India's forgotten fast for years!

By M H Ahssan

Activists from India's northeast are up in arms against the "discriminatory treatment" being meted out to them by the Indian government, the mainstream media and the "mainland" public.

While a 13-day fast by anti-corruption crusader and social activist Anna Hazare got the Indian government to begin acting on his demand for setting up of a lokpal (ombudsman) institution mandated to independently probe corrupt public officials, an 11-year fast by Irom Sharmila, an activist from the northeastern state of Manipur, has evoked no response from Delhi.

"The Indian government responded to Hazare's 13-day-fast by discussing his demands in parliament but not once in the 11 years since Sharmila began her fast has the Indian parliament her demand for repeal of the AFSPA [Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958], Irom Singhajit, Sharmila's elder brother who heads the Just Peace Foundation, told Newsindia.

"This is evidence of India's racial discrimination against the people of the northeast," he said.

Thirty-nine-year old Sharmila has been on a hunger strike since November 4, 2000, to press for the repeal of the AFSPA. Two days earlier, she had witnessed the gunning down of 10 civilians waiting at a bus stop near Imphal in Manipur by personnel of the Assam Rifles, a paramilitary counter-insurgency force in the northeast.

Convinced, like millions of others in the northeast that it is the AFSPA that enables and empowers the security forces to kill innocent civilians, she began a fast to draw attention to its draconian content and press for its repeal.

Within days of her embarking on the fast, Sharmila was arrested by police on charges of attempting suicide, an act that is illegal under section 309 of the Indian Penal Code. In the 120 months since she began her protest, Sharmila has not eaten. A nasal drip administered to her by the Indian armed forces in a prison hospital keeps her alive.

In sharp contrast to the 24/7 coverage that India's television channels provided of Hazare's fast in Delhi's Ramlila Grounds, Irom's protest has been rarely covered in India's mainstream media over the past decade.

While tens of thousands of people from across the country participated and expressed solidarity with Hazare's anti-corruption campaign, few Indians living outside the country's conflict zones know that Sharmila has been on a hunger strike since November 2000. Few outside the insurgency-wracked northeast and Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), where AFSPA is in force, are aware of this legislation or of the cause Sharmila so passionately champions.

First imposed in Nagaland in 1958 - the legislation comes into force once an area is declared "disturbed" by the federal or state government - AFSPA was supposed to be in operation for a year only. But 53 years on, the geographic area over which AFSPA's writ runs has grown exponentially. It was first imposed in parts of Manipur in 1961 and extended to the entire state in 1980. It is in effect in "disturbed areas" across all seven northeastern states. It has been in force in Kashmir since July 1990.

AFSPA confers wide powers to the armed forces to shoot at sight on mere suspicion or arrest people on flimsy grounds, conduct searches without warrants and demolish property where suspects are thought to be hiding. It provides the armed forces with immunity from prosecution. Section 6 says "no prosecution, suit or other legal proceeding shall be instituted ... against any person in respect of anything done or purported to be done in exercise of the powers conferred by this act."

Human rights activists have pointed out that AFSPA is responsible for the killing and ‘disappearance' of thousands of innocent civilians in the northeast and J&K. If the aim of AFSPA was to curb insurgency, it has clearly failed. Not only have the number of insurgent groups multiplied manifold since the legislation was first introduced but also the geographic spread of armed conflict has grown. While the armed forces claim they need special powers like those in AFSPA to combat insurgency, it would not be an exaggeration to say that AFSPA has fueled insurgency and unrest in the northeast.

The campaign calling for AFSPA's repeal goes back several decades. It is spearheaded in Manipur by the Apunba Lup, an umbrella grouping of around 32 organizations, the Meira Paibi - a grassroots movement of Manipuri village women - and rights activists. When a person goes missing, the Meira Paibi, flaming torches in their hands, gather outside the camp of the security forces to protest the AFSPA. They have rallied behind Sharmila's fast as have thousands of others in the region.

But outside the Northeast, the campaign for AFSPA's repeal has little support. Few outside the northeast know of AFSPA, let alone its negative fallout or even of Sharmila's heroic protest. This isn't surprising given the Indian media's disinterest in issues in the distant troubled region.

Moreover, since AFSPA does not apply to "mainland" India, few here empathize with the northeast's suffering.

Not that the northeast hasn't tried to draw India's attention to the AFSPA. It has adopted dramatic strategies to shock India into stirring out of its slumber.

In July 2004, for instance, when 32-year-old Thangjam Manorama Devi was raped and then shot dead by personnel of the Assam Rifles, 12 imas (mothers) of the Meira Paibi movement stripped in front of the Kangla Fort, then headquarters of the Assam Rifles, to demand the repeal of the AFSPA.

"Indian army come and rape us all," shouted the 12 naked women outside the Kangla Fort gate. Their dramatic protest was aimed at capturing the attention of the rest of India, indeed the world, regarding the brazen abuse of AFSPA by Indian security forces in the northeast.

In the face of mounting protests in Manipur, the Indian government appointed the Justice B P Jeevan Reddy Committee in 2004 to review the AFSPA. The committee recommended the AFSPA's repeal. Yet the AFSPA remains in force in Manipur and other "disturbed areas".

In the wake of Hazare's protest and the mass support Indians extended it, Manipuris have expressed distress over India's lack of response to their suffering and demands. "The people of the northeast have always been neglected and ignored by the rest of India," says Singhajit.

Indeed, the northeast rarely figures in India's history books, its media discourse or even national imagination.

The sharp contrast between the response of the Indian public and media to Hazare's fast and the government's ceding of several of his demands has underscored to the people of the northeast their existence at the periphery of India's consciousness and the low importance they are accorded by India's political class.

The contrast in India's treatment of Hazare and Sharmila was poignantly captured by an editorial in The Sangai Express, an English daily from Manipur, a week into Hazare's fast. Hazare "has managed to grab the attention of the country, send the political establishment into a huddle whenever he announces his intention to stop eating and he has been on a fast for the last seven days or so," it said. In contrast, Sharmila "has been on a fast since November 2000 without creating so much of a flutter in the corridors of power."

Unlike Anna's fast, which took place under the full glare of the media spotlight, with celebrities and high-profile activists flocking to the venue of his fast, Sharmila is not allowed to be with her family. "Even her family members are kept away from her," Singhajit said, pointing out that they need to get government permission to meet her at the prison hospital.

Indians are familiar with fasts and hunger strikes. Mahatma Gandhi undertook 17 fasts, of which three were major fasts-unto-death. Independent India has seen scores of hunger strikes by activists and politicians to press for demands. While some fasts are genuine, several are a farce, as was the post-breakfast, pre-lunch fast in 2009 by Tamil Nadu's former chief minister Muthuvel Karunanidhi to demand a ceasefire in Sri Lanka.

Fasting as conceived by Gandhi was an alternative to violence. Gandhi resorted to fasts to unite people against violence rather than to force concessions out of the British colonial rulers. In the words of his grandson, Rajmohan Gandhi, author of Mohandas, Gandhi's fasts "were to stir consciences, not create convulsions".

This is not the case with most present-day hunger strikers in India. There is an unmistakable coercive element to their fasts, with the threat of violence lurking behind their protests should their demands not be conceded. Sadly, it is to these violent fasts that the Indian government has responded.

Hazare's campaign - contrary to the non-violent Gandhian image it was given in the media - had a coercive element to it. His demands were framed in terms that reeked of intolerance, threat and blackmail.

Hazare's campaign drew on several resources. Indian corporate houses are reported to have bankrolled the latter's country-wide campaign. The country's increasingly powerful middle-class and the influential mainstream media stood by Hazare. Besides, his protest reportedly enjoyed the backing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological fount of the Hindu right-wing Sangh Parivar.

It was the size of the crowds with Hazare, the powerful interests backing him and the possibility of his death triggering mass violence and unrest that pushed the government to pay attention to his protest and concede his demands.

India remains unshaken and unmoved by Sharmila's decade-long hunger strike because the cause she champions is too distant to strike a chord with India's upwardly mobile middle class. Her attempt to stir India's conscience goes unheard because the media denies her a voice.

Thus Delhi finds it expedient to violently keep her alive by force-feeding her through painful nasal drip.

Defeat of an Idea - Head Hunting

By M H Ahssan

Hindutva is embarrassed by Hinduness. A new generation of confident Indians has started to move beyond its logic of fear and hate. Will the BJP be able to seize this moment for creative reinvention?

THE CASCADING crisis within the BJP since May 16 and their confused debate about the role Hindutva has played in their electoral defeat tells a fascinating story. It would be premature to read any of this as a signal of either the disintegration of the party or Hindutva, but one could safely say the idea of Hindutva has been defeated by India for the moment. Put on a backburner and challenged to reinvent itself.

The BJP’s dependence on Hindutva as its defining characteristic was bound to become problematic for it. Data shows that less than 10 percent of Indians have ever voted for the BJP on ideological grounds. The Hindutva project was constructed on tapping into and fostering fear and a siege mentality within Hindus: a sense of being a minority in a country in which they are clearly a numerical majority. In itself, this was not a bad thing. You need a political party to ‘summit’ these emotions so you can manage them. The Republican Party in America, for instance, also encourages and allies with Christian fundamentalists. They know a small marginal part of the vote comes from there — small, but a crucial vote percentage. So they woo them pre-election. Post election, though, there could be indirect rewards but no official rewards are handed out to them. The BJP did not understand this art of political management. They did not learn how to treat Hindutva groups as merely a sect within them; they believed their entire existence depended on the ideology.

This whole ideological stand — making Hindutva their central official line – was a myopic mistake. (The RSS of course has never been in politics so their understanding of politics is even worse.) The Indian genius is to manage contradictions. Most people forget, the Congress Party, the original party of the freedom movement, allowed many of its members to simultaneously belong to both the Congress and the Hindu Maha Sabha or other Hindu nationalist formations. This was very prevalent in Bengal because a huge proportion of Bengali freedom fighters came from a background of Hindu nationalism. Tagore himself was a member of both the Congress and the Muslim League. It is because these political impulses were accommodated within the Congress as factions that they were easier to negotiate in the early years. The BJP’s dilemma is that it thought its existence was predicated on Hindutva: now that they have lost drastically, they think Hindutva has become a liability and should be jettisoned. But the fact is, the relationship between the BJP and Hindutva will only become more clandestine. The debate they are trying to have within the party is actually nothing more than a power struggle wearing the garb of ideological challenge.

