Memory Loss & Office of The Taliban.

OCT 29, 2001: President George Bush recently boasted: "When I take action, I'm not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It's going to be decisive." President Bush should know that there are no targets in Afghanistan that will give his missiles their money's worth. Perhaps, if only to balance his books, he should develop some cheaper missiles to use on cheaper targets and cheaper lives in the poor countries of the world. But then, that may not make good business sense to the Coalition's weapons manufacturers. It wouldn't make any sense at all, for example, to the Carlyle Group—described by the Industry Standard as 'the world's largest private equity firm', with $12 billion under management. Carlyle invests in the defence sector and makes its money from military conflicts and weapons spending. Carlyle is run by men with impeccable credentials. Former US defence secretary Frank Carlucci is Carlyle's chairman and managing director (he was a college roommate of Donald Rumsfeld's). Carlyle's other partners include former US secretary of state James A. Baker III, George Soros, Fred Malek (George Bush Sr's campaign manager). An American paper—the Baltimore Chronicle and Sentinel—says that former President George Bush Sr is reported to be seeking investments for the Carlyle Group from Asian markets. He is reportedly paid not inconsiderable sums of money to make 'presentations' to potential government-clients. Ho Hum. As the tired saying goes, it's all in the family. Then there's that other branch of traditional family business—oil. Remember, President George Bush (Jr) and Vice-President Dick Cheney both made their fortunes working in the US oil industry. Turkmenistan, which borders the northwest of Afghanistan, holds the world's third largest gas reserves and an estimated six billion barrels of oil reserves. Enough, experts say, to meet American energy needs for the next 30 years (or a developing country's energy requirements for a couple of centuries.) America has always viewed oil as a security consideration, and protected it by any means it deems necessary. Few of us doubt that its military presence in the Gulf has little to do with its concern for human rights and almost entirely to do with its strategic interest in oil. Oil and gas from the Caspian region currently moves northward to European markets. Geographically and politically, Iran and Russia are major impediments to American interests. In 1998, Dick Cheney—then CEO of Halliburton, a major player in the oil industry—said: "I can't think of a time when we've had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian. It's almost as if the opportunities have arisen overnight." True enough. For some years now, an American oil giant called Unocal has been negotiating with the Taliban for permission to construct an oil pipeline through Afghanistan to Pakistan and out to the Arabian Sea. From here, Unocal hopes to access the lucrative 'emerging markets' in South and Southeast Asia. In December 1997, a delegation of Taliban mullahs travelled to America and even met US State Department officials and Unocal executives in Houston.At that time the Taliban's taste for public executions and its treatment of Afghan women were not made out to be the crimes against humanity that they are now. Over the next six months, pressure from hundreds of outraged American feminist groups was brought to bear on the Clinton administration. Fortunately, they managed to scuttle the deal. And now comes the US oil industry's big chance. REFERENCE: OCT 29, 2001 FRONTLINES War Is Peace The world doesn't have to choose between the Taliban and the US government. All the beauty of the world—literature, music, art—lies between these two fundamentalist poles. BY ARUNDHATI ROY http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?213547

Taliban Diplomat Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi with Charlie Rose (2001)

 

Taliban Diplomat Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi with... by SalimJanMazari

April 25th, 2009 US created Taliban and abandoned Pakistan, says Hillary WASHINGTON, April 24 Two days of continuous congressional hearings on the Obama administration`s foreign policy brought a rare concession from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who acknowledged that the United States too had a share in creating the problem that plagues Pakistan today. In an appearance before a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee on Thursday, Mrs Clinton explained how the militancy in Pakistan was linked to the US-backed proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. “We can point fingers at the Pakistanis. I did some yesterday frankly. And it`s merited because we are wondering why they just don`t go out there and deal with these people,” said Mrs Clinton while referring to an earlier hearing in which she said that Pakistan posed a “mortal threat” to the world. “But the problems we face now to some extent we have to take responsibility for, having contributed to it. We also have a history of kind of moving in and out of Pakistan,” she said. “Let`s remember here… the people we are fighting today we funded them twenty years ago… and we did it because we were locked in a struggle with the Soviet Union. “They invaded Afghanistan… and we did not want to see them control Central Asia and we went to work… and it was President Reagan in partnership with Congress led by Democrats who said you know what it sounds like a pretty good idea… let`s deal with the ISI and the Pakistan military and let`s go recruit these mujahideen. “And great, let them come from Saudi Arabia and other countries, importing their Wahabi brand of Islam so that we can go beat the Soviet Union. “And guess what … they (Soviets) retreated … they lost billions of dollars and it led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. “So there is a very strong argument which is… it wasn`t a bad investment in terms of Soviet Union but let`s be careful with what we sow… because we will harvest. “So we then left Pakistan … We said okay fine you deal with the Stingers that we left all over your country… you deal with the mines that are along the border and… by the way we don`t want to have anything to do with you… in fact we`re sanctioning you… So we stopped dealing with the Pakistani military and with ISI and we now are making up for a lot of lost time.” It was question from Congressman Adam Shciff, a California Democrat that spurred Secretary Clinton to delve into history and come out with an answer that other US politicians have avoided in the past. The congressman noted that while the US had provided “a phenomenal amount of military support for Pakistan,” they had not changed the paradigm. “And more pernicious, there are elements within the Pakistani intelligence services, the ISI that may be working at cross-purposes with us. “How we can possibly be funding the Pakistani military if elements of the military or intelligence services are actually working against us and having the effect of killing our troops next door?” he asked. REFERENCE: US created Taliban and abandoned Pakistan, says Hillary By Anwar Iqbal April 25th, 2009 http://archives.dawn.com/archives/33371

 2013: Ulema urge govt, Taliban to stop fighting ISLAMABAD: Ulema and representatives of various religious seminaries functioning under Wafaqul Madaris expressed concern on Monday over the “civil war-like situation” in the country and appealed to both the government and the Taliban to observe a “complete ceasefire” till the completion of the process of talks. The appeal was made in a joint statement issued after a “consultative meeting” of the Ulema and teachers of seminaries held at a hotel. It was presided over by Wafaqul Madaris chief Maulana Salimullah Khan. Abdul Quddoos, the spokesman for Wafaqul Madaris, a conglomerate of seminaries of Deobandi school of thought, said it was a routine “consultative meeting” to discuss the prevailing situation in the country and that was why the media had not been invited to cover the event or for a press briefing. In reply to a question, he said the organisation wanted to play a mediatory role in the peace process, but at the same time it was mindful of the past when the establishment “used our shoulders, but ultimately did what it had already decided”. Mr Quddoos recalled that Wafaqul Madaris played a mediatory role during the Lal Masjid episode in 2007 and later in Swat, but on both the occasions its efforts went in vain because of the use of military force. “This time we don’t want to put our reputation at stake.” The meeting was attended by Mufti-i-Azam Pakistan Mufti Muhammad Rafi Usmani, Sheikhul Islam Maulana Mufti Muhammad Taqi Usmani, head of Jamia Uloomul Islamia Binnori Town Maulana Dr Abdul Razzaq Iskandar, Maulana Fazal Muhammad, Maulana Sher Ali Shah of Jamia Haqqania, spiritual leader from tribal areas Maulana Mufti Mukhtaruddin Shah, Mufti Syed Adnan Kakakhel and Mufti Abu Labab of Jamiatur Rasheed, Maulana Muhammad Hassan of Jamia Madina Lahore and Secretary General of Wafaqul Madaris Maulana Qari Muhammad Hanif Jalandhary. REFERENCE: Ulema urge govt, Taliban to stop fighting BY AMIR WASIM 2013-10-01 07:27:27 http://dawn.com/news/1046606/ulema-urge-govt-taliban-to-stop-fighting

Analysis of Peace Agreements with Militants by Sohail Habib Tajik http://www.scribd.com/doc/173585821/Analysis-of-Peace-Agreements-with-Militants-by-Sohail-Habib-Tajik

Analysis of Peace Agreements with Militants by Sohail Habib Tajik by Aamir Mughal

2007: Maulana Hassan Jan shot dead in Peshawar Maulana Hassan Jan was a top religious leader who was respected among the followers of every sect. Maulana Hasan Jan was regarded as a friend of Taliban chief Mullah Omar. He was in a group of Pakistani scholars who traveled to Afghanistan in late 2001 in an attempt to convince Omar that he should expel Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan to avoid American attacks. Omar rejected the plea and a U.S.-led invasion later ousted the Taliban from power. REFERENCE: Maulana Hassan Jan shot dead in Peshawar BY Javed Aziz Khan Sunday, September 16, 2007 http://www.thenews.com.pk/TodaysPrintDetail.aspx?ID=10136&Cat=13&dt=9/16/2007

2005 Major weapons cache, ‘spy Drone’ found: Operation in N. Waziristan PESHAWAR, Sept 13: Security forces have captured 21 militants in a major military operation in North Waziristan, Peshawar Corps Commander Lt-Gen Safdar Hussain said on Tuesday. The search operation, the biggest in North Waziristan, also yielded a huge cache of arms and ammunition, communication equipment and a remote-controlled Drone, he told a news briefing here. The Chinese-made remote-piloted vehicle was used by militants to spy on army movements and positions in the region, the corps commander said. He said the small aircraft had a wide-angle camera underneath its belly to take pictures of targets on the ground. He showed to journalists sophisticated radio equipment used to transmit instructions to fighters in Afghanistan in Darri and Arabic. He also showed a compact disc that, he said, contained information on positions of troops in the mountainous tribal region. Also on display were hundreds of video CDs, training manuals in Arabic, instructions on how to make bombs and explosive devices and frequency modules. There were also maps and handwritten notes in Russian, apparently for militants from Central Asian republics, passports, including one of a Jordanian national, and a suicide jacket with shoulder straps and trigger hooks. “I can say it now with certainty that we have broken the back of Al Qaeda and terrorists in the entire tribal region. This was a place which served as an Al Qaeda base from where they would control and coordinate operations. We have destroyed the base. This is our contribution to the war on terrorism,” the commander said. Lt-Gen Hussain said the action was taken after security forces intercepted certain documents during routine search at a checkpoint, including a message from a local cleric, Maulana Sadiq Noor, about procurement of ammunition for ‘jihad’ and possible military targets. He said that one of those arrested was a relative of Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam MNA from Miramshah, Maulana Nek Zaman. He alleged that the MNA was indirectly involved in abetting terrorism and warned that appropriate legal action would be taken if more evidence was found against him. Maulana Zaman denied that he was related to the accused, Sadiq Noor. The commander said 21 people had been arrested during the ongoing military operations in Janikhel, Dandi Darpakhel and Mirali, many of them Afghans, including those involved in making improvised explosive devices. He disclosed that a government employee had also been arrested but his name and designation would not be released until investigations were completed. He said a stenographer of an administrative officer in Miramshah had been arrested for leaking sensitive information to militants. He said another raid had been conducted on the Abu Shuaib Madressah, whose administrator Maulana Amir Hamza was in custody of the security forces. JIHADIS’ 0FFICES: The corps commander acknowledge the existence of offices in Makin, South Waziristan, to recruit ‘mujahideen’ for ‘Jihad’ in Afghanistan but said that those belonged to tribal militant Abdullah Mehsud. But, he said, the recruitment was aimed at creating a situation in the tribal region to ‘discredit’ Baitullah Mehsud, the overall commander of the mujahideen in South Waziristan, whom Lt-Gen Hussain called a ‘soldier of peace’. “Abdullah Mehsud is a thug. It is only a matter of time before he meets his fate.” He avoided answering questions about mujahideen recruitment offices in Wana bazaar. TARGET KILLINGS: The commander did not agree with the impression that incidents of target killings of pro-government tribesmen were increasing in South Waziristan. He said that out of 58 incidents of so-called targeted killings, only eight were of pro-government or pro-army tribesmen. The rest, he claimed, had fallen prey to family or tribal feuds. STRIKE: Clerical staff in the office of the political administration in Miramshah went on a strike on Tuesday to demand release of Moharrars Rasul Hakim and Haji Feroz, who have been taken into custody by security forces for leaking sensitive information to militants. REFERENCE: Major weapons cache, ‘spy Drone’ found: Operation in N. Waziristan by ISMAIL KHAN 2005-09-14 http://beta.dawn.com/news/156608/major-weapons-cache-spy-drone-found-operation-in-n-waziristan

