By M H Ahssan
India's general election, which runs from April 16 through to the middle of May, is bringing out a streak of political self-righteousness that is exposing more than the hypocrisy that pervades a ruling elite whose position of power is dependent on the poverty-stricken masses.
The battle for votes is shedding light on wealth spirited out of the country and tucked away in Swiss banks and similar secretive hideaways. Businessmen, politicians and others living in India, the world's biggest democracy and home to one of the fastest-growing economies, have stashed away over the years a staggering US$1.3 trillion, according to a public interest petition filed this week before the Supreme Court. The petitioners sought judicial intervention to direct the government to seize the overseas loot.
Chief Justice K G Balakrishnan headed a Supreme Court bench that heard the petition on April 22, the first time such a lawsuit has reached the country's top court.
If this money is brought back, each Indian village could get $2.3 million for development, opposition politicians say. That might be rather optimistic - the petitioners' $1 trillion-plus figure represents dirty money accumulated over four decades. Even so, the Washington-based Global Financial Integrity Project says India suffers from the illegal outflows of $22 billion to $27 billion every year.
Global Financial Integrity (GFI) was launched in September 2006 "to promote national and multilateral policies, safeguards and agreements aimed at curtailing the cross-border flow of illegal money", according to the project's website.
India is not alone in suffering from such outflows. According to GFI, for every $1 poor nations receive in foreign aid, $10 in dirty money flows illicitly abroad. It says terrorist groups and drug cartels are the biggest beneficiaries of this dark economy. Efforts to counter the outflows are having little impact.
"Global corruption has not diminished despite 10 years of effort," a GFI report notes. [1] "Assets now stashed in tax havens around the globe are estimated at $11.5 trillion, and non-bank cash deposits outside the country of origin are rising."
Asia accounts for about 50% of illicit financial flows from developing economies, according to Professor R Vaidyanathan, a finance faculty member at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, and a visiting Fulbright Scholar in Corporate Finance at the University of Illinois in the United States.
India's political classes are suspected to account for much of the black money, some of it tucked away to avoid tax, and so far a cynical general public appears unimpressed by the efforts of politicians to pose as concerned retrievers of this cash.
The petitioners pleading to the Supreme Court are led by former Indian law minister Ram Jethmalani. Already a controversial lawyer and still a politician, Jethmalani suffers credibility problems after having had as his clients India's biggest stock market scamsters, Harshad Mehta and Ketan Parekh.
Respondents to the petition include India's central government, the Reserve Bank of India, stock exchange regulator the Securities and Exchange Board of India, the Directorate of Enforcement - whose functions include enforcement of laws such as the Foreign Exchange Management Act 1999 and Prevention of Money Laundering Act 2002 - and the chairman of the Central Board of Direct Taxes.
While the sight of politicians falling over each other vowing to get back the loot if voted to power is possibly more mind-boggling than the unconfirmed, gigantic quantity of the muddy money they are chasing, of more immediate interest to the Indian electorate is who stashed away the funds in the first place.
Money and elections are as inseparable as pizza and cheese, but unlike in, for example, the US where electoral funding rules are detailed, the process for funding Indian elections is dangerously hazy and unspecified. While candidates are required to divulge their wealth and assets to India's Election Commission, how they first acquired this wealth is not necessarily made clear.
Rich individuals, the source of their wealth often swathed in mystery, appear all over the Indian political landscape. The second phase of general election voting, starting on April 23, fields 288 candidates considered to be crorepati the sub-continental equivalent of millionaire, the name derived from one crore, or ten million, rupees - about US$197,500.
The first phase of voting, on April 16, featured 198 crorepatis, according to election watchdogs such as the New Delhi-based National Election Watch (NEW), a nationwide campaign involving 1,200 non-governmental organizations pushing for electoral reforms. NEW says it studies information that candidates provide to the Election Commission.
Past governmental efforts at tracking black wealth have been half-hearted at best. "Given facilities such as online banking, hiding black money these days is much more difficult," says Ramesh Kumar [2], an accountant with 19 years of experience in various companies. "If governments are serious, it should be a relatively easy matter to track down black money. The problem is that corruption reaches from top to bottom, as when a single bribe is shared among many in the ladder."
Successive Indian governments have been part of the problem of not pursuing illegal money hoarders. The German government last year offered to reveal names of slush-money account holders in Liechtenstein, a tax haven in Western Europe. Germany's overseas intelligence agency, the Bundes Nachrichten Dienst, or BND, acquired a compact disc with names of 800 secret account holders in LTG, a Liechtenstein bank. The incriminating disc fell into BND hands during an undercover operation to unearth German tax evaders.
Countries such as the US, Britain, Canada, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Ireland reportedly took up the German government offer. Critics said the Indian government declined to react because powerful people including politicians, media barons, corporate chieftains and leading stockbrokers, are in the dirty-money list the German government discovered.
The Indian government's approach to black money contrasts starkly with the US, Vaidyanathan, of the Indian Institute of Management, said. For instance, the Swiss wealth management firm UBS in February this year paid a $800 million fine to the US government for withholding details of American account holders. But UBS actually paid the Indian government a small fee for reserving the right not to disclose names of its Indian account holders, Vaidyanthan said.
"Germany, France, the US are all exerting pressure [to get back black money]," Vaidyanathan told Asia Times Online. "Hence India also should join this effort to get its funds." The issue is not a new one for Vaidyanathan, who has been writing and talking about dark wealth since 1990s. "My finance courses at IIM - Bangalore included the issue of tax havens for a long period."
"There are more than 70 tax havens in the world, but as the Internal Revenue Service of the US reveals, around 40 of them aggressively market themselves," Vaidyanathan said. "Some have gone so far as to offer asylum or immunity to criminals who invest sufficient funds."
Additional Solicitor General Gopal Subramaniam told the Supreme Court on April 22 that the government was not asleep on the black money issue. The government promised to file an affidavit within 48 hours stating what steps it had taken to bring back funds from banks in Switzerland and elsewhere.
Even so, as the volume of claim and denial in the black-money drama rises, it is sounding more hollow than convincing. Opposition politicians, who started the latest act in the drama, have so far forgotten to explain why they did nothing to recapture the funds when they were running the government.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Maoists rule India's 'Red Corridor'
By Sudha Ramachandran
Indian Maoists hijacked a train with 800 passengers in the eastern state of Jharkhand on Wednesday morning. Although the crisis was defused within five hours, when the Maoists released the train and its passengers, the incident has sparked grave concern throughout the security establishment.
The ease with which the Maoists were able to stage an operation of this magnitude - and at a time when security has been tightened for general elections - has laid bare yet again that it is the Maoists' writ, not that of the government that runs through this part of the country.
The train was on its way from Barkakana in Jharkhand to Mugalsarai in the neighboring state of Uttar Pradesh when it was hijacked near Hehegarha railway station in Latehar district. Around 200 Maoists are said to have carried out the operation. A railway station in Palamu was bombed as well.
In March 2006, a train was hijacked in the same district. Passengers were set free after 12 hours. The Indian Railways have been targeted repeatedly by the Maoists. Besides holding-up trains, they have blasted railway tracks, burned railway stations, looted weapons from railway police and abducted personnel.
No passengers were hurt in Wednesday's hijacking and hostage drama. The operation, which took place on the eve of the second part of India's month-long five-phase general election, was aimed at scaring voters into staying away from polling booths.
Maoists have called for a boycott of the polls in the states of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Bihar. In a bid to disrupt polling during the first phase of voting last week, they detonated landmines, raided polling booths and torched electronic voting machines. Around 20 people were killed and scores injured on polling day alone.
Analysts have sought to downplay the impact of the Maoist's poll violence. Bibhu Prasad Routray, research fellow at the Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management has written that "Maoist violence on April 16 affected a meager 0.09% (71) of the 76,000 polling stations that were identified as vulnerable in the first phase." He argues that Maoists suffered damage in the violence they sought to inflict on the security forces in the run-up to voting.
While the Maoists have carried out spectacular attacks and did disrupt polls to some extent, they were not fully successful in effecting a boycott. Voter turnout in the constituencies worst hit by Maoist violence was a respectable 50%.
Maoist influence runs through a stretch of territory referred to as the "Red Corridor". This extends from the Telangana region in Andhra Pradesh through Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand up to Bihar. Areas in western Orissa and eastern Uttar Pradesh are also under Maoist influence. And they have some presence in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka as well.
The area where the Maoists operate has grown dramatically in recent years. In the early 1990s the number of districts affected by varying degrees of Maoist violence stood at just 15 in four states. This rose to 55 districts in nine states by the end of 2003 and to 156 districts in 13 states in 2004. Maoists are believed to be operating now in around 200 districts (of a total of 602 districts in the country) in 17 states.
Government officials point out that these statistics and the name Red Corridor have conjured up images of Maoists being in control of a large swathe of land and posing a threat to the Indian state. An official in Chhattisgarh's Bastar region told Asia Times Online that while the Maoists do control "some area" in Dantewada district and are able to carry out big attacks in several states, in most areas of the Red Corridor they operate as a hit-and-run force.
"They do not threaten the government, either at the state or the federal level and they are nowhere near sparking off a general uprising," he said, drawing attention to the diminishing public support for the Maoists and increasing resistance to their diktats.
Human-rights activists argue that while the Maoist threat might "not have Delhi on its knees, it is a fact that the problem has laid bare India's failure to deliver good governance, to respond to the plight of the poorest and most marginalized sections of its population".
Unlike jihadi violence that comes from across the border in Pakistan, Maoist violence has its roots firmly in India. Indeed, the Maoist problem has left India red-faced.
Districts that fall in the Red Corridor are rich in minerals like iron ore and bauxite. But the people living there, who are largely Adivasi or tribal are desperately poor. Exploited by forest officials, contractors, mining companies and middlemen and neglected by the state, villagers in the Red Corridor are among the worst off in the country.
And it is to liberate them from their oppressors and the Indian state that the Maoists claim to be waging their armed struggle.
It is true the Maoists have improved life for the Adivasis by forcing local officials to dig wells or pay better wages to the villagers. But over time, the liberators have turned oppressors themselves. Villagers who don't obey the Maoists have been killed and Maoist violence stands in the way of development projects.
The scale of Maoist operations has grown dramatically over the years. In November 2005, more than 1,000 Maoists stormed a jail in Jehanabad in Bihar and freed about 350 of their jailed comrades. Armories and camps of the police and paramilitary forces have been raided. A week ago, they signaled capacity to stand and fight the security forces. Around 200 Maoists stormed a state-owned bauxite mining company in the eastern state of Orissa, taking around 100 employees hostage. They battled for more than nine hours with members of India's Special Operations Group and its Central Industrial Security Force before they finally retreated.
Analysts have drawn attention to increasing Maoist attacks on infrastructure. P Ramana, research fellow at the Delhi-based Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, has pointed out that 62 telecommunication towers were damaged by the Maoists in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Orissa in from 2005 to 2008, with 43 of these occurring in 2008. These attacks are aimed at disrupting "communication amongst the security forces, as well as between 'police informants' - who have been provided cellular telephones - and the security forces, in order that operations against the rebels get impaired," he writes.
The Maoists have also been blowing up power lines and service towers. In May 2007, they blew up three 132 KVA high-tension towers in the Bastar region, plunging six districts into darkness for a week and disrupting normal power distribution for a fortnight. "Functioning of hospitals, communication systems and rail traffic, besides iron ore mines was badly affected," Ramana points out. In June of last year, two 220 KVA towers were blasted depriving 15,000 villages of electricity.
Maoists have displayed their military capability through their high-profile attacks on railways and other infrastructure. They have been able to inflict losses running into millions of dollars on the state they are seeking to overthrow.
But simultaneously they are inflicting heavy losses on the people they claim they are going to liberate. They have worsened the daily lives of some of India's most exploited people.
Indian Maoists hijacked a train with 800 passengers in the eastern state of Jharkhand on Wednesday morning. Although the crisis was defused within five hours, when the Maoists released the train and its passengers, the incident has sparked grave concern throughout the security establishment.
The ease with which the Maoists were able to stage an operation of this magnitude - and at a time when security has been tightened for general elections - has laid bare yet again that it is the Maoists' writ, not that of the government that runs through this part of the country.
The train was on its way from Barkakana in Jharkhand to Mugalsarai in the neighboring state of Uttar Pradesh when it was hijacked near Hehegarha railway station in Latehar district. Around 200 Maoists are said to have carried out the operation. A railway station in Palamu was bombed as well.
In March 2006, a train was hijacked in the same district. Passengers were set free after 12 hours. The Indian Railways have been targeted repeatedly by the Maoists. Besides holding-up trains, they have blasted railway tracks, burned railway stations, looted weapons from railway police and abducted personnel.
No passengers were hurt in Wednesday's hijacking and hostage drama. The operation, which took place on the eve of the second part of India's month-long five-phase general election, was aimed at scaring voters into staying away from polling booths.
Maoists have called for a boycott of the polls in the states of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Bihar. In a bid to disrupt polling during the first phase of voting last week, they detonated landmines, raided polling booths and torched electronic voting machines. Around 20 people were killed and scores injured on polling day alone.
