A letter to Prof. Amartya Sen, Harvard University

Subroto Roy
The Statesman, 31 July

Dear Professor Sen,

Everyone will be delighted that someone of your worldwide stature has joined the debate on Singur and Nandigram; The Telegraph deserves congratulations for having made it possible on July 23.
I was sorry to find though that you may have missed the wood for the trees and also some of the trees themselves. Perhaps you have relied on Government statements for the facts. But the Government party in West Bengal represents official Indian communism and has been in power for 30 years at a stretch. It may be unwise to take at face-value what they say about their own deeds on this very grave issue! Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and there are many candid communists who privately recognise this dismal truth about themselves. To say this is not to be praising those whom you call the “Opposition” ~ after all, Bengal’s politics has seen emasculation of the Congress as an opposition because the Congress and communists are allies in Delhi. It is the Government party that must reform itself from within sua sponte for the good of everyone in the State.
The comparisons and mentions of history you have made seem to me surprising. Bengal’s economy now or in the past has little or nothing similar to the economy of Northern England or the whole of England or Britain itself, and certainly Indian agriculture has little to do with agriculture in the new lands of Australia or North America. British economic history was marked by rapid technological innovations in manufacturing and rapid development of social and political institutions in context of being a major naval, maritime and mercantile power for centuries. Britain’s geography and history hardly ever permitted it to be an agricultural country of any importance whereas Bengal, to the contrary, has been among the most agriculturally fertile and hence densely populated regions of the world for millennia.
Om Prakash’s brilliant pioneering book The Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal 1630-1720 (Princeton 1985) records all this clearly. He reports the French traveller François Bernier saying in the 1660s “Bengal abounds with every necessary of life”, and a century before him the Italian traveller Verthema saying Bengal “abounds more in grain, flesh of every kind, in great quantity of sugar, also of ginger, and of great abundance of cotton, than any country in the world”. Om Prakash says “The premier industry in the region was the textile industry comprising manufacture from cotton, silk and mixed yarns”. Bengal’s major exports were foodstuffs, textiles, raw silk, opium, sugar and saltpetre; imports notably included metals (as Montesquieu had said would always be the case).
Bengal did, as you say, have industries at the time the Europeans came but you have failed to mention these were mostly “agro-based” and, if anything, a clear indicator of our agricultural fecundity and comparative advantage. If “deindustrialization” occurred in 19th Century India, that had nothing to do with the “deindustrialization” in West Bengal from the 1960s onwards due to the influence of official communism.
You remind us Fa Hiaen left from Tamralipta which is modern day Tamluk, though he went not to China but to Ceylon. You suggest that because he did so Tamluk effectively “was greater Calcutta”. I cannot see how this can be said of the 5th Century AD when no notion of Calcutta existed. Besides, modern Tamluk at 22º18’N, 87º56’E is more than 50 miles inland from the ancient port due to land-making that has occurred at the mouth of the Hooghly. I am afraid the relevance of the mention of Fa Hiaen to today’s Singur and Nandigram has thus escaped me.
You say “In countries like Australia, the US or Canada where agriculture has prospered, only a very tiny population is involved in agriculture. Most people move out to industry. Industry has to be convenient, has to be absorbing”. Last January, a national daily published a similar view: “For India to become a developed country, the area under agriculture has to shrink, urban and industrial land development has to take place, and about 100 million workers have to move out from agriculture into industry and services. This is the only way forward for bringing prosperity to the rural population”.
Rice is indeed grown in Arkansas or Texas as it is in Bengal but there is a world of difference between the technological and geographical situation here and that in the vast, sparsely populated New World areas with mechanized farming! Like shoe-making or a hundred other crafts, agriculture can be capital-intensive or labour-intensive ~ ours is relatively labour-intensive, theirs is relatively capital-intensive. Our economy is relatively labour-abundant and capital-scarce; their economies are relatively labour-scarce and capital-abundant (and also land-abundant). Indeed, if anything, the apt comparison is with China, and you doubtless know of the horror stories and civil war conditions erupting across China in recent years as the Communist Party and their businessman friends forcibly take over the land of peasants and agricultural workers, e.g. in Dongzhou.
All plans of long-distance social engineering to “move out” 40 per cent of India’s population (at 4 persons per “worker”) from the rural hinterlands must also face FA Hayek’s fundamental question in The Road to Serfdom: “Who plans whom, who directs whom, who assigns to other people their station in life, and who is to have his due allotted by others?”
Your late Harvard colleague, Robert Nozick, opened his brilliant 1974 book Anarchy, State and Utopia saying: “Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights)”. You have rightly deplored the violence seen at Singur and Nandigram. But you will agree it is a gross error to equate violence perpetrated by the Government which is supposed to be protecting all people regardless of political affiliation, and the self-defence of poor unorganised peasants seeking to protect their meagre lands and livelihoods from state-sponsored pogroms. Kitchen utensils, pitchforks or rural implements and flintlock guns can hardly match the organised firepower controlled by a modern Government.
Fortunately, India is not China and the press, media and civil institutions are not totally in the hands of the ruling party alone. In China, no amount of hue and cry among the peasants could save them from the power of organised big business and the Communist Party. In India, a handful of brave women have managed to single-handedly organise mass movements of protest which the press and media have then broadcast that has shocked the whole nation to its senses.
You rightly say the land pricing process has been faulty. Irrelevant historical prices have been averaged when the sum of discounted expected future values in an inflationary economy should have been used. Matters are even worse. “The fear of famine can itself cause famine. The people of Bengal are afraid of a famine. It was repeatedly charged that the famine (of 1943) was man-made.” That is what T. W. Schultz said in 1946 in the India Famine Emergency Committee led by Pearl Buck, concerned that the 1943 Bengal famine should not be repeated following dislocations after World War II. Of course since that time our agriculture has undergone a Green Revolution, at least in wheat if not in rice, and a White Revolution in milk and many other agricultural products. But catastrophic collapses in agricultural incentives may still occur as functioning farmland comes to be taken by government and industry from India’s peasantry using force, fraud or even means nominally sanctioned by law. If new famines come to be provoked because farmers’ incentives collapse, let future historians know where responsibility lay.
West Bengal’s real economic problems have to do with its dismal macroeconomic and fiscal position which is what Government economists should be addressing candidly. As for land, the Government’s first task remains improving grossly inadequate systems of land-description and definition, as well as the implementation and recording of property rights.
With my most respectful personal regards, I remain
Yours ever
Suby

(The author is Contributing Editor, The Statesman)

