Prem Shankar Jha

The peace conference on Syria that began on January 22 in Geneva was not even a day old before two huge spanners had been thrown into its works. Iran was dis-invited from the conference at the last moment, and 55,000 pictures allegedly showing Syrian government forces torturing and killing 11,000 civilians were leaked to The Guardian and CNN. These developments expose the titanic behind-the-scenes struggle that is going on to derail the conference. The reason is that it has ramifications that go far beyond the future of Syria.

A momentous turn in western policies towards the Middle East is underway. Till only weeks ago Iran was a rogue state; Syria was a brutal family run dictatorship allied to Iran, and the Hezbollah in Lebanon and therefore a sworn enemy of Israel and the west. Russia and China were spoilers intent upon propping up anti-west regimes in a senseless prolongation of cold war hostilities. Israel was the west’s staunchest ally in the Middle East, followed closely by Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates its principal providers of oil and military bases in the Middle East. Despite several hiccups the Arab world was still regarded as a victory for the democracy over dictatorship and a vindication of the west’s export of democracy and human rights to the rest of the world even if this was being done through the barrel of a gun.

These beliefs now lie in ruins. The west has belatedly realized that however oppressive the dictatorships in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria may have been, the alternative that stares them in the face – militant Islamist theocracies spawning Jihadis in ruined economies, is infinitely worse. Its intervention in the ‘Arab Spring’ has been an unqualified disaster. Instead of strengthening its hold on the middle east , it has come close to delivering it into the hands of its most inveterate enemies. And it has been led down this self-destructive path by its own supposed allies—Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and Turkey – which have been playing their private power games with western, notably American bullets.

President Obama is the first western leader to perceive the trap into which the west has fallen, and reach out to Russia to forge a joint strategy for recovery. Their joint efforts have begun to bear fruit. Syria is close to completing the handing over of its chemical weapons and factories to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and is about to sign the Chemical weapons convention of 1992. Iran has taken its first essential steps to halt the enrichment of uranium with the fissile isotope, U-235, to the 20 percent. The Geneva II peace talks are designed to chart out the next steps in the stabilization of the middle east, and once more, the key to this is the restoration of peace and a secular, preferably democratic, government in Syria.

But the weight of past mistakes and misperceptions hangs heavily over the conference’s outcome. The chief obstacle to this is the west’s demonization of Assad as a butcher of his own people. So successful has this been that Obama is now hard pressed to explain his sudden volte face. This has already cast a pall over the conference for, to maintain a semblance of continuity in its policies and defend the correction of its past perceptions Washington has joined Britain, France and Israel and their Sunni Arab allies to keep Iran out of the conference, and to insist that Assad must relinquish power to a transitional government before they agree to stop supplying the rebels with weapons.

These moves, on the very first day of the conference, had already cast a pall over its prospects, The release of e 55,000 photographs depicting torture and murder, allegedly by Syria’s security apparatus, could well lead to its premature end. It is therefore imperative to examine whether Assad really is the demon that the international media have made him out to be over the past three years.

The case it has built against him runs as follows: First, within months of succeeding his father Hafez Al Assad, in 2001, he had promised to turn Syria into a democracy but reneged on it repeatedly in the ensuing ten years. Second, he has run a brutal dictatorship that has felt no qualms about turning its guns on its own people’ Third his regime has committed innumerable human rights abuses culminating in the use of chemical weapons against its own people.

Finally it is the excesses of his own regime that have triggered the uprising of his people, drawn thousands of Jihadis from all over the world to Syria, and inflicted untold misery on his own people. The west must therefore end this war, no matter how, in the interests of the Syrians themselves.

Did Assad go back on promises of democracy?

Syrians whom I interviewed in October 2012 in Damascus, however, had a different story to tell. Assad had sincerely wished to start the transition to democracy a decade earlier, but was forced to postpone the changeover repeatedly by the growing turmoil in Syria’s neighbourhood —the US’ invasion of Iraq in 2003; the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri and the concerted bid to force Syria out of Lebanon in 2004; Washington’s decision to break diplomatic relations with Damascus in 2005; Israel’s attack on Lebanon in 2006, its blockade of Palestine in 2007, and its bombing of Gaza in 2009. Faisal Al Mekdad, Syria’s vice minister for foreign affairs and its former permanent representative at the UN, summed up Assad’s dilemma as follows: “Each of these events reminded us of the need for unity in the face of external pressures and threats, and forced us to postpone democratization for fear of setting off fresh internal conflicts and forcing adjustments when we could least afford them’.