Analysts have sought to downplay the impact of the Maoist's poll violence. Bibhu Prasad Routray, research fellow at the Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management has written that "Maoist violence on April 16 affected a meager 0.09% (71) of the 76,000 polling stations that were identified as vulnerable in the first phase." He argues that Maoists suffered damage in the violence they sought to inflict on the security forces in the run-up to voting.
While the Maoists have carried out spectacular attacks and did disrupt polls to some extent, they were not fully successful in effecting a boycott. Voter turnout in the constituencies worst hit by Maoist violence was a respectable 50%.
Maoist influence runs through a stretch of territory referred to as the "Red Corridor". This extends from the Telangana region in Andhra Pradesh through Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand up to Bihar. Areas in western Orissa and eastern Uttar Pradesh are also under Maoist influence. And they have some presence in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka as well.
The area where the Maoists operate has grown dramatically in recent years. In the early 1990s the number of districts affected by varying degrees of Maoist violence stood at just 15 in four states. This rose to 55 districts in nine states by the end of 2003 and to 156 districts in 13 states in 2004. Maoists are believed to be operating now in around 200 districts (of a total of 602 districts in the country) in 17 states.
Government officials point out that these statistics and the name Red Corridor have conjured up images of Maoists being in control of a large swathe of land and posing a threat to the Indian state. An official in Chhattisgarh's Bastar region told Asia Times Online that while the Maoists do control "some area" in Dantewada district and are able to carry out big attacks in several states, in most areas of the Red Corridor they operate as a hit-and-run force.
"They do not threaten the government, either at the state or the federal level and they are nowhere near sparking off a general uprising," he said, drawing attention to the diminishing public support for the Maoists and increasing resistance to their diktats.
Human-rights activists argue that while the Maoist threat might "not have Delhi on its knees, it is a fact that the problem has laid bare India's failure to deliver good governance, to respond to the plight of the poorest and most marginalized sections of its population".
Unlike jihadi violence that comes from across the border in Pakistan, Maoist violence has its roots firmly in India. Indeed, the Maoist problem has left India red-faced.
Districts that fall in the Red Corridor are rich in minerals like iron ore and bauxite. But the people living there, who are largely Adivasi or tribal are desperately poor. Exploited by forest officials, contractors, mining companies and middlemen and neglected by the state, villagers in the Red Corridor are among the worst off in the country.
And it is to liberate them from their oppressors and the Indian state that the Maoists claim to be waging their armed struggle.
It is true the Maoists have improved life for the Adivasis by forcing local officials to dig wells or pay better wages to the villagers. But over time, the liberators have turned oppressors themselves. Villagers who don't obey the Maoists have been killed and Maoist violence stands in the way of development projects.
The scale of Maoist operations has grown dramatically over the years. In November 2005, more than 1,000 Maoists stormed a jail in Jehanabad in Bihar and freed about 350 of their jailed comrades. Armories and camps of the police and paramilitary forces have been raided. A week ago, they signaled capacity to stand and fight the security forces. Around 200 Maoists stormed a state-owned bauxite mining company in the eastern state of Orissa, taking around 100 employees hostage. They battled for more than nine hours with members of India's Special Operations Group and its Central Industrial Security Force before they finally retreated.
Analysts have drawn attention to increasing Maoist attacks on infrastructure. P Ramana, research fellow at the Delhi-based Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, has pointed out that 62 telecommunication towers were damaged by the Maoists in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Orissa in from 2005 to 2008, with 43 of these occurring in 2008. These attacks are aimed at disrupting "communication amongst the security forces, as well as between 'police informants' - who have been provided cellular telephones - and the security forces, in order that operations against the rebels get impaired," he writes.
The Maoists have also been blowing up power lines and service towers. In May 2007, they blew up three 132 KVA high-tension towers in the Bastar region, plunging six districts into darkness for a week and disrupting normal power distribution for a fortnight. "Functioning of hospitals, communication systems and rail traffic, besides iron ore mines was badly affected," Ramana points out. In June of last year, two 220 KVA towers were blasted depriving 15,000 villages of electricity.
Maoists have displayed their military capability through their high-profile attacks on railways and other infrastructure. They have been able to inflict losses running into millions of dollars on the state they are seeking to overthrow.
But simultaneously they are inflicting heavy losses on the people they claim they are going to liberate. They have worsened the daily lives of some of India's most exploited people.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
G20: The 'trillion' dollar magic trick
By M H Ahssan
To great fanfare, the G20 announced a US $1.1 trillion global package, which will actually deliver less than half that amount in new or guaranteed resources. Meanwhile issues of fundamental economic reform were left off the agenda.
The G20 meeting on 2 April, billed as the London Summit 2009 because of its inclusion of non-G20 players, captured positive media attention despite failing to set out a vision for transformative economic change, and pumping more money into the IMF and World Bank without a clear plan for reforming them.
Where did the 'trillion' go?
The IMF received most of the boost, with a possible $500 billion in new resources and $250 billion in issuances of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs). Of the $500 billion, only half has been signed and sealed, the vast majority of which had been previously announced: $100 billion from Japan in January and the same amount from the EU in March. Most of the new $50bn comes from China - a small drop in its vast ocean of reserves, indicating that it continues to be reluctant to back the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) financially without real governance reform. The second tranche of $250 billion only exists as a G20 promise to find the extra cash, and to make "substantial progress" in doing so by April's spring meetings.
The other massive increase in IMF resources was through an allocation of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), the IMF's own internally created reserve asset. An SDR allocation effectively means printing new money, $100 billion of which will go to "emerging market and developing countries". Unlike other forms of finance, SDRs come without conditions attached, but a country must still pay interest when it uses them. As SDRs are allocated according to voting shares at the IMF, the majority will go to rich countries.
On new money for the multilateral deveopment banks (MDBs), the language is particularly hazy. The G20 agrees only to "support" additional annual lending by the MDBs of $100 billion per year. Some of this, such as a boost to IFC trade financing, is money already promised. Some is supposed to come from existing MDB resources. Some will come from a 200 per cent boost to the Asian Development Bank's capital, and consideration of similar moves for the Inter-American Development Bank and the African Development Bank.
World Bank attempts to garner additional contributions for their 'vulnerability' funds were snubbed, with the G20 making clear that these would only be delivered bilaterally from willing donors. So far, the UK is the only country to make concrete commitments - diverting £200 million of its existing aid budget for this purpose. The G20 also asked the Bank to increase lending limits for "large countries" and to lend at market rates to low income countries, but only those with "sustainable debt positions and sound policies."
Money for the poorest?
Of the putative $1.1 trillion, $50 billion, or less than 5 per cent, is likely to be for the 49 poorest countries in the world. The communique does not give clear details of how this figure is arrived at. Brussels based NGO, Eurodad estimates that, in addition to $6 billion (over three years) from IMF gold sales that will be added to the IMF's concessional lending pot, $19 billion in new money will come from the SDR allocation. The communique also calls for a doubling of the IMF's concessional lending capacity, currently at about $20 billion. That means that most of the total is IMF loans, which are only available if poor countries' economies go into meltdown.
The detail on the promised "global effort to ensure the availability of at least $250 billion of trade finance over the next two years" is entirely absent from the communique. However, the IFC - the private sector lending arm of the World Bank - is already angling for a slice of this cash for its new global trade lliquidity programme. Most of the rest is likely to funds provided by export credit agencies, which have been heavily criticised for a host of issues, including focussing their support on the arms industry. The communique's commitment to meet existing aid pledges obviously meant more to some G20 countries than others. Italy, the current host of the G8, plans to cut its aid by 55 per cent this year.
Elephants in the room: governance and conditionality
The G20 communique says nothing new on IFI governance reform, and big increases in IMF resources have not been matched with clear commitments to end the controversial austerity policies that have so far accompanied IMF bailout packages.
Changes to voting shares to give developing economies "greater voice and representation" are promised in general but the annex appears to backtrack on IMF reform. The existing plan for Bank governance reforms by the 2010 Spring Meetings for the World Bank is reconfirmed, but on the Fund, the annex indicates that the slightly accelerated quota review may not address the democratic deficit or governance imbalance but will be undertaken "to ensure the IMF's finances are on a sustainable footing".
Critics remain concerned that lessons from the Asian financial crisis a decade ago have not been learned, where IMF conditions were blamed for worsening recessions. Duncan Green of Oxfam said: "We have deep concerns about how central the IMF has become in this crisis. The fund has been given a blank cheque but its reform remains no more than a promise."
Financial reform: does it have teeth?
Campaigning NGOs and continental European governments had pushed the issue of tax havens to the fore in the run up to the summit. The UK, itself a sponsor of many of the world's most famous tax havens including the Cayman Islands and Jersey, had picked up the rhetoric.
The G20 decided to endorse the OECD approach of exchanging information about companies and individuals suspected of evading taxes on request, rather than the more stringent automatic exchange of information called for by the Tax Justice Network and others. There was no mention of measures that could help developing countries crack down on corporate tax abuse: country-by-country financial reporting or requiring transparency of all information on beneficial ownership in all jurisdictions.
The fanfare surrounding a supposed 'blacklist' of non-cooperative countries published on the day of the summit by the OECD went silent when it emerged that only four countries were on the list - Uruguay, the Philippines, the Malaysian Federal Territory of Labuan, and Costa Rica - none of them well known tax havens. Further confusion followed when even these four were removed, leaving no countries in the OECD's worst category. The strong rhetoric - declaring that "the era of banking secrecy is over" and promising to "stand ready to deploy sanctions" - has yet to be turned into effective action.
As promised by the G20 finance ministers in March the Financial Stability Forum will be expanded to include all G20 countries, and renamed the Financial Stability Board (FSB). It will continue to have a purely advisory role to; "promote co-ordination"; "assess vulnerabilities affecting the financial system" and "set guidelines". With no specific powers or sanctions available to it, and a lack of a clear governance structure, it remains to be seen whether the new board will be an improvement on the old forum.
On banking regulation, a topic that has dominated headlines in the run up to the summit, surprisingly little concrete was agreed, though international bodies are tasked with looking further into a host of issues. International minimum capital requirements will remain unchanged "until recovery is assured" and the often criticised Basel II capital framework supported. The existing 'toxic assets' in banks remain a huge problem, but one that has been left to national regulators to fix.
In his post-summit press conference, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown repeated his assertion that the 'shadow banking system' would be brought into "the global regulatory net", but the language of the communique is far more cautious - "systematically important financial institutions, markets, and instruments" should be subject to an "appropriate degree of regulation and oversight."
The FSB and IMF are tasked with deciding what "systematically important" means. Many hedge funds and private equity firms may continue to escape the regulatory net, especially those formally headquartered in off-shore financial centres. Hedge fund and credit rating agency "registration" is promised, and credit derivatives markets will be "standardised," but it is left to the industry itself to decide how to do this.
Missing the green picture
Green groups slammed the G20 for failing to grasp the opportunity to signal a clear commitment to building a low-carbon economy. The communique promises to "make best possible use" of stimulus packages "towards the goal of building a resilient, sustainable, and green recovery" and to "identify and work together on further measures to build sustainable economies." But there were no hard commitments about what portion of stimulus packages would be directed towards green projects, technologies, or jobs.
The aim of the upcoming UN climate talks in Copenhagen is set as reaching agreement, with no reference made to the scale of the changes G20 countries, particularly the richest ones, will have to make to combat climate change. Friends of the Earth said the G20 had "short changed people and the planet". Greenpeace said climate change had been tagged on to the communique as an "afterthought".
Liberalisation still the norm?
The communique is understandably short on the usual congratulatory opening paragraphs, though it reiterates support for "an open world economy based on market principles" but now balanced by "effective regulation, and strong global institutions."
On trade the expected promise to "not repeat the historic mistakes of protectionism" is made, but the commitment to "reach an ambitious and balanced conclusion to" the Doha trade round looks suspiciously similar to the commitments made by the G20 in Washington last November, since when little progress has been made. Interestingly the G20 estimate for how much the Doha trade round could boost the global economy stands at a modest $150 billion. Civil society organisations around the globe have questioned whether reviving a trade round that developing countries have rejected many times is a good idea.
Protest grows
Marches and protests took place around the world in the run up to the G20 summit, including in India, Philippines, Indonesia, Spain, Germany, France, Austria and Italy. In London, thousands marched under the banner of 'Jobs, Justice, Climate,' as part of the 160-plus Put People First alliance of development, environment, faith groups and trade unions.
In addition to mobilisation of citizens, civil society groups have also put out collective statements which look very different from the limited set of issues in the G20 communique. At January's World Social Forum, civil society and social movements from around the world produced a statement signed up to by more than 600 organisations worldwide, entitled "Let's put finance in its place!" It includes demands barely considered by the G20, yet at the heart of the debate about how best to control global finance, including managing capital flows, and calling for "citizen control of banks and financial institutions." It also issued a challenge to the leaders gathered in London, saying: "the G20 is not the legitimate forum to resolve this systemic crisis."
On the eve of the G20, at the World in Crisis NGO summit in Prague, a declaration was issued calling for putting economies "at the service of social, environmental and other vital interests of women, men, girls and boys, in particular to start greening our economies and to increase local economic resilience." A raft of proposals were included on a host of critical topics including: market regulation; breaking the dominance of finance over the economy; keeping the climate negotiations on track; rethinking development finance; fairly sharing resource consumption across the globe; ensuring tax justice; and making IFIs more transparent, representative and accountable.