The Maoist mess-up

It boils down to providing basic governance

NIRUPOM SOM
The Statesman, July 30

An illuminating article on the Communist Party of India (Maoist) entitled “Crimson Corridor” by Mr Jagmohan appeared in this newspaper on 2-3 April, 2007. I am sure officers and men of the Indian police, now encountering the extremists all over the country, will be much encouraged by it because some of them have a feeling that they are not really fighting with the Maoists but messing with them. The article was very enlightening to a retired member of the police service like me who as Superintendent of Police, Howrah, and Midnapore and thereafter as DIG, Intelligence Branch, West Bengal had tackled the same Left-wing extremists, then called Naxalites, in the sixties and seventies. During which time many of them were ideological dreamers and qualitatively much different from their present-day brethren. They were fewer in number, much less organised, and had hazy and confusing ideas about the course of the intended revolution. They were also discouraged by their leader, Charu Mazumdar, from using sophisticated weapons for liquidating class enemies though they had a fair quantity of firearms looted from the police camps of Magurjan and Rupaskundi on the ground that this would breed eliticism for whatever that may mean.
The current triumphant phase of Left-wing extremism in India can be said to have taken off when the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), also known as People’s War Group (PWG) and the Maoist Communist Centre of India (MCC) merged to form the Communist Party of India (CPI-Maoist) at some undisclosed place in the liberated zone. The merger was announced on 14 October 2004 by Ramakrishna, the state secretary of the PWG, Andhra Pradesh, while Muppala Lakshman Rao alias Ganapati was declared in a subsequent press release as general secretary of the party. The central committee of the party formed after the merger circulated five documents of which one entitled “The Party Programme” declared that the ruling classes in India had transformed the country into a prison house of nationalities under the slogan of unity and integrity of the country. The party pledged unconditional support to the ongoing nationalities’ struggles including armed struggles for coming out of such a prison. The party thus proclaimed its support to the unrest in the north-eastern states.
Another document titled “The strategy and tactics of the Indian Revolution” is really an elaborate exposition of Maoist principles of guerrilla warfare. Considering that according to the report of the Intelligence Bureau, Government of India, 40 per cent of the geographical area is within the liberated zone and 35 per cent of the population are in that zone, Maoism has apparently more followers in India than in China. A clear goal of capturing state power in India through the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army and in the final stage by the People’s Liberation Army has removed all doubts and confusion of the seventies.
The twin concept of Compact Revolutionary Zone (CRZ) and the Red Corridor are by now familiar terms. There is, however, no dependable estimate on how many of India’s 12,476 police stations are under Maoist control. However, according to an official note circulated at a meeting of the chief ministers of Naxalite-affected states in Delhi on 21 September 2004 as many as 149 districts in 12 states were admitted as being variously affected by Maoist activity. Regarding the approximate strength of hard-core underground cadres, while home ministry’s annual report 2004-05 puts the strength at 9,300, the union minister of state for home in a written reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha on 8 March 2006, put the strength at 7,200. He did not explain how with an approximately 23 per cent erosion of strength, the Maoists are committing violent acts in an ever-expanding area of the country.
I often feel amazed when I come across reports on the modernisation of Maoist armoury, notably their firepower and ability to detonate explosives from long distances. In the sixties and seventies, I had seen their ideological brethren liquidating their class-enemies with nothing more lethal than a knife, sword and shovel in the rural areas and with pipe-guns in the urban areas. In the current phase, the Maoist raid on Orissa’s Koraput district armoury ~ incidentally the first armoury raid in free India and second in the country after Chittagong in 1919 ~ on the NMDC stores at Hirauli in Dantewara district in Chattisgarh and on the Home Guard Training Centre at Giridih in Jharkhand have been audacious. The looting took place on a gigantic scale and involved huge quantities of sophisticated weapons, such as AK-47 rifles, LMGs, carbines, grenades, INSATS 9mm pistols, ammunition, more than 50 tons of ammonia nitrate ~ and without suffering any casualty. Going by intelligence reports, the Maoists in many states have engaged experts on substantial monthly salaries for working on the designs of anti-tank rocket launchers. In Andhra Pradesh, they possess the technology to manufacture claymore mines and detonate them from a distance of five km making use of the US-made Icon ICV8 wireless sets. In March 2006, the police arrested the Maoist electronic and communications expert, Nimmala Anji Reddy, at Akkannapet railway station. It was revealed that the Maoists had for a long time been listening to police communications through wireless sets manufactured by their own experts. Similar information was obtained by the Jharkhand police when they arrested another Maoist electronics expert, Shyam Sinku, near Jamshedpur in June 2006. The seizure by the Andhra police on a single day of 600 unloaded rockets, 275 unassembled rockets, 27 rocket launchers and 70 gelatine sticks from two districts of Mahabubnagar and Prakasam clearly indicate that the Maoists have been taking great pains to outstrip the fighting power of the security forces pitted against them.
How has the soil of the world’s largest democracy become so fertile for the growth of such virulent Left-wing extremism? The answer, according to one analyst, is that while other terrorists attack the Indian state at its strongest points ~ its secularism, its inclusiveness, its democracy ~ the Maoists attack state power where it is the weakest: in delivering basic services to those who need them most.
Mr Jagmohan has in his article presented some of the social indicators revealing a pretty dismal picture. Possibly it is Amartya Sen who has said somewhere that had Rabindranath or Gandhiji been alive today, they would have certainly felt the need for a far greater urgency to remove the grinding poverty and a far greater commitment of the government to that effect. In a state like Chhattisgarh, a third of its 21 million inhabitants are aborigines belonging largely to the Gond tribe. A typical description of the Bastar forest area runs thus: “In the tiny dirt-poor villages scattered through the forest, the Indian state is almost invisible. In one there is a hand-pump installed by the local government, but the well is dry. There are no roads, water pipes, electricity or telephone lines. In another village a teacher does come, but in the absence of a school, holds classes outdoors. Policemen, health workers and officials are never seen.”
The Chhattisgarh government has sought to bring a better life for its people by signing multi-crore deals for the setting up of steel mills and power stations. Conditions are hardly better in Jharkhand or in the districts of southern Orissa. No wonder all these areas are in the Compact Revolutionary Zone. These areas and their people require bijli-pani and sarak and some land for cultivation if they are peasants, and jobs if they are artisans or have passed out from school. But who will provide them with such basics?

Unlike the planning model formulated by the Pakistani economist, Prof Mahbub-ul-Haque, who believed in an indirect attack on mass poverty, India’s Planning Commission believes in the trickle-down effects of a fast growth rate. The results are there for all to see. Many states, including West Bengal, are cheerfully spending days and months even years in preparing the BPL list. And yet it is this state that had produced Harekrishna Konar and Benoy Chowdhury who had realised that in a village a person had no izzat unless he owned some land, however small the area, and had made full use of the administrative machinery to protect the rights of the tillers.
I have reports that both Bihar and Jharkhand have thousands of acres of vested and Bhoodan land, but the governments are in no hurry to distribute them among the landless. At present, the undertaking of development projects in the Compact Revolutionary Zone will be fiercely resisted by Maoists. And if we believe KPS Gill, adviser to the government of Chhatisgarh, even if new roads are built the local people will be too scared to use them. We may, therefore, be driven to conclude with Mr Ajay Sahani of the Institute of Conflict Management that “there is absolutely no set of economic initiatives on the horizon that can give prosperity, dignity etc to 810 million people in rural India”.

Faltering steps

While mounting audacious jailbreaks, looting armouries and killing policemen performing duty in CRZ were going on, the concerned state governments were initially groping in the dark for lack of proper intelligence and taking faltering steps to formulate an effective counter-insurgency strategy. These states till then had not only failed to spruce up their administration within the existing limitations, but their police personnel/per 100,000 population was much below the national average. Regarding the morale and professional ability, the president of the Jharkhand Police Association has lamented that “Naxalites are a dedicated cadre who move fearlessly with a do-or-die motto: policemen are here to do a job and take home their salaries”.
In Bihar, there are complaints that hundreds of police stations and outposts, in extremist-afflicted districts, make do without a boundary wall or the minimum infrastructure. The Centre’s modernisation grants are lying unspent instead of being utilised for anti-insurgency measures.
However, matters have started falling into shape especially after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s Independence day speech in 2006 when he declared terrorists and Naxalites as the biggest threat to security. Since then the home ministry has been pressing the Maoist-affected states for adopting a multi-pronged approach, including sharing of intelligence and joint operations in the border areas. About 30 CRPF battalions have been placed at the disposal of these states and a special combat force of 14,000 men is being raised. In another speech on 13 April this year, the Prime Minister once again reminded the chief ministers of the affected states of the urgent necessity of going flat out against the Maoists.
According to Col (retd) Hariharan, counter-insurgency analyst of MI, India is perhaps the only country in the world, which from practically the first day of her independence has been waging insurgency and fighting it as well. Therefore, it has enough expertise to handle both operations. His first warning ~ a point also mentioned by Mr Jagmohan ~ is that politicians must stop entering into a secret understanding with Maoists to garner electoral advantage. They must also stop repeating cliches like Maoists are our errant brothers even when policemen are being killed by them. Such actions and utterances not only embolden the Maoists but also make the law-enforcement officers think again on the relevance of their operations. He also suggests proper coordination at the national level with the Centre issuing clear policy guidelines on all core issues. I do not think such an ideal position has been reached so far considering that some states ban the CPI(Maoists) and some do not. West Bengal has set up its anti-Maoist camps close to the Jharkhand border, but Jharkhand has positioned such camps not along the border but far inside ~ behind the undulating terrain of jungles giving the Maoists a safe passage to flee from West Bengal.
An important point raised in Hariharan’s article is that a proposal to enact a special law dealing with those believing in violence should be critically examined as a measure of dispensing criminal justice rather than as a political issue. An oft-quoted saying of Mao is that revolution is no dinner party. If so, fighting a revolution cannot also be a gentleman’s game and some of its essential prerequisites are superior intelligence collection, adaptation of pre-emptive and preventive measures and formation of anticipatory disaster plans. To destroy by force the constitutionally-established government in India and to seize state power is for the Maoists articles of faith. The police force that is set against them faces a war-like situation. Two cases have been mentioned in Hariharan’s article to prove that normal courts cannot provide enough protection to a force dealing with the Maoists. The first is the Srikakulam conspiracy case against Naxalites which ended in acquittal of all the accused after 10 years of trial as the court demanded additional proof of conspiracy although the accused had visited to Beijing to seek Chinese support for their revolution.
The other case reported by Mr PS Rammohan Rao, who incidentally was DGP, Andhra, when I was DGP, West Bengal, is a joint trial of 30 Naxalite accused, some of whom always managed to come out on bail, go underground, plead illness or just did not turn up in court. While the trial continued for 13 years and a half, many witnesses were liquidated.
There are several democratic countries that have armed themselves with the power of preventive detention while dealing with outfits ~ both of the Left and the Right ~ that believe in the cult of violence. In the sixties and seventies when the Naxalites were indulging in violence on a scale much limited than their present-day brethren, the Centre had enacted MISA for preventive detention. In April 2000, the Law Commission recommended the enactment of such a law to deal effectively with all terrorist outfits. Hopefully, the Centre will soon be convinced of the need for such legislation in order to strengthen the hands of the police against the Maoists. Though the Centre has failed to provide the lead, the Chhattisgarh government has already enacted such legislation in the form of the Special Protection Act that authorises preventive detention.

