Prem Shankar Jha | #politics #economics #India #indiaelections2014

Modi’s Approach to Foreign Policy Has Disrupted India’s Ties With China

01-04-2017

Modi has turned India into a military and diplomatic ally of the US. In China’s eyes, this has transformed India from a like-minded country, that shared its opposition to the US’s attempt to create a unipolar world, into an adversary.

Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) guides Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to a meeting room in Xian, Shaanxi province, China, May 14, 2015. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon

Three years ago, on the eve of the BJP’s victory in the general elections, India had achieved a status, and a degree of security, in its international relations, that it had never known before. Its relationship with the US and the European union was strengthening daily on the back of deepening economic ties; strategic cooperation with China and Russia on a wide variety of issues under the aegis of BRICS had given it a voice in the shaping of the post-Cold War global order that it had not enjoyed before, and tension with Pakistan was at an all-time low. All this was the result of patient, brick by brick, fence mending over two decades by four governments representing the entire gamut of Indian political opinion, those of Narasimha Rao, Inder Kumar Gujral , Atal Behari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh. Today all of their work has been undone and the edifice of security they built lies in ruins. India is a country under serious threat and it has no one to turn to.

The threat has come from China, whose foreign ministry has warned India not to allow the Dalai Lama to proceed with a 10-day visit to the Tawang monastery that begins on April 4. On March 3 its foreign ministry spokesman, Geng Shuang, issued a formal warning to New Delhi: “China is gravely concerned over information that India has granted permission to the Dalai Lama to visit Arunachal Pradesh. …An invitation to him to visit the mentioned territory, would cause “serious damage to peace and stability of the border region and China–India relations. We have ….urged India to stick to its political commitments and abide by the important consensus the two sides have reached on the boundary question…. (and) not provide a platform to the Dalai clique and protect that sound and stable development of Sino-India relations”.

In diplomacy the words a country uses in its formal demarches are of the utmost importance, so what he said needs to be read with care. “Grave concern” is not an ultimatum, but it is half-way there. It is reinforced by the warning that his visit now would cause “serious damage to the peace and stability of the border region”. For “serious” we should read “irreparable”. The spokesman’s use of the phrase “Peace and stability of the border region” is also a veiled warning because it is the exact title of the 1993 agreement signed during Prime minister Narasimha Rao’s visit to China that has been the bedrock of Sino-Indian relations since then. In brief, China has warned New Delhi that if India insists on letting the Dalai Lama visit Tawang it will consider the 1993 agreement to have been violated by India.

But a close reading of the statement also shows that China is reluctant to go down this road. Its use of the phrase ‘information that India has granted’ was designed to leave a loophole open for Delhi to change its mind. This may have been no more than a token gesture, for Beijing knows fully well that prime minister Narendra Modi approved of the Dalai lama’s visit Tawang as far back as on October 27 last year. But the Chinese spokesman Geng Shuang’s reference to the disputed area as Arunachal Pradesh, and as “the mentioned territory”, carefully avoiding China’s pre 2009 nomenclature of “South Tibet”, and his reference to the “important consensus on the boundary question” is an indication that China would much prefer to limit its differences with India in the Himalayas confined to a border dispute and wishes to avoid allowing it to expand into an irreconcilable dispute over the whole of Arunachal’s 140,000 sq.km of territory.

One does not know how the Foreign Office would have responded been it been given the chance, but it was pre-empted by Kiren Rijiju, Minister of State in the Home ministry, who pre-empted any measured response that might have left a door to compromise open, when he declared, suo motu, that the Dalai Lama would not only visit Tawang, but that as an ardent yellow hat Buddhist, he would be there personally to receive him. This has left China with only two choices, to assert its claims or back down.

What will China do? Indian policy makers are inclined to believe that the current demarche is another pro-forma objection of the kind that China has made every time an Indian President or Prime minister visits Arunachal, or the Dalai Lama has met the prime minister or president, in order to keep the border issue open till a formal agreement is reached. And had this been 2009, they may well have been proved right.

On that occasion too, a request by the Dalai Lama in March, for permission to visit Tawang to open a hospital in November, had set off a flurry of objections by Beijing and assertions of sovereignty by New Delhi that rapidly escalated into a war of words and turned the Dalai Lama’s impending visit into an international test of sovereignty. Another war in the Himalayas had begun to look like a distinct possibility when Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao took the unprecedented step of asking Dr. Manmohan Singh for a meeting at Hua Hin, on the sidelines of an APEC conference to sort the matter out.

The discussions between them revealed that the Chinese wanted India, above all, to let sleeping dogs lie. In their view the border dispute was a legacy of history, and would die a natural death when relations between the two countries deepened. At Hua Hin, therefore, the two sides settled resolved the conflict by keeping the international, and most of the Indian, media out of Tawang. This turned the Dalai Lama’s visit into a strictly private one, carried out in his religious capacity, and robbed it of political significance.

But the situation this time is so different that to argue from historical precedent could prove suicidal. For in the past 26 months Narendra Modi has abandoned the policy of equidistance and turned India into a military and diplomatic ally of the USA. In China’s eyes this has transformed India from a like-minded country that shared its opposition to the US’s attempt to create a unipolar world, into an adversary.

The turnaround, which took place only a week after President Xi Jinping’s state visit to India, was so sudden that it could not but have taken China by surprise. In retrospect it is apparent that it took place during his first visit to Washington, and was signaled by the abrupt replacement of Foreign Secretary Sujata Singh with S. Jayashankar. Whatever passed between him and Obama brought the latter post-haste to India in January 2015, ostensibly to be the chief guest at our Republic day parade, but in reality to sign a ‘U.S.-India Joint Strategic Vision for the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean Region’ on January 25, whose only operative clause was designed to prevent the assertion of Chinese hegemony in the South China Sea.

This did not prevent the Chinese government from laying out a red carpet for Modi during his state visit to China in May 2015, but since then the relationship has soured as India has moved rapidly into America’s strategic embrace. In the past eight months the Modi government has signed all the three military cooperation agreements needed to make it an ally of the US; and issued a second joint statement with President Obama in June last year affirming India’s intention to draw up “a roadmap for implementing the joint strategic vision that “will serve as a guide for collaboration in the years to come”.

The Chinese have responded by ignoring India’s objections to China’s building of a transit corridor to Gwadar through Gilgit and warning Delhi against trying to prevent it; refusing to allow India to become a member of the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group; refusing to allow the UN Security Council to brand Masood Azhar and Hafez Sayeed as international terrorists; increasing the frequency of their submarine incursions into the Bay of Bengal, and sending their most advanced 7,000-tonne nuclear submarine undetected through the straits of Malacca to surface deliberately in Karachi. By the time BRICS met in Goa last October, its Delhi declaration of 2012, which had laid the base for strategic cooperation between China, Russia, and India, had become a piece of waste paper.

Had matters rested there India and China might still have been able to maintain something akin to the frozen peace of the post 1962 years. But, beginning in April 2016, the central government had embarked upon a succession of actions in Arunachal Pradesh that China has found increasingly hard to ignore.

In 2016 the US Consul General in Calcutta did not only visit Itanagar but made a public statement from there that “the US considers Arunachal to be indisputably a part of India”. In the very next month the Modi government sent four Indian warships cruising through the South China Sea with a joint US-Japan task force for two-and-a-half months as its first concrete implementation of its joint strategic vision agreement with the US.

Delhi followed this up by inviting the US Ambassador to India, Richard Verma, to the Tawang festival in October. Verma celebrated this by tweeting a picture of himself, attended upon by the Assam Chief minister Sarbanand Sonowal, the Arunachal chief minister Pema Khandu, and Kiren Rijiju standing in front of the Tawang monastery, to the whole world. Six days later, the government gave permission to the Dalai Lama to visit Tawang early this year.

So far China has carefully avoided being provoked. It responded to the US CG’s visit by stating : “China and India are wise, and capable, enough to deal with their own issues and safeguard the fundamental and long-term interests of the two peoples. The intervention of any third party will only complicate the issue and is highly irresponsible.” When Indian ships joined the US-Japanese task force it again refrained from criticizing India directly and accused the US, instead, of following a ‘divide and rule’ colonial policy towards the two Asian giants.

Only after Verma’s visit to Tawang, did China warn India directly that the diplomat’s actions would damage the “hard-earned peace and tranquility of the China-India border region.” It also repeated its accusation that the US was deliberately enticing India into a confrontation with China, by reiterating that “Any responsible third party should respect efforts by China and India to seek peaceful and stable reconciliation, and not the opposite”. Last week it repeated this warning, but in words that come close to an ultimatum.

This is the first of a two part series on Indo-China relations by Prem Shankar Jha.

Modi’s Approach to Foreign Policy Has Disrupted India’s Ties With China

Modi’s Note Ban May Spell Catastrophe for the BJP

By: Prem Jha

11-01-2017

Indian Economics, Politics India

Demonetisation has hit every sector of the economy from construction to automobile at the same time and its ripple effects are likely to be felt for months to come.

Remember the old adage, ‘You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time?’ Narendra Modi’s government is reluctantly learning its truth now. Exactly a month after the sudden announcement of the demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes, even the tame audio-visual media has, almost unanimously, turned against his government on this issue. Their consensus echoes an epitaph favoured by Bismarck, “ it was not a crime; it was a mistake”.

The mistake is so elementary that it leaves no room for doubt that Modi announced the demonetisation without consulting either the Reserve Bank of India or the economists in the finance ministry and NITI Aayog. One of the most basic equations in economic theory – MV=PT – seems to have been forgotten. It is the base of the quantity theory of money upon which the whole neoliberal macroeconomics of today rests.

In layman terms, the equation states that the money supply in an economy (M) multiplied by the number of times it changes hands in a year (V) equals the average price level (P) multiplied by the number of transactions (T) that take place during the year. PT is the gross revenue generated in the economy during the year. Take away double counting – the resale of intermediate goods from one producer to the next – and you arrive at the GDP of the country.

Neo-classical economists use it to show that if you double the money supply, prices will simply have to double in the long term. But implicit in this is the belief that the velocity of circulation of money is very stable as it reflects the culturally determined habits of saving and consumption, and will therefore remain unchanged. The volume of transactions in any given period is, therefore, constant.

This assumption does not, in fact, hold true all the time. In his book General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, J.M. Keynes showed that in actual fact, V rises or falls depending on the optimism or pessimism about the future course of the economy. Thus prices can, in fact, increase – and output can respond – without an increase in money supply, and fall without a reduction in it. This is the basis of Keynes’ theory of the trade cycle, one of the two that together fully explain this endemic seesaw in a market economy.

But Keynes never envisaged the possibility that a government would, of its own volition, bring the circulation of money to a near halt and force V down close to zero. For, since anything multiplied by zero is zero, it would, therefore kill the market economy and drive it back to barter. That is precisely what the demonetisation is doing. For an already tottering economy, this is a disaster. For the political future of the BJP, it is a self-inflicted goal that may well cost it the match.

