A nightmare in the making?

The Third Front is shaped by sharply contradictory impulses. It is an inchoate cluster that pretends to act nationally but thinks locally, says Swapan Dasgupta.

All through the uncertain 1990s when India was coming to terms with the grim realities of fractured mandates and coalition governments at the Centre, a “national government” was frequently suggested as a way out of the mess. Promoted assiduously by former prime minister Chandra Shekhar, one of the few politicians with a cross-party appeal, it implicitly drew on the British experience during World War II when the Conservatives and Labour came together to forge a common front against Hitler.

Since India was not at war and felt no compelling need to shelve its rumbustious democracy the idea never really caught on. On the contrary, after the emergence of the BJP as an alternative pole to the Congress, regional parties and the Lohiaite rump decided that the way forward was link up with either of the two national parties. Initially the BJP was more accommodating towards the regional parties but after three consecutive electoral defeats the Congress too decided that it had to abandon its dream of reemerging as the dominant party. That both Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh succeeded in completing full terms propelled politics in the direction of coalitional bipolarity.

The recent buzz around a possible Third Front that will exclude both the national parties is based on some key assumptions. First, it is felt by many that the combined tally of the Congress and BJP, which narrowly crossed the half-way mark in the Lok Sabha in 2004, may well fall below the magic 272 mark on May 16. In short, the 2009 verdict may open the theoretical possibility of all the smaller groups (including those nominally attached to the UPA and NDA) forging a non-Congress, non-BJP government.

Secondly, it is believed that both the Congress and BJP have experienced ideological dissipation in the past 10 years and declined in popularity. The BJP has shed its famed “distinctiveness” and the Congress flits uncomfortably between socialism and market economics. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that the relative irrelevance of national parties — first experienced in Tamil Nadu after 1971 — has also become a feature of Uttar Pradesh which accounts for 80 MPs in the Lok Sabha.

Despite these opportunities, the Third Front hasn’t quite taken off. The many photo-ops have not been able to conceal the absence of a pre-eminent party and a coherent idea of the third way. With constant entries and departures, the Third Front has been ridiculed as a railway waiting room, a hallucination and worse.

The charge of incoherence is warranted. There appears to be two parallel versions of the third alternative jostling for prominence. The first is based on the assumption that the grouping of diverse groups from different backgrounds is a confederal partnership of equals.

For the Left, a confederal arrangement has involved an unhappy blend of two different ways of doing business with “bourgeois” parties — the United Front and the Popular Front, both dating back to the 1930s. The United Front approach involves Communists leading the fight with non-Communists in tow. The Popular Front involves Communists accepting the leadership of other classes.

In the forthcoming Lok Sabha election, the CPI(M) and CPI, despite having pretensions of being national parties, are confined to West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura. Having peaked in 2004, the Left parties are also aware that their parliamentary representation will see a sharp decline in 2009. Under the circumstances, the Communists are in no position to insist on a United Front approach. At the same time, the Popular Front approach involves ideological convulsions and a loss of ideological rigour. As a way out, the Left has attempted to forge a Third Front that is confederal in character but also bound together by a Left-dictated Common Minimum Programme that prioritises “secularism” and an “independent foreign policy”. It’s an attempt to preserve purity in a sea of contamination.

An alternative view of the Third Front is posited by Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati. Unlike the others who attended her house-warming dinner last Sunday, Mayawati is not content to limit her influence to Uttar Pradesh. She perceives the BSP as third pole in a multipolar polity and believes that her projection as a prime ministerial candidate will electrify the Dalits and some backward castes.

On the shape of a Third Front, Mayawati’s most visible differences are with the Left. While professing equidistant opposition to the Congress and the BJP, the Left believes that the BJP is its Enemy Number One. Its hostility to the Congress is confined to the Indo-US nuclear agreement and some facets of economic policy. Like the CPI during the tenures of Jawaharlal Nehru and the early Indira Gandhi, a large section of the CPI(M) believes that the Congress has a “progressive” face. Even CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat, widely perceived to be the unreconstructed face of his party, singled out Manmohan Singh and P Chidambaram for the so-called aberrations of the UPA government, notably its pro-US and pro-free market tilt. At the same time, when push comes to shove, the CPI(M) is clear that the Congress, despite all its imperfections, is a better bet than the “fascist” BJP. After the rise of the BJP as the second national party, its view of the Congress is not fundamentally dissimilar to that of the CPI which traditionally had one foot in the “progressive” Congress camp.

Mayawati draws no such distinctions. She is willing to do business with either the Congress or the BJP as long as it promotes her larger objective of making the BSP a force throughout India. She is undeterred by the fact that the national ambitions may lead to the BSP first eating into the Congress’ Dalit votebank outside UP and thereby benefiting the BJP.

The Third Front is shaped by these sharply contradictory impulses. It is an inchoate cluster that pretends to act nationally but thinks locally. In opposition the Third Front enriches the mosaic of pluralism; in government at the Centre it provokes a nightmare.

GRIM FACTS: WHAT'S BEHIND A GLASS OF MILK?

By M H Ahssan / Hyderabad

INN throws light on some grim details about the cow in India, the world’s largest producer of milk.

You know that child who throws a terrible tantrum over a glass of milk. How he kicks and screams and refuses to touch the stuff? Haven’t you wondered what the fuss is all about? After all, it’s just a glass of milk.

It turns out the child may just have the right idea. The business of producing milk — indeed, the multi-crore rupee cattle industry it’s a part of — is sustained by a process of relentless cruelty towards animals, from birth till death, with little letup. Cruelty compounded by poorly defined, poorly implemented methods and gross violations.

Manik Sarkar: India’s Poorest Chief Minister?

Manik Sarkar, who has been the Tripura chief minister for 15 years and is leading the CPI-M in upcoming elections, is perhaps India’s poorest chief minister.

Keeping in line with his party policy, Sarkar gives away his salary and allowances to the Communist Party of India-Marxist, which pays him Rs.5,000 as subsistence allowance to run his family.

In 2008, Sarkar’s cash in hand and bank deposits totalled Rs.16,120. According to his latest election affidavit, this amount has come down to Rs.10,800.

Sarkar’s wife, a retired central government employee, has Rs.22,015 in hand. She has another Rs.24,52,395 in banks. Of this, Rs.18,930 and Rs.84,118 are in two savings accounts.

The rest of the money, mostly retirement benefits, is in the form of fixed deposits. The Sarkars have no children.

After the death of his mother Anjali Sarkar in 2009, Sarkar inherited a small house in Agartala. He donated it to a kin.

HONOUR FATIGUE - SOLDIERS OF MISFORTUNE

By M H Ahssan

BEFORE THE HOME MINISTRY RAISES NEW PARAMILITARY BATTALIONS, IT NEEDS TO ASK WHY THE OLD ONES ARE QUITTING IN DROVES.

Surinder Kang joined the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) as a constable in 1990. Twenty years later, he’s risen no more than just one rank: he’s a havaldar now. What has risen dangerously over the years, though, are his chances of dying on duty.

So Kang, at 40, has sought voluntary retirement. He wants his pension (even if it is just 2/3rd of what he would otherwise get), an easier job — and he does not want to die. Needless to say, Surinder Kang has a different real name.

What makes Kang’s story extremely disturbing is that it is not an individual story of disillusionment: it is symptomatic of a rampant and growing feeling in the paramilitary. At a time when the Home Minister is speaking of raising dozens of new paramilitary battalions, apart from Kang, hundreds of other men with real names and real fears and real grievances are queuing up to quit the services. In fact, according to official data, an unprecedented 14,422 jawans applied for premature voluntary retirement from service (VRS) in 2009 — up 85 percent from the previous year and 112 percent from 2007. Compare this with the fact that only 4,622 soldiers sought voluntary retirement from the Indian Army — which is three times larger than all the paramilitary forces put together — in the same period, and the contrast becomes painfully stark.

So, why the exodus?
A few days ago, EN Rammohan, former Director General of the Border Security Force (BSF), submitted his one-man enquiry report to Home Minister P Chidambaram on what went wrong in the recent Dantewada massacre, in which Maoists ambushed and killed 76 CRPF jawans. Predictably, the report blamed “leadership failure” and “a lack of coordination between the CRPF and the state police”. Based on this, a few individual heads down the ranks will roll. But if the government stops at that, it will have misread the crisis and lose a crucial opportunity for introspection and drastic overhaul.

The truth is the Dantewada massacre is only one kind of cautionary tale about what ails the Indian paramilitary. The cautionary tale of Surinder Kang runs much deeper and is more alarming.

IF ONE were merely to read the surface signs, it might seem a fear of dying is propelling the exodus. The year 2010 has barely begun and already 79 CRPF men have died.