Ulfa affairs

As for the future of the Maoist movement in India, once the governments, both at the Centre and in the states have in the language of Clausewitz established the kind of war on which they have embarked, they must not betray the kind of vacillation that marks dealings with the Ulfa. The government must leave the details of operations in professional hands. The Indian police, I am sure, will rise to the occasion as it did in the seventies and succeed in containing the Maoists. After all, despite the Red Corridor and CRZ, the Maoist power base remains on the margins of Indian society. During the past 40 years, they have been able to do precious little towards their avowed goal of destroying the country’s democratic polity. In the neighbouring countries there are powerful forces operating with the same objective. I do not know if India’s intelligence agencies have any information if such forces are helping the Maoists. After the arrest of Maulana Naseruddin for the murder of Gujarat’s former home minister, Haren Pandya, the Naxalites in Andhra Pradesh publicly supported Dasaragh-e-Jehad-e-Shadat’s demand for his unconditional release. It is too early to predict future developments.


A retired IPS officer, the author is former Commissioner, Kolkata Police, and DGP, West Bengal.

RISE AND SHINE - Urban, industrial and commercial India since 1991

S.L. RAO
The Telegraph, July 30

A Kumbhakarna waking in India after sleeping since 1991, would have rubbed his eyes in disbelief. In the shops are apples from Fiji and China, Swiss chocolates, almost all the latest models of cars, cell phones, television, hi-fi equipment, and many consumer products including designer clothes, bags and other such luxuries. Most urban middle-class young men and women go to work, earning good salaries. So do the young from lower socio-economic strata with little education, in malls, multiplexes, fast food restaurants, supermarkets and hotels.

Housing loans at 10 per cent interest, the Sensex at 15,000 and rising, over $200 billion of foreign exchange reserves, the rupee rising every day in relation to the dollar and even other currencies, Indians welcomed as immigrants in most developed countries, India labelled as the new superpower of this century and sharply declining poverty levels make India a different country from what it was in 1991.

The rich and the middle classes are very much better off. But the over-fifty-fives of 1991 are now dependent on the generosity of their prosperous children because their savings are too small for the new higher prices of almost everything. The unorganized sector has more employment than before, but incomes remain low while agriculture has become an uncertain occupation for the many small land-owners.

Many industrialists in 1991 did not recognize that India had joined the world and would never again be an insular economy. Our opening the economy coincided with the revolution in telecommunications, information technology, travel and the growing shortage in the developed countries of people and of skills at affordable costs. Those Indian businesses that did not seize the new opportunities died or disappeared. There were many who did change and developed significant businesses. Some of them became the new barons of the Indian and the world economies.

Most knights of the ‘level playing field’ led by Rahul Bajaj later joined the race to take advantage of the new situation. Bajaj, for example, handed over to his sons, who spent some of the large cash reserves on brand building, research and development, new production facilities and new professional managers. Fortunate ones like the Parle soft-drink clan, Balsara, MTR and many others found buyers and sold out. The ‘swadeshi-ites’ led by the physicist-politician, Murli Manohar Joshi, had demanded preference to the indigenous over the foreign and coined the memorable phrase, “Yes to computer chips but no to potato chips”, shorthand for foreign investment only in high-technology areas. He and his supporters were silenced by India’s leadership in the IT revolution, the businesses it spawned and the new global reach of Indian business and human talent. Joshi’s disciples remain in government and outside and oppose foreign investment in, say, telecom and retailing. The sleazy underbelly of government, by innovating shady schemes that are mostly real estate scams like the special economic zones, give the Joshi disciples more ammunition.

The state-owned enterprises are the missing guests at this prosperous table. Their control by government bureaucrats, appointment of CEOs who are government officers, interference in investment decisions and limits on pricing freedom are some ways in which their prosperity has been hindered. An example of control was in the recent ONGC saga, first with the attempt to put the regulator of exploration, the director-general, Hydrocarbons, on the board, and then the humiliating treatment of the succeeding chairman selected by a neutral panel, initially giving him ‘acting’ charge and then confirming him after a year. The appointment of IAS officers to run the newly merged national carriers is a guarantee (from past experience) that this sensible move and its long-awaited investment in new planes will fail. The bold investment plans of BSNL have been stymied by a new minister who overruled his knowledgeable predecessor for unknown reasons. The oil-marketing companies have lost large sums because government does not want to allow higher prices for petroleum products so as to counter inflation, nor to add to its deficits by directly meeting the shortfall.

However, the nationalized banks have so improved that they now pose real competition to foreign and private banks. So have the insurance companies. BSNL has retained its No. 1 position despite intense competition. BHEL has shown good profits, but government ownership has induced a timidity that is now leading to shortages of power plants. Single-product companies like NTPC or Power Grid cannot, because of government ownership, get into related diversification.

There have been many surprising revivals. In the late Eighties, the UB group was a conglomerate with control over its original and successful liquor business, Best & Crompton, a dying engineering company, an unprofitable Hindustan Polymer, a polyester-maker, poorly run Mangalore Refinery, Berger Paints, and a pharmaceutical company. Today it is highly focused; the second largest liquor company in the world with foreign brands owned by it, and No. 2 in the airline business in India. The rest were divested. So has Parry developed a narrow focus and become very successful in fertilizers and houseware. Sanmar, a Madras group, has similarly focused its business much more on its core chemicals and plastics. TATA has become a global company, as have the Aditya Birla group, Bharat Forge and many others. Even a small company like RAIN Calcining is now the largest in the world in calcined petroleum coke through organic growth and overseas acquisition. Indian companies have displaced multinationals in India in the pharmaceutical industry.

Stories in foreign business magazines and books about strategies, buyouts, compensation and so on are no longer merely interesting reading. They are also about our companies as they grow, globalize and become more competitive. Where the maximum salary allowed by the registrar of companies for a CEO was Rs 90,000 a year, now the same company pays in crores apart from stock options and commissions, not only to the MD but also to the other top executives. But not in public sector enterprises.

Before 1991, the circumstances and challenges were different. The economy was protected and licensing ruled all management decisions. Foreign partners, imported technology and legal consumer-goods imports were all ruled by government. Smuggled products were therefore common. A departing embassy official in Delhi could sell all his belongings, even used garments, for good prices, such was the craze for foreign goods. This craze is not there now because everything is made or imported into India. Management was about small markets, small production capacities, premium prices, poor quality and relative neglect of the consumer. Most successful enterprises of past years had bought into the political system— like the Goenkas, Apollo under Raunaq Singh, the Modis, Birlas and others.

Dhirubhai Ambani also ably played the system. But he was a great visionary, a tremendous manager who was good at spotting and rewarding talented people and a genius at innovative ways of raising finance. His visions in deciding to integrate vertically, from oil well to wall socket, planning for long-distance phone calls in India to cost as much as a postcard, for fantastic volumes in a variety of products and then creating markets for them, would have assured his success in any envirnment.

Hindustan Lever used government policies to keep its business growing under majority foreign shareholding. After 1991, though first off the mark in acquiring new businesses, it could not integrate them successfully. The world is different today for urban, industrial and commercial India. We need the government to be more fixated on improving it for all.

The author is former director-general, National Council for Applied Economic Research

Peasants set the fashion in Bolivia’s ethnic revolution

Rory Carroll

The dress of the marginalised has now become synonymous with authority.

For centuries the traditional dress of South America’s indigenous people has been mocked as the garb of losers. The Indians lost power to the conquistadors, they lost land and wealth to waves of European settlers, and eventually they lost pride.

The bright tunics and unusual hats were belittled by the paler-skinned elites as the uniform of marginalised peasants in the highlands and shanty-dwellers in the cities.

But in a dramatic turnaround the style has now become synonymous with authority. Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia and a figurehead for the indigenous movement, has led the way by turning traditional dress into a statement that the natives are back in the game. The outfit he wore on the eve of his January 2006 inauguration — a multi-coloured tunic and an alpaca-wool sweater with a four-pointed hat, and a garland of coca leaves — is to be officially declared a national treasure.

“It was one of the most important moments. Those clothes were symbols. Right there was contained our history and patrimony,” said Juan Ramon Quintana, Minister to the Presidency, when he unveiled the plan to immortalise the clothes. Just a few years ago the outfit, which Morales wore at an indigenous ceremony in the sanctuary of Tiawanacu, would have been seen only in remote villages or in displays for tourists.

That it should now be elevated to a totem of national pride reflects the ascendancy of Mr. Morales, a former coca-grower and radical left-winger, over the economic and political establishment that used to run the country.

Indigenous people are still economically marginalised and often the victims of racism, but in the past decade they have emerged as a formidable political force. To protest against crushing poverty and neglect, they have blocked motorways, clashed with police, and even swung elections.

Bolivia led the way. Mr. Morales swept to power in 2005 by mobilising indigenous voters, previously neglected by the European-influenced elite. As his clout has grown, so has the visibility of traditional dress. —

Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007

West reverts to its cold war ways

Vladimir Radyuhin
The Hindu, July 30

The new Russia is building a market economy, has opened up to foreign investors, and is striving to integrate with the rest of the world. This is what makes it dangerous in the eyes of western hawks.

History has come full circle again. The west sees the new Russia as a big thorn in its side — as big and painful as the erstwhile Soviet Union. If there were any doubts about it, the row over the death by radioactive poisoning of the former Russian security officer Alexander Litvinenko in London has dispelled it. The tragic incident has been exploited to fuel a massive campaign to portray Russia as a re-incarnation of the “evil empire,” as Ronald Reagan labelled the Soviet Union.

