|
Please click on an article or scroll downwards to read this month’s Viewpoint.
By Rahul Bose (Courtesy of Rahul Bose and intentblog.com) 12 July, 2006. I board the 11.05 slow from Churchgate to Borivali. The second class bogey is half empty. But then its past rush hour, and we’re traveling against the traffic. For four hours, on eight different trains I sit down amidst the thickest cluster of commuters I can find. They stare at me, stare at the mike in my hand, trying to place the logo of the TV channel on it. I drop the mike and ask the obvious questions. The replies come readily. Yes, they feel fear but what to do? It’s a question of their jobs. Besides taxis are too expensive, and the buses take too long. Their children too caught the train earlier. How will they go to school? I ask what if there had been a communal riot instead of the blasts, would they be more or less fearful today? More. Why? Because a riot goes on for days. Politicians and religious leaders play with peoples’ emotions. Also there is a known enemy in a riot and we can see the hatred in their eyes. What do they feel about the government? They do nothing, eat our money and make speeches. See, they have never done anything for Bombay, but this at least they should have shame over. All we want is to live our lives safely. We are not asking for electricity, better trains, water, fancy bridges, Just let us move about without feeling this feeling of fear. So now what? Now what, means what? Now, nothing. Just live, just work, aisa hi chalane ka hain. What else to do? 13 July, 2006. I am part of a panel discussion on how long Bombay will tolerate terrorism of this kind. The customary politician from the ruling coalition, a rabid right-wing journalist from India’s leading newspaper and I are placed in front of an audience of college girls and a few young men. I opine that the age of terror is here to stay and Bombay is now no exception. That the best way to combat terror is to lead your life in exactly the way one would in the absence of it. That civil society should constantly question the government as to what it is doing to prevent future attacks and demand accountability for sloppy intelligence, but, that if our politicians have been powerless to stop even sati, we are seriously deluding ourselves that they will be able to pre-empt terror strikes, something even the U.S. and the U.K. have not been able to do. Therefore we are just going to have to factor this new reality into our consciousness. A wave of anger hits me. A majority of the audience believes I am advising a lie back and enjoy it policy. I am letting the government go scot-free. Seizing his chance, the right–wing journalist makes a demand for India to adopt Israel’s eye-for-an-eye anti-terrorism tactics. A few applaud him lustily. I am appalled. I say Israel’s policy has never worked, will never work. That Israelis are attacked every single week of their lives. So what do you want us to do, is the retort. Turn the other cheek? And then finally the killer question I was dreading comes from a girl in Sophia college. Please tell us who we should blame for this attack? 14 July, 2006. Shabana Azmi and her theatre colleagues have organized a peace march through the streets of Juhu that will culminate in a simple commemoration of the blasts affected at the statue of Mahatma Gandhi on the beach. The number of people gathered is impressive. Unlike what will be reported later on the news channels, the majority of marchers are not from either the film or the theatre fraternity. They are ordinary citizens of Bombay moved by the intent of the march. I speak to a few of them. Why are they here? Overwhelmingly, without a single exception, they say they are here because they really want to do something but don’t know what to do. They saw the pictures on television and wanted to help in any way but they don’t know where to go. I remind them that unlike a natural tragedy, this one has no prolonged period of devastation. It’s cut and dried, over and out, so in a perverse kind of way there’s so much less to do. I suggest they find out the families who have lost bread earners and help them. At the commemoration, television channels ask me what significance does ending the march at the Gandhi statue have. I state the obvious. That in the face of terror, love, compassion and peace are the only qualities that will keep us together, that will give the bereaved the strength to face the remaining days of our lives without a father, a daughter. Some marchers who are listening interestedly ask how this is going to help to ensure against something like this. Is the second class traveler on the local train going to be happy to hear that all he must do at this point is to bring love and compassion into his heart? 15 July, 2006. The first findings of the investigations are beginning to emerge. Newspapers show identikits of the terrorists. They have Muslim names. The list of suspected organizations is narrowed down to three. All have a Muslim fundamentalist ethos. And I begin to think of the anger that I have witnessed the past three days and a sense of dread begins to fill me. What if the obvious communal card is played by cynical religious and political leaders? How do we counter it? Will it be enough if the majority of rational Muslim leaders and clerics repeatedly denounce this act of terror? Will it be enough if the mohalla committees committed to communal harmony tirelessly spread the message of peace and brotherhood? No. It will be enough only when we realize that as soon as we swing a chopper at our neighbor’s neck we have played beautifully, dutifully into the hands of the terrorists. It will be enough only when we realize the first blow will result in mass annihilation. It will be enough only when we genuinely believe we are bigger, broader, and richer than we ever thought we were. Rahul Bose started his acting career early, when as a boy of six he played the lead in his school play, ’Tom, the Piper’s Son’. Ever since then his love for theatre has only grown with a prolific body of work on the Bombay stage, culminating in his last performance at the Leicester Haymarket in England where he played the lead in Tim Murari’s ’The Square Circle’. His film career took off with the unprecedented success of his first film, ’English, August’, today a cultish favourite amongst cinephiles. Acclaim followed for his work in movies like ’Split Wide Open’ (Best Actor, Singapore Film Festival, 2000), Mr. And Mrs. Iyer, and ’Jhankaar Beats’ - all international award-winning films. Although ’Thakshak’ and ’Chameli’ may be considered to be more mainstream, his image as India’s premier actor of the alternative cinema finds concurrence across the world. ’Time’ magazine called him ’the superstar of Indian arthouse cinema’ while ’Maxim’ (Italy), ’the Sean Penn of Oriental cinema’. His latest work in Buddhadev Dasgupta’s ’Kaalpurush’, was his fourth film to feature in the Toronto International Film Festival this year. Being hailed as his strongest work