Mr. Modi's National Unity Day

Mr. Modi's next stunt

Milligazette, 1-15 November 2014
http://www.milligazette.com/news/11189-mr-modis-next-stunt-National-Unity-Day-Sardar-Patel

The government has declared the birth anniversary of Sardar Patel as National Unity Day. Feverish planning is on for the day as had preceded the Teachers’ Day. Mr. Modi is to address the nation and students are to take a pledge. The day displaces Indira Gandhi’s birth anniversary celebrated so far as National Integration Day. It also displaces observance of her death anniversary that coincidentally falls on the same day.  However, eclipse of the dynasty in more ways than its electoral drubbing is but a side issue.

Mr. Modi, fresh from his appropriating Mahatma Gandhi’s legacy with his Swach Bharat campaign platform, is going to use the opportunity this week as yet another one to inveigle his way into popular imagination. This time he is to participate in a run. Taken together with his rushing off on Diwali to Siachen for a photo opportunity with soldiers there, there is incipient a cult phenomenon surrounding the personality of Mr. Modi.

The political dividends of this are self-evident in his notching up Maharashtra and Haryana and looking forward improbably to a victory even in J&K, one that will no doubt enabled by a more thorough boycott in the Valley. Indeed, there is precedence in post World War I Germany that in scholarly literature is taken as indicative of fascism-on-the-make. National Unity Day is to invoke similar hyper-nationalism as prevalent in states that fell to nationalism, enumerated most recently in a New York Times article by Pankaj Mishra (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/25/opinion/pankaj-mishra-nirandra-modis-idea-of-india.html?_r=1). Of course, it is a page out of the Congress book in their glorification of the dynasts. Only Mr. Modi does it better.

However, for readers of this publication, it is significant in more ways than can superficially be perceived. At face value, there can be little objection to an expression of fealty for the safety and security of one’s own state, nation and country. However, the expectation is that in the normal course, this should really be taken for granted. As citizens, we owe this obligation to the collective and take care to discharge it. That the country is being asked to reiterate the obvious therefore bears scrutiny.

To originators of the idea, perhaps in the labyrinths of Nagpur and innards of the right wing political organisation that passes for a cultural one, the act of getting all to conform and reaffirm their loyalty is to catch those opposed to them on the wrong foot. Any reticence can then be construed as disloyalty to the nation and manipulated by them for the political purposes. To them, while their co-religionists will have not problem with swearing the oath to Mother India, others of differing religious persuasion may. This will in their thinking reveal these ‘others’ as less than patriotic and, having their spiritual well springs elsewhere, also having their political compass set outside the land, and consequently, less than deserving of equal citizenship.

Even so, there can be no problem for any citizen to take an oath. After all the Constitution, while not scripture, is indeed sacred. However, the problem is in the change that is afoot in India. National ethos and culture will be first worked on and with the majority that Mr. Modi has so can the Constitution be reworked over time to fit the image of an India of right wing imagining. It is not necessary for all citizens to find this agreeable. Swearing loyalty to India as we know it is fine. But to swear loyalty to an India that appears to be emerging must give pause to all citizens. Therefore, for the government to insidiously ask all to take such a step is itself a dead give-away of a larger game-plan ahead; one that citizens need being wary of and forewarned against.

For India’s Muslims watching Mr. Modi and his government continues to be important despite his clean chit to Muslims acknowledging that they are ready to live and die for their country. It would be to succumb to a Stockholm syndrome if Mr. Modi is let off scrutiny merely on account of this. His politics has been to use Muslims as the ‘Other’ and build his ‘vote bank’ on the majority community. Having made the necessary gains in the national elections from an internal Other, for the state elections that soon followed, the government, staying aloof from the ‘love jihad’ campaign of its supporters, latched on to an external Other.

His government’s self-acknowledged shift to being aggressive on the borders figured in his election speeches, that he has ‘shut up’ the Pakistani army and has them ‘screaming’. Pakistan is seen as having a propensity to interfere with India’s internal affairs in J&K and with fostering a fifth column supposedly based on minority ‘sleeper cells’. There is therefore a collapsing of the internal Other and the external Other in the mind’s eye of right wing strategists.