Britain’s decision to expel four Russian diplomats over Russia’s refusal to extradite businessman Andrei Lugovoy, the main suspect in British eyes in the Litvinenko case, amounted to a declaration of war. The British government had known all along that Moscow would not turn over the man because Russia’s Constitution explicitly prohibits extradition of its citizens. London needed Moscow’s formal refusal to extradite Mr. Lugovoy to throw out Russian diplomats and hammer home the point that Britain was holding the Kremlin responsible for what it called an “act of state terrorism.” Moscow has strongly denied any involvement and offered to try Mr. Lugovoy in Russia if the British side provides sufficient evidence of his guilt. However, London has refused and insisted on having the man handed over to it.

Britain has thereby joined Poland and some other allies of the United States in Europe in the Russia-bashing being orchestrated by neo-conservatives such as the historian Richard Pipes. He claims Russia is a greater threat than Islamic extremism. “That country is more dangerous than bin Laden,” Dr. Pipes said in an interview to Italia’s Corriere della Sera last week.

He hit the nail on the head: Russia indeed presents a greater danger to western interests than the Soviet Union did. The only threat the Soviet Union was perceived to pose to the west was a military one, but it was easily countered with U.S. missiles and NATO tanks. The Soviet Union was isolated, securely cordoned off by the Iron Curtain. By contrast, the new Russia is not separated from the west by any ideological, political or economic walls. Russia has renounced communist ideology, is building a market economy, has opened up to foreign investors, and is striving to integrate with the rest of the world. This is what makes it dangerous in the eyes of western hawks.

There is something today the west fears more than Soviet tanks and missiles — Russia’s resurgence as a global power opposed to a U.S.-led unipolar world, and its economic expansion into western markets. The western media are full of stories about the Kremlin’s creeping conquest of Europe through Russian state-controlled mega-companies.

The Russian army has long withdrawn from Europe, BusinessWeek warned, but the Russians “are back, this time armed with bank accounts bulging with energy wealth.”

The west has even forfeited the sacred principle of economic freedom to stop the Russian economic offensive. According to Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Russian companies had failed to clinch $50 billion in deals over the past year due to western non-market barriers.

But overall, Russia has been beating the west at its own game — free market competition. Moscow has consolidated its control over Central Asia’s energy resources and increased its strategic dominance in the energy markets of Europe.

Russia’s stinging censure of the U.S. and NATO aggression in Yugoslavia and Iraq sounds almost as harsh as the anti-imperialist tirades of Soviet leaders. But they cannot be easily brushed away as ideologically motivated attacks coming from a totalitarian regime. When President Vladimir Putin in his famous speech in Munich in February blasted the U.S. for “an almost uncontained hyper use of military force in international relations, which is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts,” he spoke from the high moral ground of the leader of a nation that has embraced democracy and upholds democratic principles in world politics. Mr. Putin’s principled castigation of U.S. adventurism has raised the prestige of Russia as one of the few big nations that has the guts to stand up to the superpower.

According to International Olympic Committee members, Mr. Putin’s personal charisma played a crucial role in winning the 2014 Winter Games for Russia earlier this month. Even in the U.S., Mr. Putin scored 30 per cent in popularity ratings, which looks not bad at all compared with George W. Bush’s 45 per cent.

Nearly two decades after winning the Cold War, the west sees its victory being snatched away. “All the spoils of its [the West’s] Cold War ‘win’… are already slipping through its fingers as the global momentum in almost every sphere shifts in the favour of Russia, China, India and the East,” laments analyst W. Joseph Stroupe, trumpeter of a “Neo Cold War.”

To rescue some of its Cold War gains, the U.S. and its allies have unleashed a propaganda war depicting Russia as a totalitarian regime and denouncing its leader. Leading U.S. Senator Richard Lugar, for one, ranked Russia among “hostile regimes” along with Iran and Venezuela for pursuing an independent energy-export policy.

Britain has joined the U.S.’ campaign of Russia-baiting as eagerly as it supported the invasion of Iraq. Press outlets on both sides of the Atlantic have accused President Putin of ordering the killing of political opponents even though not a shred of evidence has been produced to support the charge. Russia has accused the British authorities of politicising the Litvinenko case and failing to provide Moscow with any evidence for the charges against Mr. Lugovoy, not even an autopsy report on Mr. Litvinenko’s death. Russian prosecutors found many gaps and inconsistencies in Scotland Yard’s investigation, while the Russian press suggested that no evidence was forthcoming because there simply was none.

It pointed out that if Britain wanted to resolve the Litvinenko case, it would have agreed to an open trial of its Russian suspect on Russian soil.

Britain meanwhile went on to fan the anti-Russia hysteria. Russian bombers on regular training flights in the Northern Sea last week were accused of encroaching into U.K. airspace in what the British media described as “the Russians flexing their muscles.” In another bizarre incident, the British police reported the arrest of a man on the suspicion of conspiring to murder fugitive Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky, whom Russian investigators suspect of organising the killing of his protégé Litvinenko. But instead of charging the man, the British authorities just deported him.

New containment policy

Moscow believes the anti-Russian campaign in the west serves to provide ideological motivation for a new containment policy. If Russia can be made out to be sliding back towards dictatorship, then the west would be perfectly justified in banning Russian companies from buying assets in Europe and the U.S., in rejecting the Kremlin’s various cooperation initiatives such as a joint global missile shield, and in putting a loaded gun to Russia’s head by setting up new military bases along its borders.

In the run-up to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s first visit to the U.S. this week, Congressman Tom Lantos, Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, gave a call to “revitalise the transatlantic alliance” to contain Russia, which “is using anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism to wreak havoc.”

Mr. Lantos stood the issue on its head. Even such a committed pro-west person as Russia’s former Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar admitted that it was Washington’s policy that had led to an alarming rise of anti-Americanism in top Russian universities and in the Russian body politic. The architect of Russia’s pro-western market reforms said he had been trying to alert western leaders to the danger that they were strengthening anti-western and authoritarian forces in Russia and this could eventually impact on Russian foreign and domestic policies.

But then this seems to be exactly the U.S. goal — to push Russia back into its totalitarian and isolationist past. “The more aggressive sections of the Western elites have long abandoned efforts to export democracy to Russia, but are actively working to lure Russia into authoritarianism,” the Kremlin-connected Expert magazine wrote in its latest issue. An authoritarian Russia “will still sell its oil and gas, but will not aspire to gain a foothold in Western gas-distribution networks and in the global markets.”

Pollsters have indeed noted a rise in anti-western sentiments in Russia recently. Nearly half of the Russians surveyed this month said the west was trying to solve its problems at Russia’s expense and “damages Russia’s interests whenever a convenient opportunity arises.”

But most importantly, opinion surveys registered a record rise in Mr. Putin’s popularity, with 85 per cent of Russians approving his fiercely nationalistic policy. The Russian leader appears to be outmanoeuvring his western foes once again: the Russia-baiting campaign has strengthened his hand at home at a time when he is preparing to hand over power to a trusted successor in the presidential elections next year.

Two missions for the 60th anniversary

M.S. Swaminathan
The Hindu, July 28

Much remains to be done to make India hunger-free and to achieve a rural knowledge revolution.

On the eve of the 50th anniversary of India’s independence on August 14-15, 1997, the then President K.R. Narayanan listed our adherence to a democratic system of governance and our launching a green revolution in agriculture as the two most important achievements of the first 50 years of what Jawaharlal Nehru christened “India’s tryst with destiny.” At a consultation held at the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation in Chennai at the beginning of th e new century, it was proposed that two major goals for the 60th anniversary commemoration should be a hunger-free India on the lines proposed by Mahatma Gandhi in 1946 at Naokhali, and accelerated progress in human resource development through a knowledge revolution in rural India. Based on a series of consultations, two Missions 2007 were launched through multi-stakeholder consortia, one for eliminating chronic under- and mal-nutrition, and the other for rural knowledge connectivity.

Unfortunately, the progress made since 1997 in the elimination of child, maternal, and adult malnutrition as well as in improving our rank in the U.N. Human Development Index has been poor in relation to our capacity to achieve them. It will therefore be worthwhile to review briefly where we are today.

Mission 2007: a hunger-free India

Over 200 million children, women, and men go to bed now partially hungry. Jointly with the World Food Programme, MSSRF scientists have analysed the causes for the persistence of widespread chronic hunger and presented the available information in two atlases relating to food insecurity in rural and urban India. These atlases provided valuable guidelines for the preparation of a road map for the elimination of chronic, hidden, and transient hunger and resulted in the development of the following seven-point action plan. This plan was developed on considerations of both affordability and ease of implementation.

1) Restructure the delivery of ongoing nutrition support programmes on a life cycle basis.

2) Universalise the Public Distribution System (PDS) and enlarge the composition of the food basket by including a wide range of nutritious cereals, millets, grain legumes, and tubers based on local preferences.

3) Introduce a food-cum-fortification approach for eliminating iron, iodine, zinc, and vitamin A deficiencies and accord priority to overcoming chronic and hidden hunger in pregnant women, and in children in the 0-2 age group.