2004 ‘Mufti Shamzai was warned by the tribal militants’ LAHORE: Militants had warned Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai not to come to South Waziristan on a government-sponsored peace mission in the area, sources told Daily Times. “Shamzai’s visit to South Waziristan was scheduled for June 1, two days after his assassination,” said a religious leader on condition of anonymity. Shamzai also persuaded Tehrik Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Muhammadi (TNSM) workers to end their protest when they blocked the Karakorom Highway in October 2001. Certain jihadi outfits were unhappy with Shamzai playing the role of a peacemaker and he had come in for a lot of criticism from them. Sources said that Shamzai was held in the highest esteem by jihadi circles despite opposition to his role in ending TNSM workers’ protest. He exercised great influence on the tribal areas’ jihadi forces as well as Arabs supposed to hiding in the tribal areas. “When the military operation started in the tribal areas, Shamzai contacted the jihadi leadership including Nek Muhammad and advised them to find a political solution to the dispute, but Nek opposed the idea,” the source said. Another religious leader said that Nek had written Shamzai a letter, expressing reservations on Shamzai’s plan to broker a deal. Nek wrote that his influence over tribesmen would benefit the government instead of tribal people. The source said militants had warned Shamzai not to come to the area and that they would resolve the crisis independently. REFERENCE: ‘Mufti Shamzai was warned by the tribal militants’ By Amir Rana http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_9-6-2004_pg7_26

Nawaz voices concern over Swat deal - News Desk Wednesday, April 22, 2009 LAHORE: PML-N Quaid Nawaz Sharif, expressing concern about a controversial peace deal with militants, has said militants in Swat were trying to export their particularly harsh version of Sharia. “How do we deal with the situation in Swat?” Nawaz asked in an hour-long interview with USA TODAY at his home on the outskirts of the city. “They are now threatening to get out of Swat and take other areas into their custody. So we’ve got to avoid that situation.” Nawaz said he opposed attacks by US drones on militant hideouts as “counterproductive” and wanted to see dialogue with more moderate groups. Nawaz downplayed fears that the country could be taken over by the Taliban militants. He said the insurgency in Swat and border areas could be defused in just two years if sufficient economic development took place. Any deal with militants should include commitments that “democracy will not be allowed to deteriorate and the writ of the government will be honoured,” Nawaz said, adding that women’s schools and universities must be allowed to stay open. Nawaz terms Swat peace deal good Monday, April 20, 2009 LAHORE: PML-N Quaid Nawaz Sharif has said the Swat agreement is a good accord, which was imperative to restore peace in the valley. He reiterated that they would support the PPP government at the Centre as the country could not afford political confrontation. REFERENCES: Nawaz voices concern over Swat deal BY News Desk Wednesday, April 22, 2009 http://www.thenews.com.pk/TodaysPrintDetail.aspx?ID=21661&Cat=13&dt=4/22/2009 Nawaz terms Swat peace deal good Says fight against militancy, extremism can be won by good governance BY our correspondent Monday, April 20, 2009 http://www.thenews.com.pk/TodaysPrintDetail.aspx?ID=21626&Cat=13&dt=4/20/2009

Mr. Shafqat Mahmood way back in 2001 wrote this on Afghanistan and Taliban Militants.

Nov 16, 2001: Afghanistan and our future by Shafqat Mahmood : The Taliban are crumbling faster than cardboard shanties in the path of a storm. Promises of fierce ground battles, that churned the blood of many a chest thumper in Pakistan, are now drifting helplessly in the dust laden Afghan wind. It is not over yet, not by a long shot, but what remains is a mopping up operation. Scattered over rural Afghanistan, the Taliban residue and their foreign volunteers will be picked off slowly but surely. It is sad in a way although I have no love for the Taliban or what they stood for. Much of this could have been avoided if they were less cocky or more rational or more ready to be a part of the world. If they were all these things, though, they would not be Taliban. People who are ready to blow up ancient Buddhist statutes because they are idols or whip women because their ankles are showing or force every man to keep a six-inch long beard, do not live in the same world as you and I. A particularly poignant moment for me as Kabul fell, was the playing of music from a truck mounted loudspeaker. If the ordinary and trivial becomes special and significant, there is something terribly wrong with the world. And there was a lot wrong with the Taliban's world. The image of young Afghans queuing up to get their beards trimmed makes this point more eloquently than a thousand or a million words.

 Imran Khan Arrest and Jamat-e-Islami - 1 (CNN November 2007)

 

Imran Khan Arrest and Jamat-e-Islami - 1 (CNN... by SalimJanMazari


Imran Khan Arrest & Jamat-e-Islami - 2 (BBC November 2007)

 
Imran Khan Arrest & Jamat-e-Islami - 2 (BBC... by SalimJanMazari

 The liberators of Kabul are not the Dad's Army either. Within their ranks are some of the most blood thirsty tyrants ever encountered in the tragic Afghan history. Yet it is a sign of the times that many ordinary Afghans let out a collective sigh of relief when the Taliban departed. So let no one mourn the Taliban. They are not synonymous with the Afghans. They were freaks of history and will hopefully be consigned to that special place where other such oddities are kept. Some of our armchair warriors are not finished though. Retired Generals Hamid Gul and Aslam 'strategic' Beg are calling the Taliban disappearing act a brilliant tactical manoeuvre. Earlier they predicted fierce land battles and now, without an apology, they see the spectre of a long drawn out guerrilla war. Do not forget that one of these gentlemen declared Saddam's 'mother of all battles' as another Vietnam. Having had such a comeuppance, he should have taken an eternal vow of silence.

No such luck. The sad part is that some newspapers still bother to give space to his never ending bombast. Others like Qazi Hussain Ahmed also need to pause and do a rethink. If the Taliban were representative of all the Afghans or even of the Pashtuns they would not have crumbled so quickly. The fact is that they were a small slice of Afghani society and had gathered momentum only because of unending conflict and depravity of the warlords. When their true face was revealed most of the Afghans grew to hate them. It must also be remembered that if Afghans hate foreigners on their soil, they must have also grown to hate the Arabs, the Chechens, the Pakistanis and others who had flocked to Osama and the Taliban. It did not require a major calculation for the Afghans to see that at least some of their difficulties were because of the foreigners. It is instructive therefore that the Northern Alliance soldiers make it a point of executing the outsiders, who surrender, but spare the Afghans even if they are Taliban. The heat of the battle may be over but the political headaches have already begun. Putting together a broad based government, which by definition should be majority Pashtun, is not going to be easy. While there are definite problems ahead, some of us are becoming overly anxious about the Afghan government of the future. Yes, it was a mistake of our intelligence not to have a link to non-Taliban forces and I hope we have learnt a lesson. But, it is not the end of the world either. We must have faith in our intrinsic importance for any Afghan government. Most of Southern and Western Afghanistan has already become a common economic market with us. Pakistani goods such as wheat, edible oil, toiletries, POL products, cloth and a host of others are a staple in Afghan markets. Our currency is a legal tender there. This integration of markets is a necessary bond between us and Afghanistan.

 Imran Khan Arrest & Role of Jamat-e-Islami - 1 (November 2007)

 
Imran Khan Arrest & Role of Jamat-e-Islami - 1... by SalimJanMazari

 Imran Khan Arrest & Role of Jamat-e-Islami - 2 (November 2007)

 
Imran Khan Arrest & Role of Jamat-e-Islami - 2... by SalimJanMazari

Geography still dictates that we provide the nearest port to Afghan goods. In fact Afghan transit trade has become a headache for us and a bonanza for Afghan governments. We are also a host to millions of Afghans, whether we like it or not. No future Afghan government can afford to be an enemy of ours. It may not be a bosom buddy but then no Afghan government has ever been one. A businesslike relationship is the best we can hope for and this will happen. We must also have faith in the strength of our armed forces. Internally we may have mixed feelings about them because of their political role but externally we must understand that they can deter any aggression. No Afghan government will risk a conflict with us because they know our strength. So, while there may be a rocky road ahead in the near term, the long-term prospect of coexistence with future Afghan governments is not bad. There is also an apprehension among some people that our love affair with the Americans is about to end. The logic is that after the collapse of the Taliban, we are no longer required. Some even think that we are going to be the next target of American aggression. This is all nonsense. I have no brief for the Americans, and certainly no information, yet is not difficult to see what lies ahead. States come together because of shared interests. I do not see American interest in this region diminishing. Therefore, their interest in us and ours in them will remain.

 The simple fact is that the American are here to stay. They have not gone to all this trouble just to defeat the ragtag Taliban or even to root out Osama. These are valid targets but there is also a long-term strategic/economic objective. Central Asia has the largest untapped reservoir of oil and gas in the world. The best way to transport this to European and American markets is through Afghanistan and Pakistan. To do this, American companies have been trying to build a pipeline for many years now. After Afghanistan has been pacified, this will become a major priority. I do not believe that Americans would have bases either in Pakistan or Afghanistan but they will have some presence in Central Asia. More importantly because of economic and strategic reasons, they will stay engaged with this part of the world. This engagement dictates that they will continue to want a friendly Pakistan. They will also want Pakistan to remain stable and this can only happen if we are economically viable. Therefore, American assistance, and help with the international financial institutions, will remain. When President Bush and Colin Powell and even Tony Blair say that we are here for the long haul, they mean it. They will remain with us not because they love us, but because their economic and strategic interest demands it. Of course, this engagement would have other repercussions; some good, some bad. If the balance has to be towards the good, we will have to play our cards right.

 Imran Khan Arrest & Jamat-e-Islami - 3 (GEO TV November 2007)

 
Imran Khan Arrest & Jamat-e-Islami - 3 (GEO TV... by SalimJanMazari

Imran Khan Arrest & Jamat-e-Islami - 4 (ARY NEWS November 2007)

 
Imran Khan Arrest & Jamat-e-Islami - 4 (ARY... by SalimJanMazari

No outside power can take us out of our difficulties, if we are not determined to help ourselves. This government has done well to keep the focus on the economy but a fundamental social problem would also have to be addressed. We cannot have three systems of education, deeni madaris, Urdu medium schools and the elite English medium. This will keep dividing our society. We need to have one system of education for everyone. Rich, poor, liberal, orthodox, Shia, Sunni, Wahabi, Punjabi, Sindhi, Baluchi and Pushtun, would all have to be weaved into a common thread of education. Only this will heal the fissures in our society. We also need to sort out the extremists, the sectarian terrorist, the fascists hiding behind religion, and others of such ilk, who destabilise our society. One way to counter them is to rid them and the country of weapons. If we begin to do some of this, we would on the right road. If we are doing right, the help of our friends from abroad will make a difference. Otherwise no amount of aid can do any good. I stick my neck out to say that I am optimistic about the future. I really think that Pakistan came to an important crossroad and took the right decision. If we follow this up with correct policies only good lies ahead. REFERENCE: Afghanistan and our future by Shafqat Mahmood The writer is a former Senator and a former federal and provincial minister Nov 16, 2001 http://jang.com.pk/thenews/columnists/shafqat/shafqat28.htm

Oil, Drugs & the Future of Afghanistan.