The number was 58 in 2009. The stark contrast with Indian Army VRS figures also seems to suggest that battling one’s own countrymen has become much tougher and more wearisome than battling enemies outside — both physically and psychologically. As Gautam Kaul, a retired IPS officer who served as Additional Director General of CRPF in 1997-98, says, “Both death in action and voluntary retirement are higher in the CRPF and BSF than in the Army. The spurt in political and civil unrest in the country does not match [the] planning and preparedness of these paramilitary forces. The demand is massive and the paramilitary forces just can’t meet the demand.”
But fear of dying does not seem to be the key reason Surinder Kang wants to leave the CRPF. Something deeper nags him. Kang has 20 long years of fighting guerilla wars and insurgencies. He has been posted thrice in Jammu and Kashmir, twice in the Northeast, and two times each in Lalgarh and Bastar.

Besides this, he has been on election duty in Gujarat, Bihar, Delhi, West Bengal and Orissa. Kang is 40 now and has grayed a little. He is extremely fit and no amount of training can bring you his experience. But Kang has queued up for VRS. He is resolved to leave the forces and work as a small-time private guard at some ATM or private industry. Kang has realised the country does not honour those who serve it. Now, he wants to be with his family at any cost.

“I spent one third of my 20 years in the CRPF just travelling. Of these 20 years, I could spend only three years with my children. I took medical leave to get married. I could only reach my village five days after I received news of my father passing away. I am the eldest in my family but I couldn’t even perform the last rites. I couldn’t COVERSTORY attend three of my four sisters’ marriages. I had to arrange a separate house for my wife and kids after my father’s death because my brother threw them out from the joint family house. But if you take any of these problems to your officers, they just shoo you away.”

Kang is not the only one. Disillusion is simmering like an epidemic beneath the disciplined skin of the paramilitary, and its reasons straddle a wide spectrum: poor work conditions; demeaning terms of service; long years away from families; arbitrary orders and a niggling sense that their life is cheap and death would come without honour.

Just walk around the paramilitary headquarters in Delhi and this honour fatigue begins to unravel. Talk to a constable under a tree and word spreads that someone is asking about their troubles. The jawan inside the canteen, the jawan walking with heaps of files to the grievance department, the jawan loading trucks, all stop to listen in. Everyone wants your number on a scrap of paper. They can’t talk now, but they all have a story to tell.

Of how they have lived in torn tents with no drinking water. Of how the holes were big enough for heat waves and pouring rain. Of how the officers live in concrete houses with three servants. Of how it’s not the government, but their own departments that ensure the welfare schemes never reach them. Of how salaries are cut even when they are injured on duty. Of how a jawan does not get paid if he is in hospital for more than six months. The recurring theme is “pressure: — of how there is too much “dabav” from commanders to blindly follow orders. Of how most of these orders are things that fall outside the purview of duty. Of how they are never consulted even while their lives are at stake. Of how they all plan to take voluntary retirement as soon as they complete 20 years of service.

There’s a jawan from Uttaranchal who has been trying to get a transfer to his home state of Gujarat for the last five years. His wife is mentally ill and unable to look after his three young children. “The officers tell me to get my wife treated in Uttaranchal,” says he. “But our camp is in the mountains, in the middle of a jungle. How is this possible?” Once he returned a few days late from a visit home. His wife’s ill-health was not a good enough shield. He lost an entire month’s pay.
Another jawan has spent 16 years in the CRPF — six in Jammu and Kashmir, three in Assam, three in Tripura, and three in Manipur. Too scared to talk at the CRPF headquarters, he calls late at night to share his story.

During a posting in Srinagar, he was charged with indiscipline and lost 15 days of pay for daring to complain about inedible food and cockroaches in his dal. When he fell sick in Tripura, he couldn’t get a car to get to hospital. “I had to hire a jeep,” says he. “Only if 15-20 constables fall sick and need a car together, there’s a chance of us getting it. Otherwise the cars are busy ferrying the officers’ children. This country got independence in 1947, but we still live like slaves. Our officers order us to do unauthorised things; we have no right to express ourselves. They tell us to barge into people’s homes and pick up bricks and cement and construct our quarters. They pocket lakhs of welfare money; they take commissions from ration shops.

We pay Rs 1,326 per month for food. The bills are for A-grade rations but we get C-grade food. The commander is like the king of a battalion. He runs it the way he wants. As a driver, I am sent all the time for unauthorised pick ups. All the risk of being caught is on me. You live under so much pressure, you either shoot yourself or shoot someone else. I am just waiting to complete 20 years so I can get a part of my pension and then I’ll quit."

The angry stories duplicate endlessly. A jawan from Gorakhpur with 17 years of service behind him speaks of how he was not granted leave to be in time for his first child’s delivery, though he was posted just a few hours away in Allahabad. When he reached a week later, his son was dead. “After the 6th Pay Commission, we were supposed to be given Rs 2,000 education allowance and a travel allowance, but I haven’t got it yet,” says he. “The officers find ways to make sure we don’t get this education allowance. Just a school certificate is not enough. They ask for bills for the child’s uniform, shoes, notebooks. How are we going to run around getting all this when we barely get leave?”

(A jawan is entitled to two months of earned leave in a year but they rarely get leave on time. “A battalion has seven companies and all the seven companies are located at different locations. The battalion commandant sits at Chandigarh. How can a jawan get leave on time if he is located in Dantewada and his commandant is in Chandigarh,” says Gautam Kaul. “Better systems have to be thought through.”)

Clearly, the issue of family — and an inability to provide adequately for them — looms large for the jawan. “We had witnessed an exodus in the paramilitary forces in 1991 too when violence had escalated in Jammu and Kashmir,” says Prakash Belgamkar, retired DIG (Operations), CRPF. “We had discovered then that a soldier’s motivation revolves around his family. But he becomes a nomad after joining the forces. The nucleus of his nuclear family goes away. He has no fixed address, his life gets fragmented.”

But no lessons seem to have been learnt since 1991. Far from any internal memos in the Home Ministry sounding alarm signals about the surge in VRS applications, or directives in paramilitary headquarters urging officers to motivate jawans, the dominant mood seems to be callous complacency: there’s more where those came from. “Yes, we have seen a spurt in voluntary retirements,” says CRPF spokesperson Ajay Chaturvedi. “But there are enough applications coming in of boys who want to join. We have filled in the vacancies. We have raised six new battalions in a year. We don’t have a crunch anymore. There’s nothing to worry.”

A wise administration would stop men like Kang, if it could. Their experience is hard won, and no training course can duplicate that. But the official position seems to be just about numbers. Building morale, quality and pride in work is not on the radar. Retaining experience seems unnecessary. In a poor country, there will always be replacements. There will always be fresh fodder for all cannons.

To get a real sense of the implications of the diving morale of the paramilitary jawan, one needs to understand first the nature and work of the paramilitary forces. India has about 7 lakh paramilitary forces which include the Central Reserve Police Force (strength 2.30 lakh); Border Security Force (strength 2.15 lakh); Central Industrial Security Force (strength 1.12 lakh); Assam Rifle (strength 50,000); Indo- Tibetan Border Police (strength 74,000) and a Sashastra Seema Bal (strength 29,000). The tasks of these battalions range across fighting internal counter-insurgencies, protecting heritage sites and national installations, providing relief during calamities, controlling riots, providing VIP security and executing election duties. (Their motto is ‘Any Task, Any Time, Any Where’ and ‘Duty unto Death’ — as opposed to the army’s which is ‘Shoot to Kill’. But far from pride, this seems to evoke cynical scorn in jawans now.)

Though law and order are State subjects that, ideally, should be handled by the State police, the National Crime Record Bureau confirms there is a shortage of two lakh policemen in the country. This places an added burden on the paramilitary forces. As former Home Secretary Madhukar Gupta says, “There is a diversity of challenges from terrorism to insurgency today, which has affected rotation and training of these paramilitary forces. This does lead to stress. The private security business has also attracted them away from the forces.

This is an evolving situation and the government has to take major initiatives to improve things.” The story about the diving morale of the jawan then is not just a story about individual griping. It should be of national concern. The jawan is the primary interface between civilians and the State in a conflict zone. Their conduct is crucial to the history of these conflicts. They need to be sensitised not brutalised. Kashmir, the Northeast, Chhattisgarh, Lalgarh (in West Bengal), Narayanpatna (in Orissa) are all rife with stories of malafide behaviour by jawans. But how can any virtuous cycles set in? As a jawan in Lalgarh says after his friend was refused a visit to his pregnant wife, “I was so angry, I wanted to shoot someone.”