I got some idea of how much V had fallen after demonetisation when a sweet shop owner told me that on the day after demonetization, his sale had fallen from Rs 30,000-40,000 per day to a mere Rs 700. A bookshop owner in Connaught Place told a friend that his sales had fallen from Rs 20,000-30,000 a day to Rs 12,000 in the past month. A high-end optician in Khan Market, New Delhi told me that his sales had fallen by 25% in the past month. Automobile sales, which had been rising at 11% a year in the first half of the year, fell by 38% for Mahindra & Mahindra, 28% for Tata Motors, 20% for Hyundai and 22% for Renault in November. There is not a single retailer who does not have a similar story to tell.

If this is the condition of demand in the urban areas, where more people have bank accounts and use credit cards, it is not hard to imagine what the situation is in rural areas where where moneylenders still meet four-fifths of the demand for credit, and nearly all the transactions are done in cash. Two-wheeler sales have fallen by 35-40% because 65% of all the sales are done in cash and tractor purchases have fallen by a whopping 63% because only farmers and a few construction companies buy them.

The worst affected sector is construction. After being starved for funds for nine years, the construction industry has been pushed further down by demonetisation. The immediate impact has been on employment, for not only is it India’s second largest employer – providing jobs to 45 million people – but since employment in agriculture stopped growing a decade and a half ago, it has also been the principal creator of new jobs.

But the bulk of its workers are migrants from other states who are paid by the day, or at best by the week, and they ask for their wages in cash. Therefore, in order to pay them, their employers need to maintain large daily stocks of cash. Those were the cash reserves that Modi made worthless overnight. What is worse, even their current overdraft facilities, and their bank deposits, are not available to them because the government has put a Rs 24,000 a day limit on all withdrawals.

Unsurprisingly, anecdotal evidence suggests that the industry has virtually ground to a halt. The employers’ shortage of cash has translated into a shortage of jobs and stalled construction. Earnings by have fallen by 80-90%. Until November 8, for instance, the mazdoor naka near the Madhuban garden in Bhandup in Mumbai was among the largest in the city, with nearly 500 construction workers thronging it every morning. On November 30, there was just a trickle of 30 workers waiting hopefully for jobs there.

In desperation, more and more workers are accepting payment in the old currency notes, and sending a member of their family to queue in front of banks all day to exchange it for legal tender. But as the employment opportunities have continued to dwindle, an increased number have joined a return flow of migrants to their villages in order wait until the times get better. Bus companies that brought migrant workers from Orissa to Gujarat are now plying in the opposite direction. There is a similar return of migrant workers to Andhra and Telangana from Mumbai and other cities in Maharashtra, and now, increasingly, from Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Rajasthan.

Construction is not the only sector in which jobs have disappeared. A fortnight after demonetisation, the Engineering and Export Promotion Council estimated that more than 400,000 workers had been laid off in the textiles and garments industries and as many as 60,000 in the leather industry. These are only a few lightning flashes illuminating the storm that is enveloping India’s poor.

Demonetisation is also laying waste to small and medium-sized producers and artisans in the country. It has not even spared the service industries, for except in software and domestic service, income and employment in every other service industry is directly related to production in the primary and secondary sectors of the economy.

The story of a utensils manufacturer in Noida that has lost more than half of its employees is the story of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of SMEs all over the country. In the month after demonetisation his sales have dropped by 90% for only one dealer has placed orders with his company during this period. More than half of his 40 workers, nearly all of whom are migrants, have been forced to go home, a journey that the government is considerately facilitating by asking the railways to accept old currency notes.

He has so far been able to retain the remaining employees only because a grocery store has been willing to provide basic food on credit. But the latter’s finances are not endless either. What is more, the remaining workers still need some money to send home. So the company’s finance manager has been standing in bank queues until 1:30 p.m. every day to withdraw money. However, after ten days of doing so, he was unable to withdraw any cash.

Demonetisation has not even spared the service industries, for except in software and domestic service, income and employment in every other service industry is directly related to production in the primary and secondary sectors of the economy. An idea of the hardship and loss of employment that it is causing, even if it is temporary, may be had from the fact that 90% of the country’s 300 million workers are in the unorganised sector and, with few exceptions, are paid entirely in cash.

What Modi has inflicted on India, therefore, is far worse than a natural calamity or a recession. For the first hits only parts of a country, while the second often spares agriculture and exports. But demonetisation has hit every part of a country and every sector of an economy at the same time.

Today, as the data for November pours in, a few of the government’s spokespersons and apologists are still trying to minimise the damage demonetisation has done by quoting the data for the whole of November, not just slurring over the fact that the first eight days saw the small surge of demand that had begun in April, but also on last-minute festival season rush.

But the retail sales data for December confirm that the post-November 8 data cited above, that the decline in sales is continuing. Even the automobile sector, where cash is least used is still experiencing a shortfall of over 20%, and two wheeler sales remain down by half.

The government spokesperson is reassuring customers that that demand will bounce back as soon as the cash crisis is over, but while this happens in sales, production will have to wait for three months’ accumulation of inventories to be liquidated in order to revive.

So the impact of demonetisation will not end when the currency replacement is complete because of the ripple effects that the sudden, two-month long contraction of demand has set off in the economy.

These effects that J.R. Hicks – another great 20th-century economist – dubbed the “accelerator,” are well known to any student who has studied his theory of trade Cycles. But if anyone in his government pointed them out to him, he chose not to listen.

As many experts have pointed out, not only was demonetisation unnecessary but also badly bungled. It was unnecessary because the government knew from its income tax raids that people hold merely 5-6% of their undeclared income in cash, and the balance is in gold, precious gems, real estate and benami shareholdings.

It was inept because not only had the government not printed the more than 20 billion new currency notes needed to replace the old, but it also changed their size to ensure that they could not be dispensed from the 150,000 ATMs in the country without extensive modifications. In the end, therefore, demonetisation has created no gainers, only losers. They now have two and a half more years to remember that they owe their hardships to a government and a prime minister who had promised them acche din, but has so far failed to deliver.

Prem Shankar Jha is a senior journalist and author of Twilight of the Nation State: Globalisation, Chaos and War, and Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger: Can China and India Dominate the West?

What Drives the Modi Government’s Systematic Onslaught on AAP?

By: Prem Jha

04-10-2016

Politics India

arvind-kejri-pti-l

Delhi’s political fishbowl has greeted Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s televised warning that prime minister Modi could get him killed with incredulity. “Has he lost his senses, or is this a clever political gambit in the intensifying the struggle between AAP and the BJP in Delhi”?

Its confusion is partly a product of the way Kejriwal’s statement has been reported—with barely a minute worth of excerpts on the TV channels overlaid with the anchor’s own incomprehension, and in short news items on the front pages of the major dailies. But Kejriwal’s full, nearly ten minute, televised statement is anything but delusional, and conveys an entirely different, chilling, message.

In brief it is this – the Modi government has been trying to incapacitate the AAP government in Delhi ever since its humiliating defeat in Delhi in December 2014, and has been failing miserably. But instead of desisting, it has only become more frantic, harming itself more and more with the electorate. Mr. Modi knows perfectly well that this is happening. So why is he persisting?

Kejriwal’s answer is deeply unsettling: it is because Narendra Modi’s actions are governed by an anger that mounts as his frustration grows. This is pushing him into acts that he knows can only harm his party. India’s national interest has already become a casualty: By imposing an oil blockade on Nepal when it was still struggling to recover from last year’s earthquake, Modi has destroyed India’s relationship with the only Hindu country in the world. He has also reversed a full decade of work by two Indian prime ministers to bring Pakistan and India closer together and end the Kashmir dispute.

Within the nation, Modi’s behavior towards the Delhi government has shown that, when angered, he may stop at nothing to have his way. Kejriwal dramatized this by saying that ‘he might even kill me’. But his deeper message was that when angered Modi showed scant respect for the law and the Constitution.

Is this political theatre a curtain raiser for the battle in Punjab and UP next year? Kejriwal would not be in politics if he did not have them at the back of his mind. But he knows that the credibility of everything he says depends upon his ability to prove his allegations against the BJP in Delhi. He has thrown caution to the winds because he knows that he is on firm ground.

Reports of the BJP’s onslaught on the Delhi state government have appeared in scattered, usually brief, news items spread over almost two years. The underlying issues have been further obscured by being presented to the public as a personal war between Kejriwal and Lieutenant Governor Najib Jung, i.e an opportunistic politician and an arrogant bureaucrat. It is only when we create a timeline for the onslaught that its full, systematic nature gets revealed.

The first conflict occurred as early as March 2015, within four weeks of the new government coming to power. When the chief secretary of Delhi went on leave for eleven days, instead of allowing Kejriwal to appoint his temporary substitute Jung forced Kejriwal to accept Shakuntala Gamlin, the Power secretary, even though this was to be an appointment for only eleven days. The pettiness of Jung’s action led to widespread speculation about its possible causes. But before long it became clear that this was the opening salvo in what was to be a long war.

The conflict was triggered by Kejriwal’s bid to end the rampant, predatory, extortion in all arms of government. During his first 49-day term in office in 2014 his invitation to the public to record any request for a bribe had brought extortion by the police, and municipal officials, down to a trickle.

So in February 2015 one of Kejriwal’s first acts was to set up a helpline where people could report such cases. Within the first 100 hours this received 32,489 calls. Of these 70 were backed with sufficient prima facie evidence to merit being passed on to the Anti-Corruption Branch. Of those 90 percent were against the police or officials of the three municipal corporations in Delhi. By April 18, the ACB had arrested 17 officials of the state government.

The Delhi police had watched these developments with mounting concern. Between April 5 and May 6 the helpline received another 125,000 calls. In an attempt to shelter the police from the deluge the police commissioner, B.S. Bassi, sent three impugned senior officers on forced leave.

But the conflict came to a head on May 1, when the ACB arrested a head constable for demanding a bribe of Rs 20,000 from a used car salesman. In a move that was without precedent the Delhi police immediately filed a case of kidnapping against the Anti Corruption Branch of the State government. Three days later the Police commissioner, B.S Bassi, phoned the head of the ACB and asked him not to forward the case to the vigilance department, but to transfer it to him for a departmental inquiry.

When the ACB chief, S.S Yadav, demurred, Jung demanded that the ACB should report to the LG and not to the state government’s vigilance department. When Kejriwal resisted this, Jung, in another move without precedent, called in a paramilitary force to surround and seize the ACB’s offices, and appointed Joint commissioner of Police Mukesh Meena in Yadav’s place. By choosing Meena, Jung waved a red rag in front of the bull, because Meena had earlier been entrusted with preparing a case against Kejriwal and the AAP for allegedly encouraging farmer Gajendra Singh to hang himself during an AAP rally at Jantar Mantar in August 2014.