Meanwhile, the London Summit was slammed for systematically excluding civil society voices. In contrast to most international gatherings there was no process for civil society organisations to accredit and attend. Of the few civil society representatives who were allowed in as media representatives, some had accreditation withdrawn at the last minute. One of these denied entrance, Benedict Southwark of UK campaigning group the World Development Movement said that this: "starts to reek of the deliberate exclusion of critical voices."
Spotlight turns to UN
A week before the G20 met in London, the UN General Assembly president's commission on financial reforms released its draft report. The Joseph Stiglitz-led commission was much stronger in the latest report than in its first set of recommendations, and appears ahead of the G20 curve. The G20 has yet to pay adequate attention to this high powered group of thinkers.
The recommendations said: "short term measures to stabilize the current situation must ensure the protection of the world's poor, while long term measures to make another recurrence less likely must ensure sustainable financing to strengthen the policy response of developing countries."
The commission was not unwilling to lay blame: "Loose monetary policy, inadequate regulation and lax supervision interacted to create financial instability," and there was "inadequate appreciation of the limits of markets." The report split its recommendations up into things to be done immediately and those that should be on the agenda for systemic reform.
Among immediate goals, it called for global fiscal stimulus, a new credit facility with better governance arrangements than exist at institutions such as the IMF, an end to pro-cyclical conditionality and rolling back the limits on developing country policy space created by trade agreements. For the financial sector the commission noted "While greater transparency is important, much more is needed than improving the clarity of financial instruments," and recommended the use of rules and incentives to limit excess leverage, prevent tax evasion, and address the regulatory race to the bottom.
While the short-term recommendations were sometimes eye-catching, the systemic demands surprised many observers. The call for "a new global reserve system", echoed the demand to end the US dollar's privileged position as international reserve currency made by China's central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan. The commission also supported the idea for a UN-based Global Economic Council at the head of state level - essentially bringing a G20 type structure under the auspices of the UN system.
On long-term changes to financial regulation, the commission listed seven areas for reform and warned against "merely cosmetic changes". Notably it said: "The fact that correlated behaviour of a large number of institutions, each of which is not systemically significant, can give rise to systemic vulnerability makes oversight of all institutions necessary." This throws cold water the G20's plans for regulating only 'systemically-important' financial institutions.
The UN commission, despite being organised more quickly than the G20 meeting, was much more open to civil society input. More than 100 organisations made submissions to the stakeholder consultation procedure, and the final report on civil society opinion was detailed, comprehensive, and well received by the commission. The civil society submissions were all put online, more than can be said of the official G20 working group reports (see Update 64), which are yet to be published. In late March, members of the commission also held interactive dialogues with representatives at the UN General Assembly and civil society organisations.
The global focus will now move to a UN conference from 1-3 June in New York, billed as the follow-up to the UN Financing for Development conference in Doha. The conference is being held at the initiative of the General Assembly president, rather than from the UN Secretariat because of opposition from some major countries. It is unclear how much participation there will be by heads of state, especially as the G20 announced that it will hold another leader's level summit sometime before the end of this year.
To great fanfare, the G20 announced a US $1.1 trillion global package, which will actually deliver less than half that amount in new or guaranteed resources. Meanwhile issues of fundamental economic reform were left off the agenda.
The G20 meeting on 2 April, billed as the London Summit 2009 because of its inclusion of non-G20 players, captured positive media attention despite failing to set out a vision for transformative economic change, and pumping more money into the IMF and World Bank without a clear plan for reforming them.
Where did the 'trillion' go?
The IMF received most of the boost, with a possible $500 billion in new resources and $250 billion in issuances of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs). Of the $500 billion, only half has been signed and sealed, the vast majority of which had been previously announced: $100 billion from Japan in January and the same amount from the EU in March. Most of the new $50bn comes from China - a small drop in its vast ocean of reserves, indicating that it continues to be reluctant to back the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) financially without real governance reform. The second tranche of $250 billion only exists as a G20 promise to find the extra cash, and to make "substantial progress" in doing so by April's spring meetings.
The other massive increase in IMF resources was through an allocation of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), the IMF's own internally created reserve asset. An SDR allocation effectively means printing new money, $100 billion of which will go to "emerging market and developing countries". Unlike other forms of finance, SDRs come without conditions attached, but a country must still pay interest when it uses them. As SDRs are allocated according to voting shares at the IMF, the majority will go to rich countries.
On new money for the multilateral deveopment banks (MDBs), the language is particularly hazy. The G20 agrees only to "support" additional annual lending by the MDBs of $100 billion per year. Some of this, such as a boost to IFC trade financing, is money already promised. Some is supposed to come from existing MDB resources. Some will come from a 200 per cent boost to the Asian Development Bank's capital, and consideration of similar moves for the Inter-American Development Bank and the African Development Bank.
World Bank attempts to garner additional contributions for their 'vulnerability' funds were snubbed, with the G20 making clear that these would only be delivered bilaterally from willing donors. So far, the UK is the only country to make concrete commitments - diverting £200 million of its existing aid budget for this purpose. The G20 also asked the Bank to increase lending limits for "large countries" and to lend at market rates to low income countries, but only those with "sustainable debt positions and sound policies."
Money for the poorest?
Of the putative $1.1 trillion, $50 billion, or less than 5 per cent, is likely to be for the 49 poorest countries in the world. The communique does not give clear details of how this figure is arrived at. Brussels based NGO, Eurodad estimates that, in addition to $6 billion (over three years) from IMF gold sales that will be added to the IMF's concessional lending pot, $19 billion in new money will come from the SDR allocation. The communique also calls for a doubling of the IMF's concessional lending capacity, currently at about $20 billion. That means that most of the total is IMF loans, which are only available if poor countries' economies go into meltdown.
The detail on the promised "global effort to ensure the availability of at least $250 billion of trade finance over the next two years" is entirely absent from the communique. However, the IFC - the private sector lending arm of the World Bank - is already angling for a slice of this cash for its new global trade lliquidity programme. Most of the rest is likely to funds provided by export credit agencies, which have been heavily criticised for a host of issues, including focussing their support on the arms industry. The communique's commitment to meet existing aid pledges obviously meant more to some G20 countries than others. Italy, the current host of the G8, plans to cut its aid by 55 per cent this year.
Elephants in the room: governance and conditionality
The G20 communique says nothing new on IFI governance reform, and big increases in IMF resources have not been matched with clear commitments to end the controversial austerity policies that have so far accompanied IMF bailout packages.
Changes to voting shares to give developing economies "greater voice and representation" are promised in general but the annex appears to backtrack on IMF reform. The existing plan for Bank governance reforms by the 2010 Spring Meetings for the World Bank is reconfirmed, but on the Fund, the annex indicates that the slightly accelerated quota review may not address the democratic deficit or governance imbalance but will be undertaken "to ensure the IMF's finances are on a sustainable footing".
Critics remain concerned that lessons from the Asian financial crisis a decade ago have not been learned, where IMF conditions were blamed for worsening recessions. Duncan Green of Oxfam said: "We have deep concerns about how central the IMF has become in this crisis. The fund has been given a blank cheque but its reform remains no more than a promise."
Financial reform: does it have teeth?
Campaigning NGOs and continental European governments had pushed the issue of tax havens to the fore in the run up to the summit. The UK, itself a sponsor of many of the world's most famous tax havens including the Cayman Islands and Jersey, had picked up the rhetoric.
The G20 decided to endorse the OECD approach of exchanging information about companies and individuals suspected of evading taxes on request, rather than the more stringent automatic exchange of information called for by the Tax Justice Network and others. There was no mention of measures that could help developing countries crack down on corporate tax abuse: country-by-country financial reporting or requiring transparency of all information on beneficial ownership in all jurisdictions.
The fanfare surrounding a supposed 'blacklist' of non-cooperative countries published on the day of the summit by the OECD went silent when it emerged that only four countries were on the list - Uruguay, the Philippines, the Malaysian Federal Territory of Labuan, and Costa Rica - none of them well known tax havens. Further confusion followed when even these four were removed, leaving no countries in the OECD's worst category. The strong rhetoric - declaring that "the era of banking secrecy is over" and promising to "stand ready to deploy sanctions" - has yet to be turned into effective action.
As promised by the G20 finance ministers in March the Financial Stability Forum will be expanded to include all G20 countries, and renamed the Financial Stability Board (FSB). It will continue to have a purely advisory role to; "promote co-ordination"; "assess vulnerabilities affecting the financial system" and "set guidelines". With no specific powers or sanctions available to it, and a lack of a clear governance structure, it remains to be seen whether the new board will be an improvement on the old forum.
On banking regulation, a topic that has dominated headlines in the run up to the summit, surprisingly little concrete was agreed, though international bodies are tasked with looking further into a host of issues. International minimum capital requirements will remain unchanged "until recovery is assured" and the often criticised Basel II capital framework supported. The existing 'toxic assets' in banks remain a huge problem, but one that has been left to national regulators to fix.
In his post-summit press conference, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown repeated his assertion that the 'shadow banking system' would be brought into "the global regulatory net", but the language of the communique is far more cautious - "systematically important financial institutions, markets, and instruments" should be subject to an "appropriate degree of regulation and oversight."
The FSB and IMF are tasked with deciding what "systematically important" means. Many hedge funds and private equity firms may continue to escape the regulatory net, especially those formally headquartered in off-shore financial centres. Hedge fund and credit rating agency "registration" is promised, and credit derivatives markets will be "standardised," but it is left to the industry itself to decide how to do this.
Missing the green picture
Green groups slammed the G20 for failing to grasp the opportunity to signal a clear commitment to building a low-carbon economy. The communique promises to "make best possible use" of stimulus packages "towards the goal of building a resilient, sustainable, and green recovery" and to "identify and work together on further measures to build sustainable economies." But there were no hard commitments about what portion of stimulus packages would be directed towards green projects, technologies, or jobs.
The aim of the upcoming UN climate talks in Copenhagen is set as reaching agreement, with no reference made to the scale of the changes G20 countries, particularly the richest ones, will have to make to combat climate change. Friends of the Earth said the G20 had "short changed people and the planet". Greenpeace said climate change had been tagged on to the communique as an "afterthought".
Liberalisation still the norm?
The communique is understandably short on the usual congratulatory opening paragraphs, though it reiterates support for "an open world economy based on market principles" but now balanced by "effective regulation, and strong global institutions."
On trade the expected promise to "not repeat the historic mistakes of protectionism" is made, but the commitment to "reach an ambitious and balanced conclusion to" the Doha trade round looks suspiciously similar to the commitments made by the G20 in Washington last November, since when little progress has been made. Interestingly the G20 estimate for how much the Doha trade round could boost the global economy stands at a modest $150 billion. Civil society organisations around the globe have questioned whether reviving a trade round that developing countries have rejected many times is a good idea.
Protest grows
Marches and protests took place around the world in the run up to the G20 summit, including in India, Philippines, Indonesia, Spain, Germany, France, Austria and Italy. In London, thousands marched under the banner of 'Jobs, Justice, Climate,' as part of the 160-plus Put People First alliance of development, environment, faith groups and trade unions.
In addition to mobilisation of citizens, civil society groups have also put out collective statements which look very different from the limited set of issues in the G20 communique. At January's World Social Forum, civil society and social movements from around the world produced a statement signed up to by more than 600 organisations worldwide, entitled "Let's put finance in its place!" It includes demands barely considered by the G20, yet at the heart of the debate about how best to control global finance, including managing capital flows, and calling for "citizen control of banks and financial institutions." It also issued a challenge to the leaders gathered in London, saying: "the G20 is not the legitimate forum to resolve this systemic crisis."
On the eve of the G20, at the World in Crisis NGO summit in Prague, a declaration was issued calling for putting economies "at the service of social, environmental and other vital interests of women, men, girls and boys, in particular to start greening our economies and to increase local economic resilience." A raft of proposals were included on a host of critical topics including: market regulation; breaking the dominance of finance over the economy; keeping the climate negotiations on track; rethinking development finance; fairly sharing resource consumption across the globe; ensuring tax justice; and making IFIs more transparent, representative and accountable.
Meanwhile, the London Summit was slammed for systematically excluding civil society voices. In contrast to most international gatherings there was no process for civil society organisations to accredit and attend. Of the few civil society representatives who were allowed in as media representatives, some had accreditation withdrawn at the last minute. One of these denied entrance, Benedict Southwark of UK campaigning group the World Development Movement said that this: "starts to reek of the deliberate exclusion of critical voices."
Spotlight turns to UN
A week before the G20 met in London, the UN General Assembly president's commission on financial reforms released its draft report. The Joseph Stiglitz-led commission was much stronger in the latest report than in its first set of recommendations, and appears ahead of the G20 curve. The G20 has yet to pay adequate attention to this high powered group of thinkers.
The recommendations said: "short term measures to stabilize the current situation must ensure the protection of the world's poor, while long term measures to make another recurrence less likely must ensure sustainable financing to strengthen the policy response of developing countries."
