:: Saturday, August 17, 2002 ::

The US and the Rest (Part II):

Is it just me or does anyone else notice the intellectual gymnastics that the US government is performing to justify its planned attack on Iraq. Here are a list of some of some of the odd and inaccurate statements I have heard recently.

1. Saddam is a cruel dictator: Okay, but we have supported and continue to support lots of cruel dictatorships. We even used to support Saddam -- where was our righteous morality then? If he is so "evil" or "insane" why did we used to support him? Why do we continue to prop up other dictatorships, if these regimes are so menacing?

2. Iraq is seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction: So what? Does anyone claim he has the potential to deliver the weapons to the US? Is it really an immediate threat to the US? If it is an immediate threat to our allies in the region, then why don't we see them jumping on the bandwagon to support an invasion?

Regardless of the immediacy of the threat, it is only a matter of time before the nuclear apartheid of the Great Powers completely breaks down. How many countries will we have to invade to preserve the post-war order? Israel already has weapons of mass destruction -- why not invade them? Iran is trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction -- why not invade them? Pakistan is a military dictatorship with weapons of mass destruction -- why not invade them?

The real threat is most likely that Iraq might have the potential to attack Israel or that Iraq could gain undue influence over oil markets. Personally, I think that Iraq's acquisition of nuclear and biological weapons is completely justified given that Israel already has such weapons. I would prefer that neither country have such weapons, but I do not see why Israel has a greater right to such weapons. I am totally unconvinced by arguments which claim that Israel is the "only" democracy in the region. I am not even sure that it is fair to call Israel a liberal democracy given its blatant abuse of human and civil rights. As for the oil markets, the US needs to grow up and ween itself off of its oil dependency. Fighting wars so that idiots can drive "super-sized" SUV's and pay less for oil than bottled water makes no sense to me. A republic requires virtue and self-discipline -- it is time for Americans to return to their roots.

3. Iraq agreed to weapons inspections and has expelled the inspectors: Iraq did not expel the UNSCOM weapons inspectors. Richard Butler pulled the inspectors out of Iraq fearing a US attack on 17 December 1998. In any case, the US yet to be held to task for using the UNSCOM inspectors as spies. Details on this dispute are well documented by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)

4. Saddam has used chemical weapons on his own population!: I doubt that Saddam views the Kurds as "his people." In any case, our wonderful allies the Turks are quite willing to gun down Kurds with Apache helicopters and we don't seem to raise an eyebrow. This line of argument seems to imply that it is okay to have chemical and biological weapons so long as one does not use it on their own people. This is utterly absurd. Why should any country be allowed to maintain stockpiles of these weapons? As it now appears that the Anthrax attacks in the US originated from a US military base, it is apparent that even the mighty US cannot adequately safeguard such weapons -- so why not eliminate the stockpiles altogether, starting in our own backyard?

5. Saddam is tied to the terrorists attack on the US: This story has been completely discredited and yet it keeps reappearing the US media. I guess the administration must believe that telling lies over and over makes them true. There is no credible evidence of a relationship between Saddam and the terrorists. I think that most Al Quaeda supporters would probably be quite happy to overthrow the secular regime in Iraq once they are done overthrowing the House of Saud. This argument is primarily meant to lump all middle east regimes together and mask the fact that the US has failed to capture Osama bin Laden. Our military wants to go back to doing what it was designed to do -- attack nation states. By pounding Iraq in to the ground we can convince ourselves that we have had a major success in the war against terrorism.

Overall, I am outraged by the hypocrisy of the US. I am upset that this country stockpiles weapons of mass destruction while telling other countries that they cannot have such weapons. Americans need to stand up and ask their government why they need so many/any chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons in the first place. Most importantly, they need to express their objection to any invasion of Iraq.

:: Vikash Yadav 1:49 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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The US and the Rest:

Protester raise arms and fly banners while staging a protest rally against the port call of the USS Abraham Lincoln in Sasebo, southern Japan, Friday, Aug. 16, 2002. U.S. (AP Photo/Junji Kurokawa)

I would like to diverge from our usual discussions of South Asian politics to say a few words about US foreign policy toward Iraq. It is widely known that almost every country in the world is opposed to the planned US invasion of Iraq. In the US, proponents of "regime change" have not been able to explain why there is so much opposition to the US approach. Global opposition is generally dismissed as a lack of will or strategic foresight. There is no serious attempt to engage with foreign opionions -- the American government is more intersted in hiring PR firms to help change the US image abroad rather than engage the ideas of foreign governments and people.

I believe a reason that the rest of the world is opposed to the US approach is based on the memory of the horrors of war which is apparently not shared by the US foreign policy making establisment. The American government has yet to seriously question the use of military force to achieve foreign policy objectives. As Secretary of State Madeline Albright once quipped, "What's the use of having all this equipment, if we don't use it?" Although the US has been defeated in the Philippines, Cuba, Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, etc. these failures are dismissed as anomalous or failures due to normative restrictions on the use of overwhelming force.

The US foreign policy establishment is rightly horrified by the traumatic experience of the recent attack on their own soil. However, the experience of terrorism is not a novel experience for the majority of countries around the world. (In fact, acts of "domestic" terrorism are hardly a novelty in the US, although one would not guess this by the disproportionate reaction of the US military.) The rest of the world is unwilling to accept the US claim that the incident on September 11th provides a mandate for endless military aggression to placate US security concerns. If the rest of the world has a more measured posture toward threats to their national security -- it is not because they are weak, it is because they realize there are limits to the use of force in the achievement of national security and foreign policy objectives. The rest of the world is willing to live with greater ambiguity in the security sphere. They are not fooled into believing that the only hindrance to security is greater relative power. The European countries in particular have only recently turned back from the imperial path that we are now treading. Countries like France and Germany have long since learned that in democratic polities security cannot be achieved by military means.

:: Vikash Yadav 10:46 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Pakistan's Independence Day:

Today Pakistan celebrates its 55th Independence anniversary, I think it is appropriate that to mark this event a critical and sympathetic view is needed. A propserous and stable Pakistan can only be an asset to the region and as after India Pakistan is the largest country in South Asia, this is an issue that concers all involved in the region. By way of commemoration of this occasion I think it only fitting to reproduce here a piece of work by one of the most peceptive and progressive scholars from and on Pakistan - Eqbal Ahmed. Vikash has already added a link to Khaldunia which is the eponymous title of the University Ahmed was trying to establish in order to remedy the dismal state of higher education in Pakistan currently. An energetic activist as well as scholar, Ahmed combines both a deep attachment to his country together with a critcial perspective that did not blind him to the less attractive sides of Pakistani political and social life today. Below is a seminal essay on the roots of violence in Pakistani society, unfortunately only the first part of this peice is available online (at the Khaldunia site) so I have here taken the liberty of reproducing the essay in its entirety as I feel its subject matter is more topical than ever and should be read by those on both sides of the Indo-Pakistani border. The clarity of style and ease of expression combine to present a relatively multi-faceted and complex phenomenon in a simple and accessible manner without losing anything in either elegance or subtlety. Pakistani society and Pakistan as a country could have had fewer advocates with greater skill, style or comitmment than Eqbal Ahmad; and given the sombre mood on its Independence celebrations it could do with many more. Re-reading his essay I am still struck by how relefvant and presceint it is today as well as wide-ranging: his attention to the problem of violence against women should be all the more poignant given the story of the horrific ganga-rape of a Pakistani woman in the NWFP, his penetrating analysis of the gradual jihadisation of Pakistan and the murky role the USA had to play should serve as a caution to anyone wishing or tempted to make hasty generalisations in the wake of September 11th, while his rejection of religious fundamentalism in all its guises is a reassurance to secularists all over the sub-continent that voices of resaon still exist and his critical yet at the same time loving evaluations of Islam and Muslim culture/history bespeak of a man all too aware of the shortcomings of his own socio-historical culture but also unwilling to overlook the nourishment and depth that the same culture has given him.

The roots of violence in Pakistani society

By Eqbal Ahmad

Proliferation of violence has become the most serious social problem in Pakistan today. Not a week, often not a day, goes by without some terrible act of violence shaking public confidence in the state’s ability to protect citizens, and reminding us that a serious decline in civility has occurred in this country. Officials announce ever stronger measures as the cure while citizens wonder over the causes which underlie our descent into insensate savagery such as the recent massacre of mourners in a Lahore cemetery. This essay is but one man’s perspectives on the roots of contemporary violence in Pakistan.

I should begin with five simple observations: One, apart from war and aggression as defined under international law, nine forms of violence may be identified as among the most commonly observed world wide. The degree of their incidence differs in place and time. They are: domestic, criminal, official, ethnic, chiliastic, political (protest oriented), religious-sectarian, terrorist, and revolutionary violence. Often these forms overlap. For example, official violence can be as terroristic in nature as revolutionary and criminal violence. Officially sponsored death squads and foreign covert operations are examples. Similarly sectarian violence frequently takes terrorist forms as Pakistan has been witnessing with some frequency. And revolutionary violence nearly always involves a combination of protest, terrorism, and warfare.

Two, of these forms of violence only one, the revolutionary type is not currently in evidence in Pakistan. Typically, revolutionary violence differs from the other forms in that it seeks system change and tends to be practised in a sociologically and psychologically selective pattern. The other eight forms not only prevail in Pakistan today but have also been on the rise in the last two decades. However, one should note that conditions for revolutionary violence have been gathering in Pakistan since the start in 1980 of the internationally sponsored Jihad in Afghanistan.

There are indications that we might be at the threshold of the outbreak of organised violence aimed at system change. If it does occur, it is unlikely to be selective in the manner practised earlier by the secular revolutionary movements in China, Vietnam, Cuba, or the Algerian struggle for independence. This lack of selectivity shall be ascribable to the fact that the perpetrators of revolutionary violence in Pakistan are likely to be religious and right wing organisations which have not set theoretical or practical limits on their use of violence. In the countries where Islamists have so far engaged in violence with revolutionary objectives, i.e. with the objective of system change, they have tended to be quite indiscriminate in its use. Contemporary Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt and, increasingly, Pakistan are examples.

Three, the convergence and accentuation of multiple forms of violence, such as now exists in Pakistan, has historically signalled the decline of the state, its legitimacy, ideological mooring, and institutional will and capacity to govern. Violence practising groups emerge as the weakened state’s competitors. As such, in countries where the phenomenon persists the state gradually loses the attributes of authority, and anarchy ensues with power passing to a myriad of militias, warlords, and other more or less lawless and predatory groupings. On a safe-to-critical scale of 1-10, Pakistan falls, in my estimation, somewhere between six and seven among contemporary states. In other words, it is not quite there but is moving perilously toward a critical zone from where it will take the state and society generations to return to a semblance of normal existence. When the critical point of near collapse is reached, the viability of statehood depends more on external than internal factors. In recent years, this development occurred in Lebanon, Somalia, Rwanda, and Liberia.