WASHINGTON, Sept 29: President Barack Obama and Uzbekistan’s leader Islam Karimov discussed on Thursday expanding US use of the Central Asian country as a supply route for troops in Afghanistan amid growing concern about the viability of Pakistan as a transit route. The White House said Mr Obama called President Karimov on Wednesday to congratulate the former Soviet republic on its 20th anniversary of independence and that the leaders talked about shared interests in a “secure and prosperous” Afghanistan. A senior Obama administration official said the use of Uzbek territory, which already serves as a key supply route for US war supplies, was an “important topic of discussion”. US senators have also made a clear push for improving ties with Uzbekistan so that more supplies can be moved to and from Afghanistan through the ‘Northern Distribution Network’. The Senate Appropriations Committee last week approved a bill that would allow the US to waive restrictions on aid to Uzbekistan if Secretary of State Hillary Clinton certifies this is needed to obtain access to Afghanistan. The restrictions had been placed over Uzbekistan’s human rights record. “We’re going to probably replace 50 per cent of what we ship into Afghanistan from Pakistan, to go through the northern route, Uzbekistan,” Senator Lindsey Graham said this week. — Reuters. REFERENCES: US discusses supply route with Uzbekistan From the Newspaper (14 hours ago) Today http://www.dawn.com/2011/09/30/us-discusses-supply-route-with-uzbekistan.html  James Montgomery Flagg (1877-1960) I Want You for the U.S. Army http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/trm015.html 

Uzbekistan Human Rights - Human Rights Concerns - Uzbekistan's disastrous human rights record worsened further in 2005 after a government massacre of demonstrators in Andijan in May. The government committed major violations of the rights to freedom of religion, expression, association, and assembly, and such abuses only increased after the May massacre. Uzbekistan has no independent judiciary, and torture is widespread in both pre-trial and post-conviction facilities. The government continues its practice of controlling, intimidating, and arbitrarily suspending or interfering with the work of civil society groups, the media, human rights activists, and opposition political parties. In particular, repression against independent journalists, human rights defenders, and opposition members increased this year. Government declarations of human rights reform, such as an announcement that the government will abolish the death penalty and the president's declaration of support for habeas corpus had no practical impact. REFERENCE: Uzbekistan Human Rights Human Rights Concerns http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/countries/europe/uzbekistan?id=1011265  Annual Report: Uzbekistan 2011 http://www.amnestyusa.org/research/reports/annual-report-uzbekistan-2011# Obama cozies up to Central Asian dictator by Justin Elliott Published in: Salon.com September 17, 2011 http://www.hrw.org/news/2011/09/17/obama-cozies-central-asian-dictator  http://www.hrw.org/europecentral-asia/uzbekistan 

The presidential electoral campaign of Barack Obama in 2008, it was thought, “changed the political debate in a party and a country that desperately needed to take a new direction.”[1] Like most preceding presidential winners dating back at least to John F. Kennedy, what moved voters of all descriptions to back Obama was the hope he offered of significant change. Yet within a year Obama has taken decisive steps, not just to continue America’s engagement in Bush’s Afghan War, but significantly to enlarge it into Pakistan. If this was change of a sort, it was a change that few voters desired. Those of us convinced that a war machine prevails in Washington were not surprised. The situation was similar to the disappointment experienced with Jimmy Carter: Carter was elected in 1976 with a promise to cut the defense budget. Instead, he initiated both an expansion of the defense budget and also an expansion of U.S. influence into the Indian Ocean.[2]

As I wrote in The Road to 9/11, after Carter’s election

It appeared on the surface that with the blessing of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission, the traditional U.S. search for unilateral domination would be abandoned. But…the 1970s were a period in which a major “intellectual counterrevolution” was mustered, to mobilize conservative opinion with the aid of vast amounts of money…. By the time SALT II was signed in 1979, Carter had consented to significant new weapons programs and arms budget increases (reversing his campaign pledge).[3] The complex strategy for reversing Carter’s promises was revived for a successful new mobilization in the 1990s during the Clinton presidency, in which a commission headed by Donald Rumsfeld was prominent. In this way the stage was set, even under Clinton, for the neocon triumph in the George W. Bush presidency. REFERENCE: Obama and Afghanistan: America’s Drug-Corrupted War by Prof Peter Dale Scott Global Research, January 1, 2010 http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?aid=16713&context=va  Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. http://www.peterdalescott.net/ 

Oil, Drugs & the Future of Afghanistan by Peter Dale Scott - Part 1 of 6


URL: http://youtu.be/M8z4348MYYA

Zalmay Khalilzad Maulavi Younus Khalis & Ronald Reagan - Trans-Afghan pipeline woes - The US is also very much implicated in the resuscitation of the Trans-Afghan gas pipeline, TAP - despite the endless political mess in Afghanistan. Halliburton - after making a killing in Iraq - would be expected to be on board in Afghanistan. The Japanese-dominated Asian Development Bank (ADB) is also very much interested. Unocal still officially maintains that it has lost interest in the Trans-Afghan gas pipeline it abandoned in 1998. But it wouldn't say no to an oil pipeline following the same route. In a predictable move, the Bush administration appointed its pet Afghan, oil man Zalmay Khalilzad, as Washington's ambassador to Kabul. Khalilzad, born in Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan but also pure University of Chicago right-wing material, has already worked with grand chess board master Zbigniew Brzezinski, former US national security advisor, and under Pentagon number two Paul Wolfowitz. It was Khalilzad - when he was a huge Taliban fan - who conducted the risk analysis for Unocal (Union Oil Company of California) for the infamous proposed $2 billion, 1,500 kilometer-long Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan,TAP, gas pipeline. While Russian President Vladimir Putin has demonstrated keen interest in an Eurasian gas alliance, Turkmenistan's main concern is to free itself from dependence on the Center Trunkline which connects the whole Central Asian gas network to the Russian system. Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai, for his part, needs money from gas transit, and Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf needs to keep strategic ties with Afghanistan. Once again, this is Pipelineistan as power politics. But TAP may reveal itself to be a hugely impractical proposition - basically because Afghanistan remains a country at war. Nobody for the moment wants to invest in TAP. Niyazov, Turkmenistan's unpredictable president, even had to court Russian gas giant Gazprom, which showed no interest. To top it all, nobody trusts Niyazov. Gazprom calculated that importing Turkmen gas is cheaper than developing remote Arctic and Siberian fields. So it looks for the moment that Russia's gas OPEC may be emerging as the winner. REFERENCE: Pipelineistan revisited By Pepe Escobar Central Asia Dec 25, 2003 http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/EL25Ag02.html 

Oil, Drugs & the Future of Afghanistan by Peter Dale Scott - Part 2 of 6

URL: http://youtu.be/KrOxDpCdJNc

Dec. 15, 1997 A Taliban delegation has visited Washington and was received by some State Department officials. The Talib delegation's meeting with U.S. Undersecretary of State for South Asia Karl Inderforth was arranged by the Unocal, which is eager to build a pipeline to pump gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan via Afghan territory. "We made our position clear, namely that the pipeline could be useful for Afghanistan's rehabilitation, but only if the situation was settled there by political means", a State Department official said on condition of anonymity. He stated that the Taliban representatives were told that they should form "a broadly-based government together with their rivals before the ambitious project to build an oil and gas pipeline is launched". According to Taliban assessments, only one pipeline could yield almost $ 300 mm for rehabilitating the war-ravaged Afghanistan. The Taliban delegation included Acting Minister for Mines and Industry Ahmed Jan, Acting Minister for Culture and Information Amir Muttaqi, Acting Minister for Planning Din Muhammad, and recently appointed Taliban Permanent Delegate on the United Nations Mujahid. A State Department official described the talks as "open and useful". He said that they also touched on the production of opium and open poppy on the Taliban-controlled territory, human rights, treatment of women, and on America's attitude to the projected pipeline. Asked whether there could be problems for the U.S. government if it backed the commercial investments into a country, which is ruled by Islamic fundamentalists, who, according to western standards, are oppressing women, the State Department official said that any real "political settlement" would resolve this problem. In the meantime, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright described the Talib government only a month ago as something quite disgusting due to its policy of oppressing women. FOR FURTHER READING: Taliban visit Washington Volume 3, issue #6 - 25-02-1998 http://www.gasandoil.com/goc/news/ntn80956.htm Read this US Government Declassified Documents. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB97/tal40.pdf UN lifts sanctions on five former Taliban officials Wednesday, 27 Jan, 2010 http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/world/04-un-sanctions-list-taliban-qs-07 Taliban leaders may join Afghan govt: US By Anwar Iqbal Tuesday, 26 Jan, 2010 http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/front-page/13+taliban-leaders-may-join-afghan-govt-us-610-za-08 Mullah Omar open to talks: Colonel Imam Tuesday, 26 Jan, 2010 http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/04-omar-talks-col-imam-qs-05

Oil, Drugs & the Future of Afghanistan by Peter Dale Scott - Part 3 of 6

URL: http://youtu.be/O7KOVPPlNN8

President George Bush recently boasted: "When I take action, I'm not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It's going to be decisive." President Bush should know that there are no targets in Afghanistan that will give his missiles their money's worth. Perhaps, if only to balance his books, he should develop some cheaper missiles to use on cheaper targets and cheaper lives in the poor countries of the world. But then, that may not make good business sense to the Coalition's weapons manufacturers. It wouldn't make any sense at all, for example, to the Carlyle Group—described by the Industry Standard as 'the world's largest private equity firm', with $12 billion under management. Carlyle invests in the defence sector and makes its money from military conflicts and weapons spending. Carlyle is run by men with impeccable credentials. Former US defence secretary Frank Carlucci is Carlyle's chairman and managing director (he was a college roommate of Donald Rumsfeld's). Carlyle's other partners include former US secretary of state James A. Baker III, George Soros, Fred Malek (George Bush Sr's campaign manager). An American paper—the Baltimore Chronicle and Sentinel—says that former President George Bush Sr is reported to be seeking investments for the Carlyle Group from Asian markets. He is reportedly paid not inconsiderable sums of money to make 'presentations' to potential government-clients. Ho Hum. As the tired saying goes, it's all in the family. Then there's that other branch of traditional family business—oil. Remember, President George Bush (Jr) and Vice-President Dick Cheney both made their fortunes working in the US oil industry. Turkmenistan, which borders the northwest of Afghanistan, holds the world's third largest gas reserves and an estimated six billion barrels of oil reserves. Enough, experts say, to meet American energy needs for the next 30 years (or a developing country's energy requirements for a couple of centuries.) America has always viewed oil as a security consideration, and protected it by any means it deems necessary. Few of us doubt that its military presence in the Gulf has little to do with its concern for human rights and almost entirely to do with its strategic interest in oil. Oil and gas from the Caspian region currently moves northward to European markets. Geographically and politically, Iran and Russia are major impediments to American interests. In 1998, Dick Cheney—then CEO of Halliburton, a major player in the oil industry—said: "I can't think of a time when we've had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian. It's almost as if the opportunities have arisen overnight." True enough. For some years now, an American oil giant called Unocal has been negotiating with the Taliban for permission to construct an oil pipeline through Afghanistan to Pakistan and out to the Arabian Sea. From here, Unocal hopes to access the lucrative 'emerging markets' in South and Southeast Asia. In December 1997, a delegation of Taliban mullahs travelled to America and even met US State Department officials and Unocal executives in Houston.At that time the Taliban's taste for public executions and its treatment of Afghan women were not made out to be the crimes against humanity that they are now. Over the next six months, pressure from hundreds of outraged American feminist groups was brought to bear on the Clinton administration. Fortunately, they managed to scuttle the deal. And now comes the US oil industry's big chance. REFERENCE: FRONTLINES War Is Peace The world doesn't have to choose between the Taliban and the US government. All the beauty of the world—literature, music, art—lies between these two fundamentalist poles. Arundhati Roy Magazine | Oct 29, 2001 http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?213547  http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?213547-2 