The commission was not unwilling to lay blame: "Loose monetary policy, inadequate regulation and lax supervision interacted to create financial instability," and there was "inadequate appreciation of the limits of markets." The report split its recommendations up into things to be done immediately and those that should be on the agenda for systemic reform.
Among immediate goals, it called for global fiscal stimulus, a new credit facility with better governance arrangements than exist at institutions such as the IMF, an end to pro-cyclical conditionality and rolling back the limits on developing country policy space created by trade agreements. For the financial sector the commission noted "While greater transparency is important, much more is needed than improving the clarity of financial instruments," and recommended the use of rules and incentives to limit excess leverage, prevent tax evasion, and address the regulatory race to the bottom.
While the short-term recommendations were sometimes eye-catching, the systemic demands surprised many observers. The call for "a new global reserve system", echoed the demand to end the US dollar's privileged position as international reserve currency made by China's central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan. The commission also supported the idea for a UN-based Global Economic Council at the head of state level - essentially bringing a G20 type structure under the auspices of the UN system.
On long-term changes to financial regulation, the commission listed seven areas for reform and warned against "merely cosmetic changes". Notably it said: "The fact that correlated behaviour of a large number of institutions, each of which is not systemically significant, can give rise to systemic vulnerability makes oversight of all institutions necessary." This throws cold water the G20's plans for regulating only 'systemically-important' financial institutions.
The UN commission, despite being organised more quickly than the G20 meeting, was much more open to civil society input. More than 100 organisations made submissions to the stakeholder consultation procedure, and the final report on civil society opinion was detailed, comprehensive, and well received by the commission. The civil society submissions were all put online, more than can be said of the official G20 working group reports (see Update 64), which are yet to be published. In late March, members of the commission also held interactive dialogues with representatives at the UN General Assembly and civil society organisations.
The global focus will now move to a UN conference from 1-3 June in New York, billed as the follow-up to the UN Financing for Development conference in Doha. The conference is being held at the initiative of the General Assembly president, rather than from the UN Secretariat because of opposition from some major countries. It is unclear how much participation there will be by heads of state, especially as the G20 announced that it will hold another leader's level summit sometime before the end of this year.
A Healthy Heart
By Sanjoy Satpathy
Why is every one so concerned about the heart and the heart attack? Because other organs give ample time before they fail but when heart stops it’s the end of the world. Liver takes days and weeks before it fails; so also, other organs like kidney, lung and brain do not cause sudden death.
Heart attack was very common in the west only a few decades back but with modification of diet, life style, education, drugs advancement in medical science, the mortality has drastically come down. But heart disease has become an epidemic in the third world or developing world. Due to improper food, sedentary life style, diabetes and blood pressure heart attacks have become the leading cause of death in middle aged people in India.
We should know a little bit of “heart attack”.
See the photograph of the heart; you will notice small arteries and veins on the surface of this wonderful organ, which supply blood to the heart muscles.
Heart has only one function to receive blood and pump out blood to all the organs of the body.
It’s a sophisticated pump working from the beginning of the life in side the mother’s womb till death.
On an average it pumps 60 to 100 times per minute you can calculate how much time it pumps blood in a day. It needs blood for its muscles through those tiny arteries. When they get blocked may be a single one or two or all the three then the person gets a heart attack and some part of the heart muscle become dead - bigger the area of the dead muscle more serious will be the out come. If it’s massive then the person dies suddenly within minutes.
The narrowing occurs because of many factors but the most important being the gene and the type life one leads. Mental stress, bad food habits, smoking, over weight, lack of physical exercise, family history, high cholesterol level all contribute to narrowing which is called atherosclerosis of arteries.
So to keep your heart healthy one has to make efforts right from child hood not after one gets a heart attack. The America heart association and WHO recommends plenty of green vegetables, fruits, whole grains, fibers in diet, less of salt, sugar and oil in diet. Keep your weight in the range for your age, sex and height. Do a little bit of exercise, if nothing is possible walk three to four kilometers a day or use cycle for going to your office if it’s with in four or five kilometers of range. Avoid saturated fatty (<7%) diet. Animal meats should be avoided and fish , especially oily ones, twice a week should be consumed in their place. For vegetarians they should get their protein from pulses and milk or curd. Avoid Soya protein or milk.
Indians do eat lots of deep fried food and the same oil is used for cooking over again and again which results in productions of toxic chemicals called oxidants which affect the vascular system of the body resulting in all sorts of disease from cancer to heart attacks.
Why is every one so concerned about the heart and the heart attack? Because other organs give ample time before they fail but when heart stops it’s the end of the world. Liver takes days and weeks before it fails; so also, other organs like kidney, lung and brain do not cause sudden death.
Heart attack was very common in the west only a few decades back but with modification of diet, life style, education, drugs advancement in medical science, the mortality has drastically come down. But heart disease has become an epidemic in the third world or developing world. Due to improper food, sedentary life style, diabetes and blood pressure heart attacks have become the leading cause of death in middle aged people in India.
We should know a little bit of “heart attack”.
See the photograph of the heart; you will notice small arteries and veins on the surface of this wonderful organ, which supply blood to the heart muscles.
Heart has only one function to receive blood and pump out blood to all the organs of the body.
It’s a sophisticated pump working from the beginning of the life in side the mother’s womb till death.
On an average it pumps 60 to 100 times per minute you can calculate how much time it pumps blood in a day. It needs blood for its muscles through those tiny arteries. When they get blocked may be a single one or two or all the three then the person gets a heart attack and some part of the heart muscle become dead - bigger the area of the dead muscle more serious will be the out come. If it’s massive then the person dies suddenly within minutes.
The narrowing occurs because of many factors but the most important being the gene and the type life one leads. Mental stress, bad food habits, smoking, over weight, lack of physical exercise, family history, high cholesterol level all contribute to narrowing which is called atherosclerosis of arteries.
So to keep your heart healthy one has to make efforts right from child hood not after one gets a heart attack. The America heart association and WHO recommends plenty of green vegetables, fruits, whole grains, fibers in diet, less of salt, sugar and oil in diet. Keep your weight in the range for your age, sex and height. Do a little bit of exercise, if nothing is possible walk three to four kilometers a day or use cycle for going to your office if it’s with in four or five kilometers of range. Avoid saturated fatty (<7%) diet. Animal meats should be avoided and fish , especially oily ones, twice a week should be consumed in their place. For vegetarians they should get their protein from pulses and milk or curd. Avoid Soya protein or milk.
Indians do eat lots of deep fried food and the same oil is used for cooking over again and again which results in productions of toxic chemicals called oxidants which affect the vascular system of the body resulting in all sorts of disease from cancer to heart attacks.
Reevaluation of India’s Nuclear Program
By Mukesh Williams
The paper concerns the reasons for India going nuclear, the development of its nuclear program and its rationale for its not signing the NPT and CTBT in spite of advocating a non-violent foreign policy. The early stages of India’s nuclear program were prompted by a perceived threat of China and later of Pakistan. The success of the program was a combination of three factors namely, a skilled organizational workforce, scientific leadership and political endorsement. In this the contributions of the IAEC, Homi Bhabha and the late Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru played a significant role.
India’s accelerated nuclear development in the 1960s and 1970s was again prompted by the nuclear ascendancy of China and its unilateral support to Pakistan as a buffer zone. India took advantage of the positive connotations of nuclear technology in mid-twentieth century and developed a thermal reactor thereby initiating a nuclear program that would evolve into the nuclear explosive project. The explosion of a nuclear device by China in 1964 initiated a debate in the Indian media and political circles on the efficacy of developing a nuclear military technology and the negative impact on its fragile economy. While the Congress Party believed in international diplomacy to contain the hegemonic intentions of China, the BJP and the Praja Socialist Party argued for developing a military nuclear option. It was believed that the military nuclearization of India would not contradict the pacifist goals of Gandhian ideals that had infused its foreign policy. On the contrary the theory of deterrence would protect the sovereignty of India thereby making the ethical compromise pragmatic and viable.
The secretive development of the nuclear program under Indira Gandhi and Homi Sethna culminated in the explosion of PNE at Pokhran in 1974 and made Indian foreign policy more assertive. The changed geo-political reality of the 1980s in the wake of Soviet invasion of Afghanistan pushed the United States closer towards Pakistan making Pakistan an American ally to combat the threat of growing Soviet communism in the region. With a supportive America, Pakistan took the Chinese help in developing its own nuclear program aimed at containing India. Perceiving a new nexus between Pakistan and China, India began to develop its own missile technology. In 1996 the CTBT once again reiterated a time bound framework for universal nuclear disarmament placing yet a new pressure on India to contain its nuclear program. Sensing the closing of the nuclear window India conducted five nuclear explosions at Pokhran to bolster its image aboard and then place a moratorium on nuclear tests. In the wake of these explosions there were worldwide condemnations and the US, European powers and its allies like Japan placed economic sanctions on India.
India however continued to develop both economically and technologically in subsequent decades and began to be perceived as a responsible nuclear nation and a western ally in its fight against terrorism. In 2006 the US signed a treaty with India initiating a civilian nuclear transfer of technology beneficial to both countries. Both the European and Japanese perceptions about India’s nuclear program has changed from political belligerence to economic advantage. India has always argued that the development of dual-purpose nuclear technology would offer a cheap and effective resource to resolve economic and social problems but this is debatable.
In a world wrought by extremely divisive forces, nations with advanced nuclear and missile technologies act as deterrence to state-sponsored violence and keep a check on the hegemonic ambitions of non-nuclear nations. Today, it is not only enough to possess nuclear weapons but also a sophisticated delivery system in the form of intercontinental ballistic missiles to be taken seriously by other nations. In its February 14, 2009 issue The Times of India reported that India would test-fire ICBMs in 2010. By this date it would also acquire a submarine launched ballistic missile technology (SLBM), and develop a ballistic missile defense system (BMD) in order to offset its military disadvantage and come closer to the exclusive club of nuclear nations formed by America, Russia and China. In the light of these new developments it is important to analyze the causes and motives that forced India to go nuclear about four decades ago in spite of espousing a non-violent foreign policy.
Early Stages of India’s Nuclear Program: India’s nuclear program began in the late 1940s when India gained independence from Britain after over 150 years of protracted colonial rule. The memory of American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was fresh in the minds of Indian leaders and the public, who felt the need to develop an indigenous nuclear technology and military superiority to prevent future colonization or hegemony by any other ambitious nation. India began to see the U. S. model of using nuclear technology for producing both domestic energy and providing military defense as an ideal for its geographical and political situation. At the same time India never lost sight of developing nuclear technology indigenously—whether it was related to the mining and enrichment of uranium and reprocessing spent fuel or the development of cryogenic engines and supercomputers.
The beginning and success of India’s nuclear program was a rich combination of perceived military threats and able political and scientific leadership to address these threats. India’s nuclear program, beginning in the 1960s and developing in the 1970s, was a direct outcome of perceived security threats from China and Pakistan. The success of the program owes in large measure to the dedicated efforts of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission, its chairman Homi Jehangir Bhabha and the late Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Together they provided the impetus for a skilled workforce, a sophisticated infrastructure and nuclear R&D to create a formidable nuclear defense plan for India that would become the envy of many nations. The first one-megawatt thermal reactor in India named Apsara went critical on August 4, 1956 paving the way for the development of its dual-purpose nuclear technology.
In the early 1950s atomic R&D was viewed in the world as a positive contribution by nations towards resolving their economic and social problems. The development of atomic energy did not have the negative connotations of ‘nuclear proliferation,’ ‘mass destruction’ or ‘global threat’ as it has today. India took advantage of this favorable international climate and used the expertise of nuclear nations like France, United Kingdom, Canada and the United States to build its own nuclear technology. Of all these nations, Canada was instrumental in helping India construct its nuclear program in the initial stages. Briefly, the initial two decades, that is the 1950s and 1960s, were basically developmental in nature as they provided India with the nuclear expertise to expand its infrastructure and nuclear agenda into what Lal Bahadur Shastri termed “the nuclear explosive” project.
The Nuclear Debate: From 1947 to 1964 India continued to develop its civilian nuclear infrastructure keeping the military option open. But when in 1964 China exploded a nuclear device, the act initiated a grand debate about the security needs of India based on its nuclear threat perception of China and Russia. India always saw communist China as a friend and often raised the highly emotional slogan Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai, or Indians-Chinese Brothers, Brothers. India never anticipated that a border dispute with China would soon turn into a full blown conflict. In 1962 India fought a contentious border war with China and lost about 50,000 square miles of territory to it. The Sino-Indian conflict revealed the abysmally poor defense system India possessed. The conflict shattered the belief that a communist country would never threaten the sovereignty of India. However, this perceived and real threat from China did not push India into a nuclear arms race with China. India still feared the debilitating effect of a costly nuclear development on its fragile economy.
The Congress government wisely realized that, at the present moment, to pursue international diplomacy in order to contain the hegemonic intentions of China would be more suited to India’s needs. The opposition parties did not share the government’s view. Both the Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh and the socialist party, The Praja Socialist Party, demanded the nation to develop a nuclear military option to combat the growing hegemonic intentions of both China and Russia. The intellectual elites, the media and the political parties in India began to debate the pros and cons of a robust nuclear policy.