Forced out of the ACB office and deprived of control over the police assigned to it, the Delhi government tried to operate the ACB from another location and get policemen from Bihar to staff it. Such transfers of cadres by one state government to another had been requested before and readily conceded, so Bihar CM Nitish Kumar quickly agreed and seconded five police persons to staff it. But Jung stepped in again, asserted that the ACB was now under him, and sent them back to Bihar. The Union Home ministry, unsurprisingly backed Jung, and accused Kejriwal of unnecessarily picking fights with the LG.

On May 21, 2015 the Union Home ministry followed this up with a notification that completely stripped the state government of its power to appoint, promote or transfer of officers in the state administration and vested all of these in the Lieutenant Governor.

A single judge bench of the Delhi High court ruled four days later that in doing so Jung had exceeded the authority given to him by the Constitution in the 69th amendment, which created Delhi State, but since he gave this opinion while hearing the bail application of the Head Constable in the May 1 bribery case, the Central government was able to get an injunction from the Supreme court to disregard it as it had been given on an unrelated matter. Knowing that public anger would serve his cause better, Kejriwal did not file an appeal against the Centre’s notification in the High court, and let the matter rest.

The May 21 notification took away the last shred of the Delhi government’s control over its officers. So when, seven months later on December 30, two senior officers belonging to the Delhi and Andaman Nicobar Service (DANICS) and employed in the State’s Home ministry refused to sign an order passed by the cabinet, stating that they had been given instructions to follow orders only from the LG, Kejriwal decided to suspend them.

Eight days earlier, the Home ministry had issued a notification that had been a year in the making, to protect IAS officers from summary transfers and suspensions by state governments by making these subject to review by the Union Home ministry. This was a much needed reform but did not apply to officers of the DANICS.

Despite that, within hours, the LG sent a letter to the Delhi chief secretary stating that the suspension was ‘illegal’ because it has been done “without the authority of Law”. The Union Home ministry also declared the suspension “ non est” i.e deemed not to exist, at the same time.

This completed the destruction of the executive powers of the Delhi administration. Emboldened by this notification, 200 officers of the DANICS cadre, supported by the IAS officers association, decided to go on a day’s leave en masse,in protest against the suspensions. Kejriwal condemned this as yet another conspiracy against Delhi’s people, but the Modi government did not stop there.

To rub still more salt into the wound the Home ministry began to transfer state government officials in critical positions without warning and without informing the chief minister and his cabinet, let alone seeking their permission. These included an officer who was supervising the establishment of CCTV cameras at critical places across the city to ensure the safety of women; another who was overseeing the regularization and development of unauthorized colonies and, most galling of all, officers from the personal staff of the chief minister.

And as if all this was not enough, over the past 18 months the CBI has called in no fewer than 150 state government officials for ‘questioning’ on issues it claims it is working on. All have been humiliated by being forced to wait from morning to night in the anterooms, and then being called in during the last hours of the day to be roundly abused and threatened.

Legislature paralysed

The centre’s lack of cooperation with Delhi is total. Fourteen bills passed by the cabinet have been sent to the Central government for assent, but the Centre hasn’t passed even one of them. These include three bills on education and three bills designed to enforce the law on minimum wages set for Delhi.

Administrative measures needed to implement government policy have also been routinely blocked by the LG. These include regularizing the employment of 15,000 temporary teachers; raising the land acquisition compensation in Delhi from the present Rs 54 lakhs per acre to the prevailing market price of Rs 3 crores, and engaging Akshaya Patra, the well-known NGO headed by Sudha Murthy, wife of Infosys founder Narayana Murthy that runs midday meal schemes for 1.5 million children, to run Delhi’s mid-day meal programme.

Till the end of 2015, the Modi government had resorted only to non-cooperation to hamstring Kejriwal’s administration. On December 15, 2015 it went on the offensive. At 9.00 a.m. that morning the CBI entered the Delhi secretariat, sealed all the three floors of the building, allowed no one to enter any office, including that of the chief minister, and began to go through the office of his principal secretary, Rajendra Kumar, an officer whom Kejriwal had picked because he had one of the cleanest records in the IAS..

The CBI claimed that it had not entered the chief minister’s office, and had only raided Kumar’s adjoining office and residence to investigate a charge of graft in five contracts placed by the Delhi government for a value of Rs. 9 crores with a company to which Kumar was allegedly linked. But the action was hasty, and stank of malice, for what it chose to ignore was that the charge had been leveled by a disgruntled AAP member, Ashish Joshi, who had been unceremoniously expelled from the Delhi Dialogue Commission.

Despite the existence of a long record of insubordination, insult and acrimony between Joshi and his seniors in the Delhi Dialogue Commission, and therefore a possibility that Joshi’s charge was mala fide, the CBI carried out no preliminary investigation of the accusation before shutting down the secretariat, raiding Kumar’s office, and invading the highly sensitive files kept there.

This omission was all the more inexcusable because the full record of the reasons why Joshi had been sent back to his parent cadre, the Indian Post and Telecommunication Finance Service, was available in the Union ministry of telecommunications. Nor did the Home ministry explain why a minor case of graft had not been handled by the Delhi police, but sent directly to the CBI.

The conclusion is inescapable: the Centre simply did not want to forego another opportunity to harass and humiliate Kejriwal. All niceties of law and procedure were cast aside and, on July 5, Rajendra was arrested and taken to jail where he was sweated by the police for five days in the hope of wringing a confession out of him, followed by another 17 days in judicial custody. Since then the principal secretary’s post in the CM’s office has remained vacant because no IAS, or any other cadre, officer is willing to put his neck on the guillotine.

Attack on AAP MLAs

The Modi government has not confined its attack to the administration. In the past year the Delhi police have arrested no fewer than 11 out of the 67 AAP MLAs in the Delhi assembly on a wide variety of charges ranging from rioting, slapping a Jal board worker, sexual molestation and domestic violence, to cheating and land grabbing, rioting, assaulting a public servant, making casteist remarks against an NDMC worker, and instigating the burning of copy of the Quran.

Only one of these, against former Law minister Somnath Bharti, merited being taken seriously because it had been filed by his wife. At the other extreme are two cases, against Mehrauli MLA Naresh Yadav and Okhla MLA Amanatullah Khan, filed while I was interviewing Kejriwal on July 24–both bear the fingerprints of a frame-up by the Delhi police.

Yadav was arrested for having instigated the burning of a copy of the Quran, on the word of the three RSS activists who were actually caught committing this desecration. Why three RSS men should have heeded the exhortations of a Muslim belonging to a party that is the BJP’s sworn enemy, is a question the police did not bother to ask.

Khan was similarly arrested on the word of a woman who claimed that he had threatened her with rape and murder when she went to him to complain against power cuts in Okhla. Even more shocking than the arrest was the summary sentence passed upon him by a city court on the basis of the woman’s word alone, of one day in police custody. AAP posted a video that showed her telling someone on a mobile phone that the Officer in charge of the Okhla police station at Okhla had urged her to accuse Khan, but by then Khan had become a registered sexual offender in the records of the police.

There is no way of telling who convinced the prime minister, or the Home minister, that this would be a good way to discredit the Kejriwal government. But what no one believes is that the BJP government is doing this out of a sudden respect for the law. Modi had promised to cleanse Indian politics of crime and corruption, but their election affidavits show that 98 out of the BJP’s 281 MPs have criminal cases pending against them. Sixty three of these face indictments for one or more of the six most serious crimes in the Indian Penal code — murder or attempted murder, dacoity, arson, rape, kidnapping, and the illegal possession of arms.

One of Modi’s ministers, Nihalchand Meghwal, has been facing a charge of rape along with 16 others, since 2011, but this has not been sufficient to prevent Modi from inducting him into his council of ministers and refusing to release him to face prosecution in a Jaipur court.

And while the guilt or innocence of the 11 indicted AAP MLAs will be decided by the courts, few of the voters of Delhi could have failed to notice this strange concentration of crime in one small party in one small state. Against 70 in Delhi, there are 4,050 MLAs in the remaining Vidhan Sabhas of the country. The total number of cases registered against them during the past 18 months does not add up to 11.

Had Modi’s persecution of Kejriwal’s government been the only example of his disregard for the niceties of the law and the constitution, it could have been ascribed to personal enmity and overlooked. But from his government’s strenuous efforts to exonerate and rehabilitate the Gujarat policemen indicted for the killings of Ishrat Jahan, Sohrabuddin Shaikh and Tulsiram Prajapati, to the framing of a case against Kanhaiya Kumar and the physical assault on him, as well as on journalists and JNU professors, by RSS affiliated lawyers who roam free today, to the constant drumbeat of persecution of Indian Muslims, there is a pattern emerging that bodes ill for India’s future.

Prem Shankar Jha is a senior journalist and author of Twilight of the Nation State: Globalisation, Chaos and War, and Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger, Can China and India Dominate the West?

India is Losing an Opportunity With China

By: Prem Jha

01-08-2016

Foreign Policy, International Issues

Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his visit to China in May 2015. Credit : PTI

When Delhi ignored Beijing’s quiet demarches to let sleeping dogs lie in Arunachal Pradesh, not only did the Vice foreign minister Liu Zhenmin summon Ambassador Ashok Kantha to express his “strong dissatisfaction and staunch opposition” to Narendra Modi’s visit in February 2015, but the entire text of his protest was released by the Foreign office, and carried in full by Xinhua , the next day.

China, he said “has never recognized the so-called ‘Arunachal Pradesh’ unilaterally set up by the Indian side. It’s an universally recognized, unevadable fact that significant disputes do exist on the eastern section of the China-India border…. the so-called “Arunachal Pradesh” was established largely on the three areas of China’s Tibet — Monyul, Loyul and Lower Tsayul currently under Indian illegal occupation. These three areas, located between the illegal “McMahon Line” and the traditional customary boundary between China and India, have always been Chinese territory”.

However Liu kept the door open for resuming the convergence towards strategic cooperation that had taken place between Hua Hin and Durban. He again said that China placed importance on developing relations with India. He said the two countries, ‘as neighbors and the top two developing countries in the world, share broad prospect on cooperation at various levels’.

He expressed ‘the hope that the Indian side should treasure the sound momentum in the growth of bilateral relations, march toward the same goal with China and abide by the important consensus on the border issue’ and “called for the Indian side not to take any action that may complicate the border issue and stick to the general orientation of resolving the issue through bilateral negotiations so as to maintain the overall growth of bilateral relations”.

But the significance of this very public demarche was lost upon the Indian media, which did not even mention it. So two months later, surreptitiously, and therefore unnoticed yet again by the media, Modi sent four Indian warships to join a US carrier fleet in the South China Sea to enforce the freedom of navigation within it less than a week before his return State visit to China. With that all ambiguity about where India stood on the central strategic issue of our age, was dispelled.