In itself, this power struggle is a healthy thing. Contrary to all the speculation around them, the BJP is not necessarily slated to disintegrate like the Janata Party. The Janata party was a coalition of factions; the BJP has merely become a party with factions. With Atal Behari Vajpayee and LK Advani past their time, all the top posts are vacant. If the BJP wants to survive and do reasonably well, they should “do a Congress”: they should find a Narasimha Rao or Manmohan Singh to lead them. All their current and prominent leaders are too high-pitched.

The BJP may be short-sighted in analysing its defeat dominantly through the Hindutva lens, but its electoral defeat does point to a kind of defeat of Hindutva itself. At the core of the Hindutva project is a war between Hindusim and Hindutva that is around 150 years old. It began in the middle of the 19th century, when ideas of Hindtuva began to take shape with the Hindu reform movements. In a sense, the defeat of Hindutva today is also a defeat of the West because the Hindutva project was one of the last remnants of the colonial West in Indian consciousness.

TODAY, BOTH detractors and defenders of Hindutva are confused about what it stands for. The truth may not be palatable to many, but Hindutva grew out of an admiration of the western European nation state and our attempt to have an indigenous form of it. When Veer Savarkar, the Hindutva fountainhead, insisted that Hindus must not read the Vedas and Upanishads but read science and technology and western political theory, this is what he had in mind. He was looking for a way to transform a chaotic, diverse, anarchic society into an organising principle for a masculine, western-style nation state, something akin to Bismarck’s Germany.

To achieve this, the Hindutva project required Indians to repudiate their Indianness, and Hindus to repudiate their Hinduness. That was part of the war. It required a chaotic, diverse society to homogenise itself into something that could be more globally acceptable and to live according to European norms. Again, public memory is short. Few people remember that Savarkar was very secular in his personal life – in the western sense. He refused to have his funeral rights according to Hindu custom; he wanted his body taken for cremation in a mechanised vehicle rather than the shoulders of relatives. He also refused to give his wife a Hindu funeral though women members of the Hindu Mahasabha sat in front of his house on a dharna.

Savarkar’s main criticism of Gandhi, in fact, was that he was unscientific, irrational and illiterate in modern political theory. He was wrong about that. Gandhi did understand political theory, but it had deeper roots, taken not only from Indian society but from the dissenting West. Gandhi did not believe in the modern nation state or in conventional ideas of nationality, nation and nationalism. He went on record to say that armed nationalism is no different from imperialism. At that point in our history, he seemed a romantic fuddy duddy. The fact is, he was way ahead of his time. He understood that India was particularly well-equipped to craft its own version of a modern nation state. It was under no obligation to follow European textbook definitions of the nation state. The irony is that today many western nations are moving away from the old model and becoming more flexible: 14 countries in Europe do not maintain any armies and have opened their borders to become the European Union. On the other hand, because of our colonial past, India and China are two of the purest forms of 19th century nation states you can find in the world today. Tagore’s friend, Brahmobandhab Upadhyay, a Catholic who called himself a ‘Hindu Christian’. Vivekananda himself said the ideal Indian would be one who had a Hindu mind and a Muslim body. But very early in his intellectual journey, Savarkar decided mere geography was too insipid a basis for nationality and began to advocate a more strident Hindu nationalism. The distasteful, clenched-teeth hatred of Muslims and other minorities associated with Hindutva took root then.

After its defeat this election, the BJP feels its middleclass base has moved away from it because it is disenchanted with Hindutva. This, perhaps, is not entirely true. The Indian middle-class has a natural affinity with the less strident aspects of Hindutva. Primarily, this is because the RSS and BJP had very strong links with the Hindu reform movements, particularly the Arya Samaj. Both Munje and Hedgewar, though, were also inspired by Ramakrishna. The project was very clear. There was a seamless continuity between these reform movements and European concepts of a nation state. This continuity began to transform Hinduism and partly led to a form of religion compatible with a modern nation state – in the same way that Protestant Christians in Europe had become more comfortable with the nation state, industrial capitalism and secularism. In many ways, all Indian religious reformers were trying to produce house-broken, tamed versions of religion which could sustain a pan- Indian consciousness and pan-Indian nationalism. All these reformers had internalised aspects of masculine Protestant Christianity. Angarik Dharmapal’s Maha Bodhi society in Calcutta, in fact, produced a kind of Protestant Buddhism which the Sri Lankans find very convenient for their majoritarian state. Hindu society was even more diverse and cruel. Anyone wedded to the conventional idea of a nation state naturally found it too chaotic, unmanageable and subversive. The idea of Hindutva was supposed to be something Hindus could hold on to and yet remain good citizens of a modern nation.

The middle-class — which is the most privileged and therefore naturally most invested in the conventional notion of the nation state — is therefore also a natural constituency for Hindutva and its version of Hindusim. In Savarkar’s fearsome novel Kala Pani, the only futuristic novel produced by a Hindutva ideologue, he paints a (for him utopian) vision of a future India that will be a totally homogenous society. People would marry across caste and sect and language and become good, pan-Indian citizens — almost like the over-insipid, boring, lowest common denominator Indians one sees nowadays in India’s metropolises. Indians with no difference in language or custom: everyone speaking in the same accents, everyone having the same choice in music, cinema, clothes. Absolutely homogenised — almost like uniform clones.

SAVARKAR WAS prescient because this, in fact, is almost a mirror image of contemporary urban middle class Indians. A class that has access to a globalised economy, speaks English as its primary language, and is shaped by a uniform media. What resonance does this new-generation Malayali or Bengali or Tamilian brought up in Delhi have with the vernacular Hindusim of his grandparents, or even parents? Do all those myriad gods and goddesses with strange names, family priests, ishta dev and ishta devis make any sense to them? What is emerging instead is a pan-Indian Hinduism that allows you to dip into a bit of Onam and a bit of Diwali and a bit of Durga puja, and not be too deeply invested in any of it. Contrary to the ‘milleniaold’ milleniaold’ tradition Hindutva ideologues claim they are a part of, this new kind of Hinduism is a very new faith. It is no more than 150 years old. It was born in the 19th century and is directly inspired by Protestant Christianity in the wake of the Arya Samaj. And this faith is also a kind of lack of faith. You can carry it with you wherever you go. It is a kind of laptop Hinduism.

The Hindutva project in India is destined not to ever occupy centre space though, because it is challenged by Hinduism. When one talks of this Hinduism which is 4,000 years old, we have in mind a religion or tradition – a sentiment — that might be shrinking everyday but still moves a majority in India. It is this concept of faith — diverse, local, intimate and highly ritual — that most Indians live with. Apart from economic reasons and the crunch on jobs and infrastructure, one of the reasons why the Shiv Sena could garner so much support for their opposition to the influx of Biharis in Mumbai was the proliferation of chhat puja. The Mumbai-wallahs felt threatened, there was a sense of ‘itni chhatt puja kahan se aa gayi’? The Biharis would have had less of a hostile backlash if they had participated in the Ganesh pujas instead. Interestingly, there are many more Durga pujas in Mumbai and Delhi than in Kolkata, but there is no hostility against this because it has graduated into an all- India phenomenon. Chhat hasn’t — yet.

It would be a mistake to conflate the occasional eruption of these hostilities with a belief that the idea of India’s plural traditions is a romantic myth. Religious groupings and sects — within Hinduism, and even between different religions — have always participated in each other’s local festivals, but they were not homogenised into an anodyne laptop religion. India was not an imitation of the Enlightenment model, in which you are deemed cosmopolitan only when you feel the other person to be completely equal. In traditional Indian societies, you are equal only in the sense that you have the right to think the other community is inferior to you, and the other person has a right to think you are inferior to them — even though neither of you might say so openly. In a homogenised, individualised society, the former is seen as cosmopolitanism. In a communitybased society, it is the latter cosmopolitanism that works.

In this continuing war between traditional, chaotic, diverse Hinduism and ordering, homogenising Hindutva, the BJP’s electoral defeat is a sign that Hindusim (which is by far the stronger force in electoral numbers) has defeated Hindutva. Hindutva expects Indians to live according to European norms of nationhood. But we are Indians: we are incorrigible, cussed, we have learnt to live with contradictions for centuries, we have learnt to live with chaos and ill-defined, half-baked ideas. We also want to keep options open for the next generation. These are the attributes that have ensured our survival when so many other major civilisations have failed. These are attributes that the BJP has to find ways to accommodate and respond to.

(I once interviewed Madanlal Pahwa — one of the Hindu militants who was among Gandhi’s assasins — in his old age. Ultimately, his most memorable years were of his childhood spent in a district in Pakistan’s West Punjab, which had Baba Farid’s mazar. There was a religious fair he would go to where qawwalis were sung. He called himself a kattar Hindu but that’s what his most nostalgic memories were about. This tells you something. We Indians are accustomed to living with multiple ledgers. He was a Hindutva wallah and all his language came from there, but his memories came from elsewhere.)

None of these arguments add up to an assertion that Hindutva will die out. What is true, though, is that, unless it metamorphoses, it will never enjoy the same vigour it did in past decades because it is inherently uncomfortable and embarrassed by Indianness and traditional Hinduism. For a generation newly emergent from colonial dominance, there was a fascination and sense of respectful subordination to things Western. But with this new post-independent, post-colonial generation, things are different. Indians have gone back to their own rhythms now, so even for the middle-classes, Manmohan Singh’s ‘West’ — with its idea that anyone can be a Tata or Ambani — is more attractive to many than Savarkar’s ‘West’. The aspiration for a global, material identity has overtaken cultural identity.

GIVEN BOTH the perceived and electoral defeat of Hindutva, it will be interesting to see what future route the BJP charts for itself. In many ways, Advani is a tragic figure. It is possible that no one has yet been able to read him correctly. Unlike Vajpayee, Advani had lived in a Hindu minority state and went to a Christian missionary convent. Having lived in a Muslimmajority state, Muslims were not unknown to him, and, perhaps, he did not feel the intrinsic discomfort expected of him. He was a part of the RSS – and probably believed in it — but there is a strong possibility that he also recognised in some ways that Hindutva was a political instrument rather than an all-encompassing ideology.