Difficulty in getting leave and family anxieties though are not the only reasons jawans are quitting in droves. The terms of service, over all, seem to need a major revision. A retired IPS officer who has served in the CRPF, ITBP and CISF in different capacities says, “Why shouldn’t the paramilitary jawans leave? I pity them for sacrificing their lives when our pay commissions do not even recognise them as ‘skilled’ workers.”

This seems merely the tip of a huge iceberg of service dissatisfactions. Army men are considered skilled workers, while paramilitary jawans trained to fight in some of the most dangerous and difficult circumstances are not considered “skilled” enough. A jawan gets a salary ranging from Rs 12,000 to Rs 15,000 (same as a civilian clerk); and an additional Rs 3,000 if he is on a ‘hard posting’ in a ‘difficult area’. (It is typical of Indian bureaucracy that while J&K and the Northeast are considered ‘difficult areas’, Chhattisgarh, Bastar and Lalgarh are yet to feature in this category though many more jawans have been killed in service here than elsewhere.) A jawan also gets Rs 1,100 — Rs 1,300 for rations but has to pay for his own mess expenses on the field, often having to find rations and cook for themselves.

Apart from these living conditions, many veterans say the essential command structure of the paramilitary forces is flawed. Kaul believes too many agencies have authority over a jawan and that contributes hugely to the low morale. “As director general of a paramilitary force, I am only entitled to perform house-keeping jobs for a jawan. I can train him and monitor his service record, but I have no powers to decide on his battalion movement and deployment,” says he. Only Home Ministry officials perform this critical job: they have the list of battalions, they assess the demand and assign locations.

This can lead to many Kafkaesque situations. One retired jawan remembers a tortuous journey in 2004 that stretched 8,000 kilometers over two months as the Home Ministry ordered his company like a pawn to move from Agartala to Gujarat via Bangladesh, Delhi, Kashmir and back to Agartala. Crowded trains, no reservations, no accommodations, no sense of why they were being deployed anywhere, and, most of all — no sense of respect. “I have fought insurgents for 20 years,” says the jawan bitterly, “but this one journey showed me my standing in my country’s eyes. How can you fool around with so many human beings on the pretext of an emergency situation?” Other jawans speak of being summoned to places for six months and being asked to stay for six years.

“Battalion movements are very frequent in the CRPF and this often leads to individual hardship. The very nature of their duty is temporary and is bound to dislocate them constantly. In the army, soldiers undertake an operation then go back to the base camp; the CRPF jawans have no fixed place to return. They are always on the move,’’ says Kaul.

This sense of the ad-hoc permeates every aspect of their lives. (For instance, it appears the Home Ministry had no idea that the CRPF had only three satellite phones till former Home Minister Shivraj PatilShivraj Patil went to Amarnath and had a sudden desire to speak to his family from the shrine. A phone was found with great difficulty for him. This is the only reason he came back to Delhi and remembered to sanction 68 satellite phones for the CRPF and an equal number for other paramilitary battalions.)

But often, this can have much more ominous implications. Kang speaks of his dread in being asked to go on an ‘area domination’ exercise in Chhattisgarh. “We hadn’t slept for days. We landed, and our induction was cut short midway, because there were no policemen for patrolling. We had no clue about the local language, culture, terrain, and most importantly, we had no intelligence about the enemy. We were there physically but had to rely on local intelligence. The paramilitary does not even have its own intelligence. So if the input is good, we succeed; if not, we become sitting ducks.”

This idea of being a ‘sitting duck’ is a powerful and repetitive leitmotif. Another retired jawan who has seen service in J&K, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand, says, “Naxalites fight with military precision. They commit mistakes but they never repeat them.” He recalls an incident in Erabore in 2005 when 200 Naxalites tried to bomb a police armory and the CRPF bunker near it. The jawans resisted the attack and informed their base camp. Help came quickly and the Naxals were repulsed.

Three months later, the CRPF battalion raided a Naxal hideout and found a document titled: Why we failed in the Erabore Police Armory Operation. The document said they had failed because they had underestimated the strength of the armory and bunker wall, and so had taken insufficient explosives, and, secondly, they had not anticipated that the CRPF’s base camp could send help that fast. A few months later, Naxals killed 23 CRPF jawans in a landmine attack. The jawans were on their way to rescue policemen trapped in an attack: the Naxals had anticipated this and laid landmines to blow the vehicle.

“We are never debriefed so thoroughly,” says the jawan. “We are constantly pushed into mindless ‘area domination’ exercises without any intelligence. We never seem to learn from our mistakes.”

What can reverse the tide then? What can stop the attrition and turn this force into a humane, yet proud and efficient line of defence? Former Home Secretary Madhukar Gupta says some initiatives were underway in his time: raising more police force, providing housing, reducing telephone rates for calls home, and counselling (when more than 10 jawans from a company apply for VRS). Prakash Belgamkar re-emphasises the need for this: “A jawan has other alternatives today. If the State wants to retain him, it has to free him of his worries about his family. If this is done, he’ll be yours for the rest of his life.” That might be only the first of many urgent correctives. The most primary one will have to be an essential change of attitude — wherein retaining men begins to matter more than merely replacing them.

Opinion: Why 'Goods And Services Tax' (GST) Is Harmful To India?

By M H AHSSAN | INNLIVE

The Goods and Services Tax will destroy governance and end incentives for states to attract businesses, harming the country in the long run.

It finally happened. Late on Wednesday, the Rajya Sabha approved a bill that will change the way India collects taxes.

The Goods and Services tax, which aims to get rid of the current patchwork of indirect taxes and to improve tax compliances, has been in the headlines for some time now.

The Brooming 'English Vinglish' Culture

Dreams of jobs, social mobility and self-respect are all tied to knowing the language. For millions, not knowing it means being walled out. 

In 2003, James Tooley, a professor at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, completed and published the results of a year-long survey of private schools for children of low-income families in Hyderabad. ‘Private Schools for the Poor: A Case Study from India’, as the report was titled, found an astounding 61 percent of all pupils in Hyderabad district — much higher than official figures — were enrolled in private, unaided schools. This included, of course, the wealthy and the poor.

Narrowing down to 15 private schools in low-income and slum areas — “an arbitrary selection… to ensure a balance of neighbourhoods and fee ranges” — Tooley and his researchers concluded teacher truancy and school responsiveness rates here compared favourably with government schools. For this, parents — “daily paid labourers, market traders or rickshaw drivers” — were willing to pay fees “in the range of five to 10 percent of the father’s annual income”. The average tuition fee in the selected schools was Rs 116 per month.

The quest for the English language was a key motivation. All 15 schools ran from nursery to Class X and all offered English-medium education. One school also had an Urdu-medium section and three schools had some Telugu-medium classes. The schools followed a standard curriculum from Class VI onwards, in preparation for state board examinations at the end of Class VII and Class X. Till Class VI, however, the schools were free to innovate. Tooley wrote, “We found schools at this level replacing much of the specified curriculum with extra English lessons — because this is often what parental demand wanted.” “School choice was taken seriously by parents,” recorded Tooley, “… One illiterate father — who was far from unusual — told us that if the standard of education did not improve in the school his child attended, then he would take him away to another school. He said that the teaching was not up to the mark, and he was aware that other children were speaking English more effectively than his own child — even though he himself could not speak any English.”

It astonished the research team that a parent who did not know English would not only make learning the language a priority for the child, but also take what he considered an informed decision on his child’s proficiency with the English language, and how well or poorly it was being taught in the school.

What Tooley found was not atypical. The quest for English is not a phenomenon in India; it is an obsession, an epidemic and often a paranoiac fear. This is a language that opens doors; for those outside the magic portals, it is an absence that builds impregnable walls. Pradeep Kumar, 35, a garbage collector at the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, mirrors the anxiety, the nervousness and the sheer and searing ambition of some of the parents Tooley met in faraway Hyderabad.

Kumar never made it past Class V and doesn’t know a word of English. Three years ago, his first born, Abhishek, was enrolled in Class V of a government school in south Delhi’s Govindpuri area. Sensing the government school was inadequate, Kumar sought out an alternative: “I tried to move him to a private school for higher studies, but the teacher there assessed him and said his proficiency in English was that of a child in lower KG or upper KG, and that I should put him in Class I.”

This stunned Kumar. He came home, pushed some English language books towards his son and asked him to read. Consider the pathos of the moment; consider how it must have been: a father who knew no English asking his son to read so that he (the father) could assess his (the son’s) fluency in English. Abhishek tried to read, and faltered; he tried again, and faltered. In a few short wrenching minutes, the humble garbage collector’s little world came crashing down.