4) Promote the organisation of community grain and water banks by local communities with the gram sabhas providing social oversight, and promote the concept, “store food grains and drinking water in every village.”

5) Pay particular attention to safe drinking water, primary health care, and nutrition education.

6) Enhance opportunities for on-farm and non-farm employment through the bio-village model of human-centred development, and improve the productivity and profitability of small farms (small farm families constitute more than 50 per cent of India’s population) through integrated crop-livestock farming systems and improved post-harvest technology.

7) Introduce a Food Guarantee Act combining the features of the food-for-work and the rural employment guarantee programmes; the use of food as currency benefits both farmers and urban consumers, since farmers will produce more if consumption is improved. In addition, household nutrition security is strengthened.

While releasing the Food Insecurity Atlas of Rural India at New Delhi on April 21, 2001, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee commended the goal of ‘Mission 2007: a hunger-free India’ in the following words:

“Democracy and hunger cannot go together. A hungry stomach questions and censures the system’s failure to meet what is a basic biological need of every human being. There can be no place for hunger and poverty in a modern world in which science and technology have created conditions for abundance and equitable development.

“The sacred mission of a “Hunger-free India” needs the cooperative efforts of the Central and State Governments, local self-government bodies, non-governmental organisations, international agencies, and, above all, our citizens. We can indeed banish hunger from our country in a short time. Let us resolve today to make this Mission substantially successful by 2007, which will mark the sixtieth anniversary of our independence.”

The National Commission on Farmers also endorsed the above strategy for achieving sustainable nutrition security. The Common Minimum Programme of the United Progressive Alliance Government contains a commitment to achieving universal nutrition security as soon as possible. Unfortunately, an integrated strategy is yet to be put in place with the result that the goal of a hunger-free India is nowhere near accomplishment.

Every village a knowledge centre

The second Mission 2007 relates to the knowledge and skill empowerment of rural families with the help of information and communication technology (ICT). Mission 2007: every village a knowledge centre stimulated developments such as the following:

1) The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launched a village resource centre programme at the block level involving satellite connectivity and teleconferencing facilities.

2) The Department of Information Technology, Government of India, launched a common service centre programme designed to cover 100,000 villages.

3) The Ministry of Panchayati Raj, Government of India, decided to provide to each panchayat the necessary ICT infrastructure to enable it to participate in the e-governance programme.

4) ITC Ltd decided to expand its e-chaupal programme in order to cover 50,000 villages

5) The MSSRF has organised so far 80 village knowledge centres and 15 cillage resource centres.

6) Many State governments, public and private sector companies, academic and financial institutions, and NGOs have organised village knowledge centres in different parts of the country.

Thus, Mission 2007 has triggered a national tele-centre movement for bridging the urban-rural digital divide and for ensuring knowledge connectivity in areas relevant to the day-to-day life and livelihood of rural families. The Government of India has included knowledge connectivity as an important component of Bharat Nirman or a New Deal for Rural India.

A national alliance has been formed for Mission 2007 — a broad based coalition of government, non-government, academic, and business sectors committed to the cause of taking ICT to all the 600,000 villages of India. In addition, with the generous assistance of Tata Trusts, the MSSRF has established a Jamsetji Tata National Virtual Academy for Rural Prosperity (NVA) and a Jamsetji Tata Training School. The NVA has currently 985 Fellows from India and 25 Foreign Fellows drawn from Afghanistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Nepal, and Nigeria. These grass roots academicians are the torch-bearers of the rural knowledge revolution.

From August 15, Mission 2007 programme will grow into a Grameen Gyaan Abhiyan, a national movement for knowledge empowerment of rural families. It is hoped by 2010, the Abhiyan will cover every village and home or hut in the country.

The Green Revolution helped to increase the productivity of crops such as wheat and rice. The knowledge revolution, on the other hand, helps to enhance human productivity and creativity in several dimensions. The Grameen Gyaan Abhiyan will be based on the following organisational structure:

1) Every block will have a village resource centre with the help of ISRO.

2) Every panchayat will have a gyan chaupal or village knowledge centre with the help of the Department of Information Technology, the Ministry of Panchayati Raj, civil society organisations, NABARD and financial institutions, multilateral donors, the academic and private sectors, and bilateral and multilateral donors.

3) The last mile and last person connectivity will be achieved through combinations of the Internet and community radio, and the Internet and the cell phone. For example, fishermen in catamarans will be guided through cell phones on wave heights and location of fish shoals.

While connectivity can be achieved, content creation and capacity building will be the greatest challenges. The content has to be dynamic, demand driven, locale specific, and in local languages.

A major role of the Grameen Gyaan Abhiyan movement will be the establishment of linkages between scientific know-how and field level do-how. For this purpose, village resource centres and village knowledge centres will have to be intimately linked with appropriate programmes such as the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan for literacy, the Yuva and Mahila Sakthi Abhiyans of the Ministry of Panchayati Raj, the National Rural Health Mission, the National Horticulture Mission, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme, and so on.

To expand the number of those being provided relevant information and services in retail trade in fruits, vegetables, and grains as well as on methods of safe handling, packaging, and marketing, a quality literacy movement based on Codex Alimentarius standards of food safety is being launched in association with the Central Food Technological Research Institute, Mysore. The Grameen Gyan Abhiyan will launch a knowledge on the wheels programme for the provision of services relevant to rural livelihoods. To start with, soil health care, water conservation and management, eye care, and post harvest technology will be covered with mobile vans designed by eminent institutions such as Sankara Netralaya in the case of eye care.

As a single step, the rural knowledge revolution is likely to have the largest beneficial impact on the physical, economic, and social well-being of the more than 700 million people living in villages. Poverty will persist under conditions where the human resource is under-valued and material resources are over-valued. Once the Grameen Gyan Abhiyan spreads, there will be a perceptible impact on the parameters governing human resource development. This, in turn, will lead to a paradigm shift from unskilled to skilled work in villages. This is the pathway to achieving the first among the U.N. Millennium Development Goals, namely the eradication of hunger and poverty.

(The writer was Chairman of the National Commission on Farmers.)



08/26/2005
INDIA

World Bank to loan India 9 billion dollars for rural development

by Maurizio d'Orlando

Suspicions abound that political and geo-strategic reasons are behind the aid.

New Delhi (AsiaNews) – During a recent Asian trip that included stops in India and Pakistan, World Bank (WB) President Paul Wolfowitz said the institution was lending India US$ 9 billion over the next three years for rural development. Press reports suggest three billions will be released each year, a 500 per cent increase over the last two years when the WB loaned only one billion the South-Asian giant.

The decision to raise aid was apparently made during Wolfowitz's trip. Before his depart, the WB was prepared to sign up for three billions over three years.

The loans are earmarked for roads, drinking water and irrigation facilities in rural areas. Nearly 70 per cent of India's more than 1 billion people live in more than 500,000 villages connected largely by dusty tracks, dependent on agriculture and forced to endure acute shortages of drinking water and electricity.

"But though it's making rapid strides, India has an unfinished agenda," Wolfowitz said in a statement released to the press. "It is still home to a quarter of the world's poor people, most of whom reside in the rural areas. Infrastructure constraints are an impediment to growth. The government has rightly made provision of rural infrastructure and investments in hard infrastructure a priority. The World Bank feels privileged to support these efforts."

In 2004 India had one of the fastest annual growth rates in the world: about 7 per cent. Sixty years ago half of the population lived below the poverty line as measured by minimum caloric intake and ability to provide basic education to children.

By some accounts, about a quarter of the population still lives below the poverty line despite obvious progress. Using different measuring criteria, other studies estimate the number of poor in India to be around 350-400 people.

Whichever is correct, it still is true that today's main social cleavage is between the rapidly growing cities and the still backward countryside.

Some Indian commentators like Sudhir Chadda of the India Daily wonder whether Wolfowitz will be able to do what Indian politicians—from the currently ruling Congress Party to the opposition Hindu nationalist BJP—have failed time and time again to do, i.e. help the poor.

Chadda notes that both parties received funds in the last elections from India's "oligarchs", the 17 families who control 87 per cent of India's wealth. For him and others, the two parties would not be able to survive even a day without the oligarchs' financial backing.

Beside what the current economic situation may mean, another political factor is at stake. The current Congress-led coalition government is in power because of the support of India's Communist Party, which controls almost 13 per cent of all the seats in parliament and is gaining support in the poorer, rural areas of the country.

Indian commentators thus view WB assistance as politically motivated, inspired by a desire to see rural voters move towards the Congress Party and the hope that aid might generate greater sympathy for the US in Indian society.

And lest we forget, Paul Wolfowitz was recently appointed to the post of WB President thanks to the backing of US President George W. Bush.

Finally, the US recently expressed its opposition to a gas pipeline linking Iran to India through Pakistan. For many observers, this opposition is rooted in strategic considerations. Whilst a pipeline might give India access to Iran's gas supplies, it would also economically and politically link the two countries.

It is no secret that Iran remains on the US unwanted guest list.

According to the Pakistani press, the WB loan offer would stop India from succumbing to Iran's excessively tight hug.

However, the WB denied reports that the donor agency had warned the Pakistani government against supporting the proposed gas pipeline, WB spokesman Shahzad Shargil said on August 18 in Islamabad.