There is much Advani has to answer for. He is culpable for the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and cannot escape history’s judgement by saying he was talking of Ram as a cultural icon and not a religious figure. He knew he was creating an explosive communal situation. But his party’s reaction to his statement on Jinnah makes him tragic. There was nothing new he said about Jinnah – it is an indication of where our political culture has reached that no one seemed to understand this. Strangely enough, despite a tremendous difference in personality, like Savarkar, Jinnah was a person who thought entirely in Western liberal terms. Their ideological bouquet were almost exactly the same. Advani was only recognising that when he called Jinnah secular. Pakistan’s first law minister was a Hindu, its first national anthem was also written by a Hindu, upon Jinnah’s invitation. Both men shared the idea that nationality is crucial in a nation state and a certain amount of violence and bloodshed is normal in the jostling for dominance. In fact, Jinnah was less accepting of this notion of violence than Savarkar.

Advani tried to cast himself as a statesman in the Vajpayee mould, but could not repudiate his past. At the same time, he could not project himself as an ideologue that could be cast in a heroic mould as, say, Narendra Modi seems to have become for the Gujarati people. He did wear different masks at different times in his career to take political advantage, but it is possible he personally remained somewhat distanced from all of them.

But this only intensifies the riddles for the BJP because it is quite possible that Narendra Modi too has passed his zenith. This election has indicated a decline in his popularity. The problem is, he did not leave any escape routes for himself, not even a cosmetic apology or expression of regret for the events in Gujarat 2002. This is likely to haunt his entire career. So the search for the correct leader has become the BJP’s biggest challenge – a leader who can lower the divisiveness and high temperature the party has become associated with.

But other questions remain for the party. If the BJP abandons Hindutva, what shape can its right of centre politics take? Its economic program cannot stretch too right of center because a majority of Indians live outside the spoils of the neo-liberal economic system. If only for electoral gains, they have to be accommodated.

What this means is that the BJP could be headed for a different kind of ideology, in which Hindutva will play a part, but there will be other competing concepts. There is no reason why Hindutva itself cannot take on a more benign form. Tagore, for instance, makes extremely powerful arguments for Hindutva in his novel Gora. This was a response to both Kipling’s Kim and Savarkar, and almost anticipated Gandhi in some ways. But even if the BJP and RSS’ think tanks are unable to come up with such innovations, it is quite certain that the party will retain some links with the ideology, and even if it is not part of its functioning ideology, it will be a party more tolerant of Hindutva groups.

VAJPAYEE, FOR instance, held Hindutva as a kind of vague, emotional frame. There’s no problem with that; in fact, it’s probably necessary in the Indian context. As Nawaz Sharif told Vajpayee, as part of the Muslim League and BJP, they were best positioned to break fresh ground in Indo-Pak relations as neither of their constituencies could accuse them of being wishywashy liberals. Above everything else though, like the Maoists who were encouraged to come overground and become part of the democratic process, the Hindu right wing must be politically accommodated. They cannot be annihilated or wished away, just as the Naxals could not be wished away. (Charu Mazumdar’s group in Bengal was wiped out with police action, but in barely 30 years Naxalism has come back again with greater force. These are idealistic people. It is a pity they have opted for the gun, but the problems they represent are real. Sitting in urban citadels, one might imagine that one can solve these problems over a 100 years and wait for some “trickle down” effect, but if millions of people are condemned to die in the meantime, one cannot expect everyone to remain unmoved.) In the same way, there are rump groups who are rabid enough to believe they should break down the Babri Masjid. They cannot just be wished away. They have to be politically accommodated and tamed.

The Mughal empire has some lessons that could be of great significance to contemporary India. The empire was so successful that the British left the Mughal system intact for 100 years. Even the Delhi Durbar of 1911 followed all conventions of a Mughal court. It allowed different levels of allegiance to the centre. The Jaipur Maharaja, for instance, was closer to Mughal Delhi than a sultan in Bengal: this meant he had more power and influence, nothing more.

The BJP has been demanding Article 370 should be abolished and the Uniform Civil Code brought in to India. These are legitimate demands in a European-style modern nation state. But why must we follow that route? Instead of hedging on Article 370, one should use it more effectively – go the whole hog with it. Why didn’t we give Article 370 to Sikkim instead of gobbling it up? Why didn’t we give it to Nagaland, rather than go in for 30 years of bloodshed which has made a whole generation bitter? If there is a worry that it is a border state, why not innovate and come up with Article 370 (a) – which defines more and less rights, with a clause put in for renegotiation at a later date? This would have increased the maneuverability of the Indian state immensely.

As Gandhi intuited, we are uniquely well-equipped to design our own version of a nation state. By pure default, we have gone in for some innovations — Indian secularism is one example. Both secularists and communalists complain about its compromises. But we will last as a society only as long as we compromise. The moment we try to harden it into something too defined, things collapse.

The current upheaval could be a creative moment both for the BJP and the RSS. Unlike the RSS heads that have gone before him, Mohanrao Bhagwat is not a very conspicuous ideologue. Nobody expects anything out of him. Because of this, he has the opportunity to be truly creative. But westernised Brahmins and modernity can be a lethal combination. It cuts you off from your native Indian genius. So will they be able to spot the moment?

In the cross fire between security and insurgency

By M H Ahssan

Plenty of criticism has been levelled at excess use of force and abuse of human rights by the Army in Manipur. And yet, with much infighting and corruption, insurgents themselves have lost the moral high ground.

As we are driven out of Imphal for sight-seeing to Loktak Lake (one of the largest fresh water lakes in northeast India) or to Moreh (a town at Manipur’s border with Burma), we are stopped a couple of times by the security forces to check us up. The vehicle stops almost equal number of times and the driver goes down to a shop or in some alley, comes back and we drive on. Later we learn that driver has to go to pay the ‘tax’!

In Manipur, a ten-sitter vehicle pays Rs.100 and a truck pays Rs.500-1000 as ‘tax’ to the local underground groups. And there are many along the route! Drivers quietly pay up as they factor it in as cost which is charged to us – clients. No wonder then, vehicle-hire in Manipur is an expensive part of the tour! A three hour drive from Imphal to Kohima (147 kms) costs Rs.6000-8000 for a non-AC ten-sitter. The same would cost at the most Rs.1500 for a ride along the Mumbai-Pune super express highway.

Sons of soil turning extortionists
This is just a miniscule glimpse into the extortions by underground groups – UG as they are labeled even in Manipur’s print media. And counting the number of insurgents is like counting stars, says Babloo Loitongbam of Human Rights Alert in Imphal. According to the reply to a recent Legislative Assembly question, the number of armed insurgents is 12000. The highest insurgent to civilian ratio is in Manipur, not Afghanistan or Iraq, says Babloo. The armed forces personnel strength in the state is 55000, which translates to 4-5 armed security personnel for every armed rebel.

And yet, these insurgents are literally holding entire state to ransom demanding ‘tax’ at every walk of life and resorting to violence. There is an organised racket of taking a share from government spending under every head – be it for road construction or water scheme or even salaries of government employees. Some people reckon, as high as 70 per cent of funds allocated for any development project go in distributing ‘cuts’ to underground groups. What work can be done in the balance 30 per cent is anybody’s guess!

It is not surprising then that the infrastructural set up in Manipur is in dire state with just four hours of power every day and roads are in broken condition soon after laying. Any resistance to extortions is met with the grave consequences as in case of Dr Kishen Singh Thingam. He was an upright civil servant who refused to the demands of an underground group, and was brutally killed in February this year in Ukhrul district.

Media in the line of fire
Even media in Manipur is not spared with UGs dictating their terms. A senior media person from a leading daily from Imphal who survived insurgents’ bullet injuries, says “if we print something criticizing a particular UG, they force us to retract the statement and threaten with dire consequences. They dictate what we write and what we don’t.” Another media person narrated how his newspaper was caught in the conflict between two warring UGs. One group ordered writing against the other and the other ordered an apology for doing that, he says.

“These terrorists think they are the sons of soil, then why they make their mothers and sisters suffer in their business of extortions”, says a wellknown member of the local elite in Imphal, requesting anonymity.

In the meantime, tales after tales circulate of atrocities inflicted upon common people by security personnel and also by insurgents. Villagers in Manipur come in the line of fire between insurgents and security forces – each suspecting them to be informers or accomplices.

Civil society groups do protest. The protests that are loud and clear are against the establishment – the security forces -- and not so loud against the umpteen insurgent groups. It is easy to identify the state repressors – the security forces who have unlimited power under the draconian Armed Forces Special Power Act (AFSPA). But excesses have been committed not only by the armed forces but so also by the countless insurgent groups who are fighting each other.

Distrust, apprehension about outsiders
The situation is so complex and appears hopeless to the outsiders. There is a general atmosphere of distrust and everyone is eyed with suspicion. Given this state of affairs in Manipur, there is no tourism worth the name.

All the same time, the people of Manipur look up to the people from mainland, especially media to carry home the message from them about the grim situation and to understand their predicament. The 7th annual meet of Network of Women in Media, India (NWMI) during March 5-7, 09 was an opportunity for both – media from the mainland India and people of Manipur to establish channels of communication. The meet was organised by Manipur chapter of NWMI led by Anjulika Thingam in the face of personal tragedy of loss of her brother Dr Kishen Singh Thingam. About 60 women journalists from all over India got first hand exposure to the grueling issues of the state and also witnessed on March 7th, the release and re-arrest of Sharmila – the iron lady on the fast unto death for last eight years demanding end of AFSPA.

Armed Forced Special Powers Act
The Armed Forces Special Power Act (AFSPA) has been in force in many parts of the Northeast and J&K for decades. But nowhere is it protested like in Manipur. Using the provisions in this Act, some security personnel misuse the power to search, destroy any structure and arrest, shoot, kill any suspect without the fear of any prosecution for gross violation of human rights. In 2000, Irom Sharmila witnessed Assam Rifle men shooting down 10 civilians at a bus stand in a town near Imphal in retaliation to insurgents attacking their convoy. Already she had witnessed Manipuri women raped and killed by the armed forces and she decided to go on fast unto death since then demanding repealing of AFSPA. She is arrested and is being force fed through nasal tubes in the custody. But one cannot be detained for more than a year for this ‘crime’, so she is released every year. Since she does not touch water or food, she is rearrested next day.