The oath of fealty on national unity day is yet another unnecessary ploy to push the largest minority on the back-foot by yet again getting it to disassociate itself from Pakistan. This is unnecessary since no such link exists but for a right wing inspired, media sponsored contrived linkage. The right wing has been known to foster this over the past decade through terror acts of uncertain origin. If investigations were to proceed to their logical end, the media that has purveyed the right wing conspiracy theory would indeed be considerably surprised. A false linkage does not need to be time and again denounced.

The day is not significant in more ways than one only for Muslims. For India’s populations on the social and geographic periphery, the latter in J&K and North East, it is yet another annual reminder that they being suspect can take as an opportunity to redeem themselves. It is ‘yet another’ imposition because the national days – Independence Day and Republic Day – are already there for all citizens to remind themselves of their obligations to the national collective.

Finally, the choice of Sardar Patel, always an icon of the right wing and soon to be honoured with the world’s tallest statue, owes not only to his contribution to making India whole as advertised, but on account of his arguably questionable role in Hyderabad and J&K. If the likes of AG Noorani are to be believed in their well-researched work on the period, national integration could have been proceeded with differently. The Hyderabad integration is being used politically for right wing penetration into South India as the gamesmanship surrounding the contretemps surrounding hoisting of the national flag in Gulbarga on the day of the merger this September shows. As for J&K, the Day will be yet another stick to beat it into submission, close on heels of Mr. Modi’s choice to spend Diwali in Srinagar (It is unlikely that a similar idea of Mr. Modi spending Holi in Nagaland would ever occur to his advisers.). Mythologising the past in face of well-founded and long-standing reservations on Mr. Patel’s attitude towards Muslims does not help unity any.

That said and acknowledged, the new regime can be given the fullest rope to first reveal itself in its fullest colours. Therefore, Muslim Indians can indulgently play along with the latest Modi stunt this National Unity Day, while keeping powder dry for when his larger cultural nationalist project reveals itself as an oncoming iceberg heading for India through the mists.  

Afzal Guru: The Man Who Knew Too Much

Milligazette 1-15 March 13

http://www.milligazette.com/print/issue/1-15-march-2013

A wit’s answer to the question that is set to become an eternal one: ‘Why did they hang Afzal Guru?’, reads: ‘Afzal Guru was hanged because the Indian law doesn't allow electric chair, lethal injection, stoning to death, guillotine or any other form of execution.’ However, there is another straight answer: He knew too much. He had already exposed the Indian state’s behavior in Kashmir in his pleadings for justice over the years. But the true face of the state is unremarkable. He knew more. He was the exposed link into a chain of subterfuge leading into the STF (Special Task Force), a unit of Kashmiri rebels who turned coat.

He had pointed this out while alive referring to a certain ‘Tariq’ in the shadowy world of the renegade rebels who set the stage for India to prevail in Kashmir by systematically killing their former comrades and their supporters using fair means and foul. The outfit called Ikhwan was inducted into the police to regularize them. Their notoriety was such that one campaign promise of a political party that won in the polls in 2002 was that they would be disbanded. They were rechristened instead, regularized and hopefully more disciplined since. That Pakistani trained jihadis were degenerate and their terror acts reprehensible, the cliché ‘fight fire with fire’ provided legitimacy to such paramilitary outfits. In that troubled era in their heyday they served to undertake the ‘dirty war’ on behalf of the state.

The ‘conspiracy theory’ needs airing at this juncture. Was the STF used, and did it, in turn, use Afzal Guru for nefarious purpose? Spelling out the conspiracy theory is necessary. This has been done competently elsewhere by the likes of Arundhati Roy and Nirmalangshu Mukherjee. It is with reason they have titled the volume in which their case appears: 13 December, a Reader: The Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament(Penguin India, pp. 233, Rs. 200, 2006). The very term ‘conspiracy’ is a way to marginalize what could well be the truth. The fact that no inquiry has gone into the parliamentary attack, the truth has not been plumbed. With Afzal gone, it is now also probably beyond reach.