According to Bassam Abu Abdallah, a professor of International affairs at Damascus university, these external pressures did not make Assad entirely abandon the quest for democracy. It did, however, limit his reforms to devolving more administrative power to local government and lifting restrictions on press freedom. The most significant development of this period was a regional conference of the Baath party in Damascus in 2005. This conference drew up the blueprint for the sweeping democratic reforms that Assad has enacted in 2011 and 2012.

Was there a spontaneous protest and was it peaceful?

Despite the rethinking that has begun on wisdom of the western intervention in Syria it remains axiomatic among western journalists that Assad brought the civil war upon himself. Syria had been convulsed by a spontaneous movement for democracy, that the Assad regime converted into an insurgency by using overwhelming force against the peaceful demonstrators. But Syrians I talked to in October 2012, and resident diplomats concurred, that there had been no spontaneous popular upsurge against the regime in Syria, and that the civil war was a fructification of plans for regime change that had been hatched much earlier and brought forward because the opportunity provided by the ‘Arab Spring’, and western liberals’ ecstatic response to it, was too good to miss.

Damascus first became aware of the conspiracy when trouble broke out on March 18, 2011 in Dera’a, a small city astride the Syria – Jordan border. A peaceful demonstration demanding some political changes in the local administration and lowering of diesel prices turned violent when shots were fired killing four persons. The international media, led by the Qatar-based Al Jazeera, and the Riyadh-based Al Arabiya television channels immediately accused Assad’s forces of firing into the crowd to disperse it.

The Syrian government’s version of what had happened was entirely different. The first shots, it claimed, were fired on March 18 but not by the police. They were fired by armed men who had infiltrated the procession and, at a pre-determined moment, begun to shoot at the security police. That is why, of the four persons killed on that day, one was a policeman. However, according to Dr Mekdad, what convinced the government that the Dera’a uprising was part of a larger conspiracy was what happened when the police sent for reinforcements. Armed men ambushed one of the trucks as it entered Dera’a and killed all the soldiers in it.

The Syrian government chose not to publicise this for fear of demoralizing its soldiers, But a careful search on the internet did provide indirect corroboration. Suleiman Khalidi, the local correspondent of Reuters, reported on March 23 that 37 bodies had been brought to the Dera’a hospital till then. The number was intriguing because all news reports had been unanimous that 13 civilians had been killed till March 23, so where did the other 24 bodies come from?

Incontrovertible confirmation came a month later when ‘peaceful protesters’ stopped an army truck outside Dera’a and again killed all the 20 soldiers in it. But this time they did so by cutting their throats. This was the sanctified method of killing that the ‘Afghanis’, as the Afghanistan-returned Jihadis were called in Algeria, had used to kill more than ten thousand villagers during two years of bitter insurgency after the First Afghan war. It was to be seen over and over again in Syria in the coming months.

The Syrian government again chose to remain silent, and the only whiff of this event in the media was a rebel claim that they had captured and burnt an armoured personnel carrier. But in Damascus the US Ambassador, Robert Ford, told a group of Ambassadors that included the Indian ambassador, that the Syrian insurgency had been infiltrated by Al Qaeda. He had come to this conclusion because, in addition to cutting throats, the insurgents had cut off the head of one of the soldiers.

Who killed Whom?

As the civil war intensified and the killing of civilians skyrocketed, the insurgents, now labeled and recognized by the west as the “Free Syrian Army” followed a set pattern of attack: This was to descend without warning on small towns, Alaouite villages and small army and police posts in hundreds, overwhelm them. After they surrendered, the insurgents would kill local officials, civilians they deemed to be pro-Assad and soldiers who would not desert to them, and claim that these were in fact deserters whom the government forces had executed after a successful counter attack. Two such episodes captured worldwide attention in 2011.