Inspite of this China pulled out all the stops to welcome Modi later that year. Xi took an entire day out of his calendar to spend it with him in Xian. Li Keqiang spent in all 13 hours with him. The joint statement issued after the visit began by acknowledging “ the simultaneous re-emergence of India and China as two major powers in the region.” This was something Beijing had never before conceded and was obviously intended to keep the door open for serious further engagement on international issues. But Indian commentators either did not notice the shift or took it as an acknowledgement of India’s growing power and influence that required no quid pro quo.

Spread over several paragraphs was also a commitment by both countries to put the border dispute in cold storage and not allow it to hinder the further development of cooperation between the two countries. It reiterated that the two governments were determined to ‘actively seek a political settlement of the boundary question’ and ‘resolve outstanding differences, including the boundary question, in a proactive manner’. They agreed to exchange regular visits and make full use of the opportunities provided by the presence of their leaders at various multilateral fora to hold consultations on bilateral relations and issues of regional and global importance. It again affirmed that an early settlement of the boundary question served the basic interests of the two countries and should be pursued as a strategic objective by the two governments.

But what was absent from it was any reference to strategic cooperation. This was glaringly obvious in the last, and from China’s point of view most important, section of the statement, sub-titled Shaping the Regional and Global Agenda. Given India’s explicit support for Vietnam’s rights in the South China sea, it came as no surprise that the statement steered clear of making even an oblique reference to the disputes that bedevil the region. But the joint statement did not even make a reference to the need to ensure the freedom of navigation in it.

China has stated, times without number, that it has no intention whatever of blocking free movement of commerce within it. Asserting a common commitment to protecting this freedom, possibly qualified by and explicit reference to commerce, would have balanced the reference to it in the Indo-US Joint Strategic vision statement of January 25. Its absence suggests that India either felt no need to establish such a balance or baulked at including any statement that would dilute the tacit commitment it had made to the US.

Equally significant was the absence of any reference to the civil war and humanitarian crisis in Syria, any explicit condemnation of ISIS and, most significantly, any welcome of the US and EU’s agreement with Iran. There was not even the implied criticism of the US’ quest for global dominance and a unipolar world that BRICS’ Delhi declaration had contained. Nor was there an endorsement of a multi-polar world order. It was as if the Delhi meeting of BRICS had never taken place.

Although Narendra Modi had taken a huge business delegation with him, and came back with $22 billion worth of state and corporate investment commitments, the joint statement concentrated only on terrorism, border demarcation, and the bilateral trade imbalance. The possibility of redressing this by facilitating large amounts of Chinese investment in India was only touched upon in passing. There was no reference in the joint statement to China’s proposal to form a Regional Cooperation Economic Partnership or to the One Belt, One Road (OBOR) plan into which it was absorbed, and no indication on whether India would join it or not.

The joint statement also showed that China had begun to hedge its bets. It ‘understood and supported’ India’s aspiration to play a greater role in the United Nations (no mention of the Security Council) and, in language that foreshadowed the US’ welcome of India’s interest in joining APEC, it ‘took note’ of India’s desire to become a member of the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group.

Since then, as the Modi government has ploughed ahead, China’s withdrawal of its offer of strategic cooperation, and return to its older policy of isolating, and neutralising India, has gathered momentum. It opposed — and prevented — Masood Azhar from being declared an International terrorist by the UN Security Council. It is opposing India’s membership of the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group. It has committed $14 billion to building a tunnel under the Great Himalayan range, roads, bridges and a rail link to end Nepal’s dependence on India for access to the rest of the world. It has committed $13 billion to building ports, roads and power plants in Sri Lanka and a whopping $45 billion to developing Pakistan’s road, rail, port and nuclear power infrastructure.

When these projects are completed Pakistan’s infrastructure will not only far outstrip that of India but also, by creating an alternate route for its exports to Africa and Europe through Pakistan, shower so much foreign exchange upon it by way of transit fees that it will never again have to turn to India for help as it did in 2012.

Prem Shankar Jha is a senior journalist and author of Twilight of the Nation State: Globalisation, Chaos and War, and Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger, Can China and India Dominate the West?

This is the third part of the series of Indian foreign policy under the Narendra Modi government. The first two can be read here and here.

How the Modi Government Spurned Friendly Overtures by China to Move Closer to the US

By: Prem Jha

01-08-2016

Foreign Policy, International Issues

File photo of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Credit: PTI

China and India’s relationship had begun to warm after the two countries signed the Agreement for Peace and Tranquility in the Border Regions, in 1993. Not only did trade between them grow at an astonishing pace, but they found themselves on the same side of the fence on a growing range of issues, from climate change to the invasion of Iraq and the need to build a multipolar world order. The first unambiguous signal that China was willing to set bilateral issues like the border dispute and Tibet aside in search of closer and more structured cooperation on strategic issues came from former premier Wen Jiabao, when he asked for a meeting with Manmohan Singh, who was then prime minister, on the side-lines of an ASEAN conference at Hua Hin, Thailand, in October 2009.

Confrontations on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) had multiplied during the previous three years. Tensions had heightened further in 2008 when a mini-revolt broke out in Tibet on the 50th anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s flight to India, that the administration in Tibet ascribed to a conspiracy hatched in Delhi and Lhasa. Finally, by September 2008, prolonged attention in the international media had begun to turn a visit by the Dalai Lama to Tawang, Arunachal Pradesh, to inaugurate a new hospital, into a confrontation between the two Asian giants that was threatening to spill over into war.

The need to defuse the mounting tension was apparent, so Delhi welcomed Wen’s initiative. What no one asked was why it was Wen, and not Singh, who had initiated the meeting. The media concluded that China had caved in when India ‘stood firm’ on the Dalai Lama’s visit to Tawang and that this was the way to deal with it in future.

Detailed briefings given by the Chinese foreign office after Wen’s return showed that what Beijing had wanted was to find a way of preventing unwelcome media attention from forcing the two countries into a confrontation that neither wanted. The issue was speedily settled when Singh decided to ban the international media from Tawang, which is beyond the Inner Line, and allowed only a handful of Indian correspondents to cover the event. The rest of the discussions between him and Wen ranged over strategic issues that affected both China and India.

Beijing’s relief was writ large in the despatches of Xinhua and reports in Global Times. In diplomatic demarches, what is not said is usually more important than what is. The statements emanating from Beijing referred once more to the Himalayan impasse as a border dispute and not as an illegal occupation of ‘southern Tibet’. Premier Wen said it would be resolved ‘gradually’, and would not be allowed to impede cooperation on other issues. The term ‘South China” was not used. C-3S, the Chennai based centre for China Studies , summed up China’s goal pithily: “Premier Wen Jiabao, obviously conveying a message from the Chinese leadership, conceded there was enough space in the world for both China and India to grow”.

The breakthrough at Hua Hin created the launch pad for a Chinese bid to raise the level of Sino-Indian cooperation from the tactical to the strategic level. A participant at a closed door conference on India=China relations held by the Lee Kuan Yew school of International Affairs in Singapore, in 2012, defined it as follows: “There can be five levels of relations between two countries – ranging from total opposition (level 1) through occasional tactical cooperation (level 3) to strategic collaboration ( level 5). China and India are on level 3. We would like to take it to level 5”.

Measured by this yardstick, China and India began moving from level 3 to level 4 at the annual BRICS meeting at Sanya, on Hainan Island, in April 2011. They began to move from level 4 towards level 5 during the fourth and fifth BRICS summits at New Delhi and Durban in 2012 and 2013.

The trigger for broadening the scope of cooperation from the economic to political and strategic issues was provided by NATO’s abuse of the UN Security Council’s no-fly-zone resolution to embark upon regime change by force in Libya, and follow it up with a similar covert attack on Syria. For China, as indeed for Russia and India, the message was clear: The invasion of Iraq in 2003 had not been an aberration. For the US, victory in the Cold War had rendered the UN charter obsolete. The Westphalian international order that it embodied, and which insisted that force must be the weapon of last, and not first, resort was therefore well and truly dead. The world was returning to the ‘constant state of war’ that the 17th century British philosopher Thomas Hobbes had described as the state of nature. China decided that it could no longer rule out becoming America’s and Nato’s next target (only two years later Russia did become the US’s next target).

BRICS’ Delhi declaration in 2012 was therefore twice as long as the one issued at Sanya. It contained the most comprehensive criticism of the failures of the West that had been voiced by any group of countries since the end of the Cold War. It demanded that the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all states, be respected. It condemned the attacks on Libya and Syria, and warned that the threats to Iran “must not be allowed to escalate into conflict”. And it explicitly called for the establishment of a multi-polar world order.

The Delhi meeting gave a fresh impetus to China’s efforts to forge strategic cooperation with Delhi. President Xi Jinping made this clear at the Durban meeting of the BRICS heads of government in March 2013, within months of succeeding Hu Jintao.

The signal was a change in the wording of the joint statement with Singh on the border dispute. From saying that the two countries would “gradually narrow differences on border issues” it read that they would “strive for a fair, rational solution framework acceptable to both sides as soon as possible”.

Break with protocol by President Xi

At the Durban meeting, Xi also broke protocol when he told Singh that Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s first foreign visit would be to India. On May 13 – days before Li Keqiang’s visit – Wei Wei, China’s ambassador to India, took what was for the Chinese government the unprecedented step of writing an op-ed piece in The Hindu, urging the Indian government to set aside the border dispute and focus attention on developing closer relations between the two countries. As in all diplomatic statements the words and phrases he used conveyed precise meanings.

“The China-India boundary question a problem left over from history … At present, the comprehensive development of China-India relations has created favourable conditions for solving border-related issues. …To strengthen good-neighbourly and friendly cooperation with India is China’s strategic choice and established policy which will not change. … Both sides “should proceed from a strategic height and a holistic perspective…. and strive for a fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable solution to the boundary question at an early date”. (emphases added)

The message could not have been more explicit: China regarded the border dispute as a legacy of the past, and wanted to get beyond it as soon as possible in order to cooperate with India on strategic issues of the future. The more China-India cooperation increased in the future, the easier would it be for both countries to find a mutually acceptable solution. One could not, however, find in history the solution to a problem created by history. One had, instead to go back to first principles and approach the task with a willingness to compromise.

Li Keqiang’s visit to India a few weeks later was an unqualified success. A senior Indian official who was present at his meeting with Manmohan Singh told me that their discussion had gone so well that it could have been choreographed. Singh summed up his own impressions in a formal statement when he said, “ I am delighted that there are so many areas of convergence between us on which there is a great deal of meeting of minds”.

Li’s visit set the stage for President Xi Jinping’s visit to India 16 months later. In the intervening months signs of the importance that Beijing attached to changing the locus of its relations with India multiplied. The Indian national day reception at Beijing in January 2014 was attended by the vice president of China, who delivered a 10 minute speech extolling the ties that had existed between China and India since antiquity.

Six months later, when ambassador Ashok Kantha, who had replaced the current foreign secretary S. Jaishankar, presented his credentials, he was one of only two out of 14 ambassadors whom President Xi asked to stay back for a short talk.