Oil, Drugs & the Future of Afghanistan by Peter Dale Scott - Part 4 of 6

URL: http://youtu.be/guIJHwSnbrI

America’s Addiction to Drug-Assisted War: Afghanistan the 1980s - It is hard to demonstrate the CIA, when unilaterally initiating a military conflict in Laos in 1959, foresaw the resulting huge increase in Laotian opium production. But two decades later this experience did not deter Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, from unilaterally initiating contact with drug-trafficking Afghans in 1978 and 1979. It is clear that this time the Carter White House foresaw the drug consequences. In 1980 White House drug advisor David Musto told the White House Strategy Council on Drug Abuse that “we were going into Afghanistan to support the opium growers…. Shouldn’t we try to avoid what we had done in Laos?”[28] Denied access by the CIA to data to which he was legally entitled, Musto took his concerns public in May 1980, noting in a New York Times Op Ed that Golden Crescent heroin was already (and for the first time) causing a medical crisis in New York. And he warned, presciently, that “this crisis is bound to worsen.”[29] The CIA, in conjunction with its creation the Iranian intelligence agency SAVAK, was initially trying to move to the right the regime of Afghan president Mohammed Daoud Khan, whose objectionable policy (like that of Souvanna Phouma before him) was to maintain good relations with both the Soviet Union and the west. In 1978 SAVAK- and CIA-supported Islamist agents soon arrived from Iran “with bulging bankrolls,” trying to mobilize a purge of left-wing officers in the army and a clamp-down on their party the PDPA. The result of this provocative polarization was the same as in Laos: a confrontation in which the left, and not the right, soon prevailed.[30] In a coup that was at least partly defensive, left-wing officers overthrew and killed Daoud; they installed in his place a left-wing regime so extreme and unpopular that by 1980 the USSR (as Brzezinski had predicted) intervened to install a more moderate faction.[31] By May 1979 the CIA was in touch with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the mujahedin warlord with perhaps the smallest following inside Afghanistan, and also the leading mujahedin drug-trafficker.[32] Hekmatyar, famous for throwing acid in the faces of women not wearing burkas, was not the choice of the Afghan resistance, but of the Pakistani intelligence service (ISI), perhaps because he was the only Afghan leader willing to accept the British-drawn Durand Line as the Afghan-Pakistan boundary. As an Afghan leader in 1994 told Tim Weiner of the New York Times:

“We didn't choose these leaders. The United States made Hekmatyar by giving him his weapons. Now we want the United States to shake these leaders and make them stop the killing, to save us from them.”[33]

Robert D. Kaplan reported his personal experience that Hekmatyar was “loathed by all the other party leaders, fundamentalist and moderate alike.”[34] This decision by ISI and CIA belies the usual American rhetoric that the US was assisting an Afghan liberation movement.[35] In the next decade of anti-Soviet resistance, more than half of America’s aid went to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who soon became “one of Afghanistan’s leading drug lords.” Brzezinski was also soon in contact with Pakistan’s emissary Fazle ul-Haq, a man who by 1982 would be listed by Interpol as an international narcotics trafficker.[36] The consequences were swiftly felt in America, where heroin from the Golden Crescent, negligible before 1979, amounted in 1980 to 60 percent of the U.S. market.[37] And by 1986, for the first time, the region supplied 70 percent of the high-grade heroin in the world, and supplied a new army of 650,000 addicts in Pakistan itself. Witnesses confirmed that the drug was shipped out of the area on the same Pakistan Army trucks which shipped in "covert" US military aid.[38] Yet before 1986 the only high-level heroin bust in Pakistan was made at the insistence of a single Norwegian prosecutor; none were instigated by the seventeen narcotics officers in the U.S. Embassy. Eight tons of Afghan-Pakistani morphine base from a single Pakistani source supplied the Sicilian mafia "Pizza Connection" in New York, said by the FBI supervisor on the case to have been responsible for 80% of the heroin reaching the United States between 1978 and 1984.[39] Meanwhile, CIA Director William Casey appears to have promoted a plan suggested to him in 1980 by the former French intelligence chief Alexandre de Marenches, that the CIA supply drugs on the sly to Soviet troops.[40] Although de Marenches subsequently denied that the plan, Operation Mosquito, went forward, there are reports that heroin, hashish, and even cocaine from Latin America soon reached Soviet troops; and that along with the CIA-ISI-linked bank BCCI, "a few American intelligence operatives were deeply enmeshed in the drug trade" before the war was over.[41] Maureen Orth heard from Mathea Falco, head of International Narcotics Control for the State Department under Jimmy Carter, that the CIA and ISI together encouraged the mujahedin to addict the Soviet troops.[42] REFERENCE: Obama and Afghanistan: America’s Drug-Corrupted War by Prof Peter Dale Scott Global Research, January 1, 2010 http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?aid=16713&context=va  Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. http://www.peterdalescott.net/

Oil, Drugs & the Future of Afghanistan by Peter Dale Scott - Part 5 of 6

URL: http://youtu.be/aPL8u-HN0wk

Oil, Drugs & the Future of Afghanistan by Peter Dale Scott - Part 6 of 6

URL: http://youtu.be/RjK-GeS9aZ8

America’s Return in 2001, Again With the Support of Drug-Traffickers - The social costs of this drug-assisted war are still with us: there are said, for example, to be now five million heroin addicts in Pakistan alone. And yet America in 2001 decided to do it again: to try, with the assistance of drug traffickers, to impose nation-building on a quasi-state with at least a dozen major ethnic groups speaking unrelated languages. In a close analogy to the use of the Hmong in Laos, America initiated its Afghan campaign in 2001 in concert with a distinct minority, the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance. In a closer analogy still, the CIA in 2000 (in the last weeks of Clinton’s presidency) chose as its principal ally Ahmad Shah Massoud of the Northern Alliance, despite the objection of other national security advisers that “Massoud was a drug trafficker; if the CIA established a permanent base [with him] in the Panjshir, it risked entanglement with the heroin trade.”[43] There was no ambiguity about the U.S. intention to use drug traffickers to initiate its ground position in Afghanistan. The CIA mounted its coalition against the Taliban in 2001 by recruiting and even importing drug traffickers, usually old assets from the 1980s. An example was Haji Zaman who had retired to Dijon in France, whom “British and American officials…met with and persuaded … to return to Afghanistan.”[44] In Afghanistan in 2001 as in 1980, and as in Laos in 1959, the U.S. intervention has since been a bonanza for the international drug syndicates. With the increase of chaos in the countryside, and number of aircraft flying in and out of the country, opium production more than doubled, from 3276 metric tonnes in 2000 (and 185 in 2001, the year of a Taliban ban on opium) to 8,200 metric tonnes in 2007. Why does the U.S. intervene repeatedly on the same side as the most powerful local drug traffickers? Some years ago I summarized the conventional wisdom on this matter:

Partly this has been from realpolitik - in recognition of the local power realities represented by the drug traffic. Partly it has been from the need to escape domestic political restraints: the traffickers have supplied additional financial resources needed because of US budgetary limitations, and they have also provided assets not bound (as the U.S. is) by the rules of war. … These facts…have led to enduring intelligence networks involving both oil and drugs, or more specifically both petrodollars and narcodollars. These networks, particularly in the Middle East, have become so important that they affect, not just the conduct of US foreign policy, but the health and behavior of the US government, US banks and corporations, and indeed the whole of US society.[45]

Persuaded in part by the analysis of authors like Michel Chossudovsky and James Petras, I would now stress more heavily that American banks, as well as oil majors, benefit significantly from drug trafficking. A Senate staff report has estimated “that $500 billion to $1 trillion in criminal proceeds are laundered through banks worldwide each year, with about half of that amount moved through United States banks.”[46] The London Independent reported in 2004 that drug trafficking constitutes "the third biggest global commodity in cash terms after oil and the arms trade."[47] Petras concludes that the U.S. economy has become a narco-capitalist one, dependent on the hot or dirty money, much of it from the drug traffic. As Senator Levin summarizes the record: "Estimates are that $500 billion to $1 trillion of international criminal proceeds are moved internationally and deposited into bank accounts annually. It is estimated half of that money comes to the United States"….

Washington and the mass media have portrayed the U.S. in the forefront of the struggle against narco trafficking, drug laundering and political corruption: the image is of clean white hands fighting dirty money from the Third world (or the ex-Communist countries). The truth is exactly the opposite. U.S. banks have developed a highly elaborate set of policies for transferring illicit funds to the U.S., investing those funds in legitimate businesses or U.S. government bonds and legitimating them. The U.S. Congress has held numerous hearings, provided detailed exposés of the illicit practices of the banks, passed several laws and called for stiffer enforcement by any number of public regulators and private bankers. Yet the biggest banks continue their practices, the sums of dirty money grows exponentially, because both the State and the banks have neither the will nor the interest to put an end to the practices that provide high profits and buttress an otherwise fragile empire.[48]

In the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, this analysis found support from the claim of Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, that “Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis.” According to the London Observer, Costa

said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result…. Costa said evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors around 18 months ago. "In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system's main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor," he said.[49]REFERENCE: Obama and Afghanistan: America’s Drug-Corrupted War by Prof Peter Dale Scott Global Research, January 1, 2010 http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?aid=16713&context=va  Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. http://www.peterdalescott.net/ 

Is there life after democracy? by Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy

Won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her first novel "The God of Small Things"; Awarded Sydney Peace Prize in 2004. Arundhati Roy is a famous Indian novelist and social activist. Arundhati Roy came into limelight in 1997 when she won the Booker Prize for her first novel "The God of Small Things". She was awarded Sydney Peace Prize in 2004. http://www.iloveindia.com/indian-heroes/arundhati-roy.html

While we’re still arguing about whether there’s life after death, can we add another question to the cart? Is there life after democracy? What sort of life will it be? By democracy I don’t mean democracy as an ideal or an aspiration. I mean the working model: Western liberal democracy, and its variants, such as they are.

So, is there life after democracy?