“I begged the teacher to take him into even Class I,” Kumar remembers, “and she said she’d try.” That’s when he decided to pull out his younger son and daughter from government schools and put them into private schools instead. “I want to make them successful,” he says, his voice almost a whisper in desperation. “In our time, you could get by. But today there are no jobs for illiterate people. They need to learn good English… I want them to have a better life than I did…”

Literacy, education, learning English: it is telling how easily Kumar conflates the three. To him, English is not just an important subject at school — it is the uber subject, the stairway to heaven, the elevator his children must take to a better life.

Stuck at a traffic signal this past week, Mann Singh, 76, a taxi driver in Mumbai, turned and asked his passenger what the word “infinity” meant. It was no abstract curiosity; he wanted to know what his city’s most popular mall was named after. His passenger explained the definition. What followed was a remarkable attempt at internalising “infinity”, almost making it a part of one’s consciousness. Singh began using the word over and over again, correctly, incorrectly, appropriately and otherwise, till he was sure he had more or less got it.

It’s a game the man has been playing for 60 years. Singh moved to Mumbai in 1956, having left his village in Punjab with a Class VIII education and not a word of English. He learnt the language in the big city, one word at a time, while doing odd jobs for businessmen, running chores, delivering parcels and, finally, some 40 years after he’d arrived in Mumbai, while driving a taxi.

Sitting behind that wheel gave Singh a luxury his four previous decades in Mumbai hadn’t allowed him: time. He bought himself a transistor and listened to cricket commentary in English. Interacting with his passengers, he moved to conversations, initially in Hindi, then in broken English. Gradually the few, isolated words he knew began forming themselves into sentences. Today, Singh knows enough of the English way to respond with a “You’re most welcome, Madam” to a passenger who runs off with a hurried “Thank you”.

If Singh can look back at his experiential learning of English with some humour, it is also because he is secure in the knowledge that he is the last of his kind in his family. All four of his children — the first a supervisor in a mall, the second a management student, the third a chauffeur for a big business corporation and the fourth a factory worker in South Africa — went to private schools and are proficient in English. In one generation, with one language, they have made the leap from working class to middle class.

The equation isn’t always that simple. English has had a complex and troubled engagement with India since Thomas Macaulay introduced it as the medium of instruction with his Minute on Education in 1835. He intended it not just as a communicative tool, but as a social enabler and part of the civilising mission of the East India Company. The condescension that carried with it notwithstanding, English proved to be an empowering force of quite another kind. In one quick move, it reduced Indians from a multiplicity of identities to just two castes — Macaulay’s Children and Macaulay’s Orphans.

The first to use and master the English were, of course, the privileged Indian communities — upper-caste Bengalis, Bombay Parsis, Poona Brahmins and so on. Yet as the decades passed, it became apparent to many that English was not just instructive; it was downright incendiary. It held the key to social disruption and the upturning of hierarchies. There is a school of Dalit scholarship that holds that knowledge of English has allowed privileged Dalits to make a leap and gain authority — with government jobs, for instance — in a manner unknown for millennia.

Chandrabhan Prasad, well-known Dalit writer, has in his articles contrasted the access to English with the historical denial of Sanskrit to the Dalit. In this framework, English is a goddess to be venerated — two years ago, a temple to English began to be constructed in Uttar Pradesh’s Lakhimpur Kheri district — and Macaulay her prophet on Earth.

Inevitably, English became part of the colonial construct. With independence, its effacement became an auxiliary of the nationalist enterprise for some. The Socialists led by Ram Manohar Lohia mocked English, a legacy that lives on in parts in the politics of Mulayam Singh Yadav and the Samajwadi Party. The Communists abolished English at the primary level in West Bengal only to acknowledge their error a quarter century later. The Sangh Parivar saw English as representing a westernisation project.

It is worth noting that many of those debates are now settled, and those emotions spent. The first-generation learner of today is no aspiring Anglophile and does not even remotely see himself as a member of the Anglosphere. Neither does he consider Britain or even America as a natural cultural reference point. He sees English for what it is: a pathway to a better job, a better life and that intangible — social status.
Few native speakers of English can even comprehend what life must be on the other side of the tracks for the vast majority of their fellow Indians. Tridip Suhrud, Ahmedabad-based social scientist, calls “the desire to learn English the biggest aspiration for Indians today… like a passport to gain cultural confidence”. Yet, he acknowledges that in “the search of an elusive promise, we have devalued learning in other languages”.

It’s a vicious circle. There are too few technical manuals and textbooks in English. This ends up meaning there are too few who master technical manuals and textbooks in anything other than English, often making a hell-for-leather attempt to reach some familiarity with the language. The result: the incentive to produce more and better technical manuals and textbooks in English declines.

This is exactly the reasoning Girish Walimbe, the septuagenarian trustee of the Maharashtra Girls Education Society, Huzurpaga, Pune, offers. Founded by the social reformer Jyotiba Phule 127 years ago as a Marathi-medium institution that pioneered girls’ education in India, the school has an illustrious history.

Five years ago, the Huzurpaga school was forced to open an English-language affiliate as well. The demand was overwhelming. “I believe the medium of instruction should be one’s mother tongue,” says Walimbe, “but knowing English is the need of the hour. The world works that way. English is the key to acquiring technical education because there are no technical books available in regional languages.”

“Feed your child once a day if needed, but make sure he goes to an English school”: Ishtyaq Bhat, 27, seems to speak with a wisdom and cynicism beyond his age. Bhat owns a popular guest house and tour company in Srinagar called Lassa Bhat, named after his grandfather. The real-life Lassa Bhat ran a tea stall near the Dal Lake. His son, Shafi Bhat, opened two rooms of the family house to western tourists. However, that was as far he got; being illiterate, he could go no further in terms of communication.

In the 1990s, as the Valley was gripped by violence, the Bhats left for Goa where Shafi and his sister became the first in their family to go to school. Returning home, Shafi expanded the Lassa Bhat Guest House and built a new wing. His familiarity with English made it easy for him to win the trust of tourists from abroad and have them recommending the guest house. It wouldn’t have been possible without English. To Shafi’s mind, learning the language has been the game-changer in his life.

What if it hadn’t turned out this way? In his novel The Story of My Assassins, Tarun Tejpal, a senior journalist, has this percussive passage on a character’s unequal struggle with English:

“The arithmetic and algebra he could manage, and Hindi he was good at. But English, and every other subject — all of them taught in English — fried his brains. He was not alone in this. The entire school was full of boys whose brains were being detonated by Shakespeare and Dickens and Wordsworth and Tennyson and memoriam and daffodils and tiger tiger burning bright and solitary reapers and artful dodgers and thous and forsooths and the rhymes of ancient mariners. The first counter-attack Kabir M made on English was in Class IV when he learnt like the rest of his reeling mates to say, ‘Howdudo? Howdudo?’ The answer being: ‘Juslikeaduddoo! Juslikeaduddoo!’ It set the pattern for life for most of them. English was to be ambushed ruthlessly when and where the opportunity arose. Its soldiers were to be mangled, shot, amputated wherever they were spotted. Its emissaries to be captured and tortured. The enemy of English came at them from every direction: in the guise of forms to be filled, exams to be taken, interviews to be given, marriage proposals to be evaluated. The enemy English had a dwarfing weapon: it made instant lilliputs of them.”

Where are the weapons to slay this enemy forged? The English coaching, tuition and informal education industry must be one of India’s largest and most underreported services-sector businesses. For Amod Kumar Bhardwaj, 45, and chief executive of the Meerut-based American Institute of English Learning (AIEL), imparting training in spoken English has proved a goldmine. “I qualified after the written exam for the Combined Defence Services,” he says, beginning his back-story. “I was confident of a good career in the army. My hopes crashed during the interview because of my poor spoken English.” That motivated him to not just improve his English-speaking skills but, in 1991, to set up AIEL.

Bhardwaj sees AIEL as a sort of finishing school. After graduating from school or college or a technical institution, the student comes here to learn to use the English language in a manner of speaking, literally, and go on to a job. Over two decades, AIEL has coached thousands of students. Today, it has a franchise running in every single one of Uttar Pradesh’s 70 districts. “We have close to 100 centres,” he says.

In ‘A Story of Falling Behind’, their 2009 study of West Bengal, economists Bibek Debroy and Laveesh Bhandari examined the private tuition boom that encompassed “80 percent of middle-school children in rural West Bengal”. Quoting a 2006 survey conducted by the Amartya Sen-founded Pratichi Trust, Debroy and Bhandari wrote: “Even among poor children, the average annual incremental expenditure because of private tuition was around 1,000. Private tuition is an endemic part of the West Bengal education system. This can partly be dated to 1983, when in an attempt to ensure equity, the West Bengal government abolished teaching of English in primary schools for the government education system. This triggered demand for private tuitions, even among the poor.”