The Indian newspapers saw the Chinese nuclear policy as a “new menace” to the world that directly affected India, its next door neighbor. Some pacifists argued that India must not develop its own nuclear weapon technology but instead seek nuclear protection from the US. Though the United States president assured India of American help in the eventuality of a nuclear attack, the US government was unwilling to make a firm commitment. The lack of a clear assurance from the US made Indian leaders feel that in case of an emergency, or a scenario where Russia and China joined hands against India, American help may not be forthcoming. India always considered verbal assurances somewhat unreliable in international diplomacy, and rightly so. The US government on the other hand was unwilling to make a firm commitment to India or sign a treaty. Given the state of affairs it was felt that an independent nuclear program would not only free India from depending on the US or Russia, but also bestow prestige on the country for its scientific prowess.
The Ethical Imperative: The Indian debate on “going nuclear” was fervently discussed under many sub-themes including necessity and cost, but the most significant sub-theme was the ethical imperative. It was felt that the nuclear program would run contrary to the general non-violent ideals propounded by Mahatma Gandhi and the pacifist principles of Panchsheel enshrined in the Indian foreign policy. Obviously the pragmatists disagreed. They argued that the threat posed by five nuclear nations to the security of India was far greater than the ethical compromise. They further argued that the theory of deterrence need not contradict the moral basis of nonviolence, but in fact lend credence to it. Since China posed a long-term threat to the security of India, China continued to shape Indian foreign policy vis-Ã -vis nuclear disarmament and sanctions. It was felt that even if China did not use the bomb on India, it would threaten to use the nuclear option to blackmail and coerce India. Therefore many intellectual elites felt that strengthening nuclear security at high cost was a far greater priority for the government than just worrying about fiscal development.
Soon the pragmatists were able to win over the moralists and the idealists in their campaign to develop a nuclear option. Both the ruling and opposition parties began to feel the need for developing military nuclear infrastructure. Even from within the Congress Party pressure began to mount on the government to produce its own “atom bomb.” The New Delhi Pradesh Congress President Mustaq Ahmed voiced this concern by suggesting that the time was right for India to develop its own nuclear infrastructure. In November 1964 the Jana Sangh tabled a motion in the Lok Sabha urging the Indian government to produce nuclear weapons. Mr. Lal Bahadur Shastri who until now was opposed to the idea of a nuclear program, began to be convinced that India should go nuclear. He modified Jana Sangh’s motion by suggesting that India should develop “peaceful nuclear explosives” in the near future. This paved the way for an underground nuclear test called the Subterranean Nuclear Explosion Project.
Response to Pakistan and China: The conflict with Pakistan also helped India to think more positively about its nuclear program. In 1965 India and Pakistan fought a bloody war to resolve the territorial dispute in Kashmir. In this conflict China supported Pakistan creating a sense of crisis in India. China threatened India with grave consequences if it proceeded with military action against Pakistan. It is during this period that India’s nonviolent idealism gave way to a pragmatic defense policy that included the nuclear option. The political history of the 1960s in India amply demonstrates this conclusion.
Though initially Indira Gandhi pursued a non-nuclear policy, the thermonuclear test by China on May 9, 1966 and the nuclear missile test on October 27, 1966 convinced her in favor of developing a nuclear explosive technology. Also the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty was increasingly considered detrimental to the security interests of India, as it did not attempt to contain the Chinese problem. On the contrary it went on to legalize China’s nuclear status. India therefore refused to sign the NPT in 1968. A survey in 1972 demonstrated that 68.9 percent of Indians were not in favor of the NPT.
India always perceived China’s nuclear and rocket technology as a threat to its security. On April 24, 1970 China tested a rocket carrying a satellite in orbit. This once again raised India’s anxiety to a new level. In response to the Chinese threat, IAEC chairman, Vikram Sarabhai initiated a 10-year nuclear space program called the Sarabhai Profile that would develop a missile delivery system for both civilian and military purposes.
The Difficult 1970s and Pokhran I: In the midst of political and technological impasse, India began to inch forward towards a nuclear option. Though the political crisis in the 1970s was obvious, the technological crisis was less obtrusive. The Americans had refused to transfer the technology of super computers and the Russians were coerced by Americans to deny cryogenic engines to India. Denied help from both the superpowers India turned swadeshi. In less than four years it was able to produce the supercomputer named Param and develop its own brand of cryogenic engine. In 1974 India conducted its first peaceful nuclear explosion or PNE at Pokhran, nicknamed “Buddha Smile,” under the leadership of Indira Gandhi and Homi Sethna, a test that was conceived much earlier by Dr. Raja Ramanna. Though India vehemently denied that the test was a precursor to the development of a formidable nuclear arsenal, the test did two things: firstly it strengthened India’s nuclear option and secondly it opened the way for the development of nuclear weapons. It can be argued that India’s increasing assertiveness in foreign policy ran at tandem with its nuclear strength. The nuclear testing at Pokhran created a quick reaction and condemnation from countries like Pakistan, United States and Canada for various reasons. Pakistan felt threatened. The United States became concerned of a regional instability in the subcontinent and Canada felt betrayed as the plutonium came from the Canadian CIRUS reactor. However, most Indians were fully supportive of the nuclear development.
The New Political Reality of the 1980s: The early 1980s saw a new realignment of superpower interests in the South Asian subcontinent. We must remember that this is the period of a Cold War between the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. The American reaction to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 pushed US interests closer towards Pakistan. The US needed Pakistan to prevent Soviet hegemony in the region and expansion in the west. It also needed Pakistan to buttress anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan. The US tilt towards Pakistan reopened American military aid in the form of financial assistance and supply of F16s to Pakistan. India began to see a new threat from the growing alliance between the US and Pakistan and between Pakistan and China. Furthermore India became deeply concerned when it saw that China was directly helping Pakistan at Kahuta and PINSTECH in Rawalpindi to build its nuclear and missile technology. At one point India even contemplated surgical and preemptive strikes at these two locations.
As a reaction to the new political realignment in the subcontinent in 1983 India initiated the Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme (IGMDP) under the direct supervision of the Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO). The IGMDP allowed India to integrate its anti-tank, surface-to-air and surface-to-surface technologies in the development of its nuclear missile program. In 1984 Pakistan’s Abdul Qadeer Khan’s comment that his country possessed the capability to produce weapon-grade uranium, accelerated India’s own nuclear program. When in 1985 Pakistan tested a triggering device for a nuclear explosion India’s threat perception of its neighbor was raised to a new height. Rajiv Gandhi was well aware of Pakistan’s nuclear ambition and its threat to India. Though he campaigned for global disarmament he did not abandon the nuclear option or the use of nuclear technology for civil use. By the early 1990s India had developed about two-dozen nuclear devices to be deployed at short notice.
Retreat of the Soviet Union: The end of the Cold War in 1991 restructured the global strategic balance. Apart from other geopolitical changes it also saw the breakup of the Soviet Union. The restructuring weakened the diplomatic support of the Soviet Union and supply of arms to India. From 1993-1995 China threatened India by deploying nuclear warheads in Tibet. China also assured Pakistan of helping it develop its nuclear and ballistic missile technologies. It is in this background that the Kashmir issue flared up. Pakistan began supporting insurgency in Muslim-dominated Kashmir and threatened India with the use of nuclear device if forced into a tight corner.
Besieged by China and Pakistan, depending on a weakened friend like the Soviet Union for support, and criticized by western powers for pursuing a nuclear program, India felt increasingly beleaguered. We must see some of the subsequent developments in the light of this situation. Though in October 1963 India had decided to join the Partial Test Ban Treaty it consistently refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) on moral grounds. As late as 1996, India voted against the UN General Assembly resolution endorsing CTBT on the grounds that the resolution lacked a “time-bound” framework for universal nuclear disarmament and a ban on laboratory simulations. However though India rejected the terms and conditions of the CTBT, major powers began using the provisions of the CTBT to put pressure on India to either join it or curtail its nuclear ambition. Since India had become a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) four of its nuclear reactors had to comply with the IAEA security safeguard standards. It became increasingly difficult for India to pursue a policy of nuclear ambiguity. India began to realize that like China, sooner or later, it had to accept the NPT and the CTBT. The rising power of China and its unequivocal support of Pakistan further exacerbated India’s anxieties. It is within these parameters that we must understand India’s movement towards Pokhran II.
Pokhran II: In early 1998 when the Hindu BJP came to power, it wanted to realize its election pledge of advancing India’s nuclear capability. In May 1998 it conducted five nuclear tests under the leadership of Atal Behari Vajpayee. It is argued that these tests were part of the party’s strategy to bolster its image both at home and abroad. Subsequent events revealed that this argument was not completely sustainable. Within a few months of Pokhran II the BJP lost elections in three major states of India, namely Haryana, Rajasthan and Delhi. However it must be remembered that in 1995 the Congress Party under Narshima Rao also wanted to test a nuclear devise but backed out under US pressure. It can be said that the pressure of the CTBT became a diplomatic barrier that India had to either break or succumb to. India chose to take a bold stand and conduct its nuclear tests.
Over the years US sanctions against India have been lifted and European and Japanese acrimony has also evaporated. In 2006 India and the US signed a civilian nuclear transfer of technology which was considered mutually beneficial. This has to do with a growing recognition in the west that India is not only a responsible nation using nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, but also a strong international ally in fighting terrorism.
Conclusion: Though the development of the nuclear program has directly addressed India’s anxieties regarding its neighbors, it is debatable whether nuclear technology for civilian use is beneficial in the long run. It is widely believed that nuclear energy would provide sustainable and cheap electricity to India in the coming years. However many scientists argue that this hope may be belied as it has been in other countries pursuing the same goal. Nuclear technology has never proved to be a major generator of electricity. On the contrary the dangers it poses to the environment are far greater than its benefits. Though the deployment of nuclear weapons is directly under the control and command of the prime minister of India, the threat of nuclear weapons from countries like China and Pakistan to the people of the Indian subcontinent cannot be ignored. Even though India’s nuclear deterrence is enormous in the region it still calls for a serious discussion on the ways nuclear technology is utilized in future and the need for nuclear disarmament in the subcontinent.
The paper concerns the reasons for India going nuclear, the development of its nuclear program and its rationale for its not signing the NPT and CTBT in spite of advocating a non-violent foreign policy. The early stages of India’s nuclear program were prompted by a perceived threat of China and later of Pakistan. The success of the program was a combination of three factors namely, a skilled organizational workforce, scientific leadership and political endorsement. In this the contributions of the IAEC, Homi Bhabha and the late Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru played a significant role.
India’s accelerated nuclear development in the 1960s and 1970s was again prompted by the nuclear ascendancy of China and its unilateral support to Pakistan as a buffer zone. India took advantage of the positive connotations of nuclear technology in mid-twentieth century and developed a thermal reactor thereby initiating a nuclear program that would evolve into the nuclear explosive project. The explosion of a nuclear device by China in 1964 initiated a debate in the Indian media and political circles on the efficacy of developing a nuclear military technology and the negative impact on its fragile economy. While the Congress Party believed in international diplomacy to contain the hegemonic intentions of China, the BJP and the Praja Socialist Party argued for developing a military nuclear option. It was believed that the military nuclearization of India would not contradict the pacifist goals of Gandhian ideals that had infused its foreign policy. On the contrary the theory of deterrence would protect the sovereignty of India thereby making the ethical compromise pragmatic and viable.
The secretive development of the nuclear program under Indira Gandhi and Homi Sethna culminated in the explosion of PNE at Pokhran in 1974 and made Indian foreign policy more assertive. The changed geo-political reality of the 1980s in the wake of Soviet invasion of Afghanistan pushed the United States closer towards Pakistan making Pakistan an American ally to combat the threat of growing Soviet communism in the region. With a supportive America, Pakistan took the Chinese help in developing its own nuclear program aimed at containing India. Perceiving a new nexus between Pakistan and China, India began to develop its own missile technology. In 1996 the CTBT once again reiterated a time bound framework for universal nuclear disarmament placing yet a new pressure on India to contain its nuclear program. Sensing the closing of the nuclear window India conducted five nuclear explosions at Pokhran to bolster its image aboard and then place a moratorium on nuclear tests. In the wake of these explosions there were worldwide condemnations and the US, European powers and its allies like Japan placed economic sanctions on India.
India however continued to develop both economically and technologically in subsequent decades and began to be perceived as a responsible nuclear nation and a western ally in its fight against terrorism. In 2006 the US signed a treaty with India initiating a civilian nuclear transfer of technology beneficial to both countries. Both the European and Japanese perceptions about India’s nuclear program has changed from political belligerence to economic advantage. India has always argued that the development of dual-purpose nuclear technology would offer a cheap and effective resource to resolve economic and social problems but this is debatable.