Attempts to answer this question often turn into a comparison of different systems of governance, and end with a somewhat prickly, combative defence of democracy. It’s flawed, we say. It isn’t perfect, but it’s better than everything else that’s on offer. Inevitably, someone in the room will say: ‘Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia . . . is that what you would prefer?’

Whether democracy should be the utopia that all ‘developing’ societies aspire to be is a separate question altogether. (I think it should. The early, idealistic phase can be quite heady.) The question about life after democracy is addressed to those of us who already live in democracies, or in countries that pretend to be democracies. It isn’t meant to suggest that we lapse into older, discredited models of totalitarian or authoritarian governance. It’s meant to suggest that the system of representative democracy—too much representation, too little democracy—needs some structural adjustment.

The question here, really, is what have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions has metastasised into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the Free Market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximising profit? Is it possible to reverse this process? Can something that has mutated go back to being what it used to be?

What we need today, for the sake of the survival of this planet, is long-term vision. Can governments whose very survival depends on immediate, extractive, short-term gain provide this? Could it be that democracy, the sacred answer to our short-term hopes and prayers, the protector of our individual freedoms and nurturer of our avaricious dreams, will turn out to be the endgame for the human race? Could it be that democracy is such a hit with modern humans precisely because it mirrors our greatest folly— our nearsightedness? Our inability to live entirely in the present (like most animals do) combined with our inability to see very far into the future makes us strange in-between creatures, neither beast nor prophet. Our amazing intelligence seems to have outstripped our instinct for survival. We plunder the earth hoping that accumulating material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable thing that we have lost.

It would be conceit to pretend that the essays in this book provide answers to any of these questions. They only demonstrate, in some detail, the fact that it looks as though the beacon could be failing and that democracy can perhaps no longer be relied upon to deliver the justice and stability we once dreamed it would. All the essays were written as urgent, public interventions at critical moments in India — during the state-backed genocide of Muslims in Gujarat; just before the date set for the hanging of Mohammad Afzal, the accused in the 13 December 2001 Parliament Attack; during US President George Bush’s visit to India; during the mass uprising in Kashmir in the summer of 2008; after the 26 November 2008 Mumbai attacks. Often they were not just responses to events, they were responses to the responses.

Though many of them were written in anger, at moments when keeping quiet became harder than saying something, the essays do have a common thread. They’re not about unfortunate anomalies or aberrations in the democratic process. They’re about the consequences of and the corollaries to democracy; they’re about the fire in the ducts. I should also say that they do not provide a panoramic overview. They’re a detailed underview of specific events that I hoped would reveal some of the ways in which democracy is practised in the world’s largest democracy. (Or the world’s largest ‘demon-crazy’, as a Kashmiri protestor on the streets of Srinagar once put it. His placard said: ‘Democracy without Justice=Demon Crazy.’)

As a writer, a fiction writer, I have often wondered whether the attempt to always be precise, to try and get it all factually right somehow reduces the epic scale of what is really going on. Does it eventually mask a larger truth? I worry that I am allowing myself to be railroaded into offering prosaic, factual precision when maybe what we need is a feral howl, or the transformative power and real precision of poetry. Something about the cunning, Brahmanical, intricate, bureaucratic, file-bound, ‘apply-through-proper-channels’ nature of governance and subjugation in India seems to have made a clerk out of me. My only excuse is to say that it takes odd tools to uncover the maze of subterfuge and hypocrisy that cloaks the callousness and the cold, calculated violence of the world’s favourite new Superpower. Repression ‘through proper channels’ sometimes engenders resistance ‘through proper channels’. As resistance goes this isn’t enough, I know. But for now, it’s all I have. Perhaps someday it will become the underpinning for poetry and for the feral howl.
~
‘Listening to Grasshoppers’, the essay from which this collection draws its title, was a lecture I gave in Istanbul in January 2008 on the first anniversary of the assassination of the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. He was shot down on the street outside his office for daring to raise a subject that is forbidden in Turkey—the 1915 genocide of Armenians in which more than one million people were killed. My lecture was about the history of genocide and genocide denial, and the old, almost organic relationship between ‘progress’ and genocide.

I have always been struck by the fact that the political party in Turkey that carried out the Armenian genocide was called the Committee for Union and Progress. Most of the essays in this collection are, in fact, about the contemporary correlation between Union and Progress, or, in today’s idiom, between Nationalism and Development—those unimpeachable twin towers of modern, Free Market Democracy. Both of these in their extreme form are, as we now know, encrypted with the potential of bringing about ultimate, apocalyptic destruction (nuclear war, climate change).

Though these essays were written between 2002 and 2008, the invisible marker, the starting gun, is the year 1989, when in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan capitalism won its long jihad against Soviet Communism. (Of course, the wheel’s in spin again. Could it be that those same mountains are now in the process of burying capitalism? It’s too early to tell.) Within months of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Indian government, once a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, performed a high-speed somersault and aligned itself completely with the United States, monarch of the new unipolar world.

The rules of the game changed suddenly and completely. Millions of people who lived in remote villages and deep in the heart of untouched forests, some of whom had never heard of Berlin or the Soviet Union, could not have imagined how events that occurred in those faraway places would affect their lives. The process of their dispossession and displacement had already begun in the early 1950s, when India opted for the Soviet-style development model in which huge steel plants (Bhilai, Bokaro) and large dams (thousands of them) would occupy the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy. The era of Privatisation and Structural Adjustment accelerated that process at a mind-numbing speed.

Today, words like ‘Progress’ and ‘Development’ have become interchangeable with economic ‘Reforms’, Deregulation and Privatisation. ‘Freedom’ has come to mean ‘choice’. It has less to do with the human spirit than with different brands of deodorant. ‘Market’ no longer means a place where you go to buy provisions. The ‘Market’ is a de-territorialised space where faceless corporations do business, including buying and selling ‘futures’. ‘Justice’ has come to mean ‘human rights’ (and of those, as they say, ‘a few will do’). This theft of language, this technique of usurping words and deploying them like weapons, of using them to mask intent and to mean exactly the opposite of what they have traditionally meant, has been one of the most brilliant strategic victories of the Tsars of the new dispensation. It has allowed them to marginalise their detractors, deprive them of a language in which to voice their critique and dismiss them as being ‘anti-progress’, ‘anti-development’, ‘anti-reform’ and of course ‘anti-national’—negativists of the worst sort. Talk about saving a river or protecting a forest and they say, ‘Don’t you believe in Progress?’ To people whose land is being submerged by dam reservoirs and whose homes are being bulldozed they say, ‘Do you have an alternative development model?’ To those who believe that a government is duty bound to provide people with basic education, healthcare and social security, they say, ‘You’re against the Market.’ And who except a cretin could be against the Market?

To reclaim these stolen words requires explanations that are too tedious for a world with a short attention span, and too expensive in an era when Free Speech has become unaffordable for the poor. This language heist may prove to be the keystone of our undoing.

Two decades of this kind of ‘Progress’ in India has created a vast middle class punch drunk on sudden wealth and the sudden respect that comes with it—and a much, much vaster, desperate underclass. Tens of millions of people have been dispossessed and displaced from their land by floods, droughts and desertification caused by indiscriminate environmental engineering and massive infrastructural projects, dams, mines and Special Economic Zones. All of them developed in the name of the poor, but really meant to service the rising demands of the new aristocracy.

The battle for land lies at the heart of the ‘Development’ debate. Before he became India’s finance minister, P. Chidambaram was Enron’s lawyer and member of the Board of Directors of Vedanta, a multinational mining corporation that is currently devastating the Niyamgiri hills in Orissa. Perhaps his career graph informed his world view. Or maybe it’s the other way around. In an interview a year ago, he said that his vision was to get 85 per cent of India’s population to live in cities.[1] Realising this ‘vision’ would require social engineering on an unimaginable scale. It would mean inducing, or forcing, about five hundred million people to migrate from the countryside into cities. That process is well under way and is quickly turning India into a police state in which people who refuse to surrender their land are being made to do so at gunpoint. Perhaps this is what makes it so easy for P. Chidambaram to move so seamlessly from being finance minister to being home minister. The portfolios are separated only by an osmotic membrane. Underlying this nightmare masquerading as ‘vision’ is the plan to free up vast tracts of land and all of India’s natural resources, leaving them ripe for corporate plunder. In effect, to reverse the post-Independence policy of Land Reforms.

Already forests, mountains and water systems are being ravaged by marauding multinational corporations, backed by a State that has lost its moorings and is committing what can only be called ‘ecocide’. In eastern India bauxite and iron ore mining is destroying whole ecosystems, turning fertile land into desert. In the Himalayas hundreds of high dams are being planned, the consequences of which can only be catastrophic. In the plains, embankments built along rivers, ostensibly to control floods, have led to rising river beds, causing even more flooding, more waterlogging, more salinisation of agricultural land and the destruction of livelihoods of millions of people. Most of India’s holy rivers, including the Ganga, have been turned into unholy drains that carry more sewage and industrial effluent than water. Hardly a single river runs its course and meets the ocean.

Based on the absurd notion that a river flowing into the sea is a waste of water, the Supreme Court, in an act of unbelievable hubris, has arbitrarily ordered that India’s rivers be interlinked, like a mechanical water-supply system. Implementing this would mean tunnelling through mountains and forests, altering natural contours and drainage systems of river basins and destroying deltas and estuaries. In other words, wrecking the ecology of the entire subcontinent. (B.N. Kirpal, the judge who passed this order, joined the Environmental Board of Coca-Cola after he retired. Nice touch!)

The regime of Free Market economic policies, administered by people who are blissfully ignorant of the fate of civilizations that grew too dependent on artificial irrigation, has led to a worrying shift in cropping patterns. Sustainable food crops, suitable to local soil conditions and micro-climates, have been replaced by water-guzzling, hybrid and genetically modified ‘cash’ crops which, apart from being wholly dependent on the market, are also heavily dependent on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, canal irrigation and the indiscriminate mining of ground water. As abused farmland, saturated with chemicals, gradually becomes exhausted and infertile, agricultural input costs rise, ensnaring small farmers in a debt trap. Over the last few years, more than 180,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide.[2] While state granaries are bursting with food, that eventually rots, starvation and malnutrition approaching the same levels as in sub-Saharan Africa stalk the land.[3] Truly the 9 per cent growth rate is beginning to look like a downward spiral. The higher the rate of this kind of growth, the worse the prognosis. Any oncologist will tell you that.

It’s as though an ancient society, decaying under the weight of feudalism and caste, was churned in a great machine. The churning has ripped through the mesh of old inequalities, recalibrating some of them but reinforcing most. Now the old society has curdled and separated into a thin layer of thick cream—and a lot of water. The cream is India’s ‘market’ of many million consumers (of cars, cell phones, computers, Valentine’s Day greeting cards), the envy of international business. The water is of little consequence. It can be sloshed around, stored in holding ponds, and eventually drained away.