Raj Kishan, 36, an autorickshaw driver in New Delhi with origins in Motihari, Bihar, would nod in agreement. His seven-year-old daughter studies in Class II in a government school, but she still goes to two coaching classes a day. “One coaching class is exclusively for English and the other is for all subjects,” Kishan explains, “I pay Rs 400 a month for each. English coaching is separate because that madam doesn’t teach anything else.”

Kostubh Vohra, a fellow of Teach for India, is in charge of Class II in a private school for underprivileged children in New Delhi. Illiterate or moderately educated parents push their children to learn at least English, and this has led Vohra to adopt innovative methods to expand reading, writing and comprehension skills. “I use various applications on the iPad,” he points out. “They help in teaching phonetics and increase the children’s interest. There is an app called Read Aloud, which shows a word on screen as it is pronounced.”

To his pupils, English is the basic ingredient of fantasy: “I tell them that if they want to become space travellers or scientists or doctors, it is necessary to learn English. It is important because all technology is in English. There is a direct co-relation between English and jobs…”

A life removed from English can be a burden, even a blow and a confidence corroder. Champa Roy, 34 from Agartala, Tripura, had it all — a loving husband, two children and a degree in science. In 2011, her husband died and she decided to look for a job as a teacher.

“I tried my luck,” she says, “and would eventually get rejected everywhere as my spoken English was weak. I had studied in a Bengali-medium school… In testing times, I understood how important it was to at least have good spoken English skills. It really helps, while being a science graduate was of no help.” To her mind, familiarity with English scores over academic or scholastic qualifications.

Is that Macaulay’s vindication or the tragedy of his legacy? One can debate that, but the fact is, it’s contemporary India’s hard, blistering reality.

‘If Digged, 'Big Dam Scams' Could Be As Big As Coalgate’

By Uday Thakur / INN Live

Environmental journalist Urmi Bhattacharjee has released a research guide on dam-building in India. The report details the whole process of building dams on rivers, including their sanction and impact on life and livelihood. In conversation with INN Live, Bhattacharjee explains the politics of dams and the risks of building big dams without proper assessments.

Edited excerpts from an exclusive interview:

Bangladesh: A Second Liberation?

By M H Ahssan

If one is looking for a single sentence to sum up the significance of the results of the December 29, 2008, parliamentary elections in Bangladesh, it should read: this is a second liberation. The first one, on December 16, 1971, rid it of Pakistan’s colonial rule and the nightmare of genocide and mass rape unleashed by the Pakistani Army since the night of March 25 that year. The results of the December elections have liberated Bangladesh from an inexorable descent into Talibanesque social medievalism and a reign of terror unleashed by Islamist fundamentalists. The country now has a chance to return to the Liberation War’s legacy of secularism, modernity, gender and social justice, political democracy and cultural pluralism, and friendship with neighbouring countries, particularly India. This is precisely the path the voters wanted their country to take.

The verdict has been overwhelmingly decisive. The Awami League (AL) has won 230 of the 299 seats (out of a total of 300 seats in the Jatiya Sangsad or National Parliament) to which elections were held on December 29, and 49.2 per cent of the votes polled, as against 62 seats and 40.13 per cent, respectively, in the 2001 election. The Grand Alliance it spearheaded has won 262 seats, with the Jatiya Party accounting for 27 (against 14 in 2001) seats, with five going to ‘others’ in the coalition. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) of Begum Khaleda Zia, which won 193 seats in 2001, now has just 29, with its share of votes declining from 40.97 per cent to 32.74 per cent. Its principal ally in the Four-Party Alliance, Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh (JeI-B or Jamaat) has had its seats reduced from 17 to two.

The Jamaat, along with its student’s wing, Islami Chhatra Shibir (ICS or Shibir), constitute the matrix within which terrorist organizations like Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami Bangladesh (HuJI-B), Jamaat-ul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh (JMJB), and Ahle Hadith Andolan Bangladesh (AHAB), evolved. Leaders like Mufti Abdul Hannan and Bangla Bhai, aka Siddiqul Islam, Operations Commanders of the HuJI-B and JMJB respectively till their arrest and eventual executions, Abdur Rahman of JMB, Muhammad Asadullah al-Galib of AHAB graduated either from the Jamaat or the Shibir or both.

The JeI has suffered major blows in the recent election. Its Amir (chief), Matiur Rahman Nizami, General Secretary, Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid, and fire-eating stalwart, Delwar Hussain Saydee, have lost. It will, however, be foolish to believe that the party has been wiped out, or that the BNP has been hobbled permanently. Though the Jamaat has won only two seats, its share of votes polled has actually increased from 4.28 per cent in 2001 to 4.55 per cent in 2008. Besides, it has never been a dominant electoral force. Its strength lies in its huge economic empire which, as Professor Abul Barkat of Dhaka University has shown, yields an annual net profit of Taka 12 billion, at least 10 per cent of which is spent on organizational matters like holding regular party activity, running military training centres and maintaining about 500,000 party workers. As long as this empire, built with funds received from abroad during the 1970s and 1980s, remains intact, the JeI will continue to have the ability to make waves in Bangladesh’s politics as a highly-organised marginal force, which can tilt the balance whenever the AL’s popularity wanes.

Some of the entrepreneurial ventures linked to the Jamaat have also been funding terrorist activity. On April 5, 2006, Bangladesh Bank (the country’s Central Bank) had fined the Islami Bank Bangladesh Ltd., which is joined at the hip with the Jamaat, Taka 100,000 for hiding suspicious transactions by terrorists violating money-laundering laws. According to the report, this was the third time that the Islami Bank had been penalized for covering up terrorist activity. Many in Bangladesh believe that a thorough investigation into its functioning — as also that of other Jamaat enterprises — is bound to reveal the party’s, as well as the Shibir’s, umbilical ties with organizations like the HuJI-B, JMB, JMJB and AHAB, which, though banned, continue to be active.

JeI leaders’ denials of ties with Islamist terrorist outfits have always lacked credibility. Referring to the notorious terrorist, Bangla Bhai aka Siddiqul Islam, Operations Commander of JMJB, Motiur Rahman Nizami, then Bangladesh’s Industries Minister, had said at a Press Conference in Dhaka on July 22, 2004, that Bangla Bhai was "created by some newspapers as the Government has found no existence of him". Ali Ahsan Mohammed Mujahid, on the same occasion, stated that the Government would certainly take legal action against Bangla Bhai ‘if he was traced out’. Among others present at the Press Conference were the Jamaat’s Assistant Secretary General Kamaruzzaman, and leaders like Abdul Kader Mollah, ATM Azharul Islam and Nayeb-e-Ameer Maqbul Ahmed.

That Bangla Bhai was not a media creation was proved beyond doubt after he was arrested and, following a trial, hanged with six others, including Abdur Rahman, on March 29, 2007.

However, it is useful to note, also, that Sheikh Hasina did not take any significant action against the Jamaat during her previous tenure as Prime Minister from 1996 to 2001. In fact, she had even allied with the Jamaat in 1994 and 1995 to launch an agitation against Begum Khaleda Zia’s Government, demanding the establishment of a caretaker Government to hold parliamentary elections.

It is, perhaps, different now. Under relentless and often murderous attack, during the regime of the BNP-led coalition Government, of which Jamaat was a assertive partner, the AL now has reason to demand stringent action. Sheikh Hasina too is likely to listen.

She will also be under pressure to act against Jamaat leaders like Matiur Rahman Nizami and Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid, on another count — the promise in the Awami League’s manifesto for the parliamentary election to bring Bangladesh’s war criminals to justice. Both have been accused of war crimes along with several other leaders of the party. It will not be easy to bring them to book. Supporters of war criminals have become firmly entrenched in Bangladesh’s premier intelligence agency, the Directorate General of Forces’ Intelligence (DGFI), which has close links with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate. They, as well as their fellow travelers, who have infiltrated into the armed forces and civilian administration, will fight bitterly to frustrate the new Government’s efforts.

On her part, Sheikh Hasina will not be without support. The Sector Commanders’ Forum, an organization spearheaded by the sector commanders of the Mukti Bahini, during the 1971 Liberation War, has sustained an intense campaign for the trial and punishment of war criminals over the last two years. Thanks to them and efforts by the Muktijuddher Chetana Bastabayan O Ekattorer Ghatak Dalal Nirmul Jatiya Samanyay Committee (National Coordination Committee for the Realisation of the Consciousness of the Liberation War and the Eradication of the Killers and Agents of ‘Seventy One’), popularly known as Nirmul Committee, evidence will not be difficult to come by. Besides, Ian Martin, the United Nations Secretary General’s Special Envoy, has promised Sheikh Hasina, whom he met on January 1, 2009, to congratulate her on her victory, all help in bringing the war criminals to justice.