In a world wrought by extremely divisive forces, nations with advanced nuclear and missile technologies act as deterrence to state-sponsored violence and keep a check on the hegemonic ambitions of non-nuclear nations. Today, it is not only enough to possess nuclear weapons but also a sophisticated delivery system in the form of intercontinental ballistic missiles to be taken seriously by other nations. In its February 14, 2009 issue The Times of India reported that India would test-fire ICBMs in 2010. By this date it would also acquire a submarine launched ballistic missile technology (SLBM), and develop a ballistic missile defense system (BMD) in order to offset its military disadvantage and come closer to the exclusive club of nuclear nations formed by America, Russia and China. In the light of these new developments it is important to analyze the causes and motives that forced India to go nuclear about four decades ago in spite of espousing a non-violent foreign policy.
Early Stages of India’s Nuclear Program: India’s nuclear program began in the late 1940s when India gained independence from Britain after over 150 years of protracted colonial rule. The memory of American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was fresh in the minds of Indian leaders and the public, who felt the need to develop an indigenous nuclear technology and military superiority to prevent future colonization or hegemony by any other ambitious nation. India began to see the U. S. model of using nuclear technology for producing both domestic energy and providing military defense as an ideal for its geographical and political situation. At the same time India never lost sight of developing nuclear technology indigenously—whether it was related to the mining and enrichment of uranium and reprocessing spent fuel or the development of cryogenic engines and supercomputers.
The beginning and success of India’s nuclear program was a rich combination of perceived military threats and able political and scientific leadership to address these threats. India’s nuclear program, beginning in the 1960s and developing in the 1970s, was a direct outcome of perceived security threats from China and Pakistan. The success of the program owes in large measure to the dedicated efforts of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission, its chairman Homi Jehangir Bhabha and the late Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Together they provided the impetus for a skilled workforce, a sophisticated infrastructure and nuclear R&D to create a formidable nuclear defense plan for India that would become the envy of many nations. The first one-megawatt thermal reactor in India named Apsara went critical on August 4, 1956 paving the way for the development of its dual-purpose nuclear technology.
In the early 1950s atomic R&D was viewed in the world as a positive contribution by nations towards resolving their economic and social problems. The development of atomic energy did not have the negative connotations of ‘nuclear proliferation,’ ‘mass destruction’ or ‘global threat’ as it has today. India took advantage of this favorable international climate and used the expertise of nuclear nations like France, United Kingdom, Canada and the United States to build its own nuclear technology. Of all these nations, Canada was instrumental in helping India construct its nuclear program in the initial stages. Briefly, the initial two decades, that is the 1950s and 1960s, were basically developmental in nature as they provided India with the nuclear expertise to expand its infrastructure and nuclear agenda into what Lal Bahadur Shastri termed “the nuclear explosive” project.
The Nuclear Debate: From 1947 to 1964 India continued to develop its civilian nuclear infrastructure keeping the military option open. But when in 1964 China exploded a nuclear device, the act initiated a grand debate about the security needs of India based on its nuclear threat perception of China and Russia. India always saw communist China as a friend and often raised the highly emotional slogan Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai, or Indians-Chinese Brothers, Brothers. India never anticipated that a border dispute with China would soon turn into a full blown conflict. In 1962 India fought a contentious border war with China and lost about 50,000 square miles of territory to it. The Sino-Indian conflict revealed the abysmally poor defense system India possessed. The conflict shattered the belief that a communist country would never threaten the sovereignty of India. However, this perceived and real threat from China did not push India into a nuclear arms race with China. India still feared the debilitating effect of a costly nuclear development on its fragile economy.
The Congress government wisely realized that, at the present moment, to pursue international diplomacy in order to contain the hegemonic intentions of China would be more suited to India’s needs. The opposition parties did not share the government’s view. Both the Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh and the socialist party, The Praja Socialist Party, demanded the nation to develop a nuclear military option to combat the growing hegemonic intentions of both China and Russia. The intellectual elites, the media and the political parties in India began to debate the pros and cons of a robust nuclear policy.
The Indian newspapers saw the Chinese nuclear policy as a “new menace” to the world that directly affected India, its next door neighbor. Some pacifists argued that India must not develop its own nuclear weapon technology but instead seek nuclear protection from the US. Though the United States president assured India of American help in the eventuality of a nuclear attack, the US government was unwilling to make a firm commitment. The lack of a clear assurance from the US made Indian leaders feel that in case of an emergency, or a scenario where Russia and China joined hands against India, American help may not be forthcoming. India always considered verbal assurances somewhat unreliable in international diplomacy, and rightly so. The US government on the other hand was unwilling to make a firm commitment to India or sign a treaty. Given the state of affairs it was felt that an independent nuclear program would not only free India from depending on the US or Russia, but also bestow prestige on the country for its scientific prowess.
The Ethical Imperative: The Indian debate on “going nuclear” was fervently discussed under many sub-themes including necessity and cost, but the most significant sub-theme was the ethical imperative. It was felt that the nuclear program would run contrary to the general non-violent ideals propounded by Mahatma Gandhi and the pacifist principles of Panchsheel enshrined in the Indian foreign policy. Obviously the pragmatists disagreed. They argued that the threat posed by five nuclear nations to the security of India was far greater than the ethical compromise. They further argued that the theory of deterrence need not contradict the moral basis of nonviolence, but in fact lend credence to it. Since China posed a long-term threat to the security of India, China continued to shape Indian foreign policy vis-Ã -vis nuclear disarmament and sanctions. It was felt that even if China did not use the bomb on India, it would threaten to use the nuclear option to blackmail and coerce India. Therefore many intellectual elites felt that strengthening nuclear security at high cost was a far greater priority for the government than just worrying about fiscal development.
Soon the pragmatists were able to win over the moralists and the idealists in their campaign to develop a nuclear option. Both the ruling and opposition parties began to feel the need for developing military nuclear infrastructure. Even from within the Congress Party pressure began to mount on the government to produce its own “atom bomb.” The New Delhi Pradesh Congress President Mustaq Ahmed voiced this concern by suggesting that the time was right for India to develop its own nuclear infrastructure. In November 1964 the Jana Sangh tabled a motion in the Lok Sabha urging the Indian government to produce nuclear weapons. Mr. Lal Bahadur Shastri who until now was opposed to the idea of a nuclear program, began to be convinced that India should go nuclear. He modified Jana Sangh’s motion by suggesting that India should develop “peaceful nuclear explosives” in the near future. This paved the way for an underground nuclear test called the Subterranean Nuclear Explosion Project.
Response to Pakistan and China: The conflict with Pakistan also helped India to think more positively about its nuclear program. In 1965 India and Pakistan fought a bloody war to resolve the territorial dispute in Kashmir. In this conflict China supported Pakistan creating a sense of crisis in India. China threatened India with grave consequences if it proceeded with military action against Pakistan. It is during this period that India’s nonviolent idealism gave way to a pragmatic defense policy that included the nuclear option. The political history of the 1960s in India amply demonstrates this conclusion.
Though initially Indira Gandhi pursued a non-nuclear policy, the thermonuclear test by China on May 9, 1966 and the nuclear missile test on October 27, 1966 convinced her in favor of developing a nuclear explosive technology. Also the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty was increasingly considered detrimental to the security interests of India, as it did not attempt to contain the Chinese problem. On the contrary it went on to legalize China’s nuclear status. India therefore refused to sign the NPT in 1968. A survey in 1972 demonstrated that 68.9 percent of Indians were not in favor of the NPT.
India always perceived China’s nuclear and rocket technology as a threat to its security. On April 24, 1970 China tested a rocket carrying a satellite in orbit. This once again raised India’s anxiety to a new level. In response to the Chinese threat, IAEC chairman, Vikram Sarabhai initiated a 10-year nuclear space program called the Sarabhai Profile that would develop a missile delivery system for both civilian and military purposes.
The Difficult 1970s and Pokhran I: In the midst of political and technological impasse, India began to inch forward towards a nuclear option. Though the political crisis in the 1970s was obvious, the technological crisis was less obtrusive. The Americans had refused to transfer the technology of super computers and the Russians were coerced by Americans to deny cryogenic engines to India. Denied help from both the superpowers India turned swadeshi. In less than four years it was able to produce the supercomputer named Param and develop its own brand of cryogenic engine. In 1974 India conducted its first peaceful nuclear explosion or PNE at Pokhran, nicknamed “Buddha Smile,” under the leadership of Indira Gandhi and Homi Sethna, a test that was conceived much earlier by Dr. Raja Ramanna. Though India vehemently denied that the test was a precursor to the development of a formidable nuclear arsenal, the test did two things: firstly it strengthened India’s nuclear option and secondly it opened the way for the development of nuclear weapons. It can be argued that India’s increasing assertiveness in foreign policy ran at tandem with its nuclear strength. The nuclear testing at Pokhran created a quick reaction and condemnation from countries like Pakistan, United States and Canada for various reasons. Pakistan felt threatened. The United States became concerned of a regional instability in the subcontinent and Canada felt betrayed as the plutonium came from the Canadian CIRUS reactor. However, most Indians were fully supportive of the nuclear development.
The New Political Reality of the 1980s: The early 1980s saw a new realignment of superpower interests in the South Asian subcontinent. We must remember that this is the period of a Cold War between the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. The American reaction to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 pushed US interests closer towards Pakistan. The US needed Pakistan to prevent Soviet hegemony in the region and expansion in the west. It also needed Pakistan to buttress anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan. The US tilt towards Pakistan reopened American military aid in the form of financial assistance and supply of F16s to Pakistan. India began to see a new threat from the growing alliance between the US and Pakistan and between Pakistan and China. Furthermore India became deeply concerned when it saw that China was directly helping Pakistan at Kahuta and PINSTECH in Rawalpindi to build its nuclear and missile technology. At one point India even contemplated surgical and preemptive strikes at these two locations.
As a reaction to the new political realignment in the subcontinent in 1983 India initiated the Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme (IGMDP) under the direct supervision of the Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO). The IGMDP allowed India to integrate its anti-tank, surface-to-air and surface-to-surface technologies in the development of its nuclear missile program. In 1984 Pakistan’s Abdul Qadeer Khan’s comment that his country possessed the capability to produce weapon-grade uranium, accelerated India’s own nuclear program. When in 1985 Pakistan tested a triggering device for a nuclear explosion India’s threat perception of its neighbor was raised to a new height. Rajiv Gandhi was well aware of Pakistan’s nuclear ambition and its threat to India. Though he campaigned for global disarmament he did not abandon the nuclear option or the use of nuclear technology for civil use. By the early 1990s India had developed about two-dozen nuclear devices to be deployed at short notice.
Retreat of the Soviet Union: The end of the Cold War in 1991 restructured the global strategic balance. Apart from other geopolitical changes it also saw the breakup of the Soviet Union. The restructuring weakened the diplomatic support of the Soviet Union and supply of arms to India. From 1993-1995 China threatened India by deploying nuclear warheads in Tibet. China also assured Pakistan of helping it develop its nuclear and ballistic missile technologies. It is in this background that the Kashmir issue flared up. Pakistan began supporting insurgency in Muslim-dominated Kashmir and threatened India with the use of nuclear device if forced into a tight corner.
Besieged by China and Pakistan, depending on a weakened friend like the Soviet Union for support, and criticized by western powers for pursuing a nuclear program, India felt increasingly beleaguered. We must see some of the subsequent developments in the light of this situation. Though in October 1963 India had decided to join the Partial Test Ban Treaty it consistently refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) on moral grounds. As late as 1996, India voted against the UN General Assembly resolution endorsing CTBT on the grounds that the resolution lacked a “time-bound” framework for universal nuclear disarmament and a ban on laboratory simulations. However though India rejected the terms and conditions of the CTBT, major powers began using the provisions of the CTBT to put pressure on India to either join it or curtail its nuclear ambition. Since India had become a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) four of its nuclear reactors had to comply with the IAEA security safeguard standards. It became increasingly difficult for India to pursue a policy of nuclear ambiguity. India began to realize that like China, sooner or later, it had to accept the NPT and the CTBT. The rising power of China and its unequivocal support of Pakistan further exacerbated India’s anxieties. It is within these parameters that we must understand India’s movement towards Pokhran II.
Pokhran II: In early 1998 when the Hindu BJP came to power, it wanted to realize its election pledge of advancing India’s nuclear capability. In May 1998 it conducted five nuclear tests under the leadership of Atal Behari Vajpayee. It is argued that these tests were part of the party’s strategy to bolster its image both at home and abroad. Subsequent events revealed that this argument was not completely sustainable. Within a few months of Pokhran II the BJP lost elections in three major states of India, namely Haryana, Rajasthan and Delhi. However it must be remembered that in 1995 the Congress Party under Narshima Rao also wanted to test a nuclear devise but backed out under US pressure. It can be said that the pressure of the CTBT became a diplomatic barrier that India had to either break or succumb to. India chose to take a bold stand and conduct its nuclear tests.
Over the years US sanctions against India have been lifted and European and Japanese acrimony has also evaporated. In 2006 India and the US signed a civilian nuclear transfer of technology which was considered mutually beneficial. This has to do with a growing recognition in the west that India is not only a responsible nation using nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, but also a strong international ally in fighting terrorism.