When asked, he declined though to make any statement whether or not the World Bank had any concerns or apprehensions regarding the project, saying that the WB President Paul Wolfowitz was the right person to comment. (MdO)


World Bank approves 600 million dollar farmers' assistance package for India

From ANI Correspondent

New Delhi, June 27, 2007: The World Bank today approved one of its largest support packages to India with a 600 million dollar loan and credit designed to transform access to financial services for India's poorest farmers.

The Strengthening Rural Credit Cooperatives Project supports the Government of India's program to reform and revitalize the country's rural Credit Cooperative Banks (CCBs). These include some 31 State Cooperative Banks, 367 District Central Cooperative Banks and over 100,000 Primary Agricultural Credit Societies. The goal is to transform them into efficient and commercially viable institutions responsive to the financial service needs of India's poorer farmers, including small and marginal farmers.

Since the early 1990s, India has introduced impressive financial sector reforms that have resulted in increased competition, diversification, openness, and depth. Yet, India's rural population still has limited access to finance from formal sources, relying instead on extortionate money lenders.

The problem is particularly severe for small and marginal farmers, who are among the poorest of India's rural dwellers farming, respectively, less than one acre and between one and four acres of land. World Bank estimates suggest that some 87 percent of marginal farmers and 70 percent of small farmers have no access to credit from a formal financial institution.

"Better access to finance for India's rural poor is absolutely critical for higher rural growth, for reducing inequality, and ultimately, alleviating poverty," said Isabel Guerrero, World Bank Country Director for India.

"By providing small farmers with improved financial services, such as credit, savings, remittances and insurance, this project will play a significant role in helping India's rural poor benefit from growth opportunities," she added.

Twelve Indian states have signed up to the reform program. Potentially viable CCBs in those states will commit to a set of far-reaching legal, regulatory, governance and institutional reforms which will open the way to financial and operational restructuring.

In the process the CCBs will be recapitalized with grants to wipe out the accumulated losses, the value of members' capital will be restored, and a minimum capital to risk weighted assets ratio (CRAR) of 7 percent will be achieved.

The project will also provide technical assistance throughout the process to strengthen CCB governance, managerial and operational performance, and support the computerization for enhanced efficiency and transparency. CCB members, particularly small and marginal farmers, will receive training in areas such as financial literacy and a strong project focus on monitoring and evaluation systems, will include monitoring by CCB members themselves.

"The project will transform India's rural credit cooperative banks into efficient and commercially viable institutions that can provide financial services to the poorest farmers at affordable terms. "This will enable poor farmers to break out of the clutches of usurious moneylenders, diversify economic activities, increase incomes, and improve their livelihoods," said Priya Basu, World Bank Lead Economist and project team leader.

The 12 states which have signed the Memoranda of Understanding with the Government of India and the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) include: Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Harayana, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and West Bengal.

The loan from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) has 20 years maturity, including a five year grace period.

The credit is provided by the International Development Association (IDA), the World Bank's concessionary lending arm and has 35 years to maturity and a 10-year grace period.


Copyright Dailyindia.com/ANI

6 killed in police firing

S. Nagesh Kumar
The Hindu, July 29

Left-sponsored bandh turns violent in Andhra Pradesh


Tragedy: The bodies of the victims of the police firing at Mudigonda village, Andhra Pradesh, being taken to hospital.

HYDERABAD: Six persons were killed on the spot in police firing at Mudigonda village in Andhra Pradesh as a Statewide bandh called by the Left parties, as part of their three-month-old land struggle, took a violent turn on Saturday.

The police opened 70 rounds of fire at Mudigonda in Khammam district, a stronghold of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India, after fighting a pitched battle with the demonstrators, who earlier ransacked the office of the Revenue Divisional Officer.

The provocation for the firing was a mob attack on the jeep of the Additional Superintendent of Police M. Ramesh Babu, who rushed to the village with reinforcements.

Seven others were injured, three of them seriously, in the firing, apart from several persons who were hurt in a lathi charge. Leaders of the Left parties shifted the bodies of the victims to Khammam, 20 km away, and placed them outside the Government General Hospital. There was a tense stand-off between the police and the demonstrators at the Collectorate located opposite the hospital.

In the adjoining Nalgonda district, Communist cadres stoned and damaged 15 buses of the state-owned A.P. State Road Transport Corporation.

In all, 54 buses were damaged across the State and hundreds of Left activists rounded up during the bandh, which disrupted normal life in several parts of Andhra Pradesh.

Judicial probe ordered

Expressing anguish at the deaths, Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy announced a judicial inquiry into the Mudigonda police firing and ordered the transfer of Superintendent of Police R.K. Meena and suspension of Mr. Ramesh Babu. He said at a press conference that the police had not heeded his advice to observe restraint during the bandh. The scale of violence took the Government by surprise since it occurred in the midst of its talks with the Left parties that went on till Friday night. Both sides were expected to resume the parleys on Saturday morning.

But the Government forcibly removed CPI (M) State secretary B.V. Raghuvulu and CPI State secretary K. Narayana from their hunger strike camp here at 1 a.m. on Saturday. These leaders had been on hunger strike for six days demanding the constitution of an independent commission with quasi-judicial powers to deal with land reforms. The Government did not concede the demand saying the commission would become a parallel body in revenue administration.

Instead, it agreed to appoint a Special Commissioner to deal with land-related issues. As there was no consensus after three rounds of talks, the Left parties went ahead with the bandh that was supported by the Telugu Desam Party.

Bet on India

The Bush administration presses forward with a nuclear agreement -- and hopes for a strategic partnership.

Washington Post, July 29

IN LARGE PART, modern U.S. nuclear nonproliferation policy began with India. India received U.S. aid under the "Atoms for Peace" program of the early Cold War era -- only to lose its U.S. fuel supply because India, which had refused to sign the 1968 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), exploded a nuclear "device" in 1974. Decades of U.S. noncooperation with India's civilian atomic energy program were intended to teach India, and the world, a lesson: You will not prosper if you go nuclear outside the system of international safeguards.

Friday marked another step toward the end of that policy -- also with India. The Bush administration and New Delhi announced the principles by which the United States will resume sales of civilian nuclear fuel and technology to India, as promised by President Bush in July 2005. The fine print of the agreement, which must still be approved by the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group and by Congress, has not yet been released. But the big picture is clear: The administration is betting that the benefits to the United States and the world of a "strategic partnership" with India outweigh the risks of a giant exception to the old rules of the nonproliferation game.

There are good reasons to make the bet. India is a booming democracy of more than 1 billion people, clearly destined to play a growing role on the world stage. It can help the United States as a trading partner and as a strategic counterweight to China and Islamic extremists. If India uses more nuclear energy, it will emit less greenhouse gas. Perhaps most important, India has developed its own nuclear arsenal without selling materials or know-how to other potentially dangerous states. This is more than can be said for Pakistan, home of the notorious A.Q. Khan nuclear network.

You can call this a double standard, as some of the agreement's critics do: one set of rules for countries we like, another for those we don't. Or you can call it realism: The agreement provides for more international supervision of India's nuclear fuel cycle than there would be without it. For example, it allows India to reprocess atomic fuel but at a new facility under International Atomic Energy Agency supervision, to protect against its diversion into weapons. The case for admitting India to the nuclear club is based on the plausible notion that the political character of a nuclear-armed state can be as important, or more important, than its signature on the NPT. North Korea, a Stalinist dictatorship, went nuclear while a member of the NPT; the Islamic Republic of Iran appears headed down the same road. Yet India's democratic system and its manifest interest in joining the global free-market economy suggest that it will behave responsibly.

Or so it must be hoped. The few details of the agreement released Friday suggest that it is very favorable to India indeed, while skating close to the edge of U.S. law. For example, the United States committed to helping India accumulate a nuclear fuel stockpile, thus insulating New Delhi against the threat, provided for by U.S. law, of a supply cutoff in the unlikely event that India resumes weapons testing. Congress is also asking appropriate questions about India's military-to-military contacts with Iran and about New Delhi's stubborn habit of attending meetings of "non-aligned" countries at which Cuba, Venezuela and others bash the United States. As Congress considers this deal, India might well focus on what it can do to show that it, too, thinks of the new strategic partnership with Washington as a two-way street.

What I Didn't Find in Africa

Published on Sunday, July 6, 2003 by the New York Times
Joseph C. Wilson 4th

Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq?

Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

For 23 years, from 1976 to 1998, I was a career foreign service officer and ambassador. In 1990, as chargé d'affaires in Baghdad, I was the last American diplomat to meet with Saddam Hussein. (I was also a forceful advocate for his removal from Kuwait.) After Iraq, I was President George H. W. Bush's ambassador to Gabon and São Tomé and Príncipe; under President Bill Clinton, I helped direct Africa policy for the National Security Council.

It was my experience in Africa that led me to play a small role in the effort to verify information about Africa's suspected link to Iraq's nonconventional weapons programs. Those news stories about that unnamed former envoy who went to Niger? That's me.

In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake — a form of lightly processed ore — by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office.