The question is of political will. Sheikh Hasina’s and the AL’s credibility will be severely dented if they are seen to be unable and/or unwilling to act firmly. Besides, war criminals, left alone, will try to stage a comeback and resume the campaign of murder and terror they had unleashed in Bangladesh between 2001 and 2006. Sheikh Hasina, who has survived several attempts on her life, including the grenade attack on a rally she was addressing in Dhaka on August 21, 2004, which left 24 persons dead, should have no illusion on the score. Besides acting against war criminals, she will also have to dismantle the Jamaat’s economic empire, which sustains the party’s activities and openly promotes a jihadi mindset.

The Sector Commander’s Forum has urged the incoming Government to begin the trial of the war criminals as soon as possible. In a statement on January 2, congratulating the AL-led Grand Alliance on their landslide victory, it said that the soul of the martyrs would remain unsatisfied and the sovereignty of the country insecure until the war criminals were tried.

The issue of the trial of war criminals has a significance that goes far beyond bringing to book people who have been involved in genocidal violence that cost the lives of three million people and involved the rape of 425,000 women, though that is monstrous enough. Those designated war criminals are also leaders of the Jamaat, the spawning ground and ideological fountainhead of Islamist terrorism in Bangladesh. Their trial and punishment will, consequently, help to neutralize the threat of a regression into near-anarchical violence and medievalism that still hangs over Bangladesh.

It will also, perhaps, help relations with India, which the Jamaat leaders have designated as Bangladesh’s enemy. This is clear from the Jamaat’s view on Bangladesh’s defence articulated by Abbas Ali Khan, who became its officiating Amir after it was revived in May 1979, after being banned in the wake of the country’s liberation. Khan writes in the party’s official website,

The very word defence raises the pertinent question, ‘defence against whom?’ Had there been several states around Bangladesh, the answer to this question might not be permanently the same. But as she is almost surrounded by one state, the answer can’t be but one. Whenever any kind of aggression comes it shall come from India alone. Consequently the psychology of the defence forces of Bangladesh must be anti-Indian. But only a negative feeling is not sufficient for developing this psychology to the spirit of highest sacrifice for the country. Nobody can deny that the Muslim sentiment or the Islamic spirit is the only positive element necessary for building up the correct and effective psychology of the defence forces. It is the spirit of jihad which can inspire them to sacrifice their life with the hope that they will be amply rewarded after death.

Understandably, relations between India and Bangladesh were tense during the entire period of the four-party coalition Government headed by Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, who is also bitterly hostile toward India and has never been averse to resorting to communal politics. A week before the elections, she had said urged voters campaigning in Sylhet, to vote for her alliance to "save Islam and the country", adding, further, "You will have to decide whether to cast your vote for setting up a puppet government for serving certain quarters at home and abroad, who had been conspiring against Bangladesh."

During Begum Zia’s second innings as Prime Minister, Bangladesh continued to provide sanctuary, training, and assistance to terrorist outfits of northeastern India, prominently including the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) and the All-Tripura Tiger Force (ATTF). Her Government had arbitrarily rejected lists of terrorist camps provided by India, stating that the latter did not exist, and had allowed wanted terrorists like Anup Chetia, Arabinda Rajkhowa and Paresh Baruah of the ULFA to move about freely and acquire massive business interests in Bangladesh. The country had also emerged, during her second tenure as Prime Minister, as a major staging ground for cross-border terrorist strikes in India, with the HuJI-B having a hand in most attacks since 2002.

In response to a question from an Indian journalist, Sheikh Hasina stated, at a Press Conference on December 31, that Bangladesh would not allow any terrorist outfit to use its soil (for attacks) against any country, including India. She also proposed the establishment of a joint task force by South Asian countries for combined action against terrorism. While nobody will question her intentions, her ability to deliver remains to be seen. She had closed down some camps of North-East Indian insurgent groups in Bangladesh after taking over as Prime Minister in 1996. But these had reopened not long thereafter, while she remained in power. Sources close to her had told this writer at that time that her hand was forced by a section of the Army and the DGFI – which may well have been the case. Both had acquired a very sizeable component of pro-Pakistan fundamentalist Islamist elements during the 15 years of thinly-disguised military rule in Bangladesh, from the end of 1975 to the beginning of 1991, when Khaleda Zia became Prime Minister for the first time. The latter’s tenure as Prime Minister, from 1991 to 1996, had seen a further consolidation of these elements, which Sheikh Hasina could only contain up to a point, and not fully curb, when she was Prime Minister from 1996 to 2001.

A part of the reason lay in the fact that the ISI was riding high. Having coordinated the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union on behalf of the United States, it had, in cooperation with the CIA and the transport mafia of Quetta, set up the Taliban in 1994. Given the background of the murder of her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and her entire family in 1975, barring her and her sister Rehana, who were not then in Bangladesh, Shiekh Hasina might well have hesitated to take on Pakistani elements in the Army and the DGFI, which were closely linked to Pakistan.

The regional and international canvas is different now. Post 9/11, the United States has declared war on al Qaeda and the Taliban. The ISI, which has spawned Islamist terrorist outfits like the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), and which has close links with al Qaeda and Taliban, is no longer the CIA’s blue-eyed boy. Sheikh Hasina will have extensive global support if she takes on Islamist terrorist organizations in Bangladesh linked to al Qaeda and Taliban. Indeed, it was pressure from the United States and the European Union countries which had forced Begum Zia to act against the JMJB, JMB and AHAB in February 2005 and the HuJI-B several months later. Also, but for international pressure the Army-backed Caretaker Government would not have come into being on January 11, 2007; nor would it, perhaps, have held the elections on December 29.

Sheikh Hasina is now clearly in a position not only to act against Islamist terrorists but even to cleanse the Army and the DGFI of elements favouring the Taliban, al Qaeda and their local franchise holders, and who are linked with the ISI. Many in Bangladesh have lauded Sheikh Hasina’s holding out the proverbial olive branch to the BNP by offering it the post of Deputy Speaker and a share in ministerial appointments; others advocate, albeit sotto voce, caution, recalling the general amnesty Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had proclaimed on November 30, 1973, which had enabled war criminals, including those convicted and sentenced, to come out from jails and the woodwork, to work surreptitiously for a revival of pro-Pakistan and fundamentalist politics. History rarely forgives those who fail to be firm when they need to.

A stern approach toward jihadi groups that use Bangladesh’s territory to mount terrorist attacks against India, and send agents and arms across the porous India-Bangladesh border, will go a long way in creating a climate in which all outstanding issues between the two countries can be sorted out; so will the withdrawal of sanctuary and assistance so long given to Indian insurgent groups. This applies particularly to the issue of illegal migration from Bangladesh which has acquired a sharp and bitter edge because of the cover it provides to infiltration by terrorists and smuggling of arms and money, and because of the ISI’s known plan to carve out a Muslim-majority state comprising parts of north-eastern India, Myanmar and Bangladesh.

Of course, it will not be easy to resolve these issues. But a beginning can be made with Bangladesh’s recognition of the existence of the problems, which it has been denying so far. This will require extraordinary political will. But so will effectively dealing with the terrorist groups and their patrons, cleansing the administration of corruption and worse, coping with continuing price rise, and the global meltdown that can hit the country particularly hard because of its dependence on the export of ready-made garments to the West and remittances from non-resident Bangladeshis. Accelerated economic cooperation with India, which is likely to be hurt far less, can provide Bangladesh with a much-needed cushion.

There is no reason why this should not come about, given the huge reservoir of goodwill that exists for Sheikh Hasina in India. But she must address New Delhi’s concerns as well, particularly since most of these affect her own and Bangladesh’s well-being as well. The stage is now set for scripting a new scenario of friendship and cooperation between India and Bangladesh. It will be great pity if the play turns into a tragedy.

Crucial Lok Sabha battle - A Hung House looms large

By M H Ahssan

By all accounts, Lok Sabha polls 2009 guarantee a totally fractured verdict that would make government-formation a most daunting task. The task will be daunting because the divisive process will then turn into a ruthless, remorseless numbers game.

The 15th Lok Sabha poll will go down in our parliamentary democracy's annals for the churning - that mythological amrit manthan - by the most divided polity since independence. What kind of visha the churning will produce is difficult to say. There is no Lord Shiva to consume it and save the nation. But this poll guarantees a totally fractured verdict that would make government-formation a most daunting task. The task will be daunting because the divisive process will then turn into a ruthless, remorseless numbers game.

What the country is witnessing in the run-up to the poll, which is most likely to continue post-poll, is amoral politics at its best. The Aya Ram Gaya Ram process that made the late 1960s notorious may well seems like juvenile pranks, what with money power now in full play.

Why is one compelled to draw such a gloomy picture? Not because of the emergence of the regional parties. Also, not because of the rise of the Dalits and those who have been denied their share of power. This twin process has to be accepted and respected.