In Jisr al Shugour, a medium sized town in the northern border province of Idlib, the international media reported, based upon rebel claims, that the government had brought in not only tanks but also helicopters to bomb the town from the air- the first resort to air power against ‘protestors’. When some soldiers, who were disgusted by the indiscriminate carnage, attempted to defect the Syrian troops killed them. The indiscriminate firing forced civilians to flee to nearby villages. Some crossed over to Turkey.

This claim captured the headlines in the western media for days, but the story pieced together by a diplomat whom the Syrian government took to Jisr-al Shugour when the town had been recaptured, was however very different. In the beginning of June 2011 some five to six hundred fighters of the Free Syrian Army suddenly laid siege to the town for 48 hours. When the army sent in reinforcements the rebels, who had mined a bridge on the approach road blew it up as a truck was passing over it, killed the soldiers and cut the only access to the town by road. Two days later, when they overwhelmed the garrison, instead of taking them prisoner they killed all of them, many by cutting their throats, threw their bodies into the Orontes river, and later posted videos claiming that these were army defectors whom the Syrian forces had killed.

This was corroborated two months later by a resident of the town who came the Indian embassy to get a visa. According to him between 500 and 600 rebels had descended upon the town from Turkey. On the way they stopped a bus, shot six of its passengers and spread the word that army had done it. Many people believed them, were enraged and stood by as the hunt for fleeing soldiers and supporters of the government began. Some joined in the hunt. In all, he said, the number of soldiers and government supporters killed and dumped in the Orontes was not 120 but close to 300. This was the first of dozens of similar war crimes by the FSA.

Till the end of May the Syrian government’s frequent assertions that it was the rebels who were opening fire first, forcing the state forces to return their fire, had been treated with disdain by the western media or simply ignored. But it too was vindicated when Hala Jaber, a British journalist with a Lebanese father, the Diplomatic correspondent of the Sunday Times and a two time winner of human rights journalism awards, described precisely how violence on the scale of Deraa was unleashed upon the city of Ma’arrat –al Numan, not far from Jisr-al-Shugour.

“They came in their thousands to march for freedom in Ma’arrat al-Nu’man, a shabby town surrounded by pristine fields of camomile and pistachio in the restive northwest of Syria.

The demonstration followed a routine familiar to everyone who had taken part each Friday for the past 11 weeks, yet to attend on this occasion required extraordinary courage.

The previous week four protesters had been shot dead for trying to block the main road between Damascus, the capital, and Aleppo, the country’s largest city. The week before that, four others were killed.

So enraged were the townspeople at the blood spilt by the Mukhabarat, or secret police, that intermediaries had struck a deal between the two sides. Four hundred members of the security forces had been withdrawn from Ma’arrat in return for the promise of an orderly protest. The remainder, 49 armed police and 40 reserves, were confined to a barracks near the centre of town. By the time 5,000 unarmed marchers reached the main square, however, they had been joined by men with pistols.

At first the tribal elders leading the march thought these men had simply come prepared to defend themselves if shooting broke out. But when they saw more weapons — rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers held by men with heavy beards in cars and pick-ups with no registration plates — they knew trouble lay ahead.’

Demonisation intensified – Houla and chemical weapons

February 2012 was a turning point in the Syrian civil war. Bashar Al Assad held a referendum for the Syrian people to endorse the new, democratic constitution that he had promised to the Syrian democracy movement at a conference held in Damascus in the previous July, and the Syrian army recaptured Baba Amr, the FSA’s stronghold in the city of Homs, after a four month siege.

This twin setback forced a change of strategy upon Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and their western backers. From February Saudi Arabia started shipping arms openly to he FSA and offering vast bribes – salaries ranging from %100 to $3,000 a month to Syrian soldiers and officers to desert from the army and join the FSA. On the other, they ramped up the effort to demonise Assad till no one in the west would dare to have any dealings with him again.

The first major effort occurred four months on May 25 2012. Reports appeared almost simultaneously in several international media that Assad’s army and Shabiha irregulars had massacred 108 people, including 49 children and 34 women, using knives, hatchets and guns in the villages of Houla and Taldou, close to Lattaqia in the north of the country. The timing of this massacre was suspicious because it occurred within days of Syria’s first ever multi party election under the new constitution. But based on these reports, supposedly by eyewitnesses, 11 western countries, Japan and Turkey expelled Syria’s ambassador and the UN security council set up an independent commission of inquiry into the massacre.