Four, durable and efficient governing structures and mechanisms often develop when there is a timely and meaningful response to the challenges posed by the enfeeblement of state institutions, and the growth of an environment of generalised violence. A meaningful response is normally one that is based on precise understanding of the roots of the violence and character of its perpetrators. It also requires a certain taming of the repressive instincts that favour augmentation in the coercive capabilities of the state as the best way to deal with augmented terrorism and crime.

The South Asian subcontinent experienced this process in the last century of Mughal power and the early years of British state formation in India. The Mughal did not respond in a creative and contemporary fashion to the challenge, and failed. The British developed contemporary institutions and legislated with care and caution, thus laying the foundations of a state which endured for more than a century. .

These considerations suggest that what Pakistan needs is a two-pronged policy pursued simultaneously: a carefully planned and methodically executed program of reform aimed at removing the root causes of the proliferation of violence in society, and improvement in the investigative, preventive and prosecutorial capabilities of security and intelligence agencies, and the administration of justice. The enactment of harsh laws such as the recently enacted anti-terrorism law, and tolerance of extra-judicial practices such as murder in custody rarely contribute to solving the problem. More frequently they blur the distinction between law and crime.

Five, throughout history violence has served as a principal weapon of domination, and final arbiter of disputes and discontents. While social attitudes toward and actual expressions of violence have not significantly changed in many societies, modern technology has vastly altered the traditional equation of means and ends in the uses of violence. Countries and cultures which fail to narrow the gap between their traditional instincts and modern reality court the risk of self-destruction. Afghanistan is a case in point.

Afghanistan’s was a warrior culture in which the tribal balance of power, the individual’s social mobility, power shifts, and even the political economy were defined by groups’ and individuals’ mastery of violence. The 'Saur revolution', the religious uprisings against it, and super power involvement in the Afghan conflict transformed Afghanistan’s arms environment. The instincts and styles of a warrior culture remained and became linked to modern technology. The outcome is the literal destruction of a country which had survived many violent challenges including three colonial wars, and countless local conflicts. A similar process was at work in Lebanon, and later in Somalia and Rwanda.

Culture and Violence

There are links between culture and violence in our society. In particular, between feudal culture and violence. Barring a few Pirs, the feudal order is rarely based on ideology or ascription. Nor, unlike capitalism, does it derive its strengths from a process of constant growth in productivity. What defines the feudal order above all is its mastery of violence. Its members practice it constantly, occasionally with some regard for local customs, and always with scant respect for the law. Any Hari knows, as the Hari Commission so accurately described some six decades ago, that violence defines the relationship between lords and peasants. Any experienced district officer will tell you that among the powerful lords of rural Sindh, Punjab, Sarhad, and Baluchistan it is the will and integrity of the government that makes the difference between law and lawlessness, civility and violence. The law abiding feudal is an oxymoron.

In economic terms, feudalism is now only one of many forces in our society, and certainly not the ascendant one. But, the culture it bred over the century remains. Culture almost always persists after the hegemon is weakened and gone. The tenacity with which the colonial culture has, after decolonisation, held out and tightened its grip on Pakistan and India is a case in point. The persistence of feudal and colonial cultures is defined by the failure of the post-colonial elite to spawn alternative values and styles as foundations of a new culture. This challenge, Pakistan’s small and excessively consumption driven, therefore cautious and west-obsessed, intelligentsia has largely ignored. In fact, while feudalism serves as the whipping boy of Pakistan’s intelligentsia, to my knowledge not one serious study exists on the nature and extent of feudal power in Pakistan, and none to my knowledge on the hegemony which feudal culture enjoys in this country. Hence, the two cultures, feudal and colonial, continue to enjoy absolute hegemony, that is to say, their norms of behaviour and values are largely those of society.

An extra-ordinary example of the persistence of feudal culture is that in the last decade of the twentieth century the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has forced open private jails; entire families have been liberated from bondage -- tortured and chained, women used, children misused. And, a remarkable detail: these liberations have been affected not by the state but by a private organisation. It is failures of this magnitude on the part of the state, and the elite that controls it, that help sustain feudal values in our society.At the expense of stating the obvious, I should note that these values are the contemporary inheritance not only of a class but of society as a whole. Until such time as the state intervenes to enforce laws, and the intelligentsia actively promotes non-violent values, the culture of violence shall continue to prevail. Rather, as social change continues at a rapid pace, traditional systems of social control become progressively dysfunctional, and the state’s administrative machinery continues to erode, violence shall increase in its varied forms.Violence has traditionally occupied a central and elevated place in our cultures. There are numerous manifestations of it in our social life. I shall mention only three: (i) the value we put on revenge, (ii) the violence against women which persists and has possibly increased and, (iii) our abuse of children.

Revenge is viewed by perhaps an overwhelming majority of Pakistanis as a natural sentiment. It is not merely accepted as normal in many areas of our social, political, and family life; rather, it is linked to the identity and honour of the individual, family, biraderi and tribe. Friends and relatives express solidarity when a man takes revenge while his adversaries proceed, more often than not, to avenge the avenger. To my knowledge, no annual statistics are compiled of revenge killings in Pakistan. Were it available the figure would run into the thousands. Pick a day, and you are likely to find a manifestation. Recently, newspapers have been carrying horrifying accounts of revenge driven tribal killings in Sindh between, among others, the Ujjan and Jatoi, Kalarie and Kalhora, Bhayo and Brohis, Magsi and Talpur. Typically, the feud between the Magsi and Talpur started 25 years ago when a woman of the Talpur clan was murdered. The latest flare-up has entailed gun battles between the two; at least one innocent girl died recently in the cross fire. A similarly old feud between the Bhaiyo and Brohis has cost not less than fifty lives in the last three years. Another fifty persons perished in the dispute between Jatois and Mahars. So goes, week after week, one continuing exhibit on the culture of violence. The latest is the revenge the Nawab of Bugti has visited upon his adversary the Kalpars with, so it appears, the connivance of the state. It is equally certain that while the Kalpar chief wanders homeless with his clan, he dreams of wreaking vengeance upon the Bugtis.

As for domestic violence, wife beating is viewed by a large section of rural society as though it were a droit de seigneur. It is common also among urban dwellers especially in working and lower middle class milieu, and is known to persist among educated upper class families. "Wife abuse is a fairly common phenomenon in Pakistan", says an extremely balanced and wise "Report of the Commission of Inquiry for Women" of August 1997, "[it] is also indulged in not only by the husband but also by other members of the husband’s family. It can take the form of slapping, beating, torture, mutilation and murder." One may safely assume that for the most part these acts of violence are an expression not so much of hatred as of habit and attitude. People regard violence as a bonafide instrument of attaining social and personal objectives.

Rape, especially gang rape, is becoming endemic in this country. It is equally likely that we are taking more notice of it. In the first nine months of 1997 over 100 women were reported to have been raped in Lahore alone; of these, 28 were victims of gang rape. Typically, the police registered only 35 of the over 100 rape cases reported to it in Lahore, a phenomenon that adds to the victims’ inhibition against reporting. Actual instances of rape are estimated by human rights groups as being two-&-a-half to three times higher than those reported in the press. This may be a conservative estimate as girls normally do not report even to their parents the molestation which they suffer at the hands of relatives and servants at home. With painstaking and risky effort, women’s groups and the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) have been documenting the crime against women. HRCP estimates that nation-wide a woman is raped in Pakistan every three hours, and "nearly as many minors become victims as adults" .In a majority of instances they also suffered violent assault either before or after the crime. Many commit suicide as a certain shame and opprobrium attaches to the victim of rape in our society.

The ultimate form of violence against women -- murder and mutilation -- is widely accepted as a mechanism for restoring honour, a practice institutionalised in customs like Karo Kari, in areas of Sindh, Baluchistan, NWFP, and southern Punjab. To these have been added now a new horror, stove burning, of which spot hospital checks indicate victims in the thousands. Notable, as they relate with my argument on feudal culture, are two facts: (i) 80% of the violent crimes against women are committed in rural areas, 20 % in the urban; and (ii) almost all victims of the reported cases of sexual assault were working class women. Since from their infancy children witness violence as an integral part of adult behaviour, males and females alike grow to accept it as a normal, even preferred, mechanism for achieving one’s objective or affecting behaviour change. There are scant laws to treat domestic violence as crime, and the police are known to routinely discourage registration of cases in domestic crimes.

Violent treatment of children is even more common than that of women. 'Spare the rod, spoil the child' remains a central tenet of our upbringing of children. It is extravagantly interpreted and excessively practised in schools no less than in homes. To be sure, physical abuse of children is less prevalent today in educated upper and middle class families than a few decades ago. It remains, nevertheless, widespread in other strata of society. In the absence of available data it is impossible to identify its comparative prevalence along class or rural/urban lines. For a host of reasons, including studies on Latin American countries, I surmise that among the urban working class, lower middle class, and lumpen-proletariat child abuse is as widely and excessively practised as in rural areas. In the religious schools (madaris), which have proliferated exponentially in the last two decades, pupils are routinely administered harsh and inhuman physical punishment. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has exposed instances even of children being kept in chains, for months even years at a time. There exists a considerable body of literature indicating that abused children often become abusive and violent adults.

If they are serious about eliminating the high rate of violence and crime in Pakistan, the least that our governments can do is to legislate against these practices, and vigorously enforce the laws. Laws, after all, are not merely links between crime and punishment. They also set the moral and behavioural standards for citizens of this and coming generations. Yet, the sensitivities of our ruling establishment are such that during nearly a decade of representative governments not one government has deemed it important to repeal a dictator’s laws – the hudood, qisas, diyat, and blasphemy laws are prime examples, which devalue the humanity of women and minorities in our society, promote retrograde attitudes, and invite murder, mutilation and communal violence.

I have not spoken to one official, in this government or the last, who was willing to defend these laws and practices. To the contrary, all have found them, as any sensible and humane person would, repugnant and harmful to society. Yet, even this government, which commands a majority large enough to repeal constitutional amendments, has failed so far to act on a single of the many sensible recommendations of the Commission of Inquiry for Women which was headed by an eminent jurist, Mr. Justice Aslam Zahid of the Supreme Court of Pakistan. This failure is of course another surrender of responsibility to opportunism, a phenomenon not uncommon in politics anywhere. So the responsibility falls ultimately upon us. The government’s inaction underlines, among other factors, the absence of organised opinion strong enough to counter the loud pressures of right wing religious groups whose archaic and imagined perspectives on Islam, commonly described by contemporary scholars as Islamism – conform neither to the tenets of religion nor to the needs of society.