Sharmila has become an icon of Manipur women’s protest against armed forces with Meira Paibi (meaning Women Torch Bearers) rallying behind her. In 2004, Manorama was raped and killed by Assam Rifles which led to histrionic stripping down by 12 Imas (mothers) from Meira Paibi in front of Kangla – then the head quarters of Assam Rifles in the sprawling erstwhile royal fort. This sent shock waves across the region and the demand for AFSPA repeal was intensified with civil society groups and human rights activists joining the protest.

This moved the Centre too and the Assam Rifles was shifted out of the fort. A committee headed by Justice Jeevan Reddy was appointed to examine the demand for AFSPA repeal. However, while recommending AFSPA repeal, the Jeevan Reddy committee has not looked into the alternative solution to the state’s insurgency.

I spoke to a cross section of Manipuri society and experts and got a mixed response to the issue of AFSPA and insurgency. True, despite AFSPA and 4-5 security persons for each insurgent (going by available data), the insurgency still goes unabated. What will happen if armed forces are withdrawn? Will it not give insurgents a free playing field?

Says Babloo Loitongbam, “The armed forces should be above the law and not under the law, they have to be answerable to the system.” This argument is supported by a woman journalist narrating her experience of high-handedness by the security forces. Traveling in the northeast for a photo feature assignment, she reached a town in Assam late in the evening and had her camera around her neck. Just then, an armed police was beating up a person pulling down the shop shutter. This policeman pulls off the camera from her neck though she had not taken any photos and takes her to the police station where they exposed her film destroying all her painstakingly done work. All they could have done is to develop the film and remove only those they suspected. And there is no recourse for such acts of the security forces under AFSPA as it allows them to destroy anything on suspicion.

As Babloo suggests, if the armed forces were above law then this journalist at least could have sought justice. Yes, police can interrogate her on suspicion but cannot destroy her work! They cannot take law into their own hands, torture, rape and kill civilians.

In response, an army officer on condition of anonymity, says, “During a riot like situation is there time to attest a suspect’s bona fide? Again, is there enough time to get official order to take action against the suspects, if we are not armed with AFSPA? Insurgents are hiding in a structure but we await orders and fall prey to their bullets? Civilians have little knowledge about armed forces operations. On one hand they call for tying our hands and then also have unrealistic expectations from us to finish insurgency. Just for few cases of rape and violence, entire armed force is branded as villain, which irks and demoralizes our men. You must have seen soldiers with rifles keeping a roving eye on the streets of Imphal but have you noticed anyone looking straight at you or any other indication of misbehaviour?”

Most of the elite in Imphal tow the popular line of criticising AFSPA, but in private say that end of Army rule means uncontrolled extortions and a new rein of terror in the state.

But Padmashri A M Gokhale, former chief secretary of Nagaland vehemently opposes AFSPA saying “There is absolutely no need for such a law. You win people through friendship and not through confrontation”. Gokhale made his mark in Nagaland during equally bad situation winning over people’s confidence through his projects ‘Village Development Board – VDB’ and ‘Nagaland Empowerment of People through Economic Development – NEPED’.

Experts, observers and also civil servants accept that a lot of wrong was done in the Northeast states especially because of AFSPA, which gave rise to the current strife.

Genesis of the insurgency
Manipur is like a bowl - valley surrounded by hills. While valley of Imphal was ruled by Vaishnavite Meitei, the surrounding hills were ancestral domain of Nagas and Kukis. Manipur kingdom came under British Rule in 1891. After British left in 1947, Manipur King signed letter of accession and Manipur was merged with India.

However, Manipur, an ancient kingdom with a 2000-year-old recorded history and a magnificent culture, was made a Union Territory and Manipuri, an ancient language spoken and written by all the Meiteis and tribals, was not included in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution then. It was granted Statehood only in 1972. This had irked the people in Manipur and insurgency in Manipur first started in sixties.

Add to this ferment the Naga-Kuki conflict and Nagas not accepting their hill districts going to the Manipur state. In fact, the seeds of over four-decade old insurgency first started with Nagas resisting Indian government taking over Naga hills from the British Empire and later distributing some Naga hill districts to Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh.

The situation was very complex and the Centre failed to handle it carefully.

In his report “Manipur: Blue Print for Counterinsurgency”, E N Rammohan, Director General of the Border Security Force (BSF) and advisor to the Governor of Manipur analyses of the bungling:

“The bureaucrats who came from Delhi and other states in 1949 were by and large not sympathetic to the Meiteis and the tribals. With a few exceptions, they did not win the confidence of the Manipuris. The worst was the policy of the party in power at Delhi, as a result of which the Northeast was flooded with funds, indirectly encouraging corruption, on the premise that this would make the people soft and finish off insurgency. On the contrary, it had just the opposite effect. ‘Delhi Durbar’ - a coterie of contractors, all followers of the party in power at Delhi - secured most of the government contracts in the North eastern states. This infamous band of contractors took 95 per cent of the development funds allocated by Delhi back to private coffers in Delhi. Hundreds of kilometers of roads were built on paper and even annually maintained on paper. Food grains from the public distribution system were siphoned off wholesale into the black market. The politicians and bureaucrats of Manipur quickly adapted to this system.”

Unemployed educated youth
With spread of Christianity in Naga Hills especially, education was available in the state. As a result, Manipuri youth are well educated but there are no job opportunities. Each year, some 5000 graduates roll out of the colleges, but there are hardly 50 new jobs in the government. Heavy bribes up to Rs.12 lakhs are paid for these jobs. In the meantime, of you join an underground group, there is a salary of Rs.500 per month!

‘If you don’t want your son to get into that, you sell your ancestral property to raise Rs.12 lakh!’ says Babloo. The ideology with which the insurgency started is dead and now it is a way of survival for thousands of educated unemployed youth, she adds.

Whither peace? The possibilities
Peace has eluded this beautiful state over last four decades. The central government’s solution has been, by far, to send money and armed forces. Per capita annual central grants for Manipur at around Rs.12000 is one of the highest among all states and nearly ten times all states average of Rs.1300. This does not include defence and security expenditure.

In his blueprint for counterinsurgency, Rammohan suggests:

“The first step in the kind of situation we are faced with in Manipur, where there is an undercurrent of secession, rampant corruption led by the politicians and tamely abetted by the bureaucrats, and a complete failure by the state to protect the few upright government servants, is to list out the local civil, judicial and police officers and identify the few who have not been tainted by corruption and who, if protected, are likely to stand up against intimidation. The second step is to post these officials in all crucial posts….The third step is to ensure that reliable judicial officers are posted….”

Perhaps, the first step would be to pacify people by repealing AFSPA and thereafter using existing civil laws more stringently to deal with insurgents. As Rammohan suggests, identify and appoint upright officials who should have knack of developing friendship with the people like Padmashri Gokhale (quoted above). Simultaneously, post-AFSPA, the same brigade of Meira Paibis along with civil society groups should carry on similar pressure on their own sons and brothers to quit extortionist way of making money under the guise of the cause. Alongside, the government, administration and people should work towards economic development generate work opportunities.

One such opportunity is already knocking at the door in Manipur with proposed road link from west of India through Imphal and Burma to South Asia. This will open the corridors for various business activities. But if Manipur’s ‘sons of soils’ keep a myopic view and turn this into another chance of ‘tax’ on vehicular traffic, the caravan will go away with outsiders taking the pie.

STUDENT SUICIDES - Pushed over the edge

By M H Ahssan

A spate of suicides by students in Lucknow has parents and school administrators equally worried. HNN reports on the reasons behind this alarming trend.
Priya Bose (14), Pinki Lal (17), Abhishek Tiwari (18) and Karvesh Choudhary (19) today exist only as impersonal case numbers in police diaries. Not too long ago, all four were teenagers with dreams and hopes. But varying degrees of stress pushed them over the edge last month, adding to the alarming numbers of young Indians who are killing themselves.

Bose was the first to go. A student of Lucknow's City Montessori School (CMS), she was driven to anxiety over her performance in the class eight final examination. Three months earlier, she had performed poorly in the half-yearly exams. Though she had been absent from school when the final exam answer sheets were shown to students (the school has a policy of showing these to the students before report cards are made, so that any discrepancies can be pointed out), she must have guessed that she wouldn't make it. So on March 30th this year, after having a cup of tea with her mother, she went up to her room, bolted herself in and used a bed sheet to hang herself by the ceiling fan. The stunned mother, who discovered the body, found a suicide note that read: "I am doing this because I am fed up and irritated with my life. Nobody but I am to be held responsible. Sorry Ma."

A day later, Lal, who had just finished giving her board examinations at New Public School, was found hanging from a fan in her room. Her parents told the police that she feared the ridicule that would follow in case her board results were poor. Two days after that, Tiwari, a class 11 student of a different branch of CMS, killed himself because he had successively failed in his science practical exams. Choudhary, a first year BTech student of the Saroj Institute of Management and Technology, hanged himself on the eve of his second semester engineering exams on April 8. He had failed in four papers in the first semester and had been denied re-examination. Lonely and away from his family, he made one final phone call to his father in Faizabad before hanging himself from the fan of his rented one-room accommodation.

Since then, 18 other young adults have taken their lives in Lucknow, throwing into disquiet school administrators, teachers, parents, counsellors and the government. According to the city's police, only five of these are clearly attributable to academic stress, a neat categorisation that falters when considering a case such as that of Pushpendra Kumar.

A class 11 student of Dayanand Inter College, Kumar hanged himself over his parents' refusal to allow him to attend his elder sister's pre-wedding ceremony. By his parents' own admission, Kumar was an outstanding student who had topped his class in the last exams. On April 16, he had a science practical exam but tried to convince his parents that he was well-prepared and hence should be allowed to be part of the ceremonies. When they refused, he hanged himself from an iron railing around the stairs in his double-storeyed home. Was Kumar then a victim of a family argument or academic stress? According to RC Jiloha, professor and head of the psychiatry department at Govind Ballabh Pant Hospital, New Delhi, "While the main cause for suicide is frustration, a belief that this life is not worth living, there may be a number of reasons that contribute to that feeling. Any one incident can act as a trigger."