Conclusion: Though the development of the nuclear program has directly addressed India’s anxieties regarding its neighbors, it is debatable whether nuclear technology for civilian use is beneficial in the long run. It is widely believed that nuclear energy would provide sustainable and cheap electricity to India in the coming years. However many scientists argue that this hope may be belied as it has been in other countries pursuing the same goal. Nuclear technology has never proved to be a major generator of electricity. On the contrary the dangers it poses to the environment are far greater than its benefits. Though the deployment of nuclear weapons is directly under the control and command of the prime minister of India, the threat of nuclear weapons from countries like China and Pakistan to the people of the Indian subcontinent cannot be ignored. Even though India’s nuclear deterrence is enormous in the region it still calls for a serious discussion on the ways nuclear technology is utilized in future and the need for nuclear disarmament in the subcontinent.
In this Election, Choose Long-Term Vision Over Short-Term Gains
By Sam Pitroda
As the world's biggest exercise in democracy gets underway, there is a sense of expectation and anticipation. With an electorate of 714 million people eligible to vote, there is a tremendous opportunity for the people of India to elect a government that will deliver results and improve the growth trajectory of the country.
In the present election environment of personal attacks and popular slogans, it is important to look at the long term implications and a concrete developmental agenda.
India's parliamentary elections are taking place at a time when the world is at a crossroads and the country has emerged as a highly significant global voice. While at one level the elections are necessarily about domestic challenges such as economic development and security, at another level they are also about the role India can play in shaping the world as the largest pluralistic democracy.
It is from the perspective of the role India ought to play on the global stage, especially in light of the global financial meltdown and associated opportunities for India and the world, that it is important that a clear verdict emerge.
The presence of a large number of regional parties in our polity affirms the vibrant nature of democracy in India. However, after laying the foundation for a great economy since 1991, India cannot afford to squander away all its gains and strengths because of a fractured mandate. The country needs a clearly defined economic, social, political, educational, cultural and scientific agenda and the ability to execute it.
Like all elections, this one too is about the future. It is about the future of 550 million people below the age of 25. Equally, it is about hundreds of millions of Indians who still languish on the margins of society and are denied basic opportunities. We owe it to them to produce a government that is not constrained by competing regional ambitions, but instead governed by a nationally collective vision for the 21st century.
One aspect of this collective vision should arise from the recognition that India can be the most effective counter against the rising tide of violent fundamentalism in the subcontinent which has a direct bearing on the stability of the world.
India can use its position as a responsible and stable democracy to galvanize international efforts towards regional stability. However, unless New Delhi has a government that is free from the compulsions of balancing coalition demands and short-term rent seeking, it cannot concentrate on effectively combating the destabilizing forces in Pakistan and Afghanistan. This inability can have serious consequences for India's own future and security.
The core of this collective vision should focus on creating inclusive growth strategies that seek to lift hundreds of millions of people at subsistence level to a better quality of life. Unless we have a government that is not looking over its shoulder about who might be out to dislodge it, it is not possible to put in place long-term plans and rational policy for overall progress and prosperity.
We must not create a situation where the country's prime minister has to continuously balance his priorities between pleasing coalition partners and the development agenda for the country.
A country in the midst of a generational transformation is bound to have many challenges, priorities and opportunities. These relate to security, economy, health, education, energy, infrastructure, agriculture, employment and more. From the perspective of the young, the twin concerns of education and employment are especially important.
Many of us are personally passionate about turning India's vast knowledge base into an asset which can help transform the country. It is not widely understood that our growing young population offers a unique demographic dividend which has the potential to transform the future course of development. To effectively harness this potential we need to invest in school, vocational and higher education with a clear focus on expansion, excellence and access.
We have to make sure that the poorest of the poor have the opportunity to get the best possible education in the country, irrespective of their background. To deliver on this unique opportunity, political will, with a strong government at the centre, is a decisive factor. This political will is possible only when we have a stable dispensation undistracted by extraneous challenges.
Unlike other political formations, today we need a nationally cohesive presence with a broad vision about how it wants the country to progress. The last five years of the Congress Party-led United Progressive Alliance government under Manmohan Singh have been generally effective in furthering many of the party's ideas for nation building and initiating an inclusive growth agenda. This is notwithstanding the pressures of a coalition government.
The choice we make becomes even more relevant in the wake of the global economic downturn. India has fared better than most other countries in coping with the global crisis. It is still the second-fastest growing economy in the world and its banking sector has largely escaped the crisis that has plagued big banks in many other emerging markets.
Yet, India is not de-hyphenated from global financial problems and is facing challenges of credit flow, unemployment, loss of exports and investments. Still, the global economic slowdown provides an interesting opportunity for India. In relative terms, it can be used to bolster growth, initiate more development and job creation.
At this stage we need to take advantage of the huge internal markets with a focus on the bottom of the pyramid. We also need people in the government that do not seek to divide India in narrowly defined sections based on identities and parochial concerns.
We need to continue to implement our unfinished reform agenda with a clear commitment to right to information, right to education, national rural employment guarantee programmes, rural health mission, education, roads, energy, foreign investment rules, labor laws, privatization of certain public sector initiatives, administrative reforms, judicial reforms, good governance, broadband connectivity etc.
Only through such a focused implementation agenda, backed by the right political will and strong and stable government at the centre, can we hope to build a prosperous India of the future where there will be no distinction between 'Bharat' and 'India'.
As the world's biggest exercise in democracy gets underway, there is a sense of expectation and anticipation. With an electorate of 714 million people eligible to vote, there is a tremendous opportunity for the people of India to elect a government that will deliver results and improve the growth trajectory of the country.
In the present election environment of personal attacks and popular slogans, it is important to look at the long term implications and a concrete developmental agenda.
India's parliamentary elections are taking place at a time when the world is at a crossroads and the country has emerged as a highly significant global voice. While at one level the elections are necessarily about domestic challenges such as economic development and security, at another level they are also about the role India can play in shaping the world as the largest pluralistic democracy.
It is from the perspective of the role India ought to play on the global stage, especially in light of the global financial meltdown and associated opportunities for India and the world, that it is important that a clear verdict emerge.
The presence of a large number of regional parties in our polity affirms the vibrant nature of democracy in India. However, after laying the foundation for a great economy since 1991, India cannot afford to squander away all its gains and strengths because of a fractured mandate. The country needs a clearly defined economic, social, political, educational, cultural and scientific agenda and the ability to execute it.
Like all elections, this one too is about the future. It is about the future of 550 million people below the age of 25. Equally, it is about hundreds of millions of Indians who still languish on the margins of society and are denied basic opportunities. We owe it to them to produce a government that is not constrained by competing regional ambitions, but instead governed by a nationally collective vision for the 21st century.
One aspect of this collective vision should arise from the recognition that India can be the most effective counter against the rising tide of violent fundamentalism in the subcontinent which has a direct bearing on the stability of the world.
India can use its position as a responsible and stable democracy to galvanize international efforts towards regional stability. However, unless New Delhi has a government that is free from the compulsions of balancing coalition demands and short-term rent seeking, it cannot concentrate on effectively combating the destabilizing forces in Pakistan and Afghanistan. This inability can have serious consequences for India's own future and security.
The core of this collective vision should focus on creating inclusive growth strategies that seek to lift hundreds of millions of people at subsistence level to a better quality of life. Unless we have a government that is not looking over its shoulder about who might be out to dislodge it, it is not possible to put in place long-term plans and rational policy for overall progress and prosperity.
We must not create a situation where the country's prime minister has to continuously balance his priorities between pleasing coalition partners and the development agenda for the country.
A country in the midst of a generational transformation is bound to have many challenges, priorities and opportunities. These relate to security, economy, health, education, energy, infrastructure, agriculture, employment and more. From the perspective of the young, the twin concerns of education and employment are especially important.
Many of us are personally passionate about turning India's vast knowledge base into an asset which can help transform the country. It is not widely understood that our growing young population offers a unique demographic dividend which has the potential to transform the future course of development. To effectively harness this potential we need to invest in school, vocational and higher education with a clear focus on expansion, excellence and access.
We have to make sure that the poorest of the poor have the opportunity to get the best possible education in the country, irrespective of their background. To deliver on this unique opportunity, political will, with a strong government at the centre, is a decisive factor. This political will is possible only when we have a stable dispensation undistracted by extraneous challenges.
Unlike other political formations, today we need a nationally cohesive presence with a broad vision about how it wants the country to progress. The last five years of the Congress Party-led United Progressive Alliance government under Manmohan Singh have been generally effective in furthering many of the party's ideas for nation building and initiating an inclusive growth agenda. This is notwithstanding the pressures of a coalition government.
The choice we make becomes even more relevant in the wake of the global economic downturn. India has fared better than most other countries in coping with the global crisis. It is still the second-fastest growing economy in the world and its banking sector has largely escaped the crisis that has plagued big banks in many other emerging markets.
Yet, India is not de-hyphenated from global financial problems and is facing challenges of credit flow, unemployment, loss of exports and investments. Still, the global economic slowdown provides an interesting opportunity for India. In relative terms, it can be used to bolster growth, initiate more development and job creation.
At this stage we need to take advantage of the huge internal markets with a focus on the bottom of the pyramid. We also need people in the government that do not seek to divide India in narrowly defined sections based on identities and parochial concerns.
We need to continue to implement our unfinished reform agenda with a clear commitment to right to information, right to education, national rural employment guarantee programmes, rural health mission, education, roads, energy, foreign investment rules, labor laws, privatization of certain public sector initiatives, administrative reforms, judicial reforms, good governance, broadband connectivity etc.
Only through such a focused implementation agenda, backed by the right political will and strong and stable government at the centre, can we hope to build a prosperous India of the future where there will be no distinction between 'Bharat' and 'India'.
Jihadis target the high seas
By M H Ahssan
Most of the media discussion about piracy in the Gulf of Aden has drifted understandably towards the sensational part of the story: how are the pirates able to roam the ocean? Is paying them ransom a better option than to engage them militarily? And will a military intervention against the pirates worsen the situation; will it lead to a massive escalation in Somalia and a Vietnam-like quagmire for many years to come?
The armed bands on the waters which are still roaming the seas of Aden and the Indian Ocean across from Somalia and Kenya are not impressed with the dozens of naval units dispatched by powerful navies from around the world.
What is behind this piracy phenomenon, what lies ahead if the international community intervenes and what could develop in that region if the latter is late to intervene or doesn't meet the challenge? It appears the strategic challenge is even bigger than the mere piracy. Indeed, the strategy now contemplated by regional powers could become a major military debacle. Here is why:
These so-called Somali pirates are strategically different from their historical predecessors in the Caribbean or from their contemporary colleagues in archipelagoes around the world. They aren't a vast collection of individual thugs, acting as bands replicating what successful sea gangs have accomplished for centuries before them. They are too many, operating from extremely long shores, all using similar methods, and are backed from hinterland forces.
They may seem like pirates as they seize ships and negotiate for ransom. But these water thugs actually belong to a wider chess game. The grand ensemble of the army of little boats is part of a regional jihadi apparatus being deployed in the Horn of Africa and beyond. The jihadi grand circle building in the region is not limited to the pirates but involves hostile forces from the mid-Red Sea to East Africa. The Somali pirates are merely one facet of this grand circle.
Ironically, the term used in Arabic (and now in Arabic media) to depict the Somali pirates is Qursaan, which derives from Corsairs, the swashbuckling French privateers from a bygone era. A view of the operations map of these Somali Qursaan leaves little room that the end aim is to create a vast zone of insecurity stretching from East Africa to the Red Sea.
A closer look allows strategists to easily realize that these are the maritime passages from the oil-rich Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal and also parts of the East African alternative routes - the most economic via Cape Town on the southern tip of Africa.
So, above and beyond the globally low (even if locally lucrative) revenues that these operations bring to their little pirates, the greater Qursaan operation is of regional-international dimension. It is about holding these passages hostage, thereby bringing global negotiation. This is nothing more than a maritime jihad striking at international lifelines on high seas to bring about a change in balance of power.
If the West (with other democracies or powers) decides to engage the Qursaan on high seas only, there will be more waves of piracy action, and revenge will gradually take place against the countries whose vessels conducted the military interdictions. When such escalation takes place, the options are only two: either the powers suspend the operations and negotiate with the pirates, or they take offensive against their ports of launching, that is, on Somali soil.
If the United States and its allies drop the naval campaign and assign diplomats to treat the matter, the Qursaan will grow in number and influence and eventually their outreach will close the waters between the Arabian Peninsula and Africa. But if the international coalition (which yet has to take shape) decides to take on the points of origins of the attackers, this will lead to a massive campaign along the Somali-Kenyan coastlines forcing actions to be taken against ports, many small ports and eventually beachheads, establishing security enclaves.
Such a projection will re-create a multinational force to perform the missions, reprisal operations and eventually inland deployment, deeper and deeper inside Somalia. That's precisely what the jihadis are looking for: brigades of international forces landing in that country, infidels in nature, so that the Somali Shabab al-Mujahideen and other groups have the honor of fighting them.
The so-called pirates are being used by land-based forces to drag the enemy into a wider war in the region, with all probabilities and possibilities open. To each decision made by the West and its allies, a counter plan will be applied. These are the types of complex threats that 21st century terror forces will develop to upset the balance of forces. For by challenging a previously stable area of transportation and commerce, the forces behind the Qursaan will be scoring a major victory. If the foe negotiates, they win, and in their view also, if the foe engages militarily, the jihadis win too.