Faith and Violence

The violence of Islamism has emerged as a subject of anxious concern throughout the world, especially the Muslim world. Countries, such as Algeria and Egypt, are virtually in a state of civil war between Islamists of differing hues and secular, regrettably authoritarian, governments. Among these countries, Pakistan is distinguished in several ways: It is the original staging ground of Jihad as an international movement. Unlike Algeria and Egypt it has had a parliamentary system of government with four elections since 1988 in which the Islamic parties' share of the vote has been declining.

Unlike Algeria and Egypt where Sunni majorities predominate, Pakistan is a multidenominational country where the non-Sunni constitute an estimated quarter of the population. Furthermore, even the Sunni are divided by theological disputes, the one between the Barelvis and Deobandis is the primary example, which have tended to turn violent. Hence, there is a proliferation here of violence. So far we have witnessed the mutual terror of Sunni and Shia, of Sunni groups against Christians and Ahmedis, and killings across the Barelvi-Deobandi divide.

Pakistan remains Islamism’s 'front-line state', so to speak. The war in Afghanistan continues and, in multiple ways impacts on the internal developments in this country.

Pakistan’s is an ideologically ambiguous polity; here, political paeans to Islam have served as the compensatory mechanism for the ruling elite’s corruption, consumerism and kow-towing to the west. As a consequence, the ideologically fervent Islamist minority keeps an ideological grip on the morally insecure and ill-formed power elite. It is this phenomenon that explains the continued political clout of the extremist religious minority even as it has been all but repudiated by the electorate. From the bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad to the recent massacre on Macleod Road, this country is strewn with innocent victims of Islamist extremism. Yet, these tragedies have barely caused any reflection in this country, and others whose policies sowed the seeds of the so-called 'Islamic terror'. The truth is that as a world-wide movement, Jihad International Inc., is a recent phenomenon, a modern, multi-national conglomerate whose founders include the governments of USA, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel. It was the American sponsored anti-communist crusade in Afghanistan that revitalised, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the notion of Jihad as the armed struggle of believers. Israel's invasions and occupation of Lebanon, the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan continue to invest it with moral meaning and give it added impetus.

In the United States, the Islamic resistance to Israel’s occupation of Lebanon, the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan and such incidents as the alleged plot to blow up the International Trade Centre in New York City, have aided the media and other propagandists’ politically motivated campaign to demonise Muslims and Islam as a threat to western interests and civilisation itself. Their motivation is suspect as it condones Israel’s U.S. aided violence on an enormously larger scale while condemning Arab resistance to it. It is suspect also because, as we shall presently discuss, the United States and Europe have played a historic part in spawning the violence of groups and individuals they now denounce, rather brazenly, as "Islamic fundamentalist". The U.S. and European countries largely withdrew from the enterprise after their interests had been served, while the native peoples among whom they promoted the violent ideological enterprise are continuing to pay the heavy price of it.

Never before in this century had Jihad as violence assumed so pronounced an 'Islamic' and international character. The twentieth was a century of secular Muslim struggles. The Ottomans fought their last wars in essentially temporal terms, in defence of a tottering empire and, at least in the Middle East, against predominantly Muslim foes. From the rise of Saad Zaghlul to the demise of Abdul Nasser, the Egyptian national movement remained secular and explicitly Arab and Egyptian. This was equally true of the Iraqi, Syrian, Palestinian, and Lebanese national struggles. The Turks attained their liberation under the banner of intemperate secularism. Iranian nationalists fought and forged a Belgium-like constitution at the start of this century. In India, Muslim nationalism, opposed by an overwhelming majority of Indian Ulema, defined the demand and achievement of Pakistan. All these movements had some resonance among other Muslim peoples who were similarly engaged in anticolonial struggles but none had an explicit pan-Islamic context.

Jihad, noun, to struggle, from the Arabic root verb J.D., to strive, was nevertheless a favoured word among Muslims in their struggle of liberation from colonial rule. When my brother was expelled from school after raising the nationalist flag, he was welcomed in our village as a mujahid, one who struggles. In the Maghrib, Algerian nationalist cadres who engaged France in an armed struggle for seven gruelling years were called Mujahideen, and their news organ was named El - Moudjahid. This newspaper was edited for a time by Franz Fanon, a non-Muslim, and the struggle was led by a secular organisation, Front du Liberation National (FLN). In Tunisia, the national struggle was led by Habib Bourguiba, a die-hard and Cartesian secularist who enjoyed nevertheless the title of Mujahidul-Akbar. The word Jihad did occasionally appear as a mobilising slogan of the 1978 Iranian revolution but Enghelab, revolution, actually dominated as the symbol of the uprising against the Shah. After seizing power Iran's revolutionary government adopted Jihad-i-Sazindazi, jihad for reconstruction, as its mobilising symbol. Without a significant exception, Jihad was used during the twentieth century in a national, secular, and political context until, that is, the advent of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan.

For the first time in this century the standard bearers of a Muslim peoples struggle for liberation were Islamic parties opposed to "godless communism", committed to its violent overthrow, and dedicated to the establishment of an "Islamic state" in Afghanistan. Theirs was a Jihad in the classical, strictly theological sense of the word. Ironically, they had the support of western powers as no liberation movement ever did. The United States and its allies supplied to the Mujahideen an estimated ten billion dollars worth of arms and aid.

They also invested in this Jihad the legitimacy of their enormous power, and the lustre of their media made glory. On one especially memorable occasion when Afghanistan’s hard line Islamist visited the White House, President Ronald Reagan described them as the Muslim world's "moral equivalent of our founding fathers". Similarly, the American and European media played up the war in Afghanistan as the greatest story of the eighties. Foreign correspondents combed the Hindu Kush for stories of 'Mooj' heroism. Competition for Jihad narrative was so great that in one instance a major network, CBS, paid handsomely to film a staged battle between Islam and Communism. As the western media carries great importance and authority in the third world, its Afghanistan war coverage made an enormous impact especially on Muslim youth.

Within a year of the Soviet intervention, Afghanistan's was on its way to becoming a pan-Islamic Jihad. Hundreds, eventually thousands, of young Muslims from places as far apart as Algeria and the Philippines, Sudan and Sinkiang travelled to Peshawar and Torkham, received training in the use of arms, and under the strict guidance of various Islamic parties became ideologically ripe and tasted more or less of the Jihad-in-the-path-of-God. The United States government and its vaunted intelligence agency saw in this process a cold war opportunity to pit militant Islam against communism. Had the Soviet Union not collapsed unexpectedly, it is likely that the United States shall still be benefiting from this historic mobilisation of jihad.

We knew of the violent pan-Islamic character which the Afghan war was assuming with American sponsorship. But no country, not Algeria, not Egypt, protested the participation of their nationals in a distant war. Pakistan was hospitable to a fault while all watched casually, then looked the other way until, that is, the chickens of Afghan insurgency returned home to roost. I found in 1986, for example, that Egyptian intelligence had an effective presence in Peshawar and excellent information on the demography of Jihad. They were merely keeping a watchful eye. America, after all, was an ally and benefactor; they could not interfere with its agenda. The demands for extradition started to reach Pakistan from Algiers and Cairo only after the U.S. had cashed in its investments in Afghanistan, and the gates of hell had broken loose in Algeria and Egypt. But whom can Pakistanis request to rid their country of the thousands of armed zealots their government has nurtured, and continues to nurture?

The Jihad's pan-Islamic dimension was a historically new phenomenon. Since the great crusades in the Middle Ages Jihad had not crossed cultural, ethnic, and territorial boundaries. Pan-Islamism did emerge briefly as a movement in the nineteenth century, its banner having been raised by such ideologues as Jamal al-Din Afghani and warriors such as Syed Ahmed Shaheed. At the climax of this pan-Islamic drive, India's Muslims launched into the Khilafat Movement to save the Ottoman Caliphate. Khilafat's leaders, the Ali brothers, did often describe their movement as a Jihad. But this was a non-violent agitation supported by such non-Muslim pacifists as M. K. Gandhi and frowned upon by Mohammed Ali Jinnah who later founded Pakistan. More to the point, it had negligible pan-Islamic resonance. Arabs, Iranians, and Turks alike viewed it as an eccentric, uniquely Indian phenomenon.

Pan-Islamism survived only as an abstract agenda of a microscopic minority of Muslim intellectuals. Its influence showed in the works of some modern writers and poets including Mohammed Iqbal. The generalised sentiment of Muslim affinity on which pan-Islamism relied was real nevertheless and from time to time manifested itself in people's expressions of solidarity with co-religionists in Palestine, Bosnia etc. Yet, the national struggles of Muslim peoples remained national, and pan-Islamism endured only as an inchoate sentiment of solidarity. By contrast, with the Afghanistan war pan-Islamism grew on a significant scale as a financial, cultural, political and military phenomenon with a world wide network of exchange and collaboration. Myriads of institutions, madaris, Islamic universities, training camps and conference centres, came into being in Pakistan and other places. Sensing its enormous opportunity, traders in guns and drugs became linked to the phenomenon creating an informal but extraordinary cartel of vested interests in gun, gold and god.

Transnational involvement in the Jihad not only reinforced links among Islamic groupings, it also militarised the conventional religious parties. Pakistan's Jamaat-i-Islami is an example. Until their involvement in Afghanistan it was a conventional party, cadre- based, intellectually oriented, and prone to debate and agitation rather than armed militancy. Today it commands, outside Pakistan's army and rangers, perhaps the largest number of battle hardened and armed veterans. In 1948-49, its chief ideologue, Maulana Abul Ala Maududi had rejected, on theological grounds, the notion of Jihad in Kashmir. Today, his party openly boasts of its militant involvement there. In effect, while the U.S. government and media blamed Iran as the source of organised Muslim rage, armed Islamic radicalism was actually nurtured in Ziaul Haq's Pakistan with American funding and the CIA's help.

In recent years, other conventional Islamic parties, the Jamiat-e-Ulama-i-Islam and Jamiat-e-Ulama-i-Pakistan. have also been militarising, thanks to their linkages with the Taliban, thanks also to their involvement in Kashmir. In addition, other armed sectarian groupings, the Sipah-e-Sahaba, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Harakatul Ansar, Sipah-e-Mohammed, Lashkar-e-Tayba, Anjuman-e-Sarfaroshan-e-Islam, have emerged to menace society no less than the state. They are all sectarian formations, apparently a far cry from Islamism as expounded by the older religious parties such as the Jamaat-i-Islami and JUI. Yet the fact remains that their antecedents lie with these parties, and they draw sustenance from the neighbouring wars which are cast in Islamic terms.