SUICIDE WARNING SIGNS

- Radical change in daily routine
- Withdrawal from family and friends
- Sleeping too much or too little
- Any mention of suicide
- Loss of interest in everyday activities
- No sense of humour
- Feelings of excessive guilt or fault finding
- Being preoccupied with death or dying
- Neglecting personal appearance
- Performing poorly at work or in school
- Becoming too philosophical
- Making statements such as these:

'I cannot go on any longer'
'I hate this life'
There is no point in living anymore'
'Everyone would be better off without me'
'Nothing matters anymore' and
'I do not care about anything'

The Lucknow cases are worrying for two reasons. One, because overall, the incidence of suicides in Uttar Pradesh (UP) is low compared to most other states. According to data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) (http://ncrb.nic.in/ADSI2006/home.htm), of the 1,18,112 people who committed suicide in 2006, only 3,070 came from the country's most populated state, making it 20th in the aforementioned list. Two, while the national average is 10.5 suicides per lakh of population, the state's average is still less, standing at just 1.7. Only Manipur, Nagaland and Bihar report lower suicide rates than UP.

Yet, between 2002 and 2007, the state saw high numbers of suicides due to academic stress. In this period, the figures were 91, 105, 143, 93, 121 and 95 for each year respectively, making "failure in exams" the sixth most common reason for suicides in a list of 22 offered by the state's police department, alongside other grounds such as illness and family problems. While only two percent of suicides all over India are because of poor performance in exams, in UP this figure is almost double (lower only than West Bengal, where the rate is 4.4 percent). This could stem from the fact that in this Hindi heartland state, low on industrialisation, success lies only with those who become doctors, engineers or bureaucrats.

Perhaps the starkest note on the fragile mental health of the country's young is made by the NCRB. Till 1998, the bureau did not have a separate category of "persons under the age of 14" committing suicide, owing to the negligible numbers. But the numbers in this new category have steadily grown as have entries under the "failure in exams" head. In 2006-07, the number of deaths attributable to failure in exams across all age groups stood at 2,378. Of the 2,464 youngsters under the age of 14 who gave up on life, 512 were driven by failure in exams.

Worrying as these figures are, they might just be the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Suicide identification is a problem due to non-reporting, which in turn exists because of the social and legal consequences of such deaths, and is compounded by inefficient municipal registration systems. Conversely, suicides due to other reasons might also be tagged in the "failure in exam" category due to its comparative social acceptance over reasons such as failed loved affairs or teen pregnancies.

Understanding suicides is difficult as studies are based on assessments of survivors, not victims. While most teen suicides are impulsive acts, spurred on by feelings of absolute helplessness in the here and now, the reasons themselves could be deep standing. Thus the teen who kills himself or herself over a bad examination result will probably have a history of low self-worth, marginalisation by the peer group, lack of communication with parents and the like, all of which will be magnified by an upsetting event.

While growing up was always serious business, in today's India, an erosion of buffers and growing levels of competition have made it an even more complicated issue. The emphasis on success at all costs means that even five-year olds are being coached to clear entrance exams to prestigious schools. Parents who cough up the high fees for these schools in turn pressurise children to do well and get into colleges or professional courses of repute. Add to that the demise of the joint family, a lack of interest in sports and co-curricular activities, and the increasing isolation of the nuclear family, and what remains is a situation fraught with the possibility of mental and emotional breakdown. Moreover, while a galloping economy means a proliferation of opportunities, it also translates into a growing disconnect between abilities and aspirations. Being second best is no longer an option.

Instant gratification is another reason why children find it difficult to cope with life's disappointments. Pressed for time, parents try to compensate with pocket money and immediate fulfillment of children's demands, some of which are often unreasonable. A study conducted by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India's (Assocham) Social Development Foundation, titled 'Plight of Working Parents Towards their Children' and released earlier this year, concluded from a sample of 3,000 working couples that parents who work full time spend only 30 minutes with their children.

Another Assocham study of 2,500 children between the ages of 10-17, titled 'Trends of Pocket Money in Urban India', also released earlier this year, fills in the other dots. According to it, with the rise in income levels of parents, pocket money has risen by about six times to Rs 1,800 per month from Rs 300 per month over the past 10 years. The majority of this money goes towards fast food, soft drinks, clothing, gift articles, mobile recharge coupons, chocolates, cosmetics, magazines, computer games and movies. A related statistic is provided by a June 2006 study of the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), according to which 58 percent of the teenagers who own mobiles spent between Rs 3,000 to Rs 7,500 on a handset, putting them only behind the 35-49 year age group.

Reena Tiwari, a resident of Lucknow and the mother of a bright 18-year-old who has recently given his class 12 exams from St Paul's School, provides the illustration to this statistic. "My son, otherwise a good student, would spend hours on the Internet looking up high-end mobile handsets. He never said he wanted one, but often spoke of peers who had brought the latest models. For all our belief in the virtues of waiting, we finally got him a handset worth Rs 15,000 to steer him back to his books," she says. It is reasonable to conclude that when such children, used to having their way within the cocoon of the family, face life's hard knocks, they find it difficult to handle the situation. Overall, this suggests a systematic failure of the family, the education system and the society at large.

On April 16, JS Rajput, former director of National Council of Educational Research and Training, tried to explain the problems in an article in the widely circulated Hindi daily Dainik Jagran: "A failure in examination is not a failure of the child, it is a failure of the whole system," he wrote.

Prabhat Sitholey, professor and head, department of psychiatry, Chattrapati Shahuji Maharaj Medical University (CSMMU), Lucknow, avers that the black hole in parental pressure is the belief that education is a one size fit all. "Just like genes for height and complexion are distributed normally within a given population, so is intelligence. We are wrong in believing that each child must at least pass class 10. Even within this framework, we are promoting an education that does not encourage the asking of questions or creativity. It is sheer drudgery. Each child is gifted separately and the educational system must define capabilities and strengths. Parental love should not depend on examination marks," he says. He also blames the media for sensationalising suicides. However, Jiloha from Delhi's Govind Ballabh Pant Hospital cautions against whipping the media. "Media reports will adversely affect only those who are gullible, they will appear suggestive only to those in a particular frame of mind," he says.

Krishna Dutt, clinical psychologist at CSMMU, whittles down the reasons behind teen suicides to the I's of impatience and individualism. "There is no time to wait and watch as patience levels are falling across generations. While individualism leads to growth and development, it also causes us not to learn from the experiences of others," he says. On the day Dutt speaks to us, he is counselling a 19-year-old, who is so unnerved about her engineering exams that she cries when asked to speak.

Tears are just one sign that something is drastically wrong. Most cues tend to be more muted and easy to miss (also see box alongside). So easily missed in fact that even traditional psychology held that a child was essentially incapable of depression. Modern psychology, however, holds that signs of depression in a child are merely different from those in adults. Thus a child who is consistently irritable or aggressive, prone to behavioural problems such as constantly seeking attention, or addiction to something, is crying for help and is not simply a 'problem' child.

"Parents are too wrapped in their expectations to notice what a child really needs and often the child blurs the distinction between himself and the parents thinking of himself as merely an extension of his parents and a tool to further their ambitions," says Nalini Sharad, principal of CMS. She illustrates her contention with the example of a class 10 student who despite being severely sick ignored the advice of doctors and came to write her board exams with a drip attached to her. "She threatened to commit suicide if not allowed to write the exams and the parents did not try to reason with her even once. In such a situation, what does the school do?" wonders Sharad.

Schools are also handicapped by the lack of access to child and educational psychologists, an issue that has to be looked at in conjunction with the low numbers of trained psychologists available in the country as a whole. According to the World Health Organization (Atlas: Country Profiles on Mental Health Resources 2001), India, which lacks a national policy on mental health, has just 0.4 psychiatrists, 0.04 psychiatric nurses, 0.02 psychologists and 0.02 social workers per 100,000 population. Moreover, the availability of mental health professionals is restricted to mostly the larger urban centres. Given this situation, it's not surprising schools do not have access to mental health services. The few schools that offer the services of counsellors do so only for career guidance.

Alok Sinha, psychologist and motivational trainer, points to a lack of understanding on the nature of counselling. "Receptionists at computer training institutes who provide information on courses are termed counsellors as are clerks who allot colleges on the basis of marks. A counsellor is a listener, not a provider of information. But even highly educated parents who approach us for counselling their children merely want us to make the children comply with the parents' wishes. Even when it comes to extra-curricular activities, all they want is for the child to be the best, and say, win a reality contest," he says.

Within the state's secondary education department, there is little acknowledgement of the department's own role and failings in making education the nightmarish experience that it is today. Stock replies about lack of staff and resources are given to explain why the department has not overhauled the board examination system that catered to 40 lakh students this year.

SUICIDE PREVENTION

- Remain calm
- Ask the child directly if s/he is thinking of committing suicide
- Focus your concern on their well-being and avoid being accusatory
- Listen
- Reassure them that there is help and they will not feel like this forever
- Do not judge
- Provide constant supervision. Do not leave the youth alone.
- Remove means for self-harm.
- Peers should not agree to keep the suicidal thoughts a secret and instead should tell an adult. Parents/school staff should seek help as soon as possible.

Sarvesh Kumar, an additional director at the department, is a rare voice of despair. "The government spends Rs 2,700 crores as salary for the staff of this department. Yet there are no measures of performance. The lone figure of students appearing for the board examination cannot be a criterion to judge our performance. We are least bothered about the quality of education being imparted and will resort to strikes at the least provocation. We are not expected to deliver, merely to keep the machinery functioning in its present state," he says.

Kumar's contention is borne out by the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), brought out by the non-government organisation Pratham. According to the 2007 ASER (Rural) report (http://www.pratham.org/aser07/aser2007.php), in UP, 3 out of 10 children in class 1 to 8 cannot read capital letters, while 7 of 10 cannot recognise numbers between 1 and 99.

At a seminar on the causes of suicide, organised in the second week of April, principal secretary of secondary education, AK Misra, elaborated on the educational system's failure. "Of the 16,000 inter-colleges in UP, only 160 can lay claim to offering quality education. Thus only five percent of those with aspirations have access to quality resources. Private schooling has become completely profit- and result-oriented. The child is filled with worry about whether he will be allowed to write the board exam or will be held back so that the school's results are not affected negatively. By raising fees, the stakes have been artificially upped, as parents who are called upon to pay exorbitant amounts will expect their children to do well at any cost. There is no getting away from the fact that we need swift policy changes or our children will be driven to meltdown," he warned.