As with any ‘strange case’, it is best to begin with the motives. Parliament attack led up to the Indian military mobilization. That the mobilization stopped at the border and did not cross it suggests more than just statesmanship on Prime Minister Vajpayee’s part. It indicates a strategy, one premeditated and not one thought up at the spur of the moment in the crisis brought on by the dastardly attack. Crisis environments do not lend themselves to cool heads. Stopping at the border was  cool headed decision. That can only have been induced by a predetermined plan of action. In effect, the conspiracy theory has it that the parliament attack was a doing of the intelligence agency put to it by the national security apparatus at the apex level. The one who could have more information on this, the then national security adviser and principal secretary, Mr. Brajeah Mishra, is now no more to confirm this. That in his absence his denial can be anticipated makes the theory a ‘conspiracy theory’.

The diplomatic coercion - coercive diplomacy in strategic terms –mounted thereafter also needed a trigger. Pakistan had crept back into American good books with 9/11. India that had begun courting the US ever since it burst its way into the nuclear club, felt left out in the cold. It needed to embarrass Pakistan, snap America out of its Musharraf infatuation. India needed a trigger. A trigger could not have waited for a bunch of obliging terrorists to come round and timelystorm the parliament. India required instead manufacturing a trigger. This is where the STF comes in.

Given the nature of the violent conflict on in Kashmir at the time, the existence of detention centers is well known. That these would have had inmates with very little chance of seeing freedom once again can also be conceded. Consider that in case a few of these inmates – who were incarcerated since they wanted to harm India – were given a choice of dying a death they had always imagined for themselves, one of a jihadi, how many would have agreed to the proposal. It is obvious that there would be at least some wanting a crack at India, dying in a blaze of imagined glory rather than blindfolded in front of a death squad.  It can be surmised that there would have been no shortage of recruits from those dark chambers. All it needed now was to put together the supporting cast and the equipment, and have a cover story. It is here that unfortunate Afzal figures in the story. The rest as they say is history; but most of it unwritten, deliberately kept unknown, and now, unknowable.

Afzal therefore had to go. The shortcomings in his trial are now well known. The unacceptable reason for his hanging – the demand of the ‘collective conscience’ – is reversion to the bygone days of human sacrifice. He would have gone earlier had the ruling formation and its lead party of the period of the parliament attack returned to power in 2004. They had much to hide. The Congress that has been around since needed him alive to keep the pressure on that party, now in opposition. However, the tide having turned against the Congress to the extent the writing is on the wall, a human sacrifice was decreed for its revival. This explains the timing of Afzal’s departure. As for the Congress, it will prove an insincere act equivalent to the opening of the locks of Babri Masjid the last time it was under siege.

Perhaps dark clouds overhead in that era – nuclear tests, Kandahar hijack, fidayeen attacks, Kargil War, Chittisingpora massacre, Srinagar assembly bombing, right wing rule, 9/11, military rule in the neighbor etc – made the intelligence games necessary. These are games nations play since Chanakyan times. Machivelli testifies that these are indulgences of princes. When elephants fight, grass suffers. Afzal Guru was but another blade of grass.

India’s security under Modi

countercurrents.org, Kashmir Times
http://www.countercurrents.org/ahmed140413.htm
http://www.kashmirtimes.com/newsdet.aspx?q=15163



That Mr. Modi is attempting to get to Delhi is by now no secret. It is also apparent that the Congress will find it hard to stay on at the Centre for another term. Finally, the third front alternative has yet to emerge. Given this configuration, it is well nigh possible that hopes of Mr. Modi’s not inconsiderable constituency of support, that includes big business, cultural nationalists, well-heeled Gujaratis, traditional conservatives, Chetan Bhagat inspired youth brigade etc, can yet come about.  

His supporters point to Modi’s record in Gujarat to make their case that this will be good for India’s continuing rise as a power. Their argument is anchored in Modi’s personality. To them he has the economic credentials to push through the pending reforms that the Congress has been at the cusp of for all of its second term but has been unable to deliver. He has also kept his state largely terrorism free through resolute leadership and can therefore be relied on to take on security challenges, unlike the pusillanimity of politicians in general and the Congress in particular in face of crises such as 26/11.