The Battle for the Muslim Soul

The birth of Jihad International coincided with another development which has had a particularly unwholesome effect on Pakistan. Following the prolonged hostage crisis during which Iranian radicals held American diplomats captive in Teheran, a contest began between two versions of political Islam, one conservative and the other radical. One was sponsored by Saudi Arabia and, until 1988, Iraq; the other was supported by Iran. While the United States was involved in this development its logic was essentially regional. Iran’s revolutionary Islamists were quite uncompromising in opposing the U.S. as an imperial power, and in their rejection of monarchy as an un-Islamic form of government. As a pro-U.S. conservative kingdom, Saudi Arabia felt threatened by Iran. Riyadh was quick to counter Iran’s proselytising zeal and was supported in this mission by such Gulf sheikhdoms as Kuwait. With the start of the Iraq-Iraq war in 1981, Saddam Hussein’s secular government joined in the theocratically cast campaign against Iran. Islamic organisations all over the Muslim world became beholden to one or the other side of this divide.

In countries with mixed Sunni-Shia population such as Lebanon, Pakistan and Afghanistan, this development had the greatest impact as sectarian groups and individuals found new incentive to arouse old hatreds. Neither the Americans, nor Saudis and Iraqis may have intended to arouse anti-Shia feelings. They were merely interested in promoting their brand of conservative Islam to counter Iran’s growing appeal. But in local terms anti-Iran was easily translated into anti-Shia. The Sipah-e-Sahaba is one such product of this process in Pakistan. It was first funded by Saudis; later Iraq stepped in. The terror and counter-terror which followed have involved murders of Iranian diplomats and trainees, American technicians, and ordinary folks in mosques, imambarahs and, most recently a cemetery. Battles for soul often degenerate into a hankering after body counts.

Stranded Between Past and Future

Without doubt, the Islamist and sectarian formations owe much of their contemporary elan, proliferation and armed militancy to the internationalised and "victorious" Jihad in Afghanistan, and to the covert warfare between Iran and its detractors. It should be noted, however, that these international factors would not have yielded such lush growth nationally had they not found fertile soil in Pakistan, Algeria, Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, or Palestine. As the case of Pakistan under Ziaul Haq and Algeria under the Junta suggests, the growth as well as limits of Islamism are defined by local factors. In Lebanon and Palestine, as in Afghanistan during the Soviet intervention, Jihad became identified with resistance to foreign occupation.

Jihad International Inc. and the contestation between Iran and its detractors developed at a time when the Pakistani environment was particularly hospitable to religious activism. General Mohammed Ziaul Haq had inaugurated the process of "islamisation" which had aroused anxieties among minorities including the Shia minority of Pakistan. One response from it was the formation of the Tehrik-i-Nifaz-e-Fiqah-e-Ja’fariyya (TNFJ) which demanded that Shia be subject to their own Fiqh, a comprehensible demand which nevertheless served to arouse the Sunni die-hard. The Sipah-e-Sahaba followed on the heels of TNFJ.

In Pakistan’s multi-denominational environment the proposal to construct the state, its laws, and institutions according to religious injunction was necessarily viewed as a differentiating, discriminatory agenda. Zia’s Islamisation, like Z.A. Bhutto’s consignment of Ahmedis to minority status, served as a framework for dividing this country and pitting its diverse people against each other. This had to be so particularly in a Muslim society. For our history is seeped in centuries of theological, often violent disputes, a point that is lost even on the current crop of politicians who have been witnesses to the pointless killing and dying of the last decade and a half.

Religious sectarian was an inevitable outcome of "Islamisation". There is first of all the simple insight that appears to have escaped several generations of politicians and soldiers of Pakistan: When a state claims a theocratic mission, it is bound to provoke conflicts over whose model shall prevail. Secondly, when religion is pushed explicitly into politics it becomes a currency of power. Any one who can uses religion to garner support and undercut actual or potential rivals. To verify this, one may need count only the number of religion wielding newcomers in national and local politics since Zia’s Islamisation began. The most virulent hate-mongers of today also belong to his era.

Once religion becomes a hard political currency it has to be deployed in the political arena by means fair and foul. Those aspirants in politics who lack other political capital, large land holdings, modern education, industry, family connection, are likely then to use religion the more, and most virulently. It is not surprising then that the Sipah-i-Sahaba and its off shoot Lashkar-e-Jhangvi were born in Jhang. There, Shia landowners have traditionally held power. Economic changes in the last four decades have, nevertheless, produced a new middle class which is compelled to compete with the traditional power holders. The SS’s new middle class leaders were keen to dislodge the old. The ideological environment of 1980s compelled them to deploy anti-Shia Islam in their battle. The logic of escalation is integral to ideology of hate; the results are before us.

There are other less obvious factors at work. The most important of these may be the highly skewed relationship that exist in contemporary Muslim societies between the past and the future. Throughout history, there has existed an ironic connection between them: Those who glorify the past and seek to recreate it almost invariably fail while those who view it comprehensively and critically are able to draw on the past in meaningful and lasting ways. People who have confidence in their future approach the past with seriousness and critical reverence. They study it, try to comprehend the values, aesthetics, and styles which invested an earlier civilisation its greatness, or conversely, caused it to decline. They preserve its remains, enshrine relevant values, and draw enrichment from the images and events of the past both collectively and individually.

By contrast, peoples and governments with an uncertain sense of the future have distorted engagements with their past. They eschew lived history, shut out its lessons, shun critical inquiry into the past, neglect its remains but, at the same time, invent an imagined past, shining and glorious, upon which are super-imposed the prejudices and hatreds of our own time. The religious-political movements of South Asia and the Muslim world bear witness to this truth.

In this region, both Hindus and Muslims of right wing persuasion view history in ways that arouse sectarian hatred. Thus for decades many Muslims viewed the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb as symbolising the strengths and virtues of Muslim rule in India. On their part, Hindu nationalists presented the Maratha chief Sivaji as an embodiment of Hindu resistance to Muslim rule. In reality, both were tragic figures out of synch with their own history, signalling the decline of Indian statehood, and the rise of a European empire in India. In this instance, as most recently in the Babri mosque affair, history became a casualty of communal myth making.

In the summer of 1990, I visited Ayodhya and Mathura while researching the campaign which militant Hindu movements, BJP, VHP, RSS, and Bajrang Dal, had launched to demolish the Babri Mosque and build a temple on the site which they claimed was the real birth place of Lord Rama two thousand years ago. I was amazed at two features of this campaign. The Hindu revivalists had put out an enormous body of publications and 'educational material' on the alleged excesses of Muslim rule in India, and Hindu resistance to it. Apart from books, colourful posters illustrated in graphic detail the presumed atrocities and heroism of the Hindu-Muslim encounter in India. Narratives in prose and songs were also available by the dozens on audio cassettes. I felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume of invented, poisonous, history. To their lasting credit, the most eminent among India's historians have consistently debunked the revivalists' version of history. When I mentioned this to him, M.R. Malkani, a BJP ideologue, was unsparing in his judgement of these historians: "Inn historians kay liye Hindustan men koi asthan naheen hai."

The same attitude towards a critical history has been prevalent in Pakistan since the 1970s, when Pakistan Studies was introduced as a compulsory subject in schools and colleges. Through this, a distorted and sectarian version of history is fed to the overwhelming majority of children and youth who are not privileged to travel the O and A level road. During the decade of Mohammed Ziaul Haq’s rule the trend toward sectarianising the educational system advanced to the point that Sunni and Shia were assigned separate Islamiyat syllabus, a practice which continues today. While they issue daily denunciations of sectarian politics, our government officials have retained the sectarian, hate-mongering syllabus in schools and colleges.

The differences between Pakistan and India are, nevertheless, worth noting. One is that during crucial periods of our history, governments have favoured sectarian elements, and actively discouraged historical research, instruction, and inquiry. The other significant difference is that because our institutions of higher learning sharply deteriorated and our insecure rulers, Mohammed Ziaul Haq occupies the highest place in this pantheon, needed the crutch of invented history, in Pakistan historians did not thrive. History and culture, including Islamic culture and history, ceased as a subject of serious study.

In fact, few subjects have suffered greater distortion in Pakistan than Islam and Muslim history. Here, Islam and its history have been invoked for more than four decades. Yet, throughout these years neither religion nor history have been accorded serious attention by the state or society. I know of not a single noteworthy work on these subjects to have been published in Pakistan. The curriculum of Islamiyat, a compulsory subject in our schools and colleges, is almost entirely devoid of a sense of piety (taqwa), spiritualism (roohaniyat), or mysticism (tassawuf). At best it is cast in terms of ritualistic formalism. At worst, it reduces Islam to a penal code, and its history to a series of violent episodes.

The well springs of righteous ignorance have deepened in Pakistan as they did in Algeria where, following decolonisation in 1962, false attempts at "indigenisation" yielded parallel systems of education, one French and the other Arabic, one modern and the other traditional. It is largely the products of the two systems that have been at war since 1992. This war has by now cost some 70,000 lives and continues to inflict enormous suffering on Algeria and its people. In Pakistan, the last two have been decades of dramatic expansion of the madaris which continue to receive generous government subsidies and undetermined amounts of funding from abroad. According to the Ministry of Education, in 1995 there were 3706 such madaris in Pakistan with an enrolment of 540048. The figure of enrolment in the higher levels of study, 80051 male, 4738 female, is notable for its social and political implications. After 12-18 years of study, these young people are unprepared for any profession except to serve as imams in mosques or yearn for an Islamic state in which they shall presumably constitute the governing elite.

Commentators in the press often characterise these as 'medieval institutions' which is an outright insult to the medieval Muslim civilisation. Spot checks at several such institutions reveal that their curricula and instruction bear little resemblance to such medieval centres of learning as al-Azhar in the 12th, Zaituna in the 13th, or the Qarawiyyin in the 14th centuries. None of the subjects that were part of the core program of studies in the Islamic centres of learning, e.g. mathematics, chemistry, botany, astronomy, and philosophy, are taught in the contemporary madrassah. They have not and are not likely to produce the al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Sheikh Saadi or Amir Khusro of the contemporary Muslim world. Their curriculum reduces Islam to a penal code, a ritual of ablutions and prayers, and a litany of sins crimes and their here and now punishments. Thousands of energetic and motivated youth who graduate from these institutions are men abandoned in the middle of the ford, cut off from their real past, totally unprepared to meet the challenges of the future, and fevered by the dreams of a religious polity.