Finally, President Xi himself met national security adviser A.K Doval when he visited Beijing on September 8, 2014 to prepare for his India visit. The last senior official who was granted this courtesy by a Chinese president may have been Henry Kissinger in 1970.

Too mired in the past

In Delhi, unfortunately, only those closest to Manmohan Singh and key members of the foreign policy establishment fully grasped the signals that Beijing was sending. The intelligentsia, with only a handful of exceptions, remained too deeply mired in the past to shed its defensive mind-set towards Beijing. This was even more true of the government that Narendra Modi established, for he not only made it a virtue to cut all links with those who had made policy during the UPA regime, but also with those who had done so under Atal Bihari Vajpayee. As a result, the new government treated President Xi’s visit more as a bilateral mending of fences, not unmixed with elements of theatre, than the culmination of a long and patiently sought rapprochement.

Whatever President Xi Jinping may have wanted to achieve during his visit was, however, sabotaged when Chinese troops surrounded an Indian outpost at Chumar, in eastern Ladakh, only days before he arrived in India. With no clear idea of the reasons behind his visit, most Indian analysts and media pundits jumped to the conclusion that he had deliberately arranged for this to happen during his visit in order to remind Modi of just who had the whip hand in Ladakh.

They could not have been more wrong. According to an Indian diplomat who was present in Ahmedabad when Modi bluntly asked Xi Jinping what had happened, the Chinese president replied, “I don’t know”, but promised to find out when he returned to Beijing. For any head of state, let alone that of China, to have to admit ignorance to his counterpart when on a state visit must have been embarrassing, if not humiliating. Again no one asked why Xi should have exposed himself to it by timing the intrusion for the day before he reached India. That he wasn’t simply saying the only thing he could have said when confronted by Modi became apparent when, on September 21, barely a day after he returned to Beijing, Xi issued a stern reprimand to the PLA to follow the dictates of the party’s military commission.

But in the next seven months, as Modi visited Japan, the US, South Korea, Australia, signed the Joint Strategic Vision for the Asia-Pacific document with Barack Obama and ignored Beijing’s privately voiced protests, it became apparent to China’s strategists that he had either not understood its overtures, or had decided to reverse the foreign policy of the UPA and its preceding three governments and edge into a closer embrace with the US. As a result its attitude towards India also began to change.

Prem Shankar Jha is a senior journalist and author of Twilight of the Nation State: Globalisation, Chaos and War, and Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger, Can China and India Dominate the West?

The Basement Sale of India’s Sovereignty

By: Prem Jha

01-08-2016

Foreign Policy, International Issues

By drawing even closer to the United States and signing binding agreements, India is giving up years of carefully calibrated balance in its foreign policy.

File picture of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Obama in the White House in June. Credit : PTI

This is the first of a three-part series on India’s foreign policy.

In two lacklustre years of governance the BJP has done very little to fulfil its promise of economic revival and vindicate the trust that the people of India had bestowed upon it. That may be why its propagandists have worked overtime to portray the signature of the Logistics and Supply Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA) with the USA, and President Obama’s designation of India as a “major defence partner” as a huge success in his foreign policy.

With very few exceptions, commentators in the national media have fallen in line with this assessment. Only a few have noticed that in his eagerness to cement a closer defence relationship with the US Modi had given away India’s most prized asset – its zealously guarded independence of foreign policy – in exchange for a barrage of flattery and a bunch of verbal assurances that do not even add up to the proverbial thirty pieces of silver .

Declaring India a major defence partner has cost the US nothing. Unlike NATO or the US’s defence treaty with Japan, it is not a mutual defence pact and does not bind the US to coming to India’s aid if it is attacked. The most that India can possibly aspire to is a relationship somewhat similar to that of the US with Israel, where the US constantly reiterates its determination to come to Israel’s aid if it is attacked, but not via a defence treaty.

But India is not Israel. Its India-born American community is rich, and becoming politically more influential by the day. But it can never, even remotely, aspire to the power to shape US policy. American military power is not, therefore, ever likely to be deployed against India’s two main adversaries, Pakistan and China: Pakistan because it too is ‘a major non-NATO ally’, and China because it is simply too big for an already war-weary nation to take on.

In sharp contrast, the commitments that India has made to become worthy of this award (for that is all it is) are concrete, onerous and, worst of all, open-ended. Indian diplomats who have been involved in the negotiations insist that, unlike the Logistics Supply Agreement (LSA) that the US has signed with its other allies, it does not give the US Navy and Air Force an automatic right to use Indian bases while waging its wars. What it will facilitate automatically is the refuelling, restocking and repair of their craft at Indian naval and air bases during joint exercises, anti-piracy and other UN-sanctioned operations in the Indian Ocean.

This is the assurance that Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar had rushed to Beijing to give to the Chinese after postponing the signature of LEMOA at the last minute during US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter’s visit to Delhi in April. But in practice, these caveats against automatic involvement in America’s wars are hollow because Delhi will find it exceedingly difficult to deny these facilities to the US once the latter has committed itself to a military operation – because of the angry reaction that will provoke in the US media, and the Congress.

LEMOA is also only the thin end of a rather fat wedge. The US has made it clear that signing it will make it easier to acquire sensitive dual-use technologies. But to get the most out of it, India will have to sign two supplementary “foundational” agreements, the Communication and Information Security Memorandum of Agreement (CISMOA) and the Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement (BECA).

The US needs these to ensure that sensitive technological information shared with India does not get passed onto ‘unfriendly’ countries. But this concern will cut both ways. Its immediate result will therefore be to cut India off from access to cutting edge Russian armaments and technology.

A big loss

This will not be a small loss. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the Soviet Union began to come apart, it could have been argued that India did not really have any alternative but to turn to the West for advanced weaponry. But that is no longer true. The S-400 surface-to-air missile batteries, Sukhoi-35 multi-role aircraft and long-range cruise missiles that Moscow unveiled in Syria last year show that the technology gap between the US and Russia has not only narrowed but, in some important areas, reversed.

There is nothing comparable to the S-400 in the western armoury, and the Su-35 costs a quarter of what India has committed itself to paying France for the Rafale. So no matter how Modi’s propagandists try to dress it up, these three agreements will lock India into permanent dependence upon American, European and Israeli suppliers and make it pay through the nose for what it gets.

Thus when CISMOA and BECA have been signed, India will lose its capacity to act independently and will become a permanent appendage of the Western alliance. To see how this could work out in practice, Modi has only to pick up the phone to Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif or, better still, ask General Pervez Musharraf about how Pakistan came to join the War on Terror after 9/11.

The difference between Modi and his predecessors is that the latter were not prepared to pay this price. Manmohan Singh, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Narasimha Rao had coped with China’s rise by assuaging its anxieties about Indian intentions in Tibet and rapidly deepening the economic relations between the two countries. But they had simultaneously asserted India’s right to deal independently with the countries around the South China sea, to continue sheltering the Dalai Lama and to allow him to run a virtual government in exile from Dharamshala.

All three also steadily deepened India’s relationship with the US, but carefully avoided making military commitments that would limit their options in the future. Vajpayee refused President George W. Bush’s request for Indian troops to pacify Iraq after the 2003 invasion, and Manmohan Singh studiously refused to sign the logistics supply, and its supporting agreements, with the US throughout his time in office.

The success of this careful balancing act is testified to by the fact that during this period it was not only the US but also China that began to woo India. Modi’s precipitate action – taken without any of the open discussion and extended parliamentary debate that had preceded the signing of the Indo-US nuclear agreement in 2008 – has ended this hard-won equidistance and the power to influence world events that went with it.

What is even more disturbing: while it has crowned Obama’s attempt to yoke India to his goal of containing China with success, it has wantonly thrown away the best opportunity India had, or may ever have again, of making a lasting peace with China and harnessing its enormous financial, technological and managerial resources to accelerate India’s industrial development.

Breaking from Nehru’s legacy

The US must have sensed its opportunity when Modi signalled his willingness, probably during his first visit to Washington in 2014, to make a clean break with Jawaharlal Nehru’s legacy in foreign policy. Barack Obama lost no time in capitalising upon this and accepted Modi’s invitation to be the guest of honour at the 2015 Republic Day celebrations. The reason why he did so at such short notice surfaced when the two leaders signed the ‘U.S.-India Joint Strategic Vision for the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean Region’ on January 25.

Encased in the fluff of mutual praise was the one paragraph that mattered: “Regional prosperity depends on security. We affirm the importance of safeguarding maritime security and ensuring freedom of navigation and overflight throughout the region, especially in the South China Sea.” As Srinath Raghavan has pointed out in The Wire, China has a far stronger interest than the US in preserving the freedom of navigation in the South China Sea because all but a small fraction of its trade, and more importantly its import of oil, travels through it. What the US is insisting on maintaining, therefore, is the freedom of navigation for military vessels and aircraft.

In April 2015, this agreement bore its first fruit when four Indian warships joined a US-Japan task force spearheaded by the American super-carrier, the John C. Stennis, ostensibly to assert freedom of navigation in the South China sea. This one action, which received virtually no mention in the Indian media, revealed how little they, and Modi himself, understood the basics, let alone the nuances, of the power-struggle that is taking place in international relations today. For at the time this happened, he was within days of making his first state visit to China.

It is possible that Modi was only paying China back in its own coin for timing its intrusion into Ladakh’s Chumur sector to coincide with President Xi Jinping’s visit to India in September 2014. But if this was indeed his intention, then he had not been briefed about the overtures that China had been making to forge a closer strategic relationship with India ever since 2009 and the strategic convergence that had taken place in their world views since then.

Prem Shankar Jha is a ‘senior journalist and author of Twilight of the Nation State: Globalisation, Chaos and War and Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger: Can China and India Dominate the West?

Kashmir is in Danger of Spinning Out of Control

By: Prem Jha

01-08-2016

Indian Economics, Kashmir

Security forces in Kashmir during the violence in Srinagar following the killing of Burhan Wani. Credit: PTI

When I read that Burhan Wani, the iconic leader of the new militancy in South Kashmir, had been killed, I should have felt at least a twinge of relief. Instead all I felt was overwhelming pity for his family and despair for my country. For his death has not brought peace nearer in Kashmir, any more than the killing of Osama bin Laden has ended the threat from Al Qaeda, or brought peace to the Middle East.

Instead, as the eruption of rage after Wani’s death shows, it has only deepened the estrangement between Kashmir and the rest of India, and brought the moment closer when, if this killing goes on, insane rage will grip the youth of that benighted paradise once more and plunge it towards its own, and perhaps India’s, destruction.

Every titbit of information that has surfaced suggests that the encounter, if not the actual killing, was choreographed. Despite the extraordinary precautions that Wani had taken to make his group in South Kashmir difficult to infiltrate, the Kashmir police had succeeded in doing so. It knew that news of his death would set Kashmir on fire, so it chose a day of the week, a time of the year and, if reports are to be believed, a time of day that would minimise the impact of his death on the people.