While Modi’s supporters rely on his leadership persona to suggest he is the right choice; his detractors point in the same direction to arrive at a conclusion to the contrary. To them, Modi, seen as a divisive and authoritarian figure, is the problem. To Modi baiters, his ‘record’ in Gujarat includes the carnage of 2002 and his culpability. To them it is not a case of inaction but active complicity that condemns Modi.

One question that has not figured so far is: What will be the security consequences of Modi’s elevation to PM? To most prosperity begets security. With prosperity, resources are made available for security. With a firm Modi hand on the security rudder, India’s redoubtable security agencies will keep India secure.  Unfortunately, the prosperity-security link is seldom so easy.

The internal security consequences of ‘Modi as PM’ seem self-evident. A consequence of Modi’s economic policies will likely spur the leftist challenge. In replicating the Gujarat model for rest of India, Modi will create ‘have nots’ that will with time form a constituency for Maoist penetration of the rest of India from their heartland currently confined to Central India.

Modi’s ascent could also see the resurfacing of minority perpetrated terror. In the short term, extremist elements will challenge the triumphalism of majoritarian extremists. In the broader social context, India’s minority has been wary of the rise of cultural nationalists in Indian polity. This suspicion of the majoritarian project will heighten its minority complex. The spread of Hindutva that was interrupted by the Congress interregnum will have a redoubled impetus since this time at the helm will be without the restraining hand of a Vajpayee. A defensive reaction from geographic and societal periphery may instigate violence.

Such internal security scenarios will provoke a ‘proactive’ steps, reminiscent of LK Advani, ‘iron man’ aspirant as home minister in the NDA regime. But if Modi’s association with his home ministers in his state is any guide Modi’s methods will not be merely suppressive, as is the wont of a state. It bears recall that one home minister was assassinated in unexplained circumstance and another was in jail temporarily for his role in custodial killings. What can be expected is that a permissive atmosphere for security forces to be less mindful for citizens’ rights will emerge. Intelligence agencies, that have little accountability at the best of times, will be much more innovative in cutting corners. The information war theme for legitimising such action will be painting of a threat from the coalescing of ‘red’ and ‘green’ terror. In short, a vicious circle can be predicted on the internal security front.  

On the external security front, the usual refrain has been that right wing governments are good for security. They are more mindful of security issues and have the tacit respect of security related institutions such as the military and intelligence services that traditionally lean conservative. Given their image and record, they have a wider berth for peace initiatives, a luxury that is not permitted to other parties such as for instance the Congress that have to be ever watchful of their flanks fearing criticism of ‘sell out’ for such initiatives.

Yet again the case for either side would be based on Modi’s leadership traits. His supporters would point to his decisiveness, claiming that India’s response to incidents like 26/11 would be firm and unmistakable. His detractors would say that decisiveness in the wrong direction can only be disastrous in crisis. The authoritarian streak in Modi will keep from diverse viewpoints necessary in strategic decision making being voiced. Silencing of dissent will make group think emerge with its associated consequences. In a nuclear neighbourhood, exhibiting political will – that nuclear deterrent theorists in India so breathlessly require of the political decision maker – is not necessarily the best or only recourse as strategists advocating political resolve portray.    

It is predicted that the India-Pakistan equations will return to square one with the departure of the west from Afghanistan in 2014. In Kashmir it is obvious that there is enough tinder awaiting the proverbial spark. In case Mr. Modi is tested with a crisis, he would be liable to fall victim to his image as worthy Gujarati descendant of the original ‘iron man’, Sardar Patel. To distance himself from the choices Congress has made in such crisis, he will be liable to privilege the military options over the diplomatic. In effect, decisions will be made not by strategic sense in the alternatives, but impulses rooted in character traits of the decision maker and in the nature of the group that such decision makers bring forth.

In respect of his prospective government’s approach to China, it would be reliant on the foundations being laid under the UPA: deterrence and external balancing by proximity to the west led democratic camp. The expectation that Modi will prove a liability for the relationship with the west in light of his human rights record is false since the west has never been known to privilege human rights considerations over its strategic objectives. In fact, UK’s actions of late suggest that Modi’s rehabilitation is well underway.