They too can produce a history of sorts, of sectarian gangs setting out to purify the country, and create the Islamic order which they imagine they are equipped to run. The Taliban, graduates themselves of Pakistani madaris, have emerged as the role model of most students and alumni of our religious and secular schools and colleges. More ominously estimates of Pakistanis who have fought with the Taliban vary from 10,000 to 15,000. Overall, the number of armed Islamist militants in Pakistan is estimated at 40,000-50,000, many of them veterans of wars in Afghanistan and Kashmir.

Many wanted Pakistani terrorists find sanctuary in Afghanistan, a fact that only occasionally becomes public. Qari Allah Wasaya who was believed to have led the jail break in Dera Ghazi Khan, is reported to have told police investigators that he had been summoned from a Harakat-ul-Ansar camp in Afghanistan to free his fellow terrorists. The massacre in the Mominpura cemetery on January 11, 1998 was an anniversary commemoration of the bomb blast which killed a founding father of the Sipah-e-Sahaba. It is understood also to be linked to Mr. Allah Wasaya’s death in police custody. In turn, the protestors against the massacre attacked and burned the office of Lahore’s deputy commissioner and the post master. This chain of events, like some others, symbolised the contradictory ways in which the state is implicated in the cycles of sectarian violence.

An Umbrella over South Asia’s Savage Exchange

Pakistani and Indian officials routinely blame RAW and ISI respectively whenever a particularly heinous terrorist attack or atrocity occurs in either country. A decade ago these accusations did not fly with such frequency. That they do, reflects a certain reality which is that the pace of proxy warfare between India and Pakistan has increased. At various times, Pakistan has suspected India of aiding Afghan sabotage attacks of the 1980s, the ethnic strife in Karachi, and the religious sectarian violence across Pakistan. India has accused Pakistan of aiding Sikh militancy in the Punjab, Muslim militancy in Kashmir, and terrorist bombings in Bombay and Delhi. Independent observers believe that there is a significant measure of truth in these allegations.

The fact that both India and Pakistan have developed nuclear weapons capability may have much to do with their increased engagement in proxy warfare. We know this phenomenon from the cold war years. The United States and the Soviet Union used the condition of nuclear deterrence to wage wars of intervention and undermine each other by aiding and abetting dissidents, rebels, and revolutionaries in each other’s spheres of power. In Iran, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and Middle East produced confrontations between the two giants; the threat of nuclear war defused them, confirming the premises of nuclear deterrence. India and Pakistan appear to have fallen for this logic of deterrence.

As countries in transition, subject to the instabilities and tensions of rapid social change, without the benefit of vast geographical separation, and lacking the elaborate system of command and control which was necessary to insure a relatively safe interplay of a mutual deterrence, they are dangerously exposed to miscalculation and misadventure. Yet, so far neither country’s ruling elite seem to recognise the risks to which they are exposing themselves.

In conclusion, I should reiterate that violence in our society, as in most environments of accentuated violence, has multiple roots. These include (a) a culture of violence which persists while the traditional values and social processes which had limited its uses in an earlier time have been eroded by rapid and uneven social and economic changes; (b) injections of religion in politics and the theocratic promises which have had the effect of provoking sectarian divisions and demands; (c) U.S. sponsorship of an internationalised Jihad which provided the framework for proliferation of arms and sanctification of organised violence on religious grounds; (d) international and regional interests which have encouraged violent groupings to engage in proxy warfare; (e) an educational policy which breeds frustrated and ignorant armies of youth bred on literature of hate and violence; (f) a nuclear stalemate which has encouraged India and Pakistan to assume that they can support armed dissidents in each others country without incurring the risk of a wider war; (g) decline in the will and capacity of state institutions to investigate crime and enforce laws rationally and vigorously. The challenge, in other words, is too large and complex to be met by limited and half-hearted measures of crisis management.

:: Conrad Barwa 6:03 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Discrimination and Citizenship:

The following is an exceprt from a report carried out by the People's Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) on the treatment of Kashmiri Muslims who have emigrated to Delhi. It was first published in the EPW of July 6th-12th, but as archived articles are only available to registered users (though registration is free) I thought it might be worthwhile to repost the entire article here:

Kashmiri Muslims in Delhi: Compounding the Misery:Kashmiris who travel to Delhi each year in pursuit of a livelihood report a sense of insecurity and vulnerability during their stay, apart from ceaseless harassment by the police.

Thirteen years of insurgency and counter-insurgency have fundamentally altered the social and economic lives of Kashmiris. According to the state government, no fewer than 30,000 people have been killed, 10,000 children orphaned, 6,000 women widowed with hardly any relief or rehabilitation. Medical facilities are inadequate to meet the needs of affected people. Mental illness has reached epidemic proportion with many suffering from post-traumatic stress disorders. In the absence of a stable economy people are left with limited employment opportunities. The tourism industry is at a standstill and exports of handicraft goods have also declined. The bulk of the state revenue goes to pay the salaries of government employees or towards security related expenses. The result is that health, education and other welfare programmes have suffered. The two main sources of employment for educated youth are recruitment in the security forces, especially the state police, or the J&K Bank.

The low earning capacity of Kashmiris in these conditions together with the rising demand for jobs have forced thousands of men to leave their homes and travel to Delhi and beyond in search of a livelihood. In the past few years they have travelled primarily to Delhi as itinerant salesmen going from door to door to sell shawls, carpets and other handicrafts. Their burden and worries about livelihood are accompanied by a deep sense of insecurity and vulnerability. Being Kashmiris, they do not feel safe either in their own state or outside. ‘Ham pareshan hain kyonki hamari paidaesh Kashmir mein hui’ (the trouble is that we were born in Kashmir). That is how most Kashmiris living in Delhi describe their condition. Even before they leave Jammu and Kashmir, they are aware that they will be met with hostility and suspicion. But nothing they have heard before or stories that have been told to them prepare them for the actual encounter with India. Perhaps the fact is that in their own state the overwhelming presence of troops and the conspicuous absence of civil liberties lends them the idea that the situation outside would be relatively better and tolerable. Their journey itself is a lesson. According to some who have travelled, it is a standard practice that once the train enters Punjab, for personnel of the Punjab police to enter the coaches, and till they leave the train no Kashmiri escapes their ‘attention’. Each person is taken to the toilet where he is searched and luggage thoroughly rummaged. All this leads to demands for money, a shawl or even a carpet. The illegal exaction goes up if they are taken into custody and therefore, people prefer to settle the matter ‘amicably’. Such encounters are often laced with the choicest abuses about them being “Kashmiris, (their) religion, (their) love for Pakistan, and involvement in terrorist activities”.

If they travel by bus, the sense of security provided by so many fellow Kashmiri travellers does not last long. Once the bus enters Punjab, anywhere on the highway throughout the state, the Jammu and Kashmir buses are stopped and taken some distance away from the main road. Everyone is made to get down with his or her luggage for a search where money is openly demanded. A young man travelling with his mother told us how humiliated he felt to hear the policemen speak rudely to his mother ordering her to step outside. Refusal to pay can attract abuse and threat of detention. Once the bus reaches ISBT near Tis Hazari, the police are waiting once again to check everyone who disembarks. “We are made to feel as though we are at the Wagah border (‘hamein yeh mahsoos hota hai jaise ki hum wagah border pahaunch gaye’).”

‘Wahan Kashmir mein karobar bandh hain to hum yahan aae.’ The most telling expression of their anguish is, ‘ab hum kahan jayen?’ There are no official figures or records available of the number of Kashmiris who visit Delhi but it is estimated that nearly two lakh Kashmiris reside in Delhi. Of these, more than half are here between September and March. Many of them live in one- or two-room tenements, paying a higher rent than what ‘others’ would have to pay for the same accommodation. Their age group is in the range of 18-50 years. Whereas some have settled here over the years, the majority migrate each year. In some cases, young men are called upon to supplement the family income even if it means termination of their education. One of the young men said, “I wanted to study more. My elder brother is a graduate but he is now a shawl seller, what is the use of education for us?”

Many men we spoke to are ‘karigar’ (craftsmen) who because of the decline in export and local orders, are itinerant salesmen. Many parents are anxious that the young men, suffering from a sense of frustration and pent-up anger, could turn to militancy. As schools close for the winter months in Kashmir, women travel with their children to visit the family for a month or two. The number of such families has progressively increased. The police do not spare them the intrusion of their privacy at any hour of the day or night. As in Kashmir, even here they fear for the safety of their men and wait anxiously for their return as dusk falls. When asked how they spent their time alone, one of them said, “I spend long hours waiting by the window for my husband and my son to return”. Most spend the empty hours, after finishing their chores, feeling anxious about the safe return of their menfolk. They visit other families but mostly in close proximity to avoid long-distance travel. Few, if any, go out on recreation to see a film, loiter in bazaars, or go out to eat.

Children are discouraged from playing in the neighbourhood parks. Two young boys who ventured out one evening were accosted by a group of boys who began to abuse them and accuse of them being “enemy agents”. When they replied that they were “Kashmiris and not terrorists” they were beaten up. Once menfolk return home, they do not step out. Being out late is taboo. Night out means returning no later than 10 p m According to many of them, they are “advised” by local police to stay indoors to avoid “trouble”. Their stay in the city is considered “dangerous” as far as the Delhi police are concerned. Earlier, Kashmiris use to dread the approach of January 26 because it was marked by large-scale detention for reasons of “national security”. Today this has become a routine part of their daily life, January 26 or otherwise.

We met scores of families in the localities of Lajpat Nagar, Bhogal, Pant Nagar, Batla House and Old Delhi. It emerged that the main problem encountered by Kashmiri shawl and carpet sellers is that of police harassment, which worsened since September 11 and peaked after December 13. The police now feel more emboldened to stop Kashmiris whenever they are out on their rounds.

Most Kashmiris ply on bicycles and two-wheelers, a few in cars. They are asked to produce their identity papers (cards), or vehicle papers, “to the satisfaction of the police”, failing which they are taken to the local police ‘thana’ for questioning. There have been instances when they have been kept in the ‘thana’ for hours and let off only when they were able to pay up money that the police demanded.

It is mostly in ‘posh colonies’ that the police harass them as, according to the police, they are barred entry into colonies. The private security guards of the colonies often refuse to let them in without an ‘entry pass’ which is not available. In one instance, a shawl seller, was asked to bring such a ‘pass’ from the home ministry. On protesting that other ‘pheriwalas’ were not stopped from entering the colonies one of them was told “these are our own people whereas you all are Kashmiris”.

In one colony, the police told a Kashmiri, “Afghanis and Kashmiris cannot be allowed to make rounds in the colony. Your licence from Kashmir will not do. All Muslims live there in Kashmir. You all collect secrets there against us”. According to one carpet seller, he had parked his scooter (loaded with carpets) when the police objected and asked him to leave, threatening that he would otherwise confiscate his carpets. This is what the police told him, ‘Parliament mein jo hua aap logon ne kiya hai. Chori dakaiti aap log karte hain’. Saying this he tried to snatch away the ID card and vehicle papers.