After consulting with the State Department's African Affairs Bureau (and through it with Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, the United States ambassador to Niger), I agreed to make the trip. The mission I undertook was discreet but by no means secret. While the C.I.A. paid my expenses (my time was offered pro bono), I made it abundantly clear to everyone I met that I was acting on behalf of the United States government.

In late February 2002, I arrived in Niger's capital, Niamey, where I had been a diplomat in the mid-70's and visited as a National Security Council official in the late 90's. The city was much as I remembered it. Seasonal winds had clogged the air with dust and sand. Through the haze, I could see camel caravans crossing the Niger River (over the John F. Kennedy bridge), the setting sun behind them. Most people had wrapped scarves around their faces to protect against the grit, leaving only their eyes visible.

The next morning, I met with Ambassador Owens-Kirkpatrick at the embassy. For reasons that are understandable, the embassy staff has always kept a close eye on Niger's uranium business. I was not surprised, then, when the ambassador told me that she knew about the allegations of uranium sales to Iraq — and that she felt she had already debunked them in her reports to Washington. Nevertheless, she and I agreed that my time would be best spent interviewing people who had been in government when the deal supposedly took place, which was before her arrival.

I spent the next eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people: current government officials, former government officials, people associated with the country's uranium business. It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place.

Given the structure of the consortiums that operated the mines, it would be exceedingly difficult for Niger to transfer uranium to Iraq. Niger's uranium business consists of two mines, Somair and Cominak, which are run by French, Spanish, Japanese, German and Nigerian interests. If the government wanted to remove uranium from a mine, it would have to notify the consortium, which in turn is strictly monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Moreover, because the two mines are closely regulated, quasi-governmental entities, selling uranium would require the approval of the minister of mines, the prime minister and probably the president. In short, there's simply too much oversight over too small an industry for a sale to have transpired.

(As for the actual memorandum, I never saw it. But news accounts have pointed out that the documents had glaring errors — they were signed, for example, by officials who were no longer in government — and were probably forged. And then there's the fact that Niger formally denied the charges.)

Before I left Niger, I briefed the ambassador on my findings, which were consistent with her own. I also shared my conclusions with members of her staff. In early March, I arrived in Washington and promptly provided a detailed briefing to the C.I.A. I later shared my conclusions with the State Department African Affairs Bureau. There was nothing secret or earth-shattering in my report, just as there was nothing secret about my trip.

Though I did not file a written report, there should be at least four documents in United States government archives confirming my mission. The documents should include the ambassador's report of my debriefing in Niamey, a separate report written by the embassy staff, a C.I.A. report summing up my trip, and a specific answer from the agency to the office of the vice president (this may have been delivered orally). While I have not seen any of these reports, I have spent enough time in government to know that this is standard operating procedure.

I thought the Niger matter was settled and went back to my life. (I did take part in the Iraq debate, arguing that a strict containment regime backed by the threat of force was preferable to an invasion.) In September 2002, however, Niger re-emerged. The British government published a "white paper" asserting that Saddam Hussein and his unconventional arms posed an immediate danger. As evidence, the report cited Iraq's attempts to purchase uranium from an African country.

Then, in January, President Bush, citing the British dossier, repeated the charges about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium from Africa.

The next day, I reminded a friend at the State Department of my trip and suggested that if the president had been referring to Niger, then his conclusion was not borne out by the facts as I understood them. He replied that perhaps the president was speaking about one of the other three African countries that produce uranium: Gabon, South Africa or Namibia. At the time, I accepted the explanation. I didn't know that in December, a month before the president's address, the State Department had published a fact sheet that mentioned the Niger case.

Those are the facts surrounding my efforts. The vice president's office asked a serious question. I was asked to help formulate the answer. I did so, and I have every confidence that the answer I provided was circulated to the appropriate officials within our government.

The question now is how that answer was or was not used by our political leadership. If my information was deemed inaccurate, I understand (though I would be very interested to know why). If, however, the information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses. (It's worth remembering that in his March "Meet the Press" appearance, Mr. Cheney said that Saddam Hussein was "trying once again to produce nuclear weapons.") At a minimum, Congress, which authorized the use of military force at the president's behest, should want to know if the assertions about Iraq were warranted.

I was convinced before the war that the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein required a vigorous and sustained international response to disarm him. Iraq possessed and had used chemical weapons; it had an active biological weapons program and quite possibly a nuclear research program — all of which were in violation of United Nations resolutions. Having encountered Mr. Hussein and his thugs in the run-up to the Persian Gulf war of 1991, I was only too aware of the dangers he posed.

But were these dangers the same ones the administration told us about? We have to find out. America's foreign policy depends on the sanctity of its information. For this reason, questioning the selective use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq is neither idle sniping nor "revisionist history," as Mr. Bush has suggested. The act of war is the last option of a democracy, taken when there is a grave threat to our national security. More than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq already. We have a duty to ensure that their sacrifice came for the right reasons.

Joseph C. Wilson 4th, United States ambassador to Gabon from 1992 to 1995, is an international business consultant.

China’s experiment with village elections

Pallavi Aiyar
The Hindu, 24 June

Are they simply a limited experiment aimed at ensuring better compliance with central government directives in the potentially restive countryside or do they hold within them the seeds of genuine political change across the system?

Deep in the countryside, away from skyscraper-filled boom towns such as Shenzhen and Shanghai, millions of villagers in China’s 700,000 villages have been involved in an ongoing experiment with democracy that grabs few headlines outside of the country but has, some experts say, been responsible for fundamentally changing Chinese political culture. Over the last decade or so, direct elections to village councils have gradually been made mandatory across China so that for the first time in the 5000-year history of this former empire, villagers are learning about filing nominations and secret ballots. In China, peasants have for centuries borne the burden of the actions of capricious rulers at the centre. The ability to elect their own leaders is thus revolutionary.

The broader significance of village elections for China’s political culture, however, remains contested. Are they simply a limited experiment aimed at ensuring better compliance with Central government directives in the potentially restive countryside, or do they hold within them the seeds of genuine political change across the system? Direct elections to village councils date back to experiments carried out in the late 1980s, but it was only in 1998 that these were formalised into law and made mandatory.

Following the collapse of the village commune system after the economic liberalisation initiated in 1978, certain leaders within the Communist Party began pushing for village self-governance as a means to counter political apathy and violent rebellion by creating mechanisms of participation and conflict resolution. Moreover, it was felt that leaders elected by villagers themselves would find it easier to implement central government policies regarding taxes and family planning.

Since 1998 elections to village councils, which comprise between three and seven members, have been institutionalised and are now carried out every three years. The council’s main responsibilities lie in deciding the allocation and use of communal land, the running of village enterprises, and the implementation of family planning directives. Councils can also decide local matters like village subscription to newspapers, the renovation of a school building, or the installation of cable television.

Jing Yue Jin, a leading political scientist at the People’s University in Beijing, says the success of these elections has been variable. Key to the village council’s ability to effect discernable change in the lives of villagers is finance. In wealthier provinces where villages have significant assets, usually comprising collectively owned enterprises, the village committee has greater power. The stakes are thus high in elections to these committees with the consequence that they are often fiercely contested. In contrast, in poor areas where villages lack an independent source of funding, the village committees are largely toothless leading to political apathy and disinterest in the electoral process.

Other than the monies derived from village enterprises, the councils are financially wholly dependent upon the township government, the lowest official tier of rural government. “For most cadres at the township level, village elections are simply a source of trouble,” says Dr. Jing.

Indeed, for township officials the elections represent somewhat of a loss of authority. Used to untrammelled power they now have to contend with elected and hence popular village chiefs with agendas that may conflict with their own. There have thus been several instances over the years where township leaders have subverted the election process, ensuring that their own yes-men are “elected.”

A further complication is the legally ambiguous relationship between the council and the village Communist Party secretary. Prior to the introduction of elections, the village party chief used to be the clear and sole authority in the village. With the implementation of the new system, however, friction between the party secretary and the head of the village council has become commonplace. Dr. Jing adds the rise of gangsterism, vote-rigging, and return of clan-based loyalties as other challenges confronting the election process.

However, the biggest obstacle to the success of the electoral experiment, he says, is the lack of a post-election management mechanism. “The villagers can now participate in electing their leaders but once elected these leaders often return to acting in traditional, non-accountable, non-transparent ways,” he explains.

Jian Yi, an independent filmmaker who recently made a documentary on the history of village democracy, agrees that “democratic management and monitoring of the village committee elected fails in most places since they are easily manipulated by party committees and township officials.”

Nonetheless, he remains guardedly optimistic regarding the broader impact of the electoral experience. “In places where village elections are better conducted, people actually do learn the rules of democracy; how to negotiate and compromise rather than to start yet another violent revolution,” he concludes.

Yawei Lu, Associate Director of the China Elections Project, a programme run by an American NGO that works with the Chinese government in monitoring elections, elaborates: “In the past the legitimacy of the government was thought to flow from the ‘barrel of the gun.’ But, in today’s China the legitimacy of the government, at least theoretically, comes from the people. Democracy at the village-level has been crucial for this.”

From the very beginning, village elections have been seen by democratic reformers within China as a starting rather than endpoint. The hope has been that the electoral process would eventually be extended vertically, to higher levels of township and county government, as well as horizontally, to local-level party officials.