But these tactics did not work and Kashmir is now perceptibly closer to the tipping point than ever before. So why is the government persisting with a counter terrorism strategy that, it must know, will only make things worse?

It was not as if it had no other options. Wani was only 22 when his life ended. Although he had joined the Hizbul Mujahideen seven years ago, he had not committed any truly heinous crimes. The Kashmir police had registered four serious cases against him, two of firing upon and injuring sarpanches, and two others of firing upon the police and the Rashtriya Rifles.

None of these had resulted in a death. So why was it so necessary to kill him? Why was no attempt ever made to persuade him to give up violence and pursue his goals peacefully? That is what governor Girish Chandra Saxena’s administration had succeeded in doing with Yasin Malik, Shabbir Shah and the militants of the 1990s. Why did no one even try?

The answer is that in the early ‘90s it was the militants who were on the offensive. The Indian state had resorted to violence with reluctance. Apart from defending themselves, the security forces used force mainly to protect civilians involved in the administration of the state, political cadres of mainstream parties and government buildings and facilities. Force was also used to underline the futility of challenging the writ of the state, but the goal was always to use a mixture of force and persuasion to make the separatists eschew violence in favour of negotiation and accommodation.

Vajpayee’s strategy

This strategy came close to success in 2002 when Atal Bihari Vajpayee rammed through a free and fair election over the strenuous objections of then Kashmir chief minister, Farooq Abdullah, facilitated the formation of a government that the Kashmiris did not consider a tool of New Delhi and launched a visionary initiative to settle the Kashmir dispute with President Musharraf of Pakistan.

The process continued with Manmohan Singh and a high point was April 5, 2005 when the first buses between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad crossed the Jhelum at Kaman post on the cease-fire line after a lapse of 40 years. Men, women and children lined the road to Srinagar dressed in their best clothes and greeted the bus form Muzaffarabad with flowers and song. It was a spontaneous outpouring of joy, such as Kashmir had not witnessed in a quarter of a century.

But the healing process that began then ended abruptly with the UPA government’s crackdown and return to police raj after the Amarnath land scam, and the BJP’s blockade of the Srinagar-Jammu highway in 2008.

That ‘crackdown’ began the return to the nightmare days of the early ‘90s. When, inspite of it, there was an unexpectedly high turnout in the valley in the December 2008 elections, Delhi seized this to claim that militancy had ended; all that was left to do was mop up its remnants and seal the border to keep infiltrators out of the valley.

That unfortunate boast ended Delhi’s dialogue with the Hurriyat. Throughout his second term in office, Manmohan Singh did not meet its leaders even once. This left capturing or killing ‘terrorists’ the only way to mop up the disaffection that remained. The task was delegated to the Kashmir police.

The resurgence of militancy today can be traced back directly to this self-serving deceit. To obtain information the police use the only methods it is familiar with: round up all known suspects and apply third degree methods to sweat information out of them. In the last six years this has turned the Kashmir police into a terror machine.

Loss of civic rights

Credit: Sunandita Mehrotra

All those who get onto its charge sheets, be it as a militant, a stone pelter or an agitator, immediately lose their civic rights. From then on they are liable to be summoned to the police station at any time of the day or night and insulted, humiliated, tortured or beaten up, at the will of the station house officer. This has turned life into an uncertain hell not only for them but also their families, who face suspicion and ostracism once they begin to receive visits from the police.

One way out is to become an informer. The other is to become a militant. Wani chose the latter. There was nothing in his family background that had predisposed him to rebellion. His father was the principal of a secondary school, his elder brother had been studying for his PhD in economics when he was killed by the police last year. Burhan was 15 when he and his brother were stopped, abused and humiliated by the police while on a joyride with a friend who was testing out a new motorcycle. Whatever happened then was sufficiently humiliating to turn him into a militant and bring him onto the police’s history sheets.

By the time he was killed, Wani had become the single most potent threat to the Indian state in Kashmir. But the threat he posed was ideological. By the yardsticks of the ’90s, his movement was still tiny and the wounds it had inflicted on the Indian state were no more than pinpricks. What made him a threat was his capacity to inspire. For there was a ‘purity’ in his revolt that the movements of the ‘90s had lost long ago. He had never crossed the border into Pakistan; he was not motivated by religious ideology, he did not want to join Pakistan and he was not in anyone’s pay. His was an apolitical revolt born out of pure rejection: he represented a Kashmiri nationalism that simply wanted to cut its links with India and become free to be itself.

But it was precisely these qualities that made it worth the government’s while to open a channel of communication with him with a view to restarting the search for a political settlement. Killing him was therefore the most self defeating thing the Indian state could have done.

If the government does not want Kashmir to spin out of control once more, it must stop the killing now. The first step would be to declare a unilateral cease-fire, wipe the police’s history sheets clean and give all those on it a respite from fear. The second would be to give full support to chief minister Mehbooba Mufti in her efforts to heal the wounds inflicted on the Kashmiri psyche. The third would be to equip the police to deal with stone pelters and others without using lethal force, inspite of every provocation to do so.

Only if these steps bring back peace will the government be able to look for ways to bring Kashmiri nationalists back to the negotiating table once more. The door to this room has been shut for so long that there is no way of knowing whether it can be opened again. But that does not exempt the government from the need to try.

Prem Shankar Jha is a senior journalist and author of Twilight of the Nation State: Globalisation, Chaos and War and Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger, Can China and India dominate the west?

Who Should Replace Raghuram Rajan as RBI Governor?

By: Prem Jha

29-06-2016

Indian Economics, Politics India

rajan_reuters

The media is rife with speculation about why the government refused to extend Raghuram Rajan’s tenure as Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor. The ideas are endless: the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was unhappy with his remarks on intolerance; his policies were, to quote Subramanian Swamy, “anti-national in intent”; he orchestrated a huge campaign in the media to make the government keep him on; P. Chidambaram, and therefore, one presumes, the Congress, was still backing him. Therefore, Rajan deserved the same fate, of summary ejection, that 360 consultants to the United Progressive Alliance government suffered when the Modi government came to power.

Alongside these ideas are predictions of the harm that the Indian economy is likely to suffer from Rajan’s expulsion: foreign investment will stream out of the country because his removal will signal a return to autarchy, and therefore unpredictability, in policy-making; the rupee will depreciate dramatically and inflation will re-surface. The timing of the government’s move, only days before Britain’s Brexit referendum, has also faced criticism, because it will magnify all these effects, should Britain decide to leave the EU.

Buried in all the speculation is the possibility that the government sacked Rajan because of his stubborn refusal to lower the interest rates. But even that is being seen as a political move designed to assuage the wrath of powerful industrial and construction lobbies in the country, and not as a hugely belated response to a decade-long dear-money policy that has each year destroyed industrial growth, bankrupted the entrepreneurial class and blighted the future of six to seven million youth who would otherwise have found jobs.

The pressing priority

The truth is that Rajan should have gone earlier. He had to go because he had continued to oppose rate cuts for two years even after his own, invented justification for keeping them up – namely, the persistence of inflation – was no longer relevant. Today, the only thing that responsible media should be discussing is how to minimise the immediate fallout his departure will cause. But that, unfortunately, is the last thing on everyone’s lists.

There is no doubt that the timing of Rajan’s departure is unfortunate, but whatever turbulence follows Brexit (if it happens) will be short-lived. The main threat to the economy will stem from the uncertainty that the change of so key an official will create, especially among foreign portfolio investors. The longer the government keeps the position vacant, the worse the situation will become. Should some of the investors pull their money out, the resulting fall in share prices will trigger the herd mentality and cause further, much larger, withdrawals.

So, no matter who did what, the government’s absolute first duty is to announce a successor without any further delay. That successor has to meet several requirements:

Firstly, their professional qualifications must be stellar and beyond question. Only then will the international financial community be convinced that the government is only changing the governor and not undermining the autonomy of the RBI.

Then, they must be a first-class economist who can explain and justify his or her decision to lower interest rates with sound economic logic. This must not be seen as another victory of crony capitalism.

Finally, the transition from the regime of Rajan to that of his successor – the time they take to become familiar with subordinates at the RBI and the members of its advisory committees, as well as learn the technicalities of the bank’s working – should be as short as possible.

The best candidate

There are any number of excellent Indian economists who meet the first two qualifications. And any one of the RBI’s present deputy governors meets the third. But finding a successor who meets both the first two and the third requirements will not be easy.

There is, however, one person already associated with the Modi government who meets all three needs to the fullest extent. That person is Bimal Jalan.

Jalan is an economist by profession and has numerous books to his credit. He is perhaps the only ‘outsider’ (to the Indian Administrative Service) who has risen to become the finance secretary, an achievement that speaks volumes for his ability and tact. He was the governor of the RBI for six years, from 1997 to 2003, and is therefore well-known among, and held in high regard by, the international financial community. Most of all, it was he who, while working closely with the then finance minister Yashwant Sinha, steered the Indian state through the aid cut-off that followed the May 1998 nuclear weapons tests, and then out of the recession of 1997-2002, onto the 8 to 9% growth path, by halving bank lending rates between 2000 and 2003.

To do the former, Jalan had to attract Foreign Direct Investment from Indians living abroad, and he did so by raising interest rates at the beginning of 1999. This killed an incipient industrial recovery that had begun under the spur of huge harvests in 1997 and the sudden jump in disposable income caused by the Fifth Pay Commission awards a year later. But Jalan began to lower interest rates less than two years later as NRI money poured into the Millennium and India Resurgent Bonds that the government floated in international markets to offset the sudden cut-off of foreign aid.

By the beginning of 2003, lending rates had halved, but the share markets were reviving as promoters turned to them to raise risk-free capital for investment. It took only one spark to ignite the sharpest stock market boom India has experienced to date, and this was provided in May, 2003, by Maruti Udyog’s decision to sell 20% of its shares to the public. This sale was oversubscribed 13 times, and the gold rush began. It did not peter out till eight years later, in 2011, and then, as in 1995, it was the morbid fear of inflation in a Congress government that brought it to its end.

Rajan was a stranger to those events, as he was in the US as they unfolded. Jalan, however, was completely a part of the whole experience.

Fake Encounters Sowed the Wind and India is Reaping the Whirlwind

By: Prem Jha

18-05-2016

Politics India

Fake encounters have become common but India needs to get back to rule of law, however weak and slow it may be.

DG Vanzara in a file photo. Credit: PTI

In her 22 minute televised press conference attacking the UPA government’s decision to revise the home ministry’s affidavit to the Gujarat high court on the Ishrat Jahan encounter killing, Union Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman hurled not one but two accusations against the Congress. The first was that it had ‘created a charade’, of an innocent girl being killed in cold blood by a brutalised police, when it knew from its own intelligence inputs that she had been a member of the Lashkar-e Taiba cell that had been sent from Pakistan to kill chief minister Narendra Modi. As my article in The Wire showed last week this was pure political jousting.