Or so they think, the men in suits. They didn’t bargain for the violent civil war that has broken out in India’s heartland: Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, and West Bengal.
~
Coming back to 1989. As if to illustrate the connection between ‘Union’ and ‘Progress’, at exactly the same time that the Congress government was opening up India’s markets to international finance, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), then in the opposition, began its virulent campaign of Hindu nationalism (popularly known as ‘Hindutva’). In 1990, its leader, L.K. Advani, travelled across the country whipping up hatred against Muslims and demanding that the Babri Masjid, an old sixteenth-century mosque that stood on a disputed site in Ayodhya, be demolished and a Ram Temple built in its place. In 1992, a mob, egged on by Advani, demolished the mosque. In early 1993, a mob rampaged through Mumbai attacking Muslims, killing almost one thousand people. As revenge, a series of bomb blasts ripped through the city, killing about two hundred and fifty people.[4] Feeding off the communal frenzy it had generated, the BJP, which had only two seats in Parliament in 1984, defeated the Congress in 1998 and came to power at the Centre.

It’s not a coincidence that the rise of Hindutva corresponded with the historical moment when America substituted Communism with Islam as it’s great enemy. The radical Islamist Mujahideen — whom President Reagan once entertained in the White House and compared to America’s Founding Fathers — suddenly began to be called terrorists. CNN’s live broadcast of the 1990–91 Gulf War — Operation Desert Storm —made it to elite drawing rooms in Indian cities, bringing with it the early thrills of satellite TV. Almost simultaneously, the Indian Government, once a staunch friend of the Palestinians, turned into Israel’s ‘natural ally’. Now India and Israel do joint military exercises, share intelligence and probably exchange notes on how best to administer occupied territories.

By 1998, when the BJP took office, the ‘Progress’ project of Privatisation and Liberalisation was about eight years old. Though it had campaigned vigorously against the economic reforms, saying they were a process of ‘looting through liberalization’, once it came to power the BJP embraced the Free Market enthusiastically and threw its weight behind huge corporations like Enron. (In representative democracies, once they’re elected, the peoples’ representatives are free to break their promises and change their minds.)

Within weeks of taking office, the BJP conducted a series of thermonuclear tests. Though India had thrown its hat into the nuclear ring in 1975, politically, the 1998 nuclear tests were of a different order altogether. The orgy of triumphant nationalism with which the tests were greeted introduced a chilling new language of aggression and hatred into mainstream public discourse. None of what was being said was new, only that what was once considered unacceptable was suddenly being celebrated. Since then, Hindu communalism and nuclear nationalism, like corporate globalization, have vaulted over the stated ideologies of political parties. The venom has been injected straight into our bloodstream. It’s there now—in all its violence and banality—for us to deal with in our daily lives, regardless of whether the government at the centre calls itself ‘secular’ or not. The Muslim community has seen a sharp decline in its fortunes and is now at the bottom of the social pyramid, along with Dalits and Adivasis.[5]

Certain events that occur in the life of a nation have the effect of parting the curtains and giving ordinary people a glimpse into the future. The 1998 nuclear tests were one such. You didn’t need the gift of prophecy to tell in which direction India was heading. This is an excerpt from ‘The End of Imagination’, an essay (not in this collection) that I wrote after the nuclear tests:

‘Explosion of Self-esteem’, ‘Road to Resurgence’, ‘A Moment of Pride’, these were headlines in the papers in the days following the nuclear tests . . . .

‘These are not just nuclear tests, they are nationalism tests,’ we were repeatedly told.

This has been hammered home, over and over again. The bomb is India, India is the bomb. Not just India, Hindu India. Therefore, be warned, any criticism of it is not just anti-national, but anti-Hindu . . . . This is one of the unexpected perks of having a nuclear bomb. Not only can the government use it to threaten the enemy, it can use it to declare war on its own people. Us . . . .

Why does it all seem so familiar? Is it because, even as you watch, reality dissolves and seamlessly rushes forward into the silent, black-and-white images from old films—scenes of people being hounded out of their lives, rounded up and herded into camps? Of massacre, of mayhem, of endless columns of broken people making their way to nowhere? Why is there no soundtrack? Why is the hall so quiet? Have I been seeing too many films? Am I mad? Or am I right? Could those images be the inescapable culmination of what we have set into motion? Could our future be rushing forward into our past? [6]

The Us I referred to were those of us who do not belong to — or identify ourselves with — the ‘Hindu’ majority. By past, I was referring to the Partition of India in 1947, when more than one million Hindus and Muslims killed each other, and eight million became refugees.
~
In February 2002, following the burning of a train coach in which fifty-eight Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya were burned alive, the BJP government in Gujarat, led by Chief Minister Narendra Modi, presided over a carefully planned genocide of Muslims in the state. The Islamophobia generated all over the world by the 11 September 2001 attacks put the wind in their sails. The machinery of the state of Gujarat stood by and watched while more than two thousand people [7] were massacred. Women were gang-raped and burned alive. One hundred and fifty thousand Muslims were driven from their homes. The community was, and continues to be, ghettoised, socially and economically ostracized. Gujarat has always been a communally tense state. There had been riots before. But this was not a riot. It was a genocidal massacre, and though the number of victims was insignificant compared to the horror of say Rwanda, Sudan or the Congo, the Gujarat carnage was designed as a public spectacle whose aims were unmistakable. It was a public warning to Muslim citizens from the government of the world’s favourite democracy.

After the carnage, Narendra Modi pressed for early elections. He was returned to power with a mandate from the people of Gujarat. Five years later he repeated his success: he is now serving a third term as chief minister, widely appreciated by business houses for his faith in the Free Market. To be fair to the people of Gujarat, the only alternative they had to Narendra Modi’s brand of Hindutva (Nuclear), was the Congress Party’s candidate, Shankarsinh Vaghela, a disgruntled former BJP chief minister. All he had to offer was his own brand of Hindutva (Lite & Muddled). Not surprisingly, it didn’t make the cut.

The Gujarat genocide is the subject of the first essay in this collection, ‘Democracy: Who’s She When She’s at Home?’, written in May 2002 when murderous mobs still roamed the streets, killing and intimidating Muslims. I have deliberately not updated the text of any of the essays, because I thought it would be interesting to see how a hard look at the systemic nature of what is going on often contains within it a forecast of events that are still to come. So instead of updating the essays, I’ve added new endnotes. For example, a paragraph in the essay on the Gujarat genocide says:

Can we expect an anniversary celebration next year? Or will there be someone else to hate by then? Alphabetically: Adivasis, Buddhists, Christians, Dalits, Parsis, Sikhs? Those who wear jeans or speak English or those who have thick lips or curly hair? We won’t have to wait long.

Mobs led by Congress Party leaders had already slaughtered thousands of Sikhs on the streets of Delhi in 1984, as revenge for the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. Goons belonging to the Bajrang Dal, a Hindu militia, had attacked an Australian missionary, Graham Staines, and his two young sons, and burned them alive in January 1999.8 By December 2007, attacks on Christians by Hindu militias moved beyond stray incidents. In several states — Gujarat, Karnataka, Orissa — Christians were attacked, churches gutted. In Kandhamal, Orissa, at least sixteen Dalit and Adivasi Christians were killed by ‘Hindu’ Dalits and Adivasis. [9] Tens of thousands of Christians now live in refugee camps or hide in the surrounding forests, afraid to venture out to tend their fields and crops. Right now, ‘Hinduising’ Dalits and Adivasis, pitting them against each other, as well as against Muslims and Maoists, is the most important part of the Hindutva project. (Once again, it’s not a coincidence that these communities live in forests and on mineral rich lands which corporations have their eyes on and governments want vacated. So the Hindutva ‘shivirs’ [camps], under the pretext of bringing them into the ‘Hindu fold’, are a means of controlling people.)

In December 2008, protected by the first-ever BJP government to come to power in a southern state, Hindu vigilante mobs in Bangalore and Mangalore—the hub of India’s IT industry—began to attack women who wear jeans and Western clothes. [10] The threat is ongoing. Hindu militias have vowed to turn Karnataka into another Gujarat. That the BJP has struck roots in states like Karnataka and Gujarat, both frontrunners in the globalization project, once again illustrates the organic relationship between ‘Union’ and ‘Progress’. Or, if you like, between Fascism and the Free Market.

In January 2009 that relationship was sealed with a kiss at a public function. The CEOs of two of India’s biggest corporations, Ratan Tata (of the Tata Group) and Mukesh Ambani (of Reliance Industries), while accepting the Gujarat Garima—Pride of Gujarat—award, celebrated the development policies of Narendra Modi, architect of the Gujarat genocide, and warmly endorsed him as a future candidate for prime minister.
~
As this book goes to press, the nearly two billion dollar 2009 General Election has just been concluded. [11] That’s a lot more than the budget of the US elections. According to some media reports the actual amount that was spent is closer to ten billion dollars. [12] Where, might one ask, does that kind of money come from?

The Congress and its Allies, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), have won a comfortable majority. Interestingly, more than 90 per cent of the independent candidates who stood for elections lost. Clearly, without sponsorship it’s hard to win an election. And independent candidates cannot promise subsidised rice, free TVs and cash-for-votes, those demeaning acts of vulgar charity that elections have been reduced to. [13]

When you take a closer look at the calculus that underlies election results, words like ‘comfortable’ and ‘majority’ turn out to be deceptive, if not outright inaccurate. For instance, the actual share of votes polled by the UPA in these elections works out to only 10.3 per cent of the country’s population! It’s interesting how the cleverly layered mathematics of electoral democracy can turn a tiny minority into a thumping mandate. [14] Anyway, be that as it may, the point is that it will not be L.K. Advani, hate-monger incarnate, but secular Dr Manmohan Singh, gentle architect of the market reforms, a man who has never won an election in his life, who will be prime minister of the world’s largest democracy for a second term.

In the run-up to the polls, there was absolute consensus across party lines about the economic ‘reforms’. Govindacharya, formerly the chief ideologue of the BJP, progenitor of the Ram Janamabhoomi movement, sarcastically suggested that the Congress and BJP form a coalition. [15] In some states they already have. In Chhattisgarh, for example, the BJP runs the government and Congress politicians run the Salwa Judum, a vicious government-backed ‘people’s’ militia. The Judum and the government have formed a joint front against the Maoists in the forests who are engaged in a deadly and often brutal armed struggle against displacement and against land acquisition by corporations waiting to set up steel factories and to begin mining iron ore, tin and all the other wealth stashed below the forest floor. So, in Chhattisgarh, we have the remarkable spectacle of the two biggest political parties of India in an alliance against the Adivasis of Dantewara, India’s poorest, most vulnerable people. Already 644 villages have been emptied. Fifty thousand people have moved into Salwa Judum camps. Three hundred thousand are hiding in the forests and are being called Maoist terrorists or sympathizers. The battle is raging, and the corporations are waiting.

It is significant that India is one of the countries that blocked a European move in the UN asking for an international probe into war crimes that may have been committed by the government of Sri Lanka in its recent offensive against the Tamil Tigers. [16] Governments in this part of the world have taken note of Israel’s Gaza blueprint as a good way of dealing with ‘terrorism’: keep the media out and close in for the kill. That way they don’t have to worry too much about who’s a ‘terrorist’ and who isn’t. There may be a little flurry of international outrage, but it goes away pretty quickly.

Things do not augur well for the forest-dwelling people of Chhattisgarh.

Reassured by the sort of ‘constructive’ collaboration, the consensus between political parties, few were more enthusiastic about the recent general elections than some major corporate houses. They seem to have realized that a democratic mandate can legitimize their pillaging in a way that nothing else can. Several corporations ran extravagant advertising campaigns on TV, some featuring Bollywood film stars urging people, young and old, rich and poor, to go out and vote. Shops and restaurants in Khan market, Delhi’s most tony market, offered discounts to those whose index (voting) fingers were marked with indelible ink. Democracy suddenly became the cool new way to be. You know how it is: the Chinese do Sport, so they had the Olympics; India does Democracy, so we had an election. Both are heavily sponsored, TV friendly spectator sports.