yet seems to have prompted four more film makers to sign him on. His next films include Aparna Sen’s ’15, Park Avenue’, and Rajeev Virani’s ’The Whisperers’. Watch how Indian nationalists and Parliament this week, like last week, is likely to see plenty of “nationalist” criticism of the India-US nuclear deal. In the US, as the nuclear bill goes to the Senate, “nonproliferation” advocates are talking it down again. Both sets of critics clothe themselves in strategic purity and present themselves as the final saviours of cherished national principles. Both project the future in terms of worst-case scenarios and slippery slope arguments but insist that their scare stories are just normal projections. Neither gives its own government, or the other government for that matter, any credit for having the ability to say no to demands that might be against national interest. Yet both rely on the same principle of rhetoric — confuse the timelines, muddle the technical concepts, ignore considered responses from the pro-deal side and play on fears of the non-experts on an emotional plane. Consider the American anti-deal lobby’s effort to chastise Dr ElBaradei. They berate him for going back on his principles of universality in nonproliferation, because he supports exception for India. Yet none of these wise folks would go out on a limb to recommend two things that would make the regime universal: ask the P-5 or the US categorically to give up nuclear weapons and ask the multilateral export control regimes like the Nuclear Suppliers Group and the Missile Technology Control Regime to disband because they are restrictive-membership agreements. Indeed, they cannot even strongly demand that China — which has about 1000 tonnes of stockpile — give a verifiable undertaking that it is no longer producing fissile material. The same disingenuous strategy is apparent in continuing the drum beat on how the deal will free up India’s indigenous uranium for bomb making. This, despite the very well-researched study (by Ashley Tellis) showing how and why this scenario is not supported by Indian behaviour six years after the Pokharan II tests and without even the carrot of the current deal. And the fact that India has sufficient uranium to build as large an arsenal as it might want to. The spectre of greater Pakistan-China nuclear cooperation is raised by obfuscating the fact that their cooperation, since the 1980s, was the reason India was compelled to test. Or that their cooperation was publicly strengthened in a nuclear cooperation agreement in the summer of 2004 — one full year before the George Bush-Manmohan Singh agreement and one month before China became an avid supporter of the nonproliferation regime by joining the Nuclear Suppliers Group. The keepers of the nonproliferation regime have chosen not to publicise the fact that Sino-Pak nuclear cooperation agreement has no clauses that demand any change in Pakistani nuclear policy. China would highlight that transfers under this agreement would be under safeguards. But the critics of the US-India deal should know better — there have been several instances in the past when Chinese technology supposedly intended for Chashma found its way into Khushab. Let us now turn to the Indian critics of the deal. A favourite bogey raised is the loss of strategic autonomy. This is a subject that is sure to ignite the anti-imperialist fears among the vanguard of the proletariat and at least a flame of ultra-nationalism among the nuclear hawks. However, signing on to any agreement with any country or group of countries (WTO, UN Charter, IAEA) means the loss of some strategic autonomy. Even the 1970s treaty with USSR bound India into not opposing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and into opposing the international action against Saddam Hussain when he invaded Kuwait. The perceived oil-dependence on the Arab states tied India in knots without even a formal accord — India did not protest at the secretive Iran-Pakistan nuclear pact, did not protest at Saudi money radicalising Indian Muslim youth, and was forced to publicly deny the growing convergence of interest with Israel while working with it for years on counter-terrorism issues. The signature on the UN Charter has recently forced India (and all other UN members) to comply with UNSC Resolution 1540. If we take the strategic autonomy argument to its logical conclusion, there would be no international agreements and in this idyllic state — where there is no international politics of course — India would not have to make any difficult choices! More to the point, before the advent of the US-India deal, India supposedly was free to build as many bombs as it wanted or needed, was free to deal with Iran in any way it thought fit, and was free to build as many nuclear reactors and as much nuclear fuel as it cared to. Yet facts seemed to point to other realities. Even under the ultra-patriotic regime of the NDA, India did not put all or even most of its (un-safeguarded) reactors to produce weapons-grade plutonium. It did not require Iran to prove its friendly credentials by giving up on Pakistan. It did not accept the premise that buying oil from Iran at high price and allowing it to come through Pakistan would ensure cheap and steady supply of energy. India did not build as many reactors as are needed, nor did its existing reactors produce more than 3 per cent of its energy requirements — even though there was no Big Brother (IAEA or the US) constraining it. In other words, critics need to show why the “free” India did no better than what a supposedly constrained India might be forced to do by the evil US plan.
Dr. Seema Gahlaut is Senior Research Associate at the Center for International Trade and Security (CITS), and adjunct faculty at the School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) at the University of Georgia. She teaches courses on American Government & Politics, Political Economy and National Security in Southern Asia, and Politics of Trade & Security Policy at SPIA coordinates the CITS Security Leadership Program. She has appeared on CNN Talk Back Live and often contributes to Voice of America, Radio Free Asia and BBC Radio (Hindi Service) as an expert. She has been quoted in a variety of publications such as the New York Times, Mother Jones, Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Aerospace Daily, Asia Times, Times of India, and Bloomberg.com. Dr. Gahlaut has an M.A. and M. Phil. from the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi), and Ph.D. from the University of Georgia. Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in these columns are solely those of the writers and do not necessarily represent those of the editor/publisher. By Shylashri Shankar
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in these columns are solely those of the writers and do not necessarily represent those of the editor/publisher.
Archives:
All Material © Copyright Kavita Chhibber and respective authors. 
E-mail this article
|
|