There are no easy answers on what these changes should be. As a first step, we need to talk about the issue and improve the systems of reporting and recording suicides. As part of its Suicide Prevention Programme, the World Health Organization suggests a comprehensive approach that involves the departments of health, police and education besides religious leaders, families and the media. This would be in addition to school-based interventions involving crisis management, self-esteem enhancement and the development of coping skills and healthy decision-making. Better communication within the family, greater acceptance of a child's abilities and a more flexible examination system would also help. Ultimately each one of us shares the responsibility to help the young around us cope with the turbulence of coming of age.

‘Pakistan Is Not In Danger Of Being A Failed State’

By M H Ahssan

Terror attacks in Pakistan. Mutiny in Bangladesh. Ethnic war in Sri Lanka. Mani Shankar Aiyar unravels the subcontinent with HNN.

Mani Shankar Aiyar is widely known as the political wit perennially out of political favour. But that is reductive of his encyclopaedic knowledge and keen insight. Over a 27-year career in the Indian Foreign Service, and later in his role both in Rajiv Gandhi’s PMO and now, as a Minister for the North East Region and Panchayati Raj, Aiyar has had a deep involvement with Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Over a four-hour conversation, full of lively anecdote, he goes beyond the alarm calls to paint a more measured picture of the subcontinent. Some excerpts.

How would you read the terror attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team?
It is a manifestation of the growing menace of terrorism the entire subcontinent is facing. There is absolutely no doubt Pakistan is a manufacturing centre of this terrorism, but we must understand this terrorism is of such a nature, it is attacking its Frankenstein creator as much as anybody else. And now that Frankenstein is as interested as other victims in keeping safe from its own monster, a solution, in a long-term sense, might lie in building a kind of cooperative venture among all the victims of terrorism, rather than in pointing fingers. The problem for us is that because some elements in the Pakistan establishment are among the key manufacturers of terror, if we start cooperating with them, there is a fear that the information might get leaked to the terrorists themselves. Still, at the end of the day, I believe a South Asia-wide cooperative against terrorism is what we really need.

Wouldn’t this parallel America’s unsuccessful war on terror, and engender more subcontinental tension?
There was no co-operation there, the victims were never coopted into the process we are talking about. The Americans just declared a unilateral war on terror and resorted to multi-military machinery. The rats just ran away, and not all the king’s men, nor all the king’s horses, could ferret them out. I am advocating something quite different.

Do you believe Pakistan is facing a new danger mark in its history? Is it under threat of being balkanised?
It is true Pakistan is facing a very dangerous moment in its history. There is a large body of opinion in India that thinks it is a failed state or a failing state. But I do not think so. The country is, indeed, reaping the wages of both what it has done and what has been done to it. For too long, it has allowed itself to become an international pawn and lent itself to foreign policy goals based on short-term pragmatism rather than any long-term vision or ethics. After all, Osama bin Laden may have still been a playboy in Saudi Arabia or America if he had not been transplanted to Afghanistan and propped up with arms and money by the international community. That apart, the Pakistani establishment itself has focused on building its idea of nationhood based on projecting India as its enemy, and by stoking trouble in Kashmir. Much of what is happening in Pakistan today is the blowback of all this.

Having said that, I don’t think it is in any danger of being balkanised. In 1964, when I joined the foreign service, Shishir Ghosh gave us a lecture in which he said Pakistan’s only expression of nationality was on anti-Indian terms. Even if this were true then, four decades later it isn’t. Postpartition generations constitute 70 to 80 percent of their population; they have no memory of being Indian. Sixty-two years after independence, I am convinced there is a very strong bonding adhesive that holds Pakistan together. Their sense of being Pakistani is as strong as being Sindhi or Baloch. So I do not see the country splintering. You must also remember Islamist forces in Pakistan have never had more than two percent of the vote.

That is true, but the people in Swat voted for a liberal party and it still caved in to the Taliban and the Sharia. Should Pakistan — and by extension India — worry about an increasing Taliban dominance?
I certainly think a growing Taliban influence is a cause for worry, but we need to be realistic about what happened in Swat. There is an extraordinary set of circumstances there that is not replicable elsewhere in Pakistan. There are no American drones bombing villages and killing innocent people elsewhere in Pakistan as they are in Swat. Swat has had a long history of struggle between extremists. I think the political party there is using a kind of homeopathic approach to the problem: it is trying to use one kind of poison to destroy another. Use moderate extremism to fight extreme extremism. I am not sure this will work, and it may certainly help the worse kind of poison gain strength, but to move from that worry to an assumption that the rest of Pakistan is under threat of a Taliban takeover is too big a leap. You must remember, like India, Pakistan is a very populous, vast and diverse society. It is not Kandahar. It has many competing ethnicities and a very westernised, sophisticated elite. Pakistanis have also displayed a huge commitment to democracy each time an opportunity has presented itself. So, to say yesterday Swat, tomorrow Rawalpindi, and then Karachi, is just too alarmist a position.

Why are our neighbours — Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka — prone to such convulsions? Why are they more precarious democracies than India?
The answer to this lies in the fact that Jawaharlal Nehru — who was Prime Minister for the first 17 crucial years of our upbringing as a modern nation — was dedicated to five very important principles of nation-building that our neighbours have not been equally committed to. The first of these is the idea of plurality and secularism. Under Nehru’s stewardship, India has, almost uniquely in the world, not only expressed its nationhood as a belief in diversity, but a celebration of it. Unity in diversity is the great subcontinental truth we all have to live with, if we want to survive as a democracy. It is not merely an ideal; it is pragmatic. All our neighbours who are in trouble are nations that have deviated from this to express nationhood in dangerously exclusivist ways.

The second thing is, Nehru was not only committed to the concept of democracy, but also to building the institutions of democracy. That bulwark has almost never been changed in our existence as a nation in 62 years. In Pakistan — under Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan — there was the same dedication to democracy, but their stewardship did not last as long, and their institutions were far less robust. So, despite an aching yearning for democracy among Pakistanis, they missed the bus by not having a Nehru among their midst in their formative years. The same thing happened in Bang - ladesh. At the beginning, there wasn’t the same commitment to building democratic institutions; soon after, with the brutal coup in 1975 when Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his family were killed, whatever had been built up was brushed aside.

Sri Lanka’s record of democratic institutions was far superior to India. So why did they fail? With Solomon Bandar - anaike’s victory in 1956, Sri Lanka jettisoned the secular ethos with which it had fought its freedom movement and opted for sectarianism and an exclusivist Sinhala identity. Over the last 30 years, Sri Lanka has suffered such a setback because of this, it is almost impossible to remember that Sri Lanka was once poised to be the Singapore of this region.

Finally, the other Nehruvian principle that has kept our democracy robust is Nehru’s commitment to a ‘socialistic pattern of society’. He accepted the Gandhian ethic that the purpose of the state‘s economic policy was welfare of the poor. In Pakistan, on the other hand, there was a blatant and blanket adoption of the capitalist model. In 1965, it was the secondmost industrialised country in Asia, after Japan. But this was concentrated in the hands of 22 feudal families and the notorious ‘303’ — the civil servants in collusion with these families. All of this came crashing down when Ayub Khan undertook his coup. The other factor in the instability Pakistan faces today is the fact that they also happily allied themselves to the Americans. Pakistan was also founded on the principle that religion constitutes nationality. This is an almost untenable premise. If being a Muslim makes you belong to Pakistan, then why is there a border between Muslim Afghanistan and Muslim Iran? And why would some of its most bitter disputes have been with its Muslim neighbours? Religion is a very poor basis for organising a nation. For all these reasons, these nation states did not become as strong in absorbing the buffeting that all nation-building involves. But while we may be stronger and more stable than our neighbours today, we have to remember that the same potential for stability and democracy exists in our neighbours. And if we move away from these ideals of plurality and secularism, we have the same potential for being torn apart.

Is there a danger of Indian Muslims being affected by the Taliban?
Its spreading influence is certainly a cause for concern, but the answer, as far as Indian Muslims go, does not lie in standing on the border of Pakistan and, like King Canute, ordering the waves to go back. What we have to do is address all the issues facing the Indian Muslim six decades after independence. These issues are meti culously documented in Justice Sachar’s report. We just have to act on them to integrate the Indian Muslim into the larger Indian family. Having said that, there will always be the individual grievance that is vulnerable to the terrorist project, and you can’t stop that. You just have to ensure there is no generic grievance. What many Indians don’t know or have forgotten is that given the restrictive franchise of 1946-47, only about five to 13 percent of the Muslim population voted for the creation of Pakistan. So, there is always the danger of exaggerating the Indian Muslim’s susceptibility to Pakistan.

We also have to ask ourselves, how many people really cleave to violence and radical views? After all, when the Hindutva wave was at its height, many Hindus might have felt it was a just cause. But with the ugly demolition of the Babri Masjid, I can bet you millions of Hindus were filled with self-disgust. To the extent that even LK Advani later distanced himself from the demolition. A few days ago, I was in Orissa at a massive gathering of Muslims. It was heartwarming to see how strongly they endorsed the Deoband fatwa against terrorism.

President Barack Obama was suppo - sed to herald a policy change in the region. But he is also focussing on the military option in Afghanistan, although no one has ever won a fight there. Conversely, is it possible to hold talks with forces like the Taliban?
A part of statecraft is the use of force against people as wedded to force as the Taliban is. But alongside, there has to be a cooption of the local population in order to make it a popular resistance rather than an imposed victory by foreign forces — especially a ‘victory’ by unmanned planes that are killing indiscriminately. Obama’s strategy is geared to fail unless it works in these other components. Seven-eights of the money being spent by the West in Afghanistan is on military hardware and software, only one-eight on development. Obama needs to change that. I am proud that as a Minister for Panchayati Raj, my own involvement in Afghanistan, requested by President Karzai, has been about empowering their local governance.

Let’s shift focus. As Minister for the North East, you are well-placed to talk about Bangladesh’s impact on India.
I was there as an Under Secretary at the very minute that the surrender document was being signed in Dhaka in 1971. So it’s a big disappointment when I look back 40 years that this wildly exciting event — the liberation of Bangladesh, and Mrs Gandhi actually withdrawing our troops within three months of its liberation — did not lead to better relations between us. We showed ourselves to be a noble nation, willing to sacrifice our own for the sake of others, and yet, respect the sovereignty of a small neighbour. So, looking back, why is Bangladesh denying us transit facilities that East Pakistan extended to us through 18 of the most tense years of the India- Pakistan relationship? And why is Indian diplomacy not able to get around this? As Minister for the North East, I have realised how much this has harmed the region and its relationship with India itself.