In one instance, two policemen tried to snatch away a carpet from a Kashmiri who was with his young son. They were later taken to a thana and kept there for four hours and were allowed to leave only after paying whatever little money they had with them (Rs 70). According to one shawl seller, “I was recently caught by a policeman in a colony. He snatched my card away and started asking me all sorts of questions. He kept calling me a terrorist. I requested him to take me to the SHO but instead he took me aside and asked for money. I did not have any so I had to plead with him to let me go. He searched my briefcase thoroughly and finally let me go after warning me never to return to the colony. What can I do? It is a question of my ‘rozgar’ (livelihood)”.

In some localities, the police also visit homes of Kashmiris and make inquiries. even at midnight. “There is no sense of security for us” said a woman in the house. “We have paid Rs 100 twice in one month (post December 13) as the police demanded ‘chai pani ka kharcha’. As a result of this kind of harassment, Kashmiris residing in Delhi feel unsafe, humiliated and at the mercy of the local police. It is not even possible for them to go out in the evenings, as they are afraid of being “picked up”. One shawl seller said, “earlier we would all collect together to have tea before returning home but not anymore. The moment we try to do it, the police tell us to disperse immediately”. The most serious outcome of all this has been that “business has come down to 25 per cent. Whereas we should sell more than 300 shawls in one season (September-March). The sale is now reduced to less than 100 shawls”.

One wholeseller told us that earlier one would take shawls on credit and return in the evening with the money. “The way I am sitting and talking to you at seven in the evening would have been impossible. At this hour the place would be crowded. Now when these young men come back in the evening it is mostly to return the shawls because there has been no sale that day.” Often young salesmen become indebted because they earn less than what they spend on the rent and their food. Or their families have to send them money. A salesman’s earning is based on 10-15 per cent commission per shawl or carpet sold. Earlier, it was possible to sell 200-300 shawls; this year the average is 40-50. “This year it has been difficult for me to pay rent or even to buy food.” Another shawl seller said that a customer responded, ‘sar par jang hain ab kya shawl loonga’. The cost of these shawls varies in price from Rs 700. They earn a 10 per cent commission on each shawl. The monetary value of commission on a carpet can run into couple of thousand rupees. In a good year they could earn Rs 10,000-15,000 after paying for their expenses. This year not one salesman we met was confident of getting close to it. Several had received money from their families back home. Earlier a salesman could earn Rs 600 as commission for each shawl sold. This year, their expenditure went up because the STD lines in Jammu and Kashmir were suspended and they have had to ring back home to ensure that everyone was all right while keeping them informed of their own safety.

A middle-aged Kashmiri businessman summed up by saying ‘Sabko hum dahshatgard lagte hain. Agar hamein alag hi rakhna hain to Jammu ke aage darwaza laga do aur hamein wahin rok do. Jab aa hi gaye hain to itminam se kaam to kar lene dejiye’ (everyone considers us a terrorist. If we are to be kept separate then why not put a gate outside Jammu and stop us there. When we are already here why not let us go about our work peacefully)!

[This account is based on the findings of the inquiries made by a PUDR team on receiving reports of harassment of Kashmiri residents in Delhi, between January 6 and 30. For reasons of security the names are being withheld. What follows is an account of the experience of Kashmiris whom we met in different localities over three weeks in January 2002. Rather than provide specific individual cases of harassment, this report merely seeks to highlight the nature of problems encountered by them in the course of their search for a livelihood.]

The Nature of Citizenship:

This is a topical concern after September 11th and has been the experience of Muslims living outside their own countries, and as the case above shows even those within their countries in some cases, as well as those in non-Islamic societies. For Arab-Americans in the USA, Muslims of South Asian origin in the UK and Algerians in France discrimination in such a manner on a daily basis has only gotten worse over the last year and now has added official sanction. As the PUDR, report shows this is true in India, where the very corruption and incompetence of the state law and order forces make them unsuited and ii-adapted to carrying out the tasks of maintaining security and counter-insurgency measures - if paying a bribe is all it takes to escape police/paramilitary security then short of martial law enforced by the army most security measures/cordons will be quite permeable. One wonders whether passing ever-increasingly draconian legislation such as POTA and TADA (the acronyms of the severe anti-teeorist legislation passed in the Indian Parliament) will achieve much apart from adding another mechanism by which such forces can extract more by way of bribes from vulnerable citizens.

In addition for Muslims/Arabs/those suspected of being Islamic fundamentalists (a problematic category if ever there was one), who are also citizens of their host/native countries such occurrences will strain the bonds of citizenship and fatally undermine the whole concept of rights any citizen can except from their government - for what is the value of being a citizen if at any moment proof of citizenship has to be produced? This very act of having to prove one's loyalty to one's country over one's religion/belief devalues the nature of citizenship itself. Hence as Vikash, noted in an earlier post, the indignity of non-White immigrants scurrying to claim a lengthy period of stay in the US as a way of distancing themselves from any accusations of disloyalty, I also recall seeing a protest by Sikh in the USA who marched in a procession with one of the banners they held saying "Sikhs are not Taliban" in response to the confused attacks on members of the Sikh community by some hardliners as they were thought to be of Afghan/Middle-eastern stock/origin. This troubles me greatly - what does this mean when communities seek to prove or distance themselves in this way - seeing that banner does this mean Sikhs would not mind what happens to Muslim immigrant communities and reprisals carried on them are non of their concern as long as Sikhs are left alone? Many Algerian parents debate over what first names to give their children, as giving them Christian names often saves them from problems when applying for jobs, scholarships or welfare payments. South Asians in the UK have been criticised for not cheering for the "home side" (i.e. English) teams in cricket matches when the English team plays one of the former colonies. The state demands a high degree of loyalty from its citizens especially its minority ones but in imposing such large expectations can it fulfil the ones asked of it by these same communities?

A Law, institution or practise can said to be racist, communal or discriminatory when it allows any servant/representative of the state to cast doubt/question the citizenship/loyalty of a citizen at the mere sight of their skin colour, name or religious affiliation. When passing such legislation all legislatures should bear in mind that there is a difference between Law and Behaviour and there are laws, which authorise the worst kinds of behaviour. In any nation and society that regards itself as progressive and democratic, citizens can expect certain guarantees of their civil liberties (such as freedom from arbitrary arrest) and an enhancement of their capabilities (welfare provisions such as education, social security etc.) as a bare minimum in response to the demands the state imposes on them. Most societies and states are willing and able to provide these in times of peace and prosperity but the real test of their commitment comes when there is a threat/existence of war or economic decline and paradoxically it is only when such rights and capabilities are the hardest to enforce or provide that they are needed the most. As the so-called war against terrorism gets underway, all citizens, especially those who by virtue of their ethnicity, religion or class are and will be insulated from the more unpleasant policing actions of the state, should beware of falling into the classic liberal fallacy over the protection of such rights - in other words being in favour and willing to fight for them in principle but not really when it matters the most.

:: Conrad Barwa 7:09 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Agricultural Sector - The Contribution to Growth:

Conrad, while I agree with your argument, I thought the chart below might help put the role of agriculture in the Indian economy into some perspective. While export subsidization may be encouraging the growth of agricultural exports, the overall contribution of the agricultural sector to economic growth appears to be declining. As I am not an economist, I will defer to your augury of these economic entrails. Overall though, you are certainly correct that the FCI and PDS have distorted regional/seasonal commodity price variations; and distorted production and consumption decisions. These distortions coulpled with subsidies on inputs (power, water, fertilizer) have crowded out public investment in much needed irrigation and rural infrastructure products and failed to resolve the problem of hunger in the countryside.

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Contribution to Growth by Sector (1951/52 - 1999/2000) in percent

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Agriculture.....(1951/52 - 79/80) 1.0 (80/81 - 90/91) 1.5 (92/93 - 96/97) 1.4 (97/98 - 99/00) 0.6

Industry.........(1951/52 - 79/80) 1.1 (80/81 - 90/91) 1.9 (92/93 - 96/97) 2.1 (97/98 - 99/00) 1.6

Services........(1951/52 - 79/80) 1.4 (80/81 - 90/91) 2.4 (92/93 - 96/97) 3.2 (97/98 - 99/00) 3.9

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Source: Daniel Kanda, Patricia Reynolds, and Christopher Towe (2001) "Structural Reform in India," in India at the Crossroads: Sustaining Growth and Reducing Poverty, Tim Callen et. al., eds. (Washington, DC: IMF), p. 173. Measured at factor cost

:: Vikash Yadav 10:27 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Food Exports from a Land of Hunger:

There is an alarming story that has yet to be told about the government’s inability to properly utilise foodstocks and the unimaginative approach to food management in general. As has been pointed out several times, the foodgrain buffer stocks have been growing beyond the capacity of the FCI to store them effectively for the past few years. The situation in July of this year was such that against a required buffer stock of 11.8 million tons of rice and 4 million tons of wheat, the stocks were actually 24.35 million tons for rice and 38.1 million tons for wheat – an excess over the required reserve of over 47 million tons.

Vent for Surplus or Unfulfilled Needs?

Partly in response to this the government sought to reduce the excess in buffer stocks by making it easier for the offloading of PDS stocks by export subsidisation, permitting exporters to lift foodgrain at Below Poverty Line prices (BPL). The PDS distribution of grain has been bifurcated, owing to the rising cost of the food subsidy into Above Poverty Line (APL) and Below Poverty Line (BPL) prices: the former contains to the costs of storage, transport and distribution but has no profit element and is meant to cover the “economic cost” of the FCI in distributing it and is meant for the section of the population that is deemed to be above the poverty line while the latter price actually explicitly subsidises food to those assessed as income poor. This targeted distribution system was meant to have reduced the burden of the food subsidy while also ensuring that food reaches those who need it the most: needless to say it has done neither particularly well. The permission to allow exporters to lift foodgrains at BPL prices is quite shocking; as part of the justification of moving away from a universal food entitlement policy was based on the supposed inability of the state to bear the fiscal burden of subsidising food on such a scale, yet here the same subsidised food is given to exporters as a means of reducing the excess stocks – this seems to be a very distorted approach to food management as it beggars the imagination as to why subsidised food should be exported rather than redistributed domestically and seems to indicate that whatever the priorities of the government are they don’t seem to include increasing domestic consumption of food. The plan resulted in the sale of 10 million tons of foodgrains but was stopped when the Ministry of Commerce pointed out that such a policy clashed on the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture (AoA).