The BBC commissioned a coach on a train — the India Election Special — that took journalists from all over the world on a sightseeing tour to witness the miracle of Indian elections. The train coach had a slogan painted on it: Will India’s voters revive the World’s Fortunes? [17] BBC (Hindi) had a poster up in a café near my home. It featured a hundred dollar bill (with Ben Franklin) morphing into a 500 rupee note (with Gandhi). It said: Kya India ka vote bachayega duniya ka note? (Will India’s votes rescue the world’s currency notes?) In these flagrant and unabashed ways an electorate has been turned into a market, voters are seen as consumers, and democracy is being welded to the Free Market. Ergo: those who cannot consume do not matter.

What does the victory of the UPA mean in this election? Obviously a myriad things. The debate is wide open. Interpreting an Indian election is about as exact a science as sorcery. Voting patterns are intricately connected with local issues and caste and community equations that vary, quite literally, from polling booth to polling booth. There can be no reliable Big Conclusion. But here’s something to think about.

In its time in office, in order to mitigate the devastation caused by its economic policies the former Congress regime passed three progressive (critics call them populist and controversial) Parliamentary Acts. The Forest Rights Act (which gave forest dwellers legal right to land and the traditional use of forest produce), the Right to Information Act and, most important of all, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). The NREGA guarantees every rural family a hundred days of work (hard, manual labour) a year at minimum wages. It amounts to an average of Rs 8000 (about $170) per family per year. Enough for a good meal in a restaurant, including wine and dessert. Imagine how hellish times must be for even that tiny amount of money to come as a relief to millions of people who are reeling under the impact of the precipitous loss of their lands and their livelihoods. (Talk about crumbs from the high table. But then, which one of us has the heart, or the right, to argue that no crumbs are better than crumbs? Or, indeed, that no elections are better than meaningless elections?) Implementing the NREGA, seeing that the crumbs actually reach the people they’re meant for, has occupied all the time and energy of some of India’s finest and most committed social activists for the last several years. They have had to battle cartels of corrupt government officers, power-brokers and middlemen. They have faced threats and a fair amount of violence. One rural activist in Jharkhand immolated himself in anger and frustration at the injustice of it all.

Ironically, the NREGA only made it through Parliament because of pressure brought to bear on the UPA government by the Left Front and, it must be said, by Sonia Gandhi. It was passed despite tremendous resistance from the mandarins of the Free Market within the Congress Party. The Corporate Media was more or less unanimously hostile to the Act. Needless to say, come election-time and the NREGA became one of the main planks of the Congress Party’s election campaign. There’s little doubt that the goodwill it generated amongst the very poor translated into votes for the Congress. But now that the elections are over, victory is being attributed to the very policies that the NREGA was passed to mitigate! The Captains of Industry have lost no time in claiming the ‘Peoples’ Mandate’ as their own. ‘It’s fast-forward for markets’, the business papers crowed the morning after, ‘Vote [was] for reforms, says India Inc’. [18]

There is an even greater irony: the Left Front, acting with the duplicity that has become second nature to all parliamentary political parties, took a sharp turn to the right. Even while it criticized the government’s economic policies at the Centre, it tried to enforce similar ones on its home turf in West Bengal. It announced that it was going to build a chemical hub in the district of Nandigram, a manufacturing unit for the Tata Nano in Singur, and a Jindal Steel plant in the forests of Lalgarh in Purulia. It began to acquire land, most of it fertile farmland, virtually at gunpoint. The massive, militant uprisings that followed were put down with bullets and lathi charges. Lumpen ‘Party’ militias ran amok among the protestors, raping women and killing people. But eventually the combination of genuine mass mobilisation and militancy worked. The people prevailed. They won all three battles, and forced the government to back off. The Tatas had to move the Nano project to Gujarat, that laboratory of fascism, which offered a ‘good investment climate’. The Left Front was decimated in the elections in West Bengal, something that had not happened in thirty years.

The irony doesn’t end there. In a fiendishly clever sleight of hand, the defeat of the Left is being attributed to its obstructionism and anti-Development policies! ‘Corporate captains feel easy without Left’, the papers said. [19] The stock market surged, looking forward to ‘a summer of joy’. CEOs on TV channels celebrated the new government’s ‘liberation’ from the Left. Hectoring news anchors have announced that the UPA no longer has any excuse to prevaricate on implementing Reforms, unless of course it has ‘closet Socialists’ hiding in its midst.

This is the wonderful thing about democracy. It can mean anything you want it to mean.

The absence of a genuinely left-wing party in mainstream politics is not something to celebrate. But the parliamentary Left has only itself to blame for its humiliation. It’s not a tragedy that it has been cut to size. Perhaps this will create the space for some truly progressive politics.

For the sake of argument, let’s for a moment contemplate the absurd and accept that India Inc and the Captains of Industry are right and that India’s millions did in fact vote for the speeding up of market ‘reforms’. Is that good news or bad news? Should we be celebrating the fact that millions of people who have something to teach the world, who have another imagination, another world view and a more sustainable way of life, have decided to embrace a discredited ideology, one that has pushed this planet into a crisis from which it may never recover?

What good will forest rights be when there are no forests? What good will the Right to Information do if there is no redress for our grievances? What good are rivers without water? What good are plains without mountains to water and sustain them? It’s as though we’re hurtling down a cliff in a bus without brakes and fighting over what songs to sing.

‘Jai Ho!’ perhaps? [20]
~
For better or for worse, the 2009 elections seem to have ensured that the ‘Progress’ project is up and running. However it would be a serious mistake to believe that the ‘Union’ project has fallen by the wayside.

As the 2009 election campaign unrolled, two things got saturation coverage in the media. One was the 100,000 rupee (two thousand dollar) ‘people’s car’, the Tata Nano—the wagon for the volks—rolling out of Modi’s Gujarat. (The sops and subsidies Modi gave the Tatas had a lot to do with Ratan Tata’s warm endorsement of him.21) The other is the hate speech of the BJP’s monstrous new debutant, Varun Gandhi (another descendent of the Nehru dynasty), who makes even Narendra Modi sound moderate and retiring. In a public speech Varun Gandhi called for Muslims to be forcibly sterilised. ‘This will be known as a Hindu bastion, no ***** Muslim dare raise his head here,’ he said, using a derogatory word for someone who has been circumcised. ‘I don’t want a single Muslim vote.’ [22]

Varun Gandhi is a modern politician, working the democratic system, doing everything he can to create a majority and consolidate his vote bank. A politician needs a vote bank, like a corporation needs a mass market. Both need help from the mass media. Corporations buy that help. Politicians must earn it. Some earn it by dint of hard work, others with dangerous circus stunts. Varun Gandhi’s hate speech bought him national headlines. His brief stint in prison (for violating the Election Commission’s Code of Conduct), cut short by a court order, made him an instant martyr. He was gently chastised for his impetuousness by his party elders (on TV, for public consumption). But then, in order to export his coarse appeal, he, like Narendra Modi, was flown around in a chopper as a star campaigner for the BJP in other constituencies.

Varun Gandhi won his election with a colossal margin. It makes you wonder — are ‘the people’ always right? It is worrying to think what lessons the BJP will draw from its few decisive victories and its many decisive losses in this election. In several of the constituencies where it has won, hate speech (and deed) have served it well. It still remains by far the second largest political party, with a powerful national presence, the only real challenge to the Congress. It will certainly live to fight another day. The question is, will it turn the burners up or down?

This said, it would be a travesty to lay all the blame for divisive politics at the door of the BJP. Whether it’s nuclear tests, the unsealing of the locks of the Babri Masjid, the culture of creating fissures and pitting castes and communities against each other, or passing retrograde laws, the Congress got there first and has never been shy of keeping the ball in play. In the past, both parties have used massacres to gain political mileage. Sometimes they feast off them obliquely, sometimes they accuse each other of committing mass murder. In this election, both the Congress and the BJP brazenly fielded candidates believed to be involved in public lynching and mass murder. At no point has either seen to it that the guilty are punished or that justice is delivered. Despite their vicious public exchange of accusations, so far they have colluded to protect one another from real consequences.

Eventually the massacres get absorbed into the labyrinth of India’s judicial system where they are left to bubble and ferment before being trundled out as campaign material for the next election. You could say it’s all a part of the fabric of Indian democracy. Hard to see from a train window. Whether the new infusion of young blood into the Congress will change the old Party’s methods of doing business remains to be seen.

As will be obvious from the essays in this book, the hoary institutions of Indian democracy—the judiciary, the police, the ‘free’ press and, of course, elections—far from working as a system of checks and balances, quite often do the opposite. They provide each other cover to promote the larger interests of Union and Progress. In the process, they generate such confusion, such a cacophony, that voices raised in warning just become part of the noise. And that only helps to enhance the image of the tolerant, lumbering, colourful, somewhat chaotic democracy. The chaos is real. But so is the consensus.
~
Speaking of consensus, there’s the small and ever-present matter of Kashmir. When it comes to Kashmir the consensus in India is hard-core. It cuts across every section of the establishment—including the media, the bureaucracy, the intelligentsia and even Bollywood.

The war in the Kashmir valley is almost twenty years old now, and has claimed about seventy thousand lives. Tens of thousands have been tortured, several thousand have ‘disappeared’, women have been raped and many thousands widowed. Half a million Indian troops patrol the Kashmir valley, making it the most militarized zone in the world. (The United States had about one hundred and sixty-five thousand active-duty troops in Iraq at the height of its occupation.) The Indian army now claims that it has, for the most part, crushed militancy in Kashmir. Perhaps that’s true. But does military domination mean victory?

How does a government that claims to be a democracy justify a military occupation? By holding regular elections, of course. Elections in Kashmir have had a long and fascinating past. The blatantly rigged state election of 1987 was the immediate provocation for the armed uprising that began in 1990. Since then elections have become a finely honed instrument of the military occupation, a sinister playground for India’s Deep State. Intelligence Agencies have created political parties and decoy politicians, they have constructed and destroyed political careers at will. It is they more than anyone else who decide what the outcome of each election will be. After every election, the Indian establishment declares that India has won a popular mandate from the people of Kashmir.

In the summer of 2008, a dispute over land being allotted to the Amarnath Shrine Board coalesced into a massive, nonviolent uprising. Day after day, hundreds of thousands of people defied soldiers and policemen — who fired straight into the crowds, killing scores of people — and thronged the streets. From early morning to late in the night, the city reverberated to chants of ‘Azadi! Azadi!’ (‘Freedom! Freedom!’). Fruit sellers weighed fruit chanting, ‘Azadi! Azadi!’ Shopkeepers, doctors, houseboat owners, guides, weavers, carpet sellers — everybody was out with placards, everybody shouted ‘Azadi! Azadi!’ The protests went on for several days.

The protests were massive. They were democratic, and they were nonviolent. For the first time in decades fissures appeared in mainstream public opinion in India. [23] The Indian state panicked. Unsure of how to deal with this mass civil disobedience, it ordered a crackdown. It enforced the harshest curfew in recent memory with shoot-at-sight orders. In effect, for days on end, it virtually caged millions of people. The major pro-freedom leaders were placed under house arrest, several others were jailed. House to house searches culminated in the arrest of hundreds of people. The Jama Masjid was closed for Friday prayers for an unprecedented seven weeks at a stretch.