Although this hope remains largely unfulfilled, there have been some signs of the spread of elections beyond the confines of the village. Thus, for example, local party secretaries are now often appointed by a “two-ballot” process, wherein the first ballot involves a popular vote on potential candidates with the second ballot restricted to party members. The importance of popularity even for party officials is thus gradually being recognised.

Moreover, some experiments in direct elections at the township level have also taken place. However, these elections have been held without the formal consent of the centre and, although Beijing has on occasion chosen to ignore them, technically they remain illegal.

Dr. Yawei is of the opinion that if China were to seriously attempt to expand elections across the political system, the experience of village democracy would prove to have been “an excellent learning ground.” “All the challenges facing the electoral process at the village level will also exist at other levels and so they [village elections] would be very valuable.”

But Dr. Jing says that despite 20-odd years of experimenting with elections most scholars in the field are disappointed with the results. “The village councils have not been as responsive to the needs of the people as we had once hoped so that the link between elected leaders and improved life for villagers is difficult to establish,” he asserts.

Electoral democracy in China, Dr. Jing continues, has never been an unquestioned, a priori goal. It has rather been looked upon as a practical tool. “The Chinese government today has a problem solving attitude. Their main concern is thus whether or not something works. Elections in villages have not been shown to directly increase the living standards of villagers. Thus the leadership has gone from being optimistic to less optimistic about these elections,” he says.

Dr. Lu agrees that Beijing is showing signs of giving up on grassroots participatory mechanisms as a way of developing rural areas and focussing instead on top-down funding for projects pre-determined by the Centre as necessary to create what is being called a “new socialist countryside.”

Ultimately it is clear that the real significance of village elections will turn on the outcome of elite contestations over the direction of political reform in China.

According to Dr. Jing, these contestations have begun to heat up of late. There are two main contending frameworks for political reform within the party, he says.

The more traditional of the two follows the line of thinking espoused by Deng Xiaoping and argues that democracy is a linear but gradual process, so when the time is ripe direct elections should be extended upwards until they reach all the way till the central government. Thus Deng had predicted that China could expect to hold general elections by 2050.

The other competing framework for reform focusses less on elections and more on non-electoral means of participation. “Some scholars believe China does not need to copy the west for a political model but can forge its own way, creating a ‘deliberative democracy’ that stresses dialogue rather competition,” says Dr. Jing. While the details of how this ‘deliberative democracy’ would function remain hazy, it is a concept that meshes well with the current Chinese leadership’s emphasis on “harmony” and is accordingly finding favour in Beijing.

The ultimate course that China’s political reform will take is still far from obvious. Dr. Jing predicts that it may become clearer after an important twice-a-decade party congress is held later this year. “In the run up to the congress, stability is paramount and no leader is willing to experiment boldly with reform. Afterwards, we hope the situation will become more flexible,” he smiles, concluding, “In China it is not only economics that’s cyclic, but also politics.”

BEYOND ARITHMETIC - The Indian economy has reached a topsy-turvy situation

Ashok Mitra
The Telegraph, 23 July

Arithmetic can be enlightening. Sometimes it can be so enlightening as to brighten the daylights out of us. Take the case of a country close to one-fifth of whose people are enjoying a rate of income growth anywhere between 30 and 40 per cent per annum. At the other end, the rest of the population experiences a niggardly rate of growth of income of around 1 to 2 per cent. Arithmetic, however, is arithmetic; despite the abysmally poor circumstances of the nation’s preponderant majority, aggregate national income will still be growing at a rate which is plus-minus 10 per cent. The absurdity of the situation would not disturb either the statisticians or the nation’s rulers in case they are sufficiently unfeeling. There would be international headlines on the country’s attaining such a high rate of growth, perhaps the highest in the world.

The instance discussed above is not altogether hypothetical or imaginary. Something similar to it is taking place in the Indian economy right at this moment. Thanks to the explosion of activities in technology-related service industries, as well as in other such services as banking, insurance, tourism and entertainments, combined with a high tide of growth over an entire range of luxury consumer industries, a narrow section of the population is benefiting from an income growth at a rate consistently around 30 per cent per annum, or even more. While all this is taking place, the farm sector, providing livelihood to nearly two-thirds of the country’s working force, is facing one crisis after another. Agricultural commodities have been hit hard by both depressed world prices and a low rate of growth; in a number of states, suicide among the farming community is ominously high. What is equally disconcerting, given the exceedingly capital-intensive nature of the fast-growing services and luxury goods-producing industries, opportunities of new employment in these activities are also getting increasingly narrowed.

The Indian economic system has thus reached a topsy-turvy situation: agriculture is down in the dumps, unemployment is rife everywhere, but for those whose obsession is to concentrate on national income-growth statistics, such developments are of little consequence: why worry, it is boom time in the services and luxury goods sectors, and overall growth of national income is unimpaired. As if to assuage the collective conscience — in case there is such a thing — the authorities have announced an additional allotment of Rs 25,000 crore for alleviating conditions in the farm sector; this allocation, it is hoped, will raise the rate of growth of agricultural output to 4 per cent per annum. Even if that hope is belied, the powers-that-be are unlikely to lose much sleep: are we not about to catch up with China as far as GDP growth is concerned?

Some other questions will crowd in though. Is such an economic arrangement, characterized by an inordinately high rate of growth, confined to a narrow section, while the rest of the nation is accursed with near-stagnation, sustainable over the long, or even intermediate, run? Will not it come a cropper because of what Marxists call “the realization problem”, or Keynesians describe as “the crisis of under-consumption”? If the output of goods and services piling up in a segregated corner of the economy is not fully matched by demand for such goods and services, would not the process of growth break down? Put in another way, were the enormously high income appropriated by a relatively insignificant minority of the nation not equalled by the total amount they spend in the form of consumption and investment, would not the system get disequilibrated? How come such a denouement has not already overtaken the Indian economy?

True, it is a near-miracle. But miracles do take place now and then. The top deciles of the Indian population — the creamy layer — have, for the present, succeeded to spend the income they are earning, and dispose of the supply of goods and services they are producing. It is as if the economy has been divided into two distinct compartments; the vastly richer compartment is carrying on on its own without bothering about the state of affairs in the other compartment. The fabulous earnings of those engaged in the IT-related services and similar other activities are, in part, getting spent on luxury consumer goods and services, which are either produced at home or imported from overseas; the residual part of their income is being ploughed back into investments in the same kind of activities they are associated with.

The export boom in the IT-related industries is, for example, being matched by a corresponding boom in the import of petroleum products mostly for the use of automobiles choking the streets of the big cities. Luxury consumption is being complemented by rising investment in the fast-expanding, capital-intensive industries and services financed by the ploughback of rising profits. Ploughbacks of this nature are necessary because of the heavy demand for the outputs of these sectors in the form of outsourcing from firms in the Western countries and Japan. Whatever goods and services are produced in this compartment of the economy is being used up without much hitch, thanks to the high levels of consumption, investment and exports.

Describing such material reality in verbal terms can pose a challenge. Some economists will describe the on-going phenomenon as an instance of exclusive growth, since roughly four-fifths of the national population are excluded from its benefits. On the other hand, there may well be a tribe of linguists and grammarians who will be inclined to consider this as an illustration of inclusive growth. To sustain the process of growth, exports to and imports from other countries are, of course, necessary. That caveat apart, growth in this department is completely self-propelled, the wretched hundreds of millions belonging to the lower deciles are not at all called for to sustain the development process. This can be a cause for satisfaction for the nation’s affluent: they can develop and prosper without any dependence on the poorer classes, they are self-sufficient, they have established the point that one part of the economy can, on its own, continue to flourish. Barring some exports and imports, theirs is, in that sense, a closed, ‘inclusive’ system.

So far, someone may say, so good. Problems however can crop up. The applecart could overturn if exports suddenly fall off on account of decisions taken in foreign countries resulting in a dramatic shrinkage in outsourcing. At least one-fifth of the American senators are already up in arms against outsourcing which, they believe, is depriving proficient American technologists of job opportunities, which would otherwise have come their way. Difficulties could also arise if the rate of obsolescence of equipment in the capital-intensive services and industries slows down perceptibly. An equally disturbing development is conceivable in case those constituting the nation’s top deciles start feeling disenchanted with the mountains of durable and non-durable luxury consumer goods they have got in the habit of accumulating, and consequently stop visiting the market, or visit less frequently and with lesser intensity.

The final question concerning the sustainability of this two-compartment economic arrangement has to do with the character of the polity. Is it, in political terms, a feasible proposition that, for years on end, one-fifth or thereabouts of the nation will continue to enjoy, undisturbed, an annual rate of growth equal to, or exceeding, 30 per cent while the overwhelming majority have a shoestring existence? Even if all other considerations are left out, what is the guarantee that the nation’s fortunate few will not be victims of that deadly sin human beings are prone to, envy?

Who knows, we may then have to prepare ourselves for another kind of denouement. Envy often instigates that other deadly sin, avarice. The combination of the two could exert a strong exogenous influence on the beautiful model of record-setting rates of GDP growth; social forces, furiously at work, will make nonsense of arithmetic.