What is difficult to digest is the approach to politics - of just about everyone demanding a pound of flesh of just every other satrap brazenly trying to be the king or the queen or kingmaker or queenmaker. All norms, all rules are being flouted. All values and virtues are being thrown to the winds as the country prepares to go to the polls.

This has fractured the polity. From a group of national parties, we have moved to two alliances led by national parties with regional allies. There is not even pretence of confidence in reaching out to the entire nation for votes. A party or alliance with nationwide reach and leaders with nationwide appeal is simply missing.

From single parties going to the polls, we are having alliances going to the polls. From two alliances we have witnessed a graduation of sorts to three alliances. And none of the three alliances has the nationwide sweep.

A vast country that once looked a single political entity seems like a conglomerate of states and regions with conflicting interests. People are sought to be divided as per their caste, religion and region. And none is sorry about it - not the players at least.

As the poll process began after the Budget Session of Parliament was completed, the first signs came from three states - Bihar, Orissa and West Bengal. In Orissa, Biju Janata Dal (BJD) ditched its senior partner Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), giving a setback not only to the BJP but also to the National Democratic Alliance (NDA).

In Bihar, two of the staunchest constituents of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) of Lalu Prasad and Lok Janashakti Party (LJP) of Ram Vilas Paswan, cocked a snook at senior partner Congress. What happened to BJP and NDA in Orissa, happened to the Congress and the UPA in the more populous Bihar.

In West Bengal, the Congress finally decided to confront the Left Front. It struck an alliance with Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress, giving her double the number of seats and accepting her as the senior partner. The Congress move has two-fold consequence: it has reduced its own prospects of winning more seats in West Bengal and more important, it has made things more difficult for the Left Front. A Congress-Mamata alliance is a formidable one in terms of political support base and could hurt the Left. With only the tiny Tripura as a safe base, the Left cannot hope to repeat its performance of 2004 poll, since it has ruined its own chances in Kerala where in-fighting within the CPM is rampant and suicidal. This reduces chances of a post-poll alliance of the UPA (or whatever that will be left of it) with the Left parties. The Left support to any move to keep the NDA out of power shall remain crucial.

The NDA too loses out on many fronts - the loss of the Orissa bastion, the parting of ways with Mamata Banerjee and with Telugu Desam Party that supported it from outside.

The NDA, reduced from the mighty 24 constituents in 2004 to just ten, can have the consolation prizes like Ajit Singh in Uttar Pradesh and Asom Gana Parishad in Assam. But they could be crucial, provided they win, when each vote will matter after the poll.

As for the Third Front, the ragtag combine midwifed by the Left has been shunned by the likes of Mayawati and Jayalalithaa. For the rest, it remains a loose conglomerate of parties rejected by the electorates in their states and leaders with overarching ambitions.

Whoever said that it is never-saydie in politics must have meant the likes of Om Prakash Chautala and Bhajan Lal and above all, H D Deve Gowda, whose greed for power and love for his sons paved the way for the BJP rule in Karnataka.

The Left is running around like a chicken with its head cut off. It must oppose BJP/NDA ideologically, but must also oppose the Congress/UPA politically. The CPM manifesto promises to undo the defence relations with the US and review the civil nuclear treaty - further reducing its own acceptance at home and in the fast-moving globalised world community. The political travesty, if one may call it, is the statement of CPM leader Prakash Karat that post poll, the Congress can seek support from, or lend support to, the Third Front. This, when even Marxist patriarch Jyoti Basu is not sure of its success.

Only the results will show who the dog is and who will wag its tail. If the CPM has to contend with serious infighting between Kerala Chief Minister Achuthanandan and Peenarayi Vijayan, the BJP had anxious moments when Arun Jaitley, assigned to coordinate the entire campaign, sulked and stayed away from meetings to display his unhappiness at the appointment of Sudhanshu Mittal, essentially a moneybag and a fixer, as coconvener for Northeast states. ThatJaitley had to climb down and Mittal did get the charge of the North-east assigned to him indicates that BJP has to contend with its dirty linen being washed in public.

BJP's woe became acute when Varun Gandhi who it hopes would some day take on cousin Rahul, botched up his electoral chances by making inflammatory speeches. The party had for long contended with the estranged 'bahu' of the Gandhi family, Maneka, but had to distance itself from Varun when the Election Commission took a serious view of his utterances.

Samajwadi Party supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav also had to contend with a recalcitrant Mohammed Azam Khan. So much so that Yadav had to publicly say that he would go and meet Khan to assuage his hurt feelings.

People switching sides when denied party nomination is the done thing in Indian politics.

Two of the more glaring examples were Nationalist Congress Party's Jaisingrao Gaekwad Patil, who joined Shiv Sena and Congress' Bhavsinh Rathod who joined BJP and got the ticket to contest the Patan seat.

There is a plethora of prime ministerial candidates. Sonia Gandhi has said that Dr Manmohan Singh would be the prime minister after the election. The BJP anointed L K Advani for the post many months ago.

An indication of Lalu Prasad- Paswan alliance was available when Paswan jauntily threw his hat in the prime ministerial ring and Lalu enthusiastically welcomed it. But the Congress, as Paswan later said, never took him seriously. That the two were moving to stall the rise of Mayawati was an open secret. This explains why Mayawati has stuck to her no-pre-poll alliance stand. She rejected overtures from the Third Front leaders like Chandrababu Naidu. This leaves a flicker of hope for Deve Gowda.

Sharad Pawar, the prime ministerial candidate since 1991 (he lost to P V Narasimha Rao) first got his party, NCP, to 'authorise' him to work for the top job. This got support from Shiv Sena that demanded a Maharashtrian prime minister. Both were playing up to their rivals: Pawar to the Congress and Bal Thackeray to the BJP. They succeeded in causing turmoil within both UPA and NDA. It was only after BJP stitched up its alliance with the Sena that Pawar changed the tune to say that he was aware of his 'limitations' and that anyone with a dozen MPs could not just catapult himself/herself to the prime minister's gaddi.

Another person with burning ambitions, but aware of her 'limitations' without admitting so, is Jayalalithaa. She does not have a single member in the 14th Lok Sabha and did not want to queer the pitch with her allies in her do-or-die fight with rival M. Karunanidhi. After the Third Front decided that it would go to the poll without a prime ministerial candidate, apparently a Left stipulation, Jayalalithaa said that she was not in the race "as of now."

The only person who has no qualms about being "in the race" is Mayawati who thinks she can do it single-handedly. A good omen for her was the break-down of the Congress-Samajwadi alliance in Uttar Pradesh. Much would depend on how many seats she gets in UP and how many more in other states where she is putting up a large number of candidates. For the moment, Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party seems to be the only 'national' party ready to take on one and all. There is no sign of dissension and money is not a problem. How the one-woman army handles this battle in a vast terrain remains to be seen. The general perception is that, if not the queen herself, she may end up being the king/queen maker. Even that would give her a position of pre eminence.

UPA Anti-Terror ‘Strategy’: When Doing Nothing Looks Like Success

According to the South Asia Terrorism expertise database, terrorism and insurgency-related fatalities in India have fallen from a peak of 5,839 in 2001 to 804 in 2012. Indeed, the decline has been sustained in each year since 2001, with a significant reversal of the trend only in 2005, and a marginal reversal in 2008.

The most dramatic drop has, of course, been in Jammu and Kashmir, for long the country’s worst insurgency, which witnessed a collapse from 4,507 fatalities in 2001 to 117 in 2012 (down from 183 in 2011, and 375 in 2010).

For a while, it appeared that a rampaging Maoist rebellion would escalate to fill up the gap, as fatalities surged from 675 in 2005 to 1,180 in 2010. Worse, the Maoists appeared to be expanding their theatres of operation at an unprecedented pace, confronting India with the most widespread insurgency of its Independent history. By 2010, 223 districts (out of a total of 636) in 20 states were thought to be affected by varying levels of Maoist ‘activity’, though only some 65 of these witnessed any recurrent violence. But the Maoist insurgency also appears to be in retreat. Total fatalities in Maoist violence dropped to 367 in 2012, even as the number of afflicted districts shrank to 173.

The broad trends in the chronically-troubled North-east have also been salubrious, with total fatalities declining from a recent peak of 1,051 in 2005 to 317 in 2012. Disturbing proclivities, however, do persist. The Maoists have extended their presence into this unstable region and are creating new partnerships with its fractious and collapsing insurgencies.

Some states, most prominently including Manipur, see a cyclical trend in violence. So, while fatalities were down to 190 in 2002, they rose almost steadily thereafter, to 485 in 2008, dropping to just 65 in 2011, and rising, again, to 111 in 2012. Fratricidal turf wars between various rebel Naga factions have also seen a spike in killings in this state, from 15 in 2011, to 65 in 2012.