So yes, I do think we need to reorient our foreign policy vis-a-vis Bangladesh in a way that will help the North East realise its immense potential. India’s recent decision to open up to Bangladeshi investment gives me hope. Given Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s massive majority and her attitude towards us, notwithstanding the very serious setback we’ve seen in the last few days, I believe the India-Bangladesh relationship can be improved.

Isn’t Bangladesh beset by the same liberal polity versus army-and-Islamist forces axis? Is it as precarious as Pakistan, but less on our radar?
I think it’s much less precarious and that is because Bangladesh internally is a much more plural society than Pakistan ever aspired to be. Pakistan is, in fact, a very plural society, but its ideology forces it to present itself as a more unitary entity than it really is.

The average Indian thinks of Bang - ladesh in terms of the HUJI or the problem of Bangladeshi immigrants. How would you rate these concerns?
The HUJI is definitely a problem area. How many proxy soldiers are there in the Kashmir valley? Estimates range from about 2,000 to 6,000. Yet we need an army a hundred times its size to contain it. The numbers are always small, but the capacity for havoc is huge. The HUJI also has definite links with ULFA. Many of these groups, in fact, seem to be forging links with each other. But you have to abstract this from Islam. Terror and its allies in India, or elsewhere, has nothing to do with any religion. In Nagaland and Manipur, terrorist groups are Christian, the ULFA is Hindu, the Naxals have no religion, the Sinhalese outfits are Buddhist, you had Sikh terrorism, and, of course, there is LeT or the Indian Mujahideen that are Islamic.

I believe panchayati raj is the ultimate solution to all of this. There was an excellent Planning Commission report about using panchayati raj as an instrument to deal with extremist affected areas in central India. How has terrorism been pushed back in Nagaland? I think the village development boards and councils have had more to do with that than any amount of army action. Giving people a sense of participation in their own governance is much more effective than shooting or imprisoning, or Salwa Judum. Maybe all anti-terrorist initiatives should be placed under the Minister of Panchayati Raj.

What is the problem area we should be focusing on then in Bangladesh?
The problem area is the relationship between the military and the liberal polity. The relationship between those who have the banduk and those who have the ballot. It is heartening that the army has been disciplined enough not to go on a rampage against the mutineers. Sheikh Hasina has been able to be very stern, and at the same time rein in a lynching mentality that could easily have been stoked in the army in response to what happened.

How is it that the army has never fallen foul of democracy in India?
As I said earlier, what saved India was Nehru’s unflinching commitment to the democratic process. As a college boy, I remember sitting in the Visitor’s Gallery in Parliament. Nehru had just dismissed EMS Namboodiripad’s government in Kerala. We sat transfixed as Comrade Dange tore into Nehru. At the climax of his oration, he pointed at Nehru and said, “You are like Yudhistir. When he lied about Aswathama, his chariot immediately fell to the ground. Your chariot too has fallen today.” Did Nehru call in the army? No, he listened to the indictment, then stood up and gave his answer.

Moving to Sri Lanka, do you think this is really endgame for the LTTE? And how will it affect India?
I’m not 100 percent sure it’s the endgame, because the LTTE still has 58 square kilometers to operate from. I don’t quite accept the complacent statements coming out of Colombo. But even if this war were over, the LTTE is not over. They could continue being a destructive force in the Sri Lankan, and possibly even the Indian, polity. There has to be a political solution which addresses the grievances of the people. Panchayati raj is the solution to everything. I am not being facetious when I say this. It is the only way to wean people away from violent protest. Now Mahindra Rajapaksa who, curiously, I first met at a panchayati raj workshop in Dehradun, says he really believes in grassroots democratic institutions. What people wonder is that, is his idea of panchayati raj in Sri Lanka the same as basic democracy under Ayub Khan or the lazim system under Musharraf — institutions of local democracy designed to undermine democracy at higher levels — or is it a Rajiv Gandhi concept of local government? That is the question that Rajapaksa and history will have to answer once the peace process begins.

INDIA GENERAL ELECTIONS 2009 NOTIFICATION ANNOUNCED

By Kajol Singh

Lok Sabha polls will be held in five phases from April 16 to May 13, the Election Commission announced on Monday.

The five phased polls will be held in Jammu and Kashmir and Uttar Pradesh while Bihar will have four-phased elections, Chief Election Commissioner N Gopalaswami told a press conference in New Delhi.

Maharashtra and West Bengal will witness three phased polls while Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Punjab will have elections in two phases.

Remaining 15 states and seven union territories will have one-day polling.

The counting of votes will take place on May 16 and the 15th Lok Sabha will be constituted by June two.

In the first phase, 124 constituencies will go to polls on April 16. 141 constituencies will witness balloting in the second phase on April 23, 107 seats in third phase on April 30, 85 seats in fourth phase on May 7 and 86 constituencies in the last phase on May 13.

Elections to Assemblies in Andhra Pradesh, Sikkim and Himachal Pradesh will be held simultaneously with the Lok Sabha polls.

Photo electoral rolls will be used for the first time in 522 out of the 543 constituencies, Gopalaswami said.

499 constituencies have been redrawn in the delimitation exercise.

Delimitation could not be undertaken in Andhra, Assam, Jharkhand, Manipur and Nagaland, Gopalaswami said.

At least 71.4 crore will be the number of eligible voters, an increase of 4.3 crore over the 2004 figure of 67.1

The Commission will be using around 11 lakh electronic voting machines for the exercise to be held in eight lakh polling stations.

Around 40 lakh civil staff and 21 lakh security personnel will be deployed for the smooth conduct of elections, Gopalaswami said.

The dates were finalised taking into account aspects like school board examinations, local holidays, festivals and harvest, said Gopalaswami, who was flanked by Election Commissioners Naveen Chawla, whose removal he had sought for alleged "misconduct", and MY Qureishi.

On government's advice, President Pratibha Patil rejected the CEC's recommendation paving the way for Chawla to become the next head of the poll panel. Gopalaswami retires on April 20.

The poll schedule was worked out after series of meetings with political parties, Chief Secretaries and Director Generals of Police and Railway Board officials starting from February three, the CEC said.

INDIA GENERAL ELECTIONS 2009 NOTIFICATION ANNOUNCED

By Kajol Singh

Lok Sabha polls will be held in five phases from April 16 to May 13, the Election Commission announced on Monday.

The five phased polls will be held in Jammu and Kashmir and Uttar Pradesh while Bihar will have four-phased elections, Chief Election Commissioner N Gopalaswami told a press conference in New Delhi.

Maharashtra and West Bengal will witness three phased polls while Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Punjab will have elections in two phases.

Remaining 15 states and seven union territories will have one-day polling.

The counting of votes will take place on May 16 and the 15th Lok Sabha will be constituted by June two.

In the first phase, 124 constituencies will go to polls on April 16. 141 constituencies will witness balloting in the second phase on April 23, 107 seats in third phase on April 30, 85 seats in fourth phase on May 7 and 86 constituencies in the last phase on May 13.

Elections to Assemblies in Andhra Pradesh, Sikkim and Himachal Pradesh will be held simultaneously with the Lok Sabha polls.

Photo electoral rolls will be used for the first time in 522 out of the 543 constituencies, Gopalaswami said.

499 constituencies have been redrawn in the delimitation exercise.

Delimitation could not be undertaken in Andhra, Assam, Jharkhand, Manipur and Nagaland, Gopalaswami said.

At least 71.4 crore will be the number of eligible voters, an increase of 4.3 crore over the 2004 figure of 67.1

The Commission will be using around 11 lakh electronic voting machines for the exercise to be held in eight lakh polling stations.

Around 40 lakh civil staff and 21 lakh security personnel will be deployed for the smooth conduct of elections, Gopalaswami said.

The dates were finalised taking into account aspects like school board examinations, local holidays, festivals and harvest, said Gopalaswami, who was flanked by Election Commissioners Naveen Chawla, whose removal he had sought for alleged "misconduct", and MY Qureishi.

On government's advice, President Pratibha Patil rejected the CEC's recommendation paving the way for Chawla to become the next head of the poll panel. Gopalaswami retires on April 20.

The poll schedule was worked out after series of meetings with political parties, Chief Secretaries and Director Generals of Police and Railway Board officials starting from February three, the CEC said.

The Devil In The Backyard

By M H Ahssan

The Zardari Government is making peace with the Taliban which is hanging amputated bodies from electric poles. HNN analyses the dangers for Pakistan.

The one time tourist heaven of Swat looks like a ghost valley today. The people have still not recovered from the gory nightmare that was unleashed by the local Taliban. The last one-and-a-half year has seen a population of 1.5 million people being held hostage by a ragtag force of some 2,500 Taliban. They are under the leadership of Maulvi Fazalullah, popularly known as Mullah Radio for his jihad-inflected sermons, aired through his illegal FM radio. Fazalullah’s men have fought bloody battles with the army over the past two years. They virtually took control of most of Swat last year. Over 1,200 civilians have died so far and around 350,000 hapless locals forced to leave through rough mountain terrain.

The rich have left for Peshawar — 70 miles away, and the richer for more posh Islamabad — 100 miles in the south. The poor, with no place to go, suffered the trauma that makes Hollywood horrors look like a picnic. Intelligence sources dubbed as ‘spies’ and government officials — particularly from law-enforcing agencies — were specifically targeted by the Taliban. They were abducted and maimed and their killing turned into a gruesome spectacle in order to send a message to others.

The reign of terror is symbolised by what has come to be known as Khooni Chowk — the Crossing of Blood. A band of Taliban would, late at night, block the central crossing in the city centre of Mingora, the district headquarters the size of Srinagar and no less beautiful. They hung amputated bodies — some headless — on an electrical pole in the middle of the crossing, with notes giving their name and details of their ‘misdeeds’ against Islam. The bodies were not to be removed before a given date. Anybody violating this dictat could do so only at the risk of being himself put up headless.

THIS SCENE — perpetuated for days and weeks — is not from the Wild West of the cowboys. It happened in the Swat valley, which once took pride in having the most peaceful and bettereducated residents not just in the frontier province alone, but all over Pakistan. The princely state — annexed by Pakistan in 1969 — had better schools, hospitals and police stations than anybody else. It had an airport, and attractions like ski resorts and trout fishing on the meandering River Swat, which used to attract hordes of tourists every year. No more.

