and waved their guns as they set the granary on fire,” says Sanni, a tribal woman in south Chhattisgarh, standing by the burnt-out heap that was her harvest until two nights ago. “My son ran away and isn’t back.” He was lucky. The attackers took away two other villagers. No, says Sanni, the attackers weren’t Naxals, the Maoist rebels who have waged an armed rebellion for three decades. “They were from Salwa Judum,” she says.

Ten weeks after the police and members of the Salwa Judum, a controversial police-backed militia, killed 19 people early January in the forests of the neighboring Dantewada district, NGOs have reported a spurt in such attacks at places in south Chhattisgarh. Sanni’s village is in Bijapur district, which was carved out of Dantewada last August. Her village is located 5km north of the Indravati, one of the three big rivers in the region. The two districts together have thickly forested plains and hills across an area in excess of 15,000 sq km. They are also the parts of India most heavily affected by the Naxals.

This is decidedly ghost country. As we cross the river where it is thigh-deep to enter what is referred to on both sides as the ‘war zone’, village upon village appears abandoned. “For fear of the Salwa Judum,” explains one of our fixers. They are accompanying us to a meeting with a Naxal leader, Rengam, whose “jurisdiction”, as a leader of the underground Communist Party of India (Maoist), it is claimed, covers about 75 to 100 villages.

The Naxal superstructure is said to resemble a batch of concentric circles: the innermost being the most powerful leadership, located in the remotest forests, forever on the move. The ‘zone’, ‘area’ and ‘range’ commanders people the middle: the levels of the classic pyramid management structure. These are reportedly the backbone: the hands-on, day-to-day direct leaders of the cadres, leading assaults and tracking the goings-on in the villages on their watch. The outermost circles comprise the ‘sympathisers’, who do not wear uniforms, freely interface with the “outside world” on the basis of their identity of the average villagers, but are the “eyes and ears”, the runners for the “brothers” inside. When police claim they have killed or arrested Naxals, it is believed they are mostly these outermost cadres. Of course, the Naxals claim that the police arrest or kill only the innocent people.

After walking three hours with the “sympathisers”, we were made to rest another two, and then handed over to a new group whose members, though not in uniform, wore shoes (the average tribal walks barefoot), carried a radio transistor, and held sharp, curved knives. Two of the five had guns under their arms. It was only at 6pm, 10 hours after we started walking, that we reached a village where a group of 20, led by Rengam, was waiting for us. As we later returned to our base station that night, walking back the 20km through the dark jungles, a fixer laughed, “Neither the Naxals nor the Salwa Judum would believe that you outsiders were boldly walking here this late.”

Two days later, a day after Holi, we got word that another set of Naxals was waiting to meet us elsewhere in the Dantewada district. As this was an outlying area with a far greater chance of the police, the paramilitary and the Salwa Judum turning up, a much stricter “sanitising” procedure was employed before we could be face to face with Kunjam, another Naxal leader (See interview). Here, the mystery of the transistor was solved. As it was abruptly switched on and a Hindi film song pierced the stillness, the Naxal leader appeared in two minutes. It was a signal for him.

CONGRESS CAN ONLY WATCH FRONTMEN

By M H Ahssan

Bhubaneswar meeting part of an effort to make a cohesive anti-Cong, anti-BJP alliance; Lucknow meeting of Lalu, Mulayam & Paswan aimed at arresting revival of GOP in cowbelt.

Alate cut may be a good shot to play in cricket but not in politics. Sensible politics is all about anticipating danger and tackling it early. The Congress seems to have missed this key principle while deciding to go it alone in politically-crucial states and downgrading its ties with allies such as NCP.

There was some recognition in the Congress of the fallout of its adventurism. On the eve of two important events — one in Bhubaneswar and the other in Lucknow — home minister P Chidambaram, who was fielded as a party spokesman on Thursday, said it would be better if NCP chief Sharad Pawar did not share the dais with “parties opposed to the Congress.”

While the Bhubaneswar meeting is part of an effort to make a cohesive anti-Congress, anti-BJP alliance out of the odd parties, the Lucknow meeting of Yadav chieftains Lalu Prasad and Mulayam Singh and Mr Ram Vilas Paswan is aimed at fashioning a strategy to arrest the revival of the Congress in the cowbelt.

The Congress leadership has been using varied expressions to explain the sudden loss of alliance quotient. Pranab Mukherjee has been describing the decision of railway minister Lalu Yadav to disband the UPA in Bihar as shocking and Congress leaders are training the gun on Mulayam Singh for the rupture in the ‘secular’ alliance in Uttar Pradesh. Implicit in them is a realisation that election prospects of the Congress are getting cloudy.

Mr Pawar on Thursday attempted to create the right atmospherics for a giving shape to the Third Front by praising the contribution of the Left in the four-andhalf years that it had backed the Manmohan Singh government. “But for their support, many of the key policy initiatives of the UPA government would not have been possible,” Mr Pawar said.

The partners cannot be faulted for charting independent course as the trigger for the current crisis came from the Congress’ end. The decision to go it alone was ratified by CWC after the leadership was pushed into a make believe world by durbari politicians. The argument was that a contest without the baggage of Yadavs and Pawars will give the party an opportunity to reinvent itself and regain public confidence.

UPA partners, who are wary of any interventions into the space occupied by them in their respective areas of influence, read the signals correctly. These regional players already have strong challengers like Mayawati and Nitish Kumar and any attempt of Congress to stage a comeback can be only at the cost of their interests.
That the Congress is trapped in Delhi is evident from its post-UPA disintegration campaign strategy. At the meetings addressed by Rahul Gandhi in Bihar on Wednesday, he concentrated his attack on NDA. The electorate can naturally turn around and ask if the purpose was only to defeat NDA, what was the reason for fighting solo in Bihar.

The Congress is obviously hoping that the anti-BJP glue that was binding UPA partners for the past five years will regain its effectiveness after polls. But that can happen only if Congress has the necessary numbers to be the kingpin of a politically-viable coalition. As of now, prospects of parties like SP submitting itself to the Congress’ wishes look quite bleak. Rhetorical skirmishes between Congress and its partners can only intensify in the days to come.
The lack of a script can prove to be costly for Congress. For, elections are won not by dragging the nation through partisan politics or sweet rhetoric. In the changed circumstances, power will remain distant if a party lacks geographical spread or powerful allies.