But in the furore that followed Sitharaman’s second, more serious, allegation slipped into peoples’ minds through the cracks created by the first. This was that by unleashing the CBI on the case, and allowing it to interrogate officers and men of the Gujarat police endlessly in their search for evidence with which to discredit the Modi government, the UPA had divided and demoralised the police and security agencies, and harmed the country’s security.

To make this accusation Sitharaman glossed over the fact that the CBI had had to be brought in because the reaction of the Gujarat government to affidavits presented to the Gujarat High Court by two ‘whistleblowers’ in the government, S.P. Tamang, chief metropolitan magistrate of Ahmedabad, and Satish Verma, member of the Special Investigation Team set up by the Gujarat high court after it received Tamang’s report, showed that it had no intention of indicting its own police personnel.

Both had presented evidence to the court that the four had been killed in cold blood at least six hours earlier, and that whatever the other three might have been, Ishrat Jahan could not possibly have been a Lashkar terrorist.

Debate on faked encounters

When Gandhinagar took no action it left the Centre with two choices: turn a blind eye, or turn the case over to the CBI. It started out to do the former but in 2009, with faked encounters in Punjab, Assam and Kashmir already a subject of anguished debate in the country and media empowered by satellite TV and internet, this option was closed. Embarrassing Modi was a bonus.

Why did Gandhinagar make itself complicit in the killings? The short answer is that by 2009 faked encounters had become a part of India’s unwritten code of criminal justice. When the Ahmedabad CBI court dismissed the CBI’s charges against former home minister Amit Shah, he did not say “God and our courts are just, I have been vindicated”. He said , “these accusations were politically motivated. There have been far more encounters in other states. Gujarat has had the fewest encounters, and also has one of the best records in maintaining peace.” Why, he asked in short, were we singled out?

However repugnant one may find his reasoning, it would be less than just to dismiss it out of hand, because ‘encounters’ have been the Indian State’s way of dealing with dangerous criminals and insurgents since well before independence. In the 1920s Sultana Daku was caught and hanged by the British under due process of law, but large numbers of others simply disappeared. After independence, in its half century long bid to clear the Chambal ravines the Madhya Pradesh Police killed more than 500 dacoits. A majority, police sources told me then, were killed after being captured. It was to avoid this fate that others surrendered.

In 1980 and 1981, during the chief ministership of V.P. Singh, the UP police killed more than 2,000 dacoits in Uttar Pradesh. The newspapers of the time were rife with accusations of fake encounters and the deaths of innocents. But that campaign did curb the menace of dacoity in the state and open the way for its development.

Integral part of counter insurgency

In more recent years fake encounters have become an integral part of counter insurgency operations in Punjab, Kashmir and the North-East. In Punjab, in particular, this policy was forced upon the police by the acute shortcomings of the criminal justice system, and by the insurgents practice of killing judges, and the families of high profile policemen to paralyse the this criminal justice system.

The insurgencies have all but ended, but the practice of letting the police be the judges and executioners of persons considered too dangerous to allow back onto the streets, has taken on a life of its own. Today, dozens of bodies are being recovered from the state’s irrigation canals every week. According to Inderjit Singh Jaijee, the human rights activist who brought this to light, many are farmers who have committed suicide, but the majority are what he terms ‘missing people’. At a time when Punjab is being overwhelmed by drug smugglers with powerful political patrons, the possibility that many of these are captured drug smugglers cannot be ruled out.

Initially Kashmir suffered less from the disease of fake encounters than Punjab. But, contrary to what Kashmiris had expected, fake encounters, extortion and other crimes committed by the police multiplied after 1996, when the elected government shifted the responsibility of ‘mopping up’ the remaining ‘terrorists’ from the security forces to the police. Today it is their frequent misuse of power in the rural areas, and continuation of the bestial practice, also adopted in Punjab, of awarding prize money to those who bring in the heads of alleged terrorists, that is mainly responsible for the resurgence of terrorism in South Kashmir.

In Gujarat, the growing disquiet in civil society was not stoked, much less manufactured, by the Congress. It became the focus of civil society’s disquiet because none of the conditions that had made people condone the shortcuts employed by other state governments existed there. Gujarat did not face an insurrection, and the handful of home grown and imported terrorists who came there after the 2002 riots had not even tried to kill judges or policemen’s family members.

Turf wars between smugglers

It had a large and variegated Muslim population with a prosperous middle class component. The communal riots that it had experienced every few years since 1969 had been triggered by turf wars between rival gangs of smugglers and illicit liquor vendors, and not religious passion. Had the riots of 2002 not taken place the state would in all probability, have remained entirely free of terrorism and encounters, whether genuine or fake.

The Godhra train burning and the riots that followed changed everything for they were the very first to be covered by television. Previously people had only read circumscribed reports. This time millions actually saw the burnt bogey of the Sabarmati express and the corpses being carried out from it. Nearly 2,000 people died in the riots that followed, and for the first time the killing was fanned by pure communal hatred.

Without waiting for an enquiry Modi and his cabinet jumped to the conclusion that the Godhra train burning was the work of Muslim terrorists and adopted a pro-active policy of prevention in anticipation of terrorist reprisals.

The custodial killings that occurred between 2002 and 2005 ,for which 32 police officers and men await trial today, were the outcome of that policy. They were therefore not only morally indefensible, but actually increased the threat of a future communal insurrection by showing Muslim youth how casually their fundamental right to life could be taken away from them.

Nirmala Sitharaman is right when she says that the controversy over the Gujarat encounter killings has demoralised the security apparatus of the country and seriously weakened it’s security. But curiously enough, the officers and men indicted for them blame the Modi government, and not the Congress for their plight.

Vanzara’s letter

Their monumental sense of betrayal was captured by D.G. Vanzara, director-general of Gujarat’s anti-terrorism force and widely known as its ‘encounter specialist’, in the letter of resignation from the India Police Service, that he wrote from jail on September 1 2013. Forfeiting all his post-retirement benefits Vanzara wrote:

“To the best of my knowledge, nowhere in any part of the country, such a big number of police officers were/are arrested and continuously being kept in the jails for such a long period of time except in the state of Gujarat. The most notable part of the whole episode is that they are made to suffer in the jails, inspite of the fact that they had been, and are, loyal soldiers of this government who fought incessant war against Pakistan inspired terrorism with complete honesty, integrity and sincerity without falling prey to any of the mundane temptations….

With the passage of time, I realized that this government was not only not interested in protecting us but it also has been clandestinely making all efforts to keep me and my officers in the jail so as to save its own skin from CBI on one hand and gain political benefits on the other…..

‘I, therefore, would like to categorically state in the most unequivocal words that the officers and men of Crime Branch, ATS and Border Range, during the period of years between 2002 to 2007, simply acted and performed their duties in compliance of the conscious policy of this government … we have simply implemented the conscious policy of this government which was inspiring, guiding and monitoring our actions from the very close quarters.”

Vanzara’s letter contains no tinge of remorse, but also none of communal rancour:

“A monstrous episode of Godhra train burning and equally horrible post-Godhra riots in Gujarat provided a pretext to Pakistan based terrorist outfits like Let, JeM and D gang under the direct supervision of ISI, to “convert Gujarat into another Kashmir” by exploiting the sentiments of the muslims all over the world.”

Listing 14 bomb blasts, five assassination attempts and two fidayeen attacks on the Rath Yatra and the Swaminarayan temple at Akshardham, he concludes: “I can say with pride that my officers and men not only successfully prevent(ed) Gujarat from becoming another Kashmir, but were also instrumental in providing a solid atmosphere of durable peace and security in the state”.

The bulk of the letter is a violent diatribe against the Modi government, and Amit Shah in particular, for having abandoned his police force when it most needed their support.

“This government suddenly became vibrant and displayed a spur of sincere activities only when Shri Amitbhai Shah, former MOS, Home, was arrested by CBI. It (engaged) Shri Ram Jethmalani, the most learned, senior most and highest paid advocate of India … and got him released on regular bail within (the) record time of 3 months of his imprisonment.

In contrast, when I, along with Rajkumar Pandian and Dinesh M.N, was arrested by the CID Crime, forget about providing the legal services, nobody from the government bothered even to provide a lip service to us or to our family members. (The) Gujarat police … used to be one of the finest … in the country till the coronation of this government in Gandhinagar. Today the same proud police … stands totally shattered and demoralized (by)….. the continuous betrayal of jailed police officers since last six years”.

Gujarat is not the only state in which the police feel betrayed. Within weeks of the end of the Khalistan insurgency in 1993 the Punjab police was assailed by a spate of indictments for carrying out fake encounters. The feeling of betrayal this generated in the police was highlighted when a senior superintendent of Police, A.S Sandhu, threw himself in front of a train to express his protest.

Re-instating indicted policemen

Today the Modi government is frantically trying to make amends by bailing out and re-instating indicted police officers. P.P. Pandey, police commissioner of Ahmedabad in 2004, was not merely released but is now the director general of police in Gujarat. Former assistant commissioner of police ( crime) in Ahmedabad, N.K. Amin, has been made the superintendent of Police for Mahisagar district.

Vanzara, who was released on bail in December 2014 on condition that he did not enter Gujarat, has been allowed to do so . He was greeted with flowers on his return to his village by no less eminent a person that DGP P.P Pandey, and is now being wooed by the BJP to join politics, while still being indicted for murder.

Modi does not seem to realise that the further the government goes down this road the more will India become a country that is not only without law, but one that flaunts its disregard for the very concept of law. When this realisation sinks in abroad, India will become not only an economic but also a political pariah.

This must not happen. The first requirement for containing and repairing the damage that has already been done is for all political parties to admit their culpability and jointly resolve never again to allow anyone in police custody to be killed, or punished in any other way, than through the due process of the law. Existing laws, like the National Security Act, allow incarceration for long periods. Prisoners deemed to be too dangerous to be incarcerated in their home state can be sent to jails in distant parts of the country. If it is deemed necessary to protect judges and witnesses, trials can also be held in these locations, and conducted in camera.

None of this involves rocket science. If it hasn’t been done so far—if government after government has continued to take the easy route of killing inconvenient prisoners, it is because clever lawyers have made a fine art out of subverting justice by raising procedural issues that make trials last forever. As Pakistan is showing with its 21st constitutional amendment and military tribunals, this too can be got around, although at some cost in terms of fairness and equity. But some legal process, however restricted, is a huge improvement over sanctioned, extra-judicial murder.

Police Encounters are the Dirty Side of Indian Democracy

By: Prem Jha

18-05-2016

Politics India

Raising a ruckus over P. Chidambaram’s “second affidavit” in the Ishrat Jahan case will not make the truth about encounter killings go away

The bodies of Ishrat Jahan and others who were allegedly shot dead in police encounters

Sixty-nine years after its birth, India’s democracy is facing a mortal threat. A government – and a political party – with little respect for the law is using the law to harass and humiliate its political opponents. It may not be the only government in India to have done so. But it is the first Central government to do so, and it is pursuing its vendetta with a disregard for consequences that is threatening to tear the seams of democracy asunder.