A majority of the police force has either run away, resigned or simply not turned up for work. Local newspapers are filled with advertisements from policemen declaring that they have left their jobs, and hence they be spared “in the name of their small children.” A new force of 600 locals was recruited for special commando training to combat what is actually an insurgency. The story goes that 450 of them disappeared during the training itself, and another 148 did not appear on the date of joining. The two men left in the force have not ventured outside their office in uniform since.

This left the entire populace at the mercy of the wolves that are masquerading as saviours of religion. People have seen throats being slit. Those who violate the Taliban code are either lashed or hanged in public jirgas (gatherings). Events where masked gunmen with the latest weaponry went on the rampage were skillfully orchestrated, and then their videos released in order to instill fear in the public. This took a severe toll on the psyche of the public, already hard pressed thanks to unemployment and hunger.

Life has come to a standstill for 80 percent of the people whose earnings came from tourism. Orchids have become rotten in the absence of labour and markets; and the fields lie barren. People go without fire, food, and electricity for days. The only cinema in Mingora was forced to down shutters, television and music has been banned, and CD shops have been closed. Even barbershops were shutdown as shaving, according to the interpretation of the Taliban, is un-Islamic.

It has been particularly hard for women, children and the handicapped because of the problems of age or sickness. Over 200 schools have been blown up as they were giving “western education.” Girls are barred from schooling. Over 100,000 Swati girls stand to lose their chance of education and, consequently, any career or professional life. This is happening in a place where the ratio of women in literacy and the job market was one of the highest in the province. The new edict may allow girls an education till the fourth grade, but with a revised curriculum. Also, they must always wear scarves on their heads. In any case, it will take awhile as most schools have been destroyed.

Women have been rendered prisoner in their own homes as they are now barred from going out in public, something that even Saudi Arabia has not tried. The central bazaar for women — with items like cosmetics and bangles, when partially open — today gives an image of a haunted place without shoppers. But then, cosmetics are a lesser priority when your children sleep hungry. Women are not allowed to work. Even women doctors are not permitted to carry on with their jobs. Stories abound where women lost babies because of the non-availability of doctors. Many others have died because of the lack of medicines and medical treatment.

The question is — how did over a million people accept the inhuman dictates of a bunch of jihadi thugs who do not fit into any Islamic school of thought? Well, they have not. They voted liberal parties to power in the last election. But these parties did not have either the political muscle, or the will, to protect them from the evil of the Taliban.

But how did the Taliban gain ascendancy? The system of justice under the princely state was more efficient than what followed. The people, therefore, wanted Sharia courts to be established as a way of achieving quick justice and dispensing with the long delays and corruption of the civil courts. But the Taliban, who had a different agenda, hijacked their demand. For ordinary people, in the absence of the writ of the state, it’s just a matter of choosing a lesser evil.

All hopes now hinge upon Maulana Sufi Mohammad, the father-in-law of Fazalullah. Sufi Mohammad is no angel himself. He is a radical cleric freed in 2008 after spending six years in jail for leading 10,000 Pashtun tribesmen to fight the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Nearly 7,000 died in the bombing and he ran back for his life. The people whose children he took with him after indoctrinating them, leading to their being killed, hate him. He has now been resurrected in order to persuade Fazalullah to accept the government’s offer of a ceasefire, which he has agreed to partially. How long this respite will last, only time will tell.

The ceasefire agreement with the Taliban has raised questions as to whether it is a victory for the Pakistan Government, capitulation before the Taliban who want to recreate a 1,500-year-old replica of Islamic rule, or a strategic retreat by the military.

IT IS ironic that Frontier Chief Minister Ameer Khan Hoti, the great grandson of the champion of nonviolence, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan — the Frontier Gandhi — has signed the agreement. He has justified it saying, “I have done this to stop violence and to fulfill my electoral promise of restoring peace.” His uncle and Awami National Party Chief Asfand Yar Wali — whose party runs the troubled province bordering Afghanistan — is under attack from the Taliban. He survived a suicide bomb attack three months ago while most of his party members are on the run because of constant threats to their life.

The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Government at the Centre is playing it safe. President Asif Zardari’s position is that he will decide when the agreement will come to him for his signature. Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood has tried to pacify the Americans while on a tour of Washington, saying, “it’s a local remedy to a local problem.” The PPP has neither accepted the agreement nor rejected it. Obviously, the PPP Government would like to see what the outcome will be in a couple of months, if not earlier, before taking a stand. In the meantime, PPP spinmasters are arguing that the Sharia courts are not the same as strict Islamic law. The new laws, for instance, would not ban education of women or impose other strict tenets espoused by the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

LIBERAL CIRCLES in Pakistan and abroad are fuming over what they call “the sellout.” Some, like human rights activist Iqbal Haider, have described it as a deal with the devil. “How can you sit with the very people who have maimed hundreds of people,” he protested. “It’s a matter of principle which should be supreme. These people should be tried for crimes against humanity.”

The liberals have a valid argument that the agreement will now be a model for the rest of the Taliban. They will demand similar Sharia in other parts of the province. “Now they know that militancy is the way to coerce the government into submission,” said senior analyst Saleem Khilji. They have a point, as the agreement extends the scope of their power. The government has conceded that the new Sharia will be extended beyond Swat to the other five districts of Malakand division also.

The Pakistan Army has taken refuge behind the government, saying that it is following orders to stay out till further notice. They should be the happiest lot if this agreement were to result in peace. They have taken the brunt of the fight. Media reports say army casualties number more than a hundred dead but the Taliban claims that it might be much higher.

The issue is that the Pakistan Army has been trained to fight with India, and it may not be comfortable with counterinsurgency operations. It does not have sufficient experience of that except for the Balochistan insurgency in the 1970s, unlike its Indian rival, which has consistently countered insurgencies in Kashmir, Nagaland and Mizoram.

The army will remain stationed in Swat to deal with the fallout. The underlying assumption is that either Sufi Mohammad will deliver peace or fight with his son-inlaw. This will be a tactical victory. Instead of the army fighting the Taliban, it would be the militants fighting each other.

But then there is a counter-theory — the two factions might use the time to regroup, consolidate their power and fight later with even more ferocity. There are already signs of this happening. An indicator is that the price of arms in the tribal belt has almost doubled because of the massive demand.

In any case, the agreement is simply not implementable. Each party has a different interpretation of it. The governments in the Frontier and Islamabad think that the Sharia court is old wine in a new bottle. Sufi Mohammad believes that his mandate is to provide Sharia courts where religious scholars will be independent judges and not advisers to the regular civil judges like in the earlier agreement of six years ago. “The choice of judges will be ours and they will be all-powerful,” said Maulana Izzat, spokes man of Sufi Mohammad, in a telephonic interview.

Fazalullah wants the complete domination of the Sharia, encompassing all sectors beyond the judiciary. “We shall run the entire area in accordance with the holy book, “countered Muslim Khan, another spokesman for Fazalullah. “We don’t accept any system but our own and will inshallah spread it to other parts of Pakistan very soon.”

The legal and administrative intricacies involved in merging the old system with the new are something beyond these clerics. The Taliban have simply ceased fire but not surrendered. Both sides are waiting for the next round to start with bated breath. It almost came to that when a newly-appointed senior district official was kidnapped by militants two days after the ceasefire. After a tense standoff lasting hours, the official, Kushal Khan, was freed.

Later, it was disclosed that his release had been the result of a swap: Pakistani authorities released two militants who had been picked up a day earlier in Peshawar. Next time around, it is possible that some freed militants like this might renew the fighting while both sides continue to sit in the trenches.

Swat is different from other trouble spots like Bahaur, Waziristan and Khyber. It is the only trouble spot that is not a federal (FATA) but a provincial tribal area (PATA). It is wrong to generalise about the Taliban and the Swat situation in particular.

FAZALULLAH, A barely-literate former lift operator, was an indigenous product. He does not come from the ranks of Taliban or Al-Qaeda, but was later accepted by them and adopted as the commander of the area looking after his hold in the area. It is only in Swat that schools have been closed in an organised manner, otherwise the Taliban have not done so in FATA, except for occasional episodes. The Taliban have generally refrained from killing hostages, except for spies or the recent Polish engineer in Waziristan. The Swat Talibans have slit throats of hostages and security forces with ruthless abandon.

Swat is the only place which has been completely taken over by the Taliban. This may be because of its geography — it is a bowl-shaped valley. The Swat terrain makes it strategically easier for Taliban to hold power against numerical odds. There is one major communication artery along the Swat River that could easily be blocked from anywhere. In Bajaur, Khyber and Waziristan, the Taliban are dominant, but they do not run those agencies. Swat is also the only hotspot that does not border Afghanistan. In fact, it remained aloof and generally peaceful during the war with Afghanistan.

Swat has a past of peace and culture where thousands thronged from all over Pakistan and abroad every summer. Its capital, Mingora, happens to be much bigger than any other town in any of the troubled agencies.

Also, it houses the elite of Pashtun tribes, and is the abode of the royal, sophisticated Yousafzais of Tana, whereas the other agencies have a history of warring tribes. The impact of Swat’s takeover, like in the classical Clausewitzian centre of gravity, has been immense on the psyche of Pashtuns.

If the impression goes out that it’s a victory for the Taliban, it will encourage militancy elsewhere, in the rest of Pakistan. It becomes more alarming when seen in the larger context where the Waziristan commanders, pro-Pakistan Mullah Nazir and anti-state Baitullah Mehsud, along with Haji Gul Bahadur, have patched up differences in Waziristan to become a formidable force; Bajaur Taliban now expect similar Sharia in their area, and Hamimullah is blocking NATO supplies in Khyber. The Taliban seem to be on the ascendant, which should be a source of worry for not just Pakistan, but also the entire region and the world.

If the social fabric continues to be torn apart as it has in Swat, this will lead to the rise of more non-state actors who are not under the control of anyone. Since all of these commanders are connected to each other, including the militants in Kashmir, the genie is threatening to become ever more dangerous. The question is not just about the outcome of the investigation into the Mumbai attack. A more serious question is: what will happen if there is another attack of a similar nature?

(With inputs from Syed Saleem Shehzad & Maria Zuber Khan in Pakistan)