This forced the Ministry of Food and Civil Supplies to withdraw the BPL rate for food exporters and impose APL rates instead. The price at which exporters were being allowed to lift foodgrains from bulging stocks was very much below the market price in the domestic Indian market; and under WTO regulations, if India were to export commodities at prices below those prevailing in its domestic market then it would be liable to face charges of dumping. Global competitors are wary of Indian exports exerting a downward pressure on global prices. As a result of export subsidisation India has emerged as the seventh largest exporter of wheat with exports growing by 20% in 2001-2002. To prevent the export of foodgrains from being derailed, the government resorted to indirectly subsidising exporters by providing a transport subsidy, which supposedly covered the transportation costs from the FCI’s godowns to the ports. While this subsidy was actually calculated as the difference between the new APL price for exporters and the BPL price, meaning that in the first instance exporters had to buy foodgrains at the new higher prices and were then provided with a cash transport subsidy. In reality this indirect subsidy meant that exporters could continue to buy foodgrains at BPL prices.

This has been part of a longer evolving strategy which has gradually opened the way to allowing foodgrain exports: the ban on wheat exports was lifted in early 2000, as traditionally maintaining domestic supply being the main aim of the government; shipments of foodgrain (except for high quality rice) was not permitted on any large scale. By the end of 2001 all restrictions on exports of wheat, rice and wheat products were removed and between November 2000 and May 2002 India exported 6.6 million tons of wheat and 3.8 million tons of rice with earnings of roughly Rs. 50 billion (exports were mainly to South-east Asia, Bangladesh and Sub-Saharan Africa. Before the present drought, rice exports in the current year were set to double to 2.5 million tons despite the falling international price for rice. In May of this year the export target was increased by 50% from 10.5 million tons to 15 million tons; India is already set to become the second largest exporter of rice after Vietnam, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s monthly Rice Monitor.

This trend is disturbing for several reasons. Firstly, if large foodstocks are seen as a burden or dead-end investment, rather than a tool for poverty alleviation; then the government is caught in a long-term trap, as procurement prices don’t seem to fall downwards but only rise due to the strong lobby of surplus farmers in procurement regions and the unwillingness/inability of successive governments to confront them; part of the high cost of procurement has been passed on to consumers by ending the policy of universal food distribution and introducing the targeted PDS and raising the issue price of even BPL grain allotments. Of course this has only added to the problem of stock management as even the poor have either switched to open market sources or curtailed their foodgrain consumption leading to falling offtake from the PDS. This has meant that unless procurement is reduced or consumption increased the problem of excessive stocks will remain and is a structural rather than a temporary phenomenon.

With this in mind the policy of export subsidisation can be seen as a way of reducing the burgeoning stocks of foodgrains seen as a problem by the government. It also shows the paradoxes and power realities prevalent in India today: clearly a food policy that was instituted in the 1960’s to ensure food security for consumers has now been turned primarily into a producer subsidy benefiting farmers in ecologically- well endowed regions and when the costs of the “food subsidy” rise the government find it more expedient to penalise consumers rather than producers; in such a scenario the term “food subsidy” is misleading as the current operations of the FCI and the PDS benefit food consumers less than they benefit surplus producers. Secondly it is mind-boggling that a policy and institutional structure set up to feed and ensure food security for the mass of the population is now being used to export food at subsidised prices. Export of food from FCI stocks even at market prices subverts this aim as those stocks have been produced and procured with large amounts of subsidisation from the public sector with the express aim of increasing domestic food security, exporting this food and to add insult to injury subsidising this export explicitly, stretches the imagination. It sends out the message that the government’s main aim is to reduce food stocks rather than remove malnutrition and also squanders a good opportunity for increasing offtake through a Food-for-Work programme. The plea that this involves an additional revenue burden on the state seems less defensible when the indirect and direct subsidisation of foodgrains is taken into account. One must ask what motivates the government as increasing food access to those suffering from malnutrition is plainly not a core policy gaol, the rather wasteful subsidisation of exports of such food, especially in light of Vikash’s observations on the weak budgetary position of the Central Government also seems at odds with the political rhetoric emanating from official circles and most policymakers. Quite clearly even when facing a severe fiscal crunch the government is still capable of wasting/spending money on pointless and self-defeating schemes such as the one described here. It should be remembered that food stocks large or small, in a country where endemic malnutrition is widespread, represents a vital resource that should be directed at increasing the nutritional and calorific intake of those who are malnourished and not be treated as some sort of Smithian vent for surplus of excess goods that cannot consumed as wants have been met. Low offtake or consumption is not an automatic sign of full bellies or the absence of demand but rather reflect the inequitable pricing and distribution policies of the food system and the pre-existing income/asset poverty of those who go hungry.

:: Conrad Barwa 9:46 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Straight Talk in Gujarat:

"Are you a joker? You say only sporadic incidents took place here when 185 houses were burnt in a single locality (Noor Complex in Tarsali),’’ Chief Election Commissioner J.M. Lyngdoh inquired of District Collector Bhagyesh Jha. The latter had no answer. ‘‘Are you not ashamed of yourself?’’ he told Jha, in the presence of civil and police officials....

Selectively talking only to riot-affected persons, the CEC cavalcade then moved to Kishanwadi slum, from where about 250 Muslim families had migrated. Only 35 have returned so far....- The Sunday Express.

:: Vikash Yadav 1:42 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Some Aspects of Natural Disaster Management in India:

Referring to Vikash’s post below on the current drought situation in India, it may be worthwhile to examine the experience and ability of the Indian state to respond to natural disasters. Currently India faces both severe drought conditions and flooding, indicative of the widely varying ecological zones that are prevalent in different parts of the country; such a scenario will stretch the response/management capabilities of any state, especially with regards to ensuring food distribution, as Vikash notes there are enough surplus stocks in the Food Corporation Of India’s (FCI) godowns, so any problems that occur will not be ones of production or availability but will lie elsewhere. For example the nine districts of Western Orissa, known collectively as “KBK” (for the regions of Kalahandi, Bolangir and Koraput) are amongst the biggest contributors to the FCI’s Orissa pool of food stocks yet starvation deaths are an enduring phenomenon in the belt. I will also refer to the story in the current issue of Frontline, where a group of economists travel to Manatu village in Palamau district within Jharkhand; the report group finds endemic starvation and the occurrence of four starvation deaths, all of which are denied by the state administration – out of 21 sampled households 20 report that they have to regularly skip meals and more than half of the households reported that they have spent all their income on purchases of food for the last month. Incredibly, on the same road as the taluka headquarters is a FCI godown that is full of grain but is padlocked and sealed from the hungry, such paradoxes are in direct contravention to the recent Supreme Court order (PUCL vs. Union Government of India, Writ Petition No. 196) which instructed all state governments to introduce cooked mid-day meals in primary schools within six months; moreover the District collector (the senior most IAS officer in the district) is empowered to break open medical and food stores (privately owned) by law if starvation deaths or deaths due to medical emergencies have occurred; in fact all IAS officers in the field have what is called a “Red Alert” booklet handed down from colonial times which contains clear guidelines as to when the senior officer within the district can declare an emergency (usually in times of communal conflict, social unrest etc.) the existence of endemic starvation and starvation deaths are also one of these cases– why this has not been done so is a matter of concern, both in this particular case and in the many others like it that are an everyday story within rural India – actually this is one of the reasons why all levels of the government from the village level to the regional state are always eager to deny the existence of starvation deaths within their jurisdiction; in the case of Kalahandi as noted by Robert Currie this took almost farcical overtones as NGOs such PUCL petitioned the Supreme Court to release surplus footstock to the starving villagers, while the State government under the then Chief Minister JB Patnaik took out multi-page advertisements in major English newspapers denying the existence of any drought or starvation deaths, in this way the plight of the poor become reduced to the playthings between different interest groups. I would recommend Frontline's recent story,"Starving Still in Jharkhand", as a good example of some of the problems in ensuring food access for the deprived groups. But this as well as the problems of endemic malnourishment are a separate issue, which deserves another discussion; the plight of such food-deficit households is even more serious when they are affected by natural calamities such as droughts or floods.

Vulnerability to Natural Disasters:

India is amongst the most disaster prone areas in the world, with a high vulnerability to natural hazards such as: Cyclones, Earthquakes, droughts, flooding, landslides and pest infestations. I will consider only the two that are currently proving to be a major problem – floods and drought. India is affected by one major natural disaster practically every year – over the decennial 1987-96 over 57 million people have been affected by natural disasters, excluding drought. The costs of these disasters are clearly inequitable, falling heaviest on lower-income groups who have limited resources and take a long time to adjust to the new conditions. Some of the more serious recent such occurrences include: the Latur earthquake 1993 killing about 10,000, the Andhra Pradesh cyclone of 1996 which killed 1,000, the Gujarat cyclone of 1998 killing over 3,500 and the Orissa super-cyclone killing more than 10,000 people.

The vulnerability to drought is particularly severe when agriculture is taken into consideration: about 68% of the total sown area in India is drought-prone, two-thirds of the country is classed as semi-arid and dry sub-humid prone to recurrent droughts; leading to more than 50 million people being affected by drought conditions every year and some states suffer from drought as a perennial feature. Agricultural droughts result due to the imbalance between soil moisture and the evapo-transpiration needs of a crop for a fairly long period, causing damage to the standing crop and a reduction in crop yield. This imbalance can have four main sources: the annual precipitation being less than normal, late onset of the monsoon rains, early withdrawal of the monsoon rains and long inter-dry spells in the monsoon period.

The vulnerability to flooding is less widespread but no less severe. About 6% of the country is prone to annual flooding, an average of 8.6 million hectares of land is flooded annually, occurring mainly in the Ganga-Brahamaputra-Meghna basin, which carries 60% of the nation’s total river flow, affecting over 30 million people annually. This is caused by the peculiarities of rainfall in India: over 75% of the rainfall is concentrated over a short monsoon season of three to four months. As a result there is a very heavy discharge from these rivers during this period causing severe flooding.

Warning Systems:

The Indian Meteorology Department (IMD) has the responsibility of providing long-range forecasts of monsoon rainfall. In 1988 a Parametric Power Regression Model was developed on a basis of global and regional meteorological and oceanic parameters for estimating monsoon rainfall. The model has been successful in estimating the correct nature of the monsoons during the past few years. For instance, it has been observed that when the rainfall is less than 10% of the long period average value, a large part of the country suffers from deficient rainfall. Such information can be utilised for advance drought planning. In addition the IMD carries out rainfall monitoring at a district level on a real time basis.