Modi for his part, not needing to wear his nationalism on his sleeve, will hardly be coy. In effect, India will overtly bid for frontline status in the anti-China front being forged by the US in its rebalancing towards Asia currently underway. The difference is that the Congress is getting to this position surreptitiously. The upshot will be that a ‘two front’ situation – a contingency assiduously being prepared for by the armed forces – will no longer be a ‘contingency’. It will be the strategic circumstance for India.

But security is not only physical. It is also about security of values and the kind of nation and state India wishes to be. The last time the BJP was in power it appointed a committee to recommend changes in the Constitution. Luckily for the country, the electorate denied it a second term. This time round there would be greater hurry in saffron ideologues to unfurl their ideological agenda. It is easier to push change in a climate vitiated by an adverse security condition as painted. Therefore, the security threat will not be from without as much from the government itself.   

While there are other good reasons for the voter to keep Mr. Modi out, security must hereon also figure among them.

milligazette
BLASTING THE TERROR NARRATIVE

By Firdaus Ahmed

In a first, the NIA has been launched from the very outset to probe a bomb blast at the Delhi High Court. It has earlier been grafted onto cases already being pursued by the police. In yet another useful precedent, the government has been careful not to point fingers prematurely. These two suggest an improvement in India’s response to terrorism, even if yet another blast is a case of one too many.

As is usual by now, ‘informed’ analysts are taking it upon themselves to dwell on the helpful pointers in the email purportedly received from the perpetrators. The HUJI has apparently claimed responsibility, with the blasts intended to force the release Afzal Guru from death row. With newspapers carrying the identity kit portrait of a bearded suspect with upper lip clean shaven, the know-all analysts rest their case.

But the government’s initial caution bespeaks of a wider set of suspects. By its two acts the government has broadcast that the net cast will be much wider. It will hopefully include majoritarian terrorists, even as the HUJI angle is pursued to its logical conclusion. The implication is that there is more to the Abhinav Bharat case than out in the open.

It is lazy analysis and worse crime forensics to assume that emails from unidentified sources serve as evidence of culpability. For one, an earlier email for instance had the sender identifying himself as al Arbi, corruption of al Arabi, quite like the current one does. Al Arabi incidentally was a renowned sufi. Second, arrest of a cyber café owner in in Kishtwar suggests a link to Kashmir, the email could be merely to take advantage of the occasion to press home the case for Afzal Guru. Third, that the emails have incendiary content against the majority could equally indicate a desire for deepening the rift, an aim that saffron extremists mirror. Any creative writer can put together such emails.

Questions surrounding the Batla House encounter make the explanation of the blasts in the cosmopolitan cities in 2008 unpersuasive. The blasts that did not occur in Surat remain unexplained. Perpetrators of the blast of May this year in the court premises and those involved in the drive by shooting of the Taiwanese tourists prior to the CWG remain unknown.

One nationalism inspired anchor asked if vote bank politics holds back the government. He is right in sensing that it does, but wrong in his unstated understanding, an understanding seemingly widely shared with his viewers and therefore left unstated, that it is the minority vote at stake. Instead, the government’s reticence stems from its inability and unwillingness to beard the majoritarian terrorist in his den. That would cost it credibility with the majority, misled for over a decade of media fanned minority baiting. The decade since 9/11 formed the perfect backdrop for the campaign.

The government is rightly circumspect, but on the right track. Its noose, with a little help from the Supreme Court, is closing in on an opposition stalwart. The extreme right, with subterranean linkages with the political right, is mobilising silently to thwart it. Behind the current attack can be read once again a diversionary gambit; now that Mr. Anna Hazare is back in Ralegaon Siddhi.

The popular narrative is flawed. It carries little conviction with the minority community. This is itself evidence of the inter-community distance opened up over the last three decades, index of the success of the as yet unidentified standard bearers of Hindutva’s challenge to secular culture. The government, run by center-right party cannot, as the well worn cliché will have it, ‘run with the hare and hunt with the hounds’. It needs taking the opportunity offered by the investigations to open up India’s violent recent past to a ‘warts and all’ scrutiny. This will fetch it votes of the non-denominational secular majority.