Indeed, if Somalia goes back to full war, the forces engaged in such a campaign would involve many navies in the area.
Two months ago, Eritrea and the Iranian regime signed an agreement granting naval facilities to Iranian military ships to use the country's ports and eventually build a base on the Red Sea. Last month, reports signaling an alignment of military intelligence between the Sudanese and Iranian regimes and Hezbollah's networks in the region.
At this stage, sensationalist stories and footage of modern-day piracy dominate. In the war rooms of the other side, the Qursaan are probably the tip of an Islamic iceberg moving slowly towards one of the most sensitive regions of the world.
Most of the media discussion about piracy in the Gulf of Aden has drifted understandably towards the sensational part of the story: how are the pirates able to roam the ocean? Is paying them ransom a better option than to engage them militarily? And will a military intervention against the pirates worsen the situation; will it lead to a massive escalation in Somalia and a Vietnam-like quagmire for many years to come?
The armed bands on the waters which are still roaming the seas of Aden and the Indian Ocean across from Somalia and Kenya are not impressed with the dozens of naval units dispatched by powerful navies from around the world.
What is behind this piracy phenomenon, what lies ahead if the international community intervenes and what could develop in that region if the latter is late to intervene or doesn't meet the challenge? It appears the strategic challenge is even bigger than the mere piracy. Indeed, the strategy now contemplated by regional powers could become a major military debacle. Here is why:
These so-called Somali pirates are strategically different from their historical predecessors in the Caribbean or from their contemporary colleagues in archipelagoes around the world. They aren't a vast collection of individual thugs, acting as bands replicating what successful sea gangs have accomplished for centuries before them. They are too many, operating from extremely long shores, all using similar methods, and are backed from hinterland forces.
They may seem like pirates as they seize ships and negotiate for ransom. But these water thugs actually belong to a wider chess game. The grand ensemble of the army of little boats is part of a regional jihadi apparatus being deployed in the Horn of Africa and beyond. The jihadi grand circle building in the region is not limited to the pirates but involves hostile forces from the mid-Red Sea to East Africa. The Somali pirates are merely one facet of this grand circle.
Ironically, the term used in Arabic (and now in Arabic media) to depict the Somali pirates is Qursaan, which derives from Corsairs, the swashbuckling French privateers from a bygone era. A view of the operations map of these Somali Qursaan leaves little room that the end aim is to create a vast zone of insecurity stretching from East Africa to the Red Sea.
A closer look allows strategists to easily realize that these are the maritime passages from the oil-rich Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal and also parts of the East African alternative routes - the most economic via Cape Town on the southern tip of Africa.
So, above and beyond the globally low (even if locally lucrative) revenues that these operations bring to their little pirates, the greater Qursaan operation is of regional-international dimension. It is about holding these passages hostage, thereby bringing global negotiation. This is nothing more than a maritime jihad striking at international lifelines on high seas to bring about a change in balance of power.
If the West (with other democracies or powers) decides to engage the Qursaan on high seas only, there will be more waves of piracy action, and revenge will gradually take place against the countries whose vessels conducted the military interdictions. When such escalation takes place, the options are only two: either the powers suspend the operations and negotiate with the pirates, or they take offensive against their ports of launching, that is, on Somali soil.
If the United States and its allies drop the naval campaign and assign diplomats to treat the matter, the Qursaan will grow in number and influence and eventually their outreach will close the waters between the Arabian Peninsula and Africa. But if the international coalition (which yet has to take shape) decides to take on the points of origins of the attackers, this will lead to a massive campaign along the Somali-Kenyan coastlines forcing actions to be taken against ports, many small ports and eventually beachheads, establishing security enclaves.
Such a projection will re-create a multinational force to perform the missions, reprisal operations and eventually inland deployment, deeper and deeper inside Somalia. That's precisely what the jihadis are looking for: brigades of international forces landing in that country, infidels in nature, so that the Somali Shabab al-Mujahideen and other groups have the honor of fighting them.
The so-called pirates are being used by land-based forces to drag the enemy into a wider war in the region, with all probabilities and possibilities open. To each decision made by the West and its allies, a counter plan will be applied. These are the types of complex threats that 21st century terror forces will develop to upset the balance of forces. For by challenging a previously stable area of transportation and commerce, the forces behind the Qursaan will be scoring a major victory. If the foe negotiates, they win, and in their view also, if the foe engages militarily, the jihadis win too.
Indeed, if Somalia goes back to full war, the forces engaged in such a campaign would involve many navies in the area.
Two months ago, Eritrea and the Iranian regime signed an agreement granting naval facilities to Iranian military ships to use the country's ports and eventually build a base on the Red Sea. Last month, reports signaling an alignment of military intelligence between the Sudanese and Iranian regimes and Hezbollah's networks in the region.
At this stage, sensationalist stories and footage of modern-day piracy dominate. In the war rooms of the other side, the Qursaan are probably the tip of an Islamic iceberg moving slowly towards one of the most sensitive regions of the world.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Opinion: The mouse that roared
By M H Ahssan
Never underestimate the wrath of the timid man. The NDA's prime ministerial hopeful, Lal Krishna Advani, has been stung by the surprisingly bitter counter-attacks of Manmohan Singh, who has managed to wound the former by his sharp diatribes on the Kandahar, Babri Masjid, and Gujarat episodes.
The Advani-Manmohan relationship has personal animosity woven into it. For this reason alone it would have made sense for Advani to be doubly careful while attacking Singh. However, when one is blinded by dislike, no one can predict the mistakes one will make. Not surprisingly, the PM has so far come off better in this visceral, verbal skirmish.
Singh skillfully used Advani's own words against him. "When held to the fire (on Kandahar)", the PM intoned the other day, the "iron man" melted; Advani, he added, was found "weeping in a corner" while hoodlums tore down the Babri Masjid. The punchline came on Monday in Mumbai, scene of 26/11: "Advani has the unique ability to combine strength in speech with weakness in action." Touche!
Advani would have fared better if he had chosen his words more carefully, and planned his defence in advance before lunging at the PM. Start with the primary allegation that Singh is a weak prime minister. The choice of the word "weak" here is wrong, for the word is subject to many interpretations.
What Advani probably meant to convey was that Singh was a mere proxy for the real power, Sonia Gandhi. He could have called him a nominee of Sonia or a regent holding fort before the heir apparent was offered the throne. But weak? Manmohan latched on to the word and took Advani apart.
The Indian Airlines hijack to Kandahar in Afghanistan was not the NDA's proudest moment, since it involved capitulation to the demands of the hijackers after complete chaos and confusion at the Indian end. The plane was hijacked in Indian airspace in December, 1999, after leaving Kathmandu. It landed in Amritsar, but was mysteriously allowed to take off after the NSG failed to arrive. The airplane refuelled in Lahore, landed in Dubai and finally reached Kandahar, where the Taliban regime was sympathetic to the hijackers' cause of freeing some militants from Indian jails.
The battle was lost when the plane left Indian airspace, and the relatives of the passengers made things impossible by raising a public ruckus on TV. After that, capitulation was the only option, since the Taliban would not allow commando operations on their territory. The ultimate ignominy was the fact that the foreign minister personally ferried across the jailbirds in exchange for the hostages' safety.
Advani could have expected Singh's counter-attack and prepared his defence accordingly. Among other things, he could have claimed that Kandahar was a mistake from which the government learnt a lot and contrasted that with the subsequent victory in Kargil. He could have pointed out the number of passengers saved as against the lives lost in 26/11. But he was unprepared.
The problem with the word weak is that we are all weak in some areas and strong in others. A traditional wife may lack the formal power of her spouse, but she is certainly not weak. More often than not, she influences outcomes. Singh's situation is similar. He cannot decide policy in areas managed by Sonia, but given the fact that she can't find anyone else to keep the PM's gaddi warm till Rahul is ready, she has her own weaknesses. This was what enabled Singh to push the nuke deal through by offering to quit. Left to herself, she would have dumped the deal to keep the Left on her side.
Advani also missed scoring on Singh's real area of weakness: reforms and the economy. When Advani suggested that the country should try to bring home the booty squirrelled away by Indian nationals in Swiss banks, the PM imperiously pronounced Advani's policies as bankrupt. However, the truth is really the opposite. Currently, it is Singh who has been "weeping" while India's fiscal edifice was being demolished by political hoodlums. He has been unable to rein in unsustainable subsidies and his government has been fiscally irresponsible. Despite holding the title of "reformer", reforms have been absent from his agenda. Advani did not have the confidence or presence of mind to parry the PM's thrust, and thus seemed to retire hurt.
He could also have made the point that the NDA, after negotiating a tougher economic environment during the dotcom bust, took hard economic decisions by raising oil prices and privatising public sector companies. It left the UPA a booming economy. In contrast, the UPA is leaving a tottering economy, where jobs are vanishing. With a fiscal deficit as high as 11 per cent of GDP -- worse than in 1991-92 -- Manmohan has left the economy bankrupt, but Advani had nothing to say about it.
The moral: if you do intend to wound your opponent, don't assume he is too weak to strike back. Advani's overconfidence did him in.
Never underestimate the wrath of the timid man. The NDA's prime ministerial hopeful, Lal Krishna Advani, has been stung by the surprisingly bitter counter-attacks of Manmohan Singh, who has managed to wound the former by his sharp diatribes on the Kandahar, Babri Masjid, and Gujarat episodes.
The Advani-Manmohan relationship has personal animosity woven into it. For this reason alone it would have made sense for Advani to be doubly careful while attacking Singh. However, when one is blinded by dislike, no one can predict the mistakes one will make. Not surprisingly, the PM has so far come off better in this visceral, verbal skirmish.
Singh skillfully used Advani's own words against him. "When held to the fire (on Kandahar)", the PM intoned the other day, the "iron man" melted; Advani, he added, was found "weeping in a corner" while hoodlums tore down the Babri Masjid. The punchline came on Monday in Mumbai, scene of 26/11: "Advani has the unique ability to combine strength in speech with weakness in action." Touche!
Advani would have fared better if he had chosen his words more carefully, and planned his defence in advance before lunging at the PM. Start with the primary allegation that Singh is a weak prime minister. The choice of the word "weak" here is wrong, for the word is subject to many interpretations.
What Advani probably meant to convey was that Singh was a mere proxy for the real power, Sonia Gandhi. He could have called him a nominee of Sonia or a regent holding fort before the heir apparent was offered the throne. But weak? Manmohan latched on to the word and took Advani apart.
The Indian Airlines hijack to Kandahar in Afghanistan was not the NDA's proudest moment, since it involved capitulation to the demands of the hijackers after complete chaos and confusion at the Indian end. The plane was hijacked in Indian airspace in December, 1999, after leaving Kathmandu. It landed in Amritsar, but was mysteriously allowed to take off after the NSG failed to arrive. The airplane refuelled in Lahore, landed in Dubai and finally reached Kandahar, where the Taliban regime was sympathetic to the hijackers' cause of freeing some militants from Indian jails.
The battle was lost when the plane left Indian airspace, and the relatives of the passengers made things impossible by raising a public ruckus on TV. After that, capitulation was the only option, since the Taliban would not allow commando operations on their territory. The ultimate ignominy was the fact that the foreign minister personally ferried across the jailbirds in exchange for the hostages' safety.
Advani could have expected Singh's counter-attack and prepared his defence accordingly. Among other things, he could have claimed that Kandahar was a mistake from which the government learnt a lot and contrasted that with the subsequent victory in Kargil. He could have pointed out the number of passengers saved as against the lives lost in 26/11. But he was unprepared.
The problem with the word weak is that we are all weak in some areas and strong in others. A traditional wife may lack the formal power of her spouse, but she is certainly not weak. More often than not, she influences outcomes. Singh's situation is similar. He cannot decide policy in areas managed by Sonia, but given the fact that she can't find anyone else to keep the PM's gaddi warm till Rahul is ready, she has her own weaknesses. This was what enabled Singh to push the nuke deal through by offering to quit. Left to herself, she would have dumped the deal to keep the Left on her side.
Advani also missed scoring on Singh's real area of weakness: reforms and the economy. When Advani suggested that the country should try to bring home the booty squirrelled away by Indian nationals in Swiss banks, the PM imperiously pronounced Advani's policies as bankrupt. However, the truth is really the opposite. Currently, it is Singh who has been "weeping" while India's fiscal edifice was being demolished by political hoodlums. He has been unable to rein in unsustainable subsidies and his government has been fiscally irresponsible. Despite holding the title of "reformer", reforms have been absent from his agenda. Advani did not have the confidence or presence of mind to parry the PM's thrust, and thus seemed to retire hurt.
He could also have made the point that the NDA, after negotiating a tougher economic environment during the dotcom bust, took hard economic decisions by raising oil prices and privatising public sector companies. It left the UPA a booming economy. In contrast, the UPA is leaving a tottering economy, where jobs are vanishing. With a fiscal deficit as high as 11 per cent of GDP -- worse than in 1991-92 -- Manmohan has left the economy bankrupt, but Advani had nothing to say about it.
The moral: if you do intend to wound your opponent, don't assume he is too weak to strike back. Advani's overconfidence did him in.
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