Once the rebellion was brought under control, the government did something extraordinary—it announced elections in the state. Pro-independence leaders called for a boycott. They were re-arrested. Almost everybody believed the elections would become a huge embarrassment for the Indian government. The security establishment was convulsed with paranoia. Its elaborate network of spies, renegades and embedded journalists began to buzz with renewed energy. No chances were taken. (Even I, who had nothing to do with any of what was going on, was put under house arrest in Srinagar for two days.)

Calling for elections was a huge risk. But the gamble paid off. People turned out to vote in droves. It was the biggest voter turnout since the armed struggle began. It helped that the polls were scheduled so that the first districts to vote were the most militarized even within the Kashmir valley.

None of India’s analysts, journalists and psephologists cared to ask why people who had only weeks ago risked everything, including bullets and shoot-at-sight orders, should have suddenly changed their minds. None of the high-profile scholars of the great festival of democracy — who practically live in TV studios when there are elections in mainland India, picking apart every forecast, exit poll and minor percentile swing in the vote share—talked about what elections mean in the presence of such a massive, year-round troop deployment. (An armed soldier for every twenty civilians.) No one speculated about the mystery of hundreds of unknown candidates who materialized out of nowhere to represent political parties that had no previous presence in the Kashmir valley. Where had they come from? Who was financing them? No one was curious.

No one spoke about the curfew, the mass arrests, the lockdown of constituencies that were going to poll. Not many talked about the fact that campaigning politicians went out of their way to de-link ‘Azadi’ and the Kashmir dispute from elections, which they insisted were only about municipal issues—roads, water, electricity. No one talked about why people who have lived under a military occupation for decades—where soldiers could barge into homes and whisk away people at any time of the day or night—might need someone to listen to them, to take up their cases, to represent them. [24]

The minute elections were over, the establishment and the mainstream press declared victory (for India) once again. The most worrying fallout was that in Kashmir, people began to parrot their colonizers’ view of themselves as a somewhat pathetic people who deserved what they got. ‘Never trust a Kashmiri,’ several Kashmiris said to me. ‘We’re fickle and unreliable.’ Psychological warfare has been an instrument of official policy in Kashmir. Its depredations over decades — its attempt to destroy people’s self-esteem — are arguably the worst aspect of the occupation.

But only weeks after the elections it was back to business as usual. The protests and demands for Azadi and the summary killings by security forces have begun again. Newspapers report that militancy is on the rise.

Unsurprisingly, the poor turnout in the subsequent general elections did not elicit much comment.

It’s enough to make you wonder whether there is any connection at all between elections and democracy.

The trouble is that Kashmir sits on the fault lines of a region that is awash in weapons and sliding into chaos. The Kashmiri freedom struggle, with its crystal clear sentiment but fuzzy outlines, is caught in the vortex of several dangerous and conflicting ideologies—Indian Nationalism (corporate as well as ‘Hindu’, shading into imperialism), Pakistani Nationalism (breaking down under the burden of its own contradictions), US Imperialism (made impatient by a tanking economy), and a resurgent medieval-Islamist Taliban (fast gaining legitimacy, despite its insane brutality, because it is seen to be resisting an occupation). Each of these ideologies is capable of a ruthlessness that can range from genocide to nuclear war. Add Chinese imperial ambitions, an aggressive, re-incarnated Russia, the huge reserves of natural gas in the Caspian region and persistent whispers about natural gas, oil and uranium reserves in Kashmir and Ladakh, and you have the recipe for a new Cold War (which, like the last one, is cold for some and hot for others).

In the midst of all this, Kashmir is set to become the conduit through which the mayhem unfolding in Afghanistan and Pakistan spills into India, where it will find purchase in the anger of the young among India’s one hundred and fifty million Muslims who have been brutalized, humiliated and marginalised. Notice has been given by the series of terrorist strikes that culminated in the Mumbai attacks of 2008.

There is no doubt that the Kashmir dispute ranks right up there, along with Palestine, as one of the oldest, most intractable disputes in the world. That does not mean that it cannot be resolved. Only that the solution will not be completely to the satisfaction of any one party, one country or one ideology. Negotiators will have to be prepared to deviate from the ‘party line’. Of course, we haven’t yet reached the stage where the Government of India is even prepared to admit that there’s a problem, let alone negotiate a solution. Right now it has no reason to.

Internationally, its stocks are soaring. Its economy is still ticking over, and while its neighbours deal with bloodshed, civil war, concentration camps, refugees and army mutinies, India has just concluded a beautiful election.

However, Demon-crazy can’t fool all the people all the time. India’s temporary, shotgun solutions to the unrest in Kashmir (pardon the pun) have magnified the problem and driven it deep into a place where it is poisoning the aquifers.
~
Perhaps the story of the Siachen Glacier, the highest battlefield in the world, is the most appropriate metaphor for the insanity of our times. Thousands of Indian and Pakistani soldiers have been deployed there, enduring chill winds and temperatures that dip to minus 40 Celsius. Of the hundreds who have died there, many have died just from the cold—from frostbite and sunburn. The glacier has become a garbage dump now, littered with the detritus of war, thousands of empty artillery shells, empty fuel drums, ice-axes, old boots, tents and every other kind of waste that thousands of warring human beings generate. The garbage remains intact, perfectly preserved at those icy temperatures, a pristine monument to human folly. While the Indian and Pakistani governments spend billions of dollars on weapons and the logistics of high altitude warfare, the battlefield has begun to melt. Right now, it has shrunk to about half its size. The melting has less to do with the military standoff than with people far away, on the other side of the world, living the good life. They’re good people who believe in peace, free speech and human rights. They live in thriving democracies whose governments sit on the UN Security Council and whose economies depend heavily on the export of war and the sale of weapons to countries like India and Pakistan. (And Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia, the Republic of Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan . . . it’s a long list.) The glacial melt will cause severe floods in the subcontinent, and eventually severe drought that will affect the lives of millions of people. [25] That will give us even more reasons to fight. We’ll need more weapons. Who knows, that sort of consumer confidence may be just what the world needs to get over the current recession. Then everyone in the thriving democracies will have an even better life—and the glaciers will melt even faster.
~
While I read ‘Listening to Grasshoppers’ to a tense audience packed into a university auditorium in Istanbul (tense because words like unity, progress, genocide and Armenian tend to anger the Turkish authorities when they are uttered close together), I could see Rakel Dink, Hrant Dink’s widow, sitting in the front row, crying the whole way through. When I finished, she hugged me and said, ‘We keep hoping. Why do we keep hoping?’ We, she said. Not you. The words of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, sung so hauntingly by Abida Parveen, came to me:

nahin nigah main manzil to justaju hi sahi

nahin wisaal mayassar to arzu hi sahi

I tried to translate them for her (sort of):

If dreams are thwarted, then yearning must take their place

If reunion is impossible, then longing must take its place

You see what I meant about poetry?

1. See P. Chidambaram’s interview to Shoma Chaudhury and Shantanu Guha Ray, Tehelka, Vol. 5, Issue 21, 31 May 2008.

2. P. Sainath, ‘Neo-Liberal Terrorism in India: The Largest Wave of Suicides in History’, CounterPunch, 12 February 2009.

3. See United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), The State of Asia-Pacific’s Children 2008 (May 2008). Report available online at: http://www.unicef.org/publications/index_45086.html

(accessed 29 March 2009).

4. For a detailed account of the Mumbai riots of 1993, see the Report of the Justice B.N. Srikrishna Commission of Enquiry. Available online at http://www.sabrang.com/srikrish/sri%20main.htm (accessed 29 March 2009).

5. Sachar Committee Report, November 2006. Available online at http://minorityaffairs.gov.in/newsite/sachar/sachar.asp

6. Arundhati Roy, ‘The End of Imagination’, in The Cost of Living (New York: Modern Library, 1999), pp. 106–08.

7. See the Rejoinder Affidavit of the Citizens For Justice & Peace through its president Vs The Dist. Collector, Ahmedabad & Ors . . . Respondents in Writ Petition Civil 3770/2003. Rejoinder filed in October 2006 http://www.cjponline.org/compensation/note.pdf.

8. See Celia W. Dugger, ‘India Orders Inquiry Into Missionary’s Killing’, New York Times, 29 January 1999, p. A9.

9. See Angana Chatterji, ‘Hindutva’s Violent History’, Tehelka, 13 September 2008. See also Angana P. Chatterji, Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India’s Present; Narratives from Orissa (Gurgaon: Three Essays Collective, 2009).

10. See Somini Sengupta, ‘Attack on Women at an Indian Bar Intensifies a Clash of Cultures’, New York Times, 8 February 2009, p. A5.

11. ‘Lok Sabha Polls to Cost More Than US Presidential Poll’, Times of India, 1 March 2009.

12. See Shantanu Guha Ray, ‘Offer Valid Till Votes Last’, Tehelka, 27 May 2009.

13. Election Commission of India. http://www.eci.nic.in

14. Of India’s population of 1000 million, the registered voter base is 672 million. In 2009, only 356 million Indians voted, a turnout of 53 per cent. Of this the UPA vote share was approximately 33 per cent, i.e., less than 120 million voted for the UPA. http://eciresults.nic.in/frmPercentVotesPartyWiseChart.aspx

15. See ‘BJP, Congress should join hands, says Govindacharya’, Press Trust of India, Indore, 15 May 2009.

16. See ‘India, Pak Unite to Block Anti-Lanka Move at UN’, Indian Express, 28 May 2009

17. See ‘Journalism on Wheels’, photo by Rajeev Bhatt of BBC’s India Election Special Train, The Hindu, 26 April 2009.

18. See ‘Vote for reforms, says India Inc’, Sunday Hindustan Times, 17 May 2009.

19. See ‘Corporate Captains feel easy without Left’, Sunday Hindustan Times, 17 May 2009.

20. The theme song from the hit film Slumdog Millionaire, which was bought by the Congress Party for its election campaign for a sum of Rs 1 crore ($200,000).

21. See Uday Khandeparkar, ‘Behind the Nano Hype’, Wall Street Journal, 19 March 2009.

22. D.K. Singh, ‘“In logon ko pakad pakad ke nasbandi karana padega”’ (‘These People Must Be Caught and Sterilized’), Indian Express, 22
March 2009.

23. See Pratap Bhanu Mehta, ‘A Country in 40 Acres’, Indian Express, 6 August 2008. See also Vir Sanghvi, ‘Think the Unthinkable’, Hindustan Times, 16 August 2008, and Swaminathan Iyer, ‘Pushing Kashmir towards Pakistan’, Economic Times, 13 August 2008.

24. For an appraisal of the recently concluded elections in Jammu and Kashmir, see Gautam Navlakha, ‘Jammu and Kashmir Elections: A Shift in Equations’, and Rekha Chowdhary, ‘Separatist Sentiments and Deepening of Democracy’, Economic and Political Weekly, 17–23 January 2009.

25. For a detailed report, see Rajeev Upadhyay, ‘The Melting of the Siachen Glacier’, Current Science, 10 March 2009, pp. 646–48.

SOURCE: THE CURRENT AFFAIRS

URL: http://thecurrentaffairs.com/india-is-there-life-after-democracy.html