The other major scheme in terms of monitoring systems is the National Agricultural Drought Assessment and Management System (NADAMS) which comes under the joint management of the Department of Space, of Agriculture and is primarily based on the monitoring of vegetation status through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) using advanced high resolution data. This drought assessment is based on a comparative evaluation of satellite-observed vegetation cover (both area and greenness) of a district in any specific time period with that of any similar period in previous years. The comparative evaluation helps in fixing the current situation in the scale of historic agricultural situations. In 1989-91 drought assessment was intimated to drought affected areas within 48-72 hours of every bi-weekly period by telex/telegram and printed bulletins were despatched within 10 days. During 1992, the frequency of the drought report was changed to a monthly interval, but with a more detailed assessment of seasonal conditions and integrating ground observations of rainfall and agricultural situation with satellite data.

Coping with Drought:

Several scholars have noted the relationship between the occurrences in droughts and fluctuations in agricultural production and the incidence of rural poverty (e.g. Ahluwalia and less controversially Dharm Narain). Unlike other natural disasters such as cyclones and earthquakes, droughts tend to have specific features such as higher frequency, larger coverage of space and people and more crucially a sustained adverse impact on food production. Over the past 50 years droughts in India have occurred almost once in every three years at the national level, although meteorologically there has not been any change in the frequency of droughts over the last 100 years. What is of concern is that their intensity has increased over time due partly to: increased demand for water (vis-à-vis the same levels of precipitation), low technical efficiency in water use and unequal distribution of water among households. Unplanned overexploitation of natural resources and the neglect of conservation measures can aggravate the ecology of drought-prone areas.

The Drought Prone Areas Programme (DPAP) was launched by the Government of India in the early 1970’s as a means of combating adverse impacts of droughts in the regions that were worst affected by them. By the mid-1990’s the DPAP programme had still only succeeded in giving immediate relief and rehabilitation (to varying degrees) to drought-afflicted areas, and it was combined with other anti-poverty Schemes such as the Desert Development Programme, JRY and the IRDP to form what was called a Watershed Development Project (WDP) which sought to improve the ecological balance within target areas, and promote the access of the resource poor and disadvantaged sections of the community to water. Though not stated explicitly the WDP have become a major plank for drought-proofing large tracts in dryland regions in the country.

A cursory look at the WDP and DPAP projects revels interesting observations. Firstly, drought-prone regions do not always coincide with regions of high poverty. Only 32 out of the 125 DPAP districts have a high or very high incidence of poverty. It has been noted that for many of the poor households in these regions, poverty is acute and transient rather than chronic or perpetual. Examining the socio-economic data for the districts the following observations can be made:

1) Despite the relatively lower land productivity, per capita production of foodgrains is higher or more or less the same amongst the DPAP districts vis-à-vis the state averages. Since the difference in the average size of landholdings is very small except in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, higher or almost the same level of foodgrain production per capita in DPAP districts might be due to the lower rate of population growth amongst these districts.

2) Most of the DPAP districts have lower levels of development with respect to indices such as literacy rate, urbanisation and infant mortality than the state averages (except for Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu). These combined with a lower rate of population growth (in 7 out of 10 districts) indicate net out migration of workers from these regions. Such migration is a coping strategy in response to the prevalent and recurrent drought conditions in the DPAP districts, which reduce employment and income opportunities from agriculture.

3) Migration can be an effective strategy only when it is combined with alternative economic avenues in the growing industrial and tertiary sectors. In industrially developed states like Gujarat, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, migration might result in upward economic mobility for people from the DPAP regions due to market support for better investment opportunities and higher reservation prices among these intra-state migrants. But for high-poverty states with lower levels of industrialisation, this involves long-distance migration often to industrially/agricultural developed regions such as Gujarat, Punjab etc. This kind of migration may also have significant social costs, besides other hardships that they might have to undergo during the migration.

4) While migration as a coping strategy among people from dryland regions is widely prevalent, little is known about the outcomes of such migrations, especially in terms of the social costs and economic upward mobility in the long run. What is apparent is that unless efforts are made to develop the home economy, outmigration from drought-prone regions may only shift povert from rural to urban or from dryland to agro-climatically better-endowed regions.

5) Ensuring water for drinking and domestic use is the top priority under a drought condition. The usual approach for achieving this is in situ conservation and harvesting of rainwater, through various measures such as gully plugs, check dams, village and farm ponds, field bounding and trenching and recharging of wells. In practices preference has been given to water harvesting structures, as observed in the large number of micro watersheds in dryland/drought-prone regions. This has led to the neglect of ensuring adequate drinking water during periods of rainfall scarcity. Given the wide variation in groundwater availability and water retention capacity within a micro-region, any measure for conserving water has to take into account such demands.

6) Improved technology in water use is also an important but often neglected factor in drought management strategies. The effective availability of water supplies depends not only on supply but how efficiently it is used. The inappropriate pricing of water for agriculture and irrigation means that additional water harvested through water conservation measures often gets used for growing water-intensive crops such as cotton, sugar or spices in watershed projects in drought-prone areas. This kind of response to conservation efforts limits water availability not only during a drought year but also across households within a watershed community. This happens because planning for water harvesting measures is often silent about its use pattern and sharing arrangements. For instance, if a check dam under the project recharges groundwater in a region, its beneficiaries are automatically defined by virtue of owning land in the catchment area of the structure. The rest of the village community has a very limited share in the pattern of water use by the landowning households. In this context the Technical Committee on DPAP headed by the agricultural economist Hanumantha Rao (1994), had suggested a cautious approach to for water use allowing tapping of only the rechargeable water reserves without tapping the static water supplies and also asserted that drinking water should be given priority over water for crops during drought years. A much mooted but ignored suggestion so far has been the policy to shift a part of the subsidy from the construction of water harvesting structures to adoption of water saving devices like drip irrigation systems.

Although drought relief operations usually can be fully implemented once political issues are resolved, there still remain some technical and strategic deficiencies in the way such operations are conducted over and above any political considerations. For example, given the acute water shortage in most parts of drought-prone areas, large-scale measures such as the inter-basin transfer of water should be considered as part of the drought management process.

Dealing with Drought:

These are just some initial thoughts on how the state can better prepare for future droughts, in particular I have not really said much about the plight of marginal communities such as arboreal tribal groups, fishing communities and pastoralists all of whom are a significant minority amongst the rural population and are also those who have the least access to food security and have experienced some of the most negative effects of economic growth without seeing any of the benefits, again this is a specialised issue that deserves its own discussion but many states which suffer from perennial droughts such as Gujarat and Rajasthan have a sizeable share of such communities amongst the affected. Moreover, as noted the diverse ecological nature of the country means that there are almost always some drought affected districts that are almost continually plagued by drought conditions on a regular basis even when there is a good monsoon – Rajasthan is a notable example of a state where at least a handful of districts always experience drought conditions; even before the widely reported poor rains this year the dry land regions of Gujarat such as Saurashtra have been suffering from drought for the last two years; so much so that in the last general election, when the BJP leader LK Advani went to address rallies in the region, usually considered a safe Hindutva region he was met by cries of “we want pani (water) not Ad-vani!” by irate farmers who were upset with the inaction of the local administration and the state government. As Vikash suggests, Federal-State relations can play a large role and the determination of DPAP districts does not always follow non-political criterion; therefore despite the WDP warnings and water conservation measures in Maharashtra a state which is deemed to be in danger of drought vulnerability and having marginal water supplies in most years, it is still one of the largest producers of sugar a very water intensive crop, closer investigations reveal that there is an alarming overlap between those agricultural districts producing sugar and DPAP districts – the same districts which receive large amount of subsidies to conserve water as they are drought-prone are also ones that produce some of the most water intensive crops, rather than the more hardy and less water reliant coarse cereals!! The power of the rural sugar lobby in Maharashtra may account for this apparent paradox. Moreover, part of the fallout of the Green Revolution has been a widespread switch to the superior cereals such as rice and wheat away from the so-called coarse cereals such as jowar, bajra and millet which are the main foodgrains of the poor – such crops are not only hardier, more drought resistant and require less water but they are more nutritious and require less labour than the traditional Green Revolution varieties; however the area under coarse cereal cultivation has fallen by 7 million hectares over the 1990’s and that under pulse cultivation has fallen by 2.4 million hectares. This has been accompanied by a more general decline in foodgrain per capita availability – declining from 173.5kg in 1989-90 to 159.9kg in 1999-2000 over the same period per capita availability of pulses have fallen by 2.4kg; such trends are alarming especially given the levels of malnutrition evinced in India. Part of the reliance on the monsoons and the worsening intensity of droughts despite the fact that their occurrence has not significantly increased over the last 100 years can be partly attributed to the massive fall in the cultivation and consumption of coarse grain cereals which are a main staple of the poor, such a switch is an integral part of the broader Green Revolution strategy that has been pursued by the state: one must ask whether especially outside the wetland/irrigated regions it is wise to push cultivation of HYV crops which require time-sensitive, intensive-water inputs and part of the price of the increased food security may have come at the price of this greater annual instability in foodgrain production. This is not to mention the nutritional consequences of such a narrowing food base, V. Ramachandran’s survey of labouring and farm households in the Green Revolution areas of the Punjab and Haryana found that over the last 20 years the variety of foods and grains consumed has declined on average from a basket of 20 to just 5, thus while absolute consumption has increased this has come at the cost of reduced diversity and access to non-carbohydrate nutrients.

As outlined above, the state has a considerable apparatus and ability to monitor and predict some of the adverse weather shocks that affect the agricultural production cycle, moreover, given the recurrence of drought patterns there should be some indication of the regions and areas that are most affected by drought. In light of the fact that some states tend to suffer from periodic and sustained droughts/flooding – e.g. Rajasthan from the former and Assam from the latter, it would be wise to ensure that regionally targeted drought/flood funds and lines of credit are set which will allow these states to draw upon these resources upon meeting some set ecological/climactic criteria – this will insulate the process of relief fund distribution from political manipulation. Of course this will not be adequate to meet a widespread drought like the current situation, which will need a more substantial effort.

As part of a more flexible approach to drought/disaster management within rural development, Indian policymakers suffer from what I would call a bias in production-thinking. Production-thinking has three main drawbacks, the first which is probably the most well known due to its publicisation by Amartya Sen’s work on famines and entitlement, is that increased production itself is no guarantee of consumption and that what is important is not only how much is produced but who produces it, where it is produced and who can command it once it is produced. Secondly, production-thinking has led to an excessive concentration on yields per acre. In practise farmers have many criteria of which yield is only one. With open-ended matrix scoring, surveys in across most of the major agricultural states in India have ranked the criteria considered when planting crops – yields topped the list in less than half of the surveys: examples of the other criteria considered more important include – range of soils in which variety can be grown, timing of maturity, disease