Attacks by Pakistan-backed Islamist terrorists across India recorded a remarkable decline, with just one incident in 2012 outside J&K – a low intensity blast in Pune. 2011 had registered three such attacks outside J&K, with at least 42 killed. 2008, of course, saw such incidents peaking, with seven attacks, and 364 fatalities, of which 195 (166 civilians, 20 SF personnel and nine terrorists) were accounted for by the 26/11 Mumbai terror attack alone.

It is natural, in the present circumstances, to attribute this broad trend towards internal security stabilisation – at least in part – to state policy. The argument, crudely put, is that the government must be doing something that is right if all our insurgencies are collapsing, and Pakistan-backed Islamist terrorists are in evident retreat, both in J&K and across the rest of the country. Such an assessment, the argument goes, cannot be undermined by an occasional attack, such as the 21 February 2013, twin blasts in Hyderabad, which killed 16.

Indeed, some supporters of the present United Progressive Alliance (UPA) regime have sought to interpret the contrast between insurgency-terrorism-related fatalities under the preceding National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government and the current trend as evidence of the great sagacity of strategy and policy that the former has brought to internal security management.

Curiously, as an aside, it is interesting to notice that, on the one hand, the government and its supporters argue that declines in violence are the result of the ‘success’ of ‘policies’ and ‘strategies’ (neither of which appear to have been defined in any distinctive terms, or to have been implemented on any measurable parameters); on the other, at the first sign of trouble – the Hyderabad blasts, for instance – they insist that it is necessary to create the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) if terrorism has to be fought successfully.

But if recent improvements in trends are the consequences of ‘good policies and strategies’ – obviously implemented by existing institutions – the NCTC is, evidently, not necessary. On the other hand, if the NCTC is, indeed, necessary, then the declines in terrorist violence would need to be attributed, not to any great strategic coherence or operational effectiveness, but to extraneous factors for which the government cannot claim credit.

The Hyderabad blasts, in fact, tell us precisely that our vulnerabilities remain undiminished, and that it is in a wide range of other factors – and not in any spectacular augmentation of state capacities and capabilities, or any impressive evolution of national strategy – that we would find explanations of the broad decline of insurgent and terrorist violence in India.

This is not to say that the state and its agencies have done nothing, or that there has been no capacity augmentation. Rather, what is being done does not constitute any radical departure from what was being done earlier – with very limited impact – and capacity augmentations have been far too modest to register any remarkable improvement in efficiency and effectiveness of CI-CT capabilities and responses.

To take one obvious and visible parameter, between 2008 (the year of the 26/11 attacks) and 2011 (the last year for which credible data is available) the police-population ratio rose from 128 to just 137; significant, of course, but nowhere near the strengths required even for peacetime policing – which, on international estimates, should range well above 220 per 100,000.

Various institutional innovations, prominently including the Multi Agency Centre (MAC) and the Joint Task Force on Intelligence (JTFI) in the IB, and the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS), which were to provide the core of augmented CI-CT capabilities, remain mere shells, years after they were sanctioned, with no measurable impact on ground level capabilities of the state.

Of course, state and central agencies have made continuous arrests and have successfully identified and neutralised a wide range of the state’s enemies on a fairly regular basis. However, such preventive operations and arrests were also carried out when violence was rising, and there is no evidence to suggest that the plummeting trends in insurgent and terrorist violence are the consequence of extraordinary operational efficacy.

It is, indeed, safe to say that, in the main – though not in their entirety – the improvements in India’s internal security environment are consequences of factors extraneous to the strategies, policies and actions of the state and its agencies; unless, of course, an attitude of majestic indolence can be regarded as ‘strategy’, ‘policy’ or ‘action’. It would, in fact, not be far from the truth to say that India has, more often than not, simply worn out its enemies by its indifference, than defeated them by the vigour and sagacity of its responses.

There are, of course, exceptions to this broad observation – Punjab, Tripura and Andhra Pradesh provide dramatic examples of what the state and its agencies can do when they actually find the clarity of purpose and the determination. But the lessons of these theatres have largely been ignored in a muddled discourse on ‘developmental’ and ‘political’ solutions, and by those who have given vent to immature anti-Maoist fantasies on ‘clear, hold and develop’, or to theatrical institutional innovations such as the NCTC, to the abiding neglect of the nuts and bolts of capacities and capabilities of the country’s intelligence and policing apparatus on the ground.

It is not a coincidence that the sustained reversal in terrorism-insurgency trends commenced after 2001. The 9/11 attacks in the US signalled the beginning of a new age in which the opportunistic ‘tolerance of terrorism’ that had marked the attitudes of the West was brought to an end. The enveloping global environment became abruptly hostile to those who used extreme violence to secure their political ends, and to the states that sponsored them.

The attacks of 9/11 also brought the massive US-led Western intervention in Afghanistan, and its gradual impact on the wider AfPak region. The result was progressively rising pressure on the Pakistani covert establishment to end at least visible levels of support to terrorism on India soil, as well as the impact of escalating domestic destabilisation that came to afflict Pakistan as a result of the ‘blowback’ of its support to international terrorism and its campaigns in Afghanistan.

A shift in Pakistan’s strategic priorities, towards the more urgent imperatives of its campaigns in Afghanistan, and away from Kashmir and India, further weakened India-directed terrorist impulses, providing tremendous relief, particularly in J&K. It remains the case, however, that Pakistan has kept anti-India terrorist formations of various hues alive and in reserve, hoping that a Western withdrawal from the region will reopen opportunities for a renewal of its Indian campaign.

The collapse of the regime of ‘tolerance of terrorism’ had it wider impact on other insurgencies in India. It was in December 2003 that the multiple insurgencies of India’s North-east received their first body blow, when the groups – led by the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) – were expelled from Bhutanese soil, where they had received safe haven for years. After 2007, the environment became hostile in Bangladesh as well, and after the Sheikh Hasina Wajed government came to power in 2009, Bangladesh intensified action against the North-east insurgent groups and even dismantled the structure of Islamist extremist and terrorist groupings that had crystallised on its soil.

Large proportions of the North-east insurgent leadership were simply handed over to Indian authorities. Others found surrender or negotiations with the state more attractive, against the now-rising uncertainties of a fugitive life. The degraded insurgencies of the North-east are now also afflicted by an exhaustion brought about by the protracted and ponderous insensitivities of the Indian state.

Significantly, as the West grew more intolerant of their antics, insurgent groupings have been finding it difficult to secure some measure of political and propaganda space abroad, even as many of their domestic apologists have started running out of enthusiasm in the face of rising criticism. This has certainly blunted recruitment potential and the political space for extremism, once again, eroding prospects of insurgent mobilisation.

The Maoists remained substantially insulated from these developments. Reinvigorated by the merger of the People’s War Group and the Maoist Communist Centre in September 2004, the newly formed Communist Party of India – Maoist (CPI-Maoist) embarked on an ambitious adventure to “extend the people’s war throughout the country”. Over the succeeding six years, they expanded into regions that were far from the population, geographical, administrative and developmental profile of the Red Corridor areas where they had found their natural habitat.

This was a tremendous strategic miscalculation, exposing them to the obvious risks of penetration during a phase of rapid expansion, compounded by the fact that these regions were much better connected, better serviced and (relatively) better administered. The result was that the Maoists suffered massive leadership losses – for instance, at least 18 members of the 39-member Central Committee of 2007 were arrested or killed during this phase. An overwhelming proportion of these losses were far afield, in urban centres and in states where the Maoists were making tentative forays to set up their networks, and not, with only occasion exception, as a result of the vaunting ‘clear, hold and develop’, or ‘cordon and search’ operations that the Centre launched in 2009 – and that came to a virtual and abrupt end with the Chintalnar massacre of April 2010.

Much of the Maoist escalation during the 2009-10 phase was, in fact, a retaliation against the Centre’s decision to challenge them in their areas of strength, though the pre-election mischief in West Bengal also gave them space for dramatic intensification in that state. Nevertheless, it is the leadership losses that have now forced the Maoists into a tactical retreat and an effort to reconsolidate their bases in their areas of strength – the Red Corridor.

Right to the end of his tenure as Union Home Minister, P Chidambaram had repeatedly stated that, despite the enormous investments and institutional transformations he took credit for, “all of India’s cities” remained vulnerable to terrorist attack. This would be a fairly correct assessment of the overall situation even now – we remain as vulnerable today as we were on 26/11, or as our forces were at Chintalnar.

It is true that our enemies have weakened – some temporarily, some more permanently; but it would be wrong to believe that we have become significantly stronger.