In less than two years it has dragged Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Arvind Kejriwal, its principal opponents in the nation, and in Delhi, into court on flimsy charges that no self-respecting judge should have entertained. It has sent the police into Jawaharlal Nehru University, something no previous government had done, and arraigned JNU Students Union president Kanhaiya Kumar on the basis of a doctored video that its own propaganda factories have produced; it has kept the Patidar agitation leader in Gujarat, Hardik Patel in jail for 80 days, repeatedly denying him bail.

It is now contemplating dragging former home minister P. Chidambaram into court on the charge of having changed an affidavit the Union home ministry submitted to the Gujarat high court on the Ishrat Jahan encounter in 2009 in order to strengthen the case being made by the Central Bureau of Investigation against the then Gujarat home minister Amit Shah and a score of indicted Gujarat police officers and men. The Modi government’s opportunity to do this arose on February 12, 2016, when the 26/11 mastermind, David Headley, stated – while ‘cooperating’ with Indian interrogators – that the 19-year-old Ishrat Jahan was not an innocent bystander but a member of the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba.

Armed with Headley’s statement and a junior home ministry official’s claim that he had been coerced by his senior into preparing the second affidavit, Union home minister Rajnath Singh has sought to suggest that there was no fake encounter, that Ishrat Jahan was a suicide bomber and had been killed in a genuine shootout, and that Chidambaram fabricated evidence in order to create a case against Modi and Amit Shah.

Dangerously inflammatory statement

Union commerce minister Nirmala Sitharaman has gone a long step further and claimed that the purpose of the changed affidavit was to invite ‘the enemy’ to launch more terrorist attacks to assassinate Narendra Modi because they cannot fight him politically. “They are happy to play with the enemy… they wanted to quietly watch a terror plot bloom in order to eliminate a political opponent.” she said in a carefully prepared, 22 minute televised statement.

If this allegation were true, the Congress would be guilty of having violated the first principle of democracy – the replacement of the ballot with bullets. It would therefore provide a moral justification for the BJP to abandon democratic politics as well, and resort to brute force to destroy its opponents.

Sitharaman’s accusation therefore needs to be subjected to the most rigorous scrutiny possible. If it cannot be substantiated, it will rank as the single-most dangerously inflammatory statement made by any politician in India’s 69 years of independence.

Fortunately this allegation fails to cross the very first hurdle it encounters: a complete absence of motive. Had Chidambaram revised the first affidavit in late 2013, there would have been room to doubt his motives, for the Congress was clearly on its way out and the BJP had chosen Modi as its prime ministerial candidate. But in September 2009, when the home ministry filed its revised affidavit, the Congress had just won a huge victory in the national elections four months earlier, and the next Gujarat state election – where it would have to pit itself against Modi once more – was still more than three years away.

The BJP had lost a sixth of its 2004 voter base in 2009 and Modi had yet to replace L.K. Advani as its national leader. The economy was also at its peak, with GDP growing by more than 9%, industrial growth close to 14% and employment growing by 7 million a year. Inflation was also close to zero. So what could the Congress conceivably have gained from inciting the assassination of Narendra Modi?

Sound reason for revising the Ishrat affidavit

Second, the sequence of events in 2009 shows that there was a perfectly legitimate reason for the home ministry to order the filing of a second affidavit on September 29.

Its first affidavit, submitted at the beginning of August, had dismissed the LeT’s later retraction of its claim that Ishrat Jahan was one of theirs, and firmly backed the Gujarat government’s claim that there had been a genuine shootout. But five weeks later, on September 7, Ahmedabad metropolitan magistrate S.P. Tamang submitted a 243-page report on the killing to the Gujarat high court, prepared on his own initiative, that made a very convincing case that the four alleged terrorists had been kidnapped and brought to Ahmedabad a few days earlier, and killed in cold blood a day before the alleged encounter.

The crucial piece of evidence he cited was the pathologist’s finding that when the bodies were examined, they were already in rigor mortis, which had set in about six hours before the reported time of the encounter. Tamang gave a two-page list of police officers and constables who had been involved in the fake encounter.

More convincing even than the evidence he adduced were the precautions that he took to keep his findings secret from the entire city. In an unprecedented departure from practice, Tamang did not employ a stenographer, and did not use a computer, but wrote the entire 243-page report in long-hand. Tamang clearly did not trust even his personal staff and the inviolability of his computer. There can be no more eloquent testimony of the atmosphere of terror that the Gujarat police had created to keep its misdeed secret.

The Tamang report and the circumstances in which it was prepared may have delighted the Congress, but it also made it impossible for the home ministry to keep ignoring the LeT’s retraction of its initial claim. The revised affidavit did not reverse any conclusion it had reached in the first. It simply removed sections that referred to Ishrat Jahan.

Did the BJP only seize the opportunity created by David Headley’s identification of Ishrat Jahan as a suicide bomber? Or did it create it? Conspiracy theories are inherently repugnant but in this case the second possibility cannot be ruled out.

Headley’s confession has been accepted as gospel far too readily. “Jahan was an LeT member, Pakistani-American Headley said in his sensational disclosure while deposing before Special TADA Court Judge … on Thursday”, one online journal asserted.

In fact he did nothing of the sort. The video of this portion of Special Public Prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam’s interrogation, uploaded to YouTube, shows that Headley did not volunteer the admission. Nikam led him to it by the nose, asking no fewer than four leading questions, to name Ishrat Jahan a terrorist. The last two of which were “do you remember her name” and “was it Noorjahan Begum, or Ishrat Jahan, or Mumtaz Begum”.

Noorjahan and Mumtaz are names rarely, if ever, given to girls today because they were the titles, not names, of the wives of Mughal emperors Jahangir and Shahjahan. Noorjahan’s real name was Mehr-un-Nissa, and Mumtaz Mahal’s was Arjumand Banu. What is more, begum is a form of address reserved for married women. There is no possible way David Headley would not have understood what Nikam wanted him to say. How he, and his former ISI handlers in Rawalpindi, must have chuckled when the storm broke!

What is the compulsion that has made the BJP, if not coax David Headley into indicting Ishrat Jahan as a terrorist, then leap upon it a full 12 years after she was killed? The answer is that Ishrat Jahan’s is not the only fake encounter to have taken place in Gujarat during the tenure of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. Thirty-two officers and men of the Gujarat police, including six senior officers, are either out on bail or have been languishing in jails for up to eight years, waiting to be tried for no fewer than five separate fake encounter cases.

When these come up in court, as they must one day, they will reveal that between 2002 and 2007 the crime branch of the Ahmedabad police had become a “killing machine” (a term senior New York Times correspondent Mark Mazzetti had coined for the CIA) not only for terrorists from Pakistan but also for eliminating other criminals whom the rickety and deadlocked judicial system could not punish, and, in some cases, even people unconnected to wrongdoing of any kind who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Nothing reveals the damage that the five cases together can inflict more clearly than the “encounter killing” of Sohrabuddin Sheikh in November 2005.

Killing of Sohrabuddin

Sohrabuddin and his accomplice Tulsiram Prajapati were straightforward gangsters and assassins for hire. Both faced a number charges of criminal extortion from marble mine owners in Rajasthan and Gujarat, arms smuggling, and murder. According to the CBI, Sohrabuddin was taken off an interstate bus, along with his wife Kausar bi and Prajapati, taken to a farmhouse outside Ahmedabad, and killed in a staged ‘encounter’ – allegedly as a terrorist who was planning to assassinate Modi.

Three days later Kausar bi was strangled, taken to Illol village in Gujarat – the home village of D.G.Vanzara, director general of the state anti-terrorist task force – and cremated there. (The killing was later admitted by the attorney general of Gujarat before the Supreme Court). Prajapati, who was a crime branch informer, was initially spared.

No one doubted the police version of the Sohrabuddin killing till, a year later, drunken police officers boasted about it in front of a journalist, Prashant Dayal, who published a well-researched report in a Gujarat daily, Divya Bhaskar. Four weeks later, on December 28, Prajapati was killed in another staged encounter whose details were recounted in excruciating detail by the CBI in its charge sheet against Amit Shah.

These were the three ‘encounter killings’ for which the CBI indicted Amit Shah – then Modi’s home minister in Gujarat, in 2010. Dayal believed that the Gujarat police had carried out a Rs. 2 crore supari – contract killing – of Sohrabuddin, then killed his wife to silence her, and killed Prajapati in order to eliminate the sole remaining witness.

In its indictment of Shah, the CBI presented evidence of Amit Shah’s involvement. It also submitted cell-phone records, and audio and video tapes that, seemingly, implicated Shah in the conspiracy to eliminate Tulsiram Prajapati. Shah was arrested, but immediately granted bail and remained the home minister of Gujarat. But a dozen officers and men were sent into judicial custody.

This is simply not the kind of publicity that Modi can afford, either as the leader of the BJP, or as the prime minister of India. Nor is it, in the Information Age, something that India can. For the plain truth, which public trials of the indicted officers and men will reveal, is that there is hardly a state in the country where fake encounters have not become the police’s way of dealing with insurgents, terrorists and criminals.

This is the dirtiest side of India’s corruption-ridden democracy. The BJP’s leaders knows trading accusations with rival political parties is not the way to exonerate themselves. They also know high-profile trials that expose this pattern to the world – and their own culpability – need to be avoided. The Narendra Modi-Amit Shah strategy is to try and contain the damage by making the encounter cases simply disappear. That is not going to happen. What could disappear, if this no-holds-barred, law-be-damned effort continues, however, is democracy itself.

Prem Shankar Jha is a senior journalist and former adviser to V.P Singh.

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How the Modi Government Spurned Friendly Overtures by China to Move Closer to the US

The Basement Sale of India’s Sovereignty

By drawing even closer to the United States and signing binding agreements, India is giving up years of carefully calibrated balance in its foreign policy.

Kashmir is in Danger of Spinning Out of Control

Who Should Replace Raghuram Rajan as RBI Governor?

Fake Encounters Sowed the Wind and India is Reaping the Whirlwind

Fake encounters have become common but India needs to get back to rule of law, however weak and slow it may be.

Police Encounters are the Dirty Side of Indian Democracy

Raising a ruckus over P. Chidambaram’s “second affidavit” in the Ishrat Jahan case will not make the truth about encounter killings go away

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Modi has turned India into a military and diplomatic ally of the US. In China’s eyes, this has transformed India from a like-minded country, that shared its opposition to the US’s attempt to create a unipolar world, into an adversary.

Demonetisation has hit every sector of the economy from construction to automobile at the same time and its ripple effects are likely to be felt for months to come.

By drawing even closer to the United States and signing binding agreements, India is giving up years of carefully calibrated balance in its foreign policy.

Fake encounters have become common but India needs to get back to rule of law, however weak and slow it may be.

Raising a ruckus over P. Chidambaram’s “second affidavit” in the Ishrat Jahan case will not make the truth about encounter killings go away

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