Only later did it emerge that all of these reports had been based upon the statements of a single supposedly 11 but probably 8 or 9 year old boy, and that several other eyewitnesses had given detailed, graphic accounts, which showed that the killers were Islamists belonging to the so-called ‘Free Syrian Army’. A detailed investigation by a European Citizen’s group, published in May 2013 revealed that five groups of the FSA that had taken part in the massacre. By then, however, the damage had been done.

Inspite of this, as the summer wore on the pendulum continued to swing in favour of the government. By October 2012 it was the FSA that was on the run. Its fragmented leadership was incapable of coherent action and the trickle of deserters from the Syrian army had all but dried up. Its cries for help from a direct intervention by the west on the Libya model grew more shrill. It may not therefore be a coincidence that October was the month in which Israel ‘s satellites ‘discovered’ that the Syrian army was mixing the chemicals normally held separately that together produce Sarin Gas.

Thus was planted the seed of the diplomatic –cum-propaganda offensive that first trapped Obama in December 2012 into promising to attack Syria if it crossed the red line of using chemical weapons, and then culminated in the Sarin gas attack against civilians in the Ghouta on August 13 last year the precise day on which a UN team of inspectors began its investigations into two earlier allegations of gas attacks in Damascus and Aleppo that, by then, had been all but proven to have been launched by the insurgents.

The last throw of the dice

By then however, behind the screen of rhetoric defending its past actions, the US had seen through the game. It knew that the Syrian National Coalition which had replaced the Syrian National Council as the west’s chosen vehicle for replacing Assad, was anything but a coalition; that al Qaeda and its affiliates had taken over the war against Assad and a moderate FSA was a fiction; that its Arab allies were arming the Jihadis with wire-guided anti-tank missiles and surface to air heat seeking missiles against its express wishes, and that Al Qaeda was using the war in Syria to re-invigorate Al Qaeda in Iraq.

With enormous courage therefore, Obama has turned US policy around 180 degrees from confrontation towards cooperation, from military pressure to diplomatic peruasion. A new era is trying to be born, therefore, in international relations. But this turnaround has left Israel and the Gulf sheikhdoms especially vulnerable. The 55,000 picture assault on Assad’s regime unveiled, with a by now familiar accuracy in timing, could therefore be their latest attempt to using the military and diplomatic might of the US to continue down the road to war and destruction. It could be their last throw of the dice.

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In a few days the 16th Lok Sabha will be prorogued and the UPA’s – basically the Congress’– ten year reign will come to an end. With that will end the most tragic period in independent India’s history. Tragic not because any catastrophe has befallen the nation, but because during this period Indians got a brief glimpse of affluence, a brief taste of global respect, and a brief view of a more secure future, only to have all three snatched away from before it ended.

This is not India’s first lost decade. There was another between 1965 and 1974. But that was triggered by events outside the government’s control – two successive droughts in 1965 and 1966 and two wars in 1962 and 1965. The Indira Gandhi government’s response deepened the economic crisis these caused and slowed down growth even further, but it was not responsible its onset.

In sharp contrast, most of the wounds of the past decade have been self –inflicted. In 2004 Atal Behari Vajpayee’s government bequeathed to the UPA a country whose economy had just recovered from a five year recession and recorded an 8.1 percent rate of growth in 2003-4, the highest the country had known. It had demonstrated India’s nuclear weapons capability, weathered the storm of sanctions the world had unleashed upon it, forced the US into its first serious dialogue with India, and made it rethink its policies towards Pakistan and Kashmir.

It had pushed through Kashmir’s first truly free and fair election in 2003, in the teeth of universal scepticism, a Hurriyat boycott, and determined opposition by the National Conference, and shown Kashmiris that they could make Indian democracy work for them. It had decisively won the Kargil war and, two years later forced Pakistan to reconsider and all-but-abandon its proxy war, using ‘non-state actors’, against India. It had then held out a hand of friendship to Pakistan in 2003, symbolically from Srinagar.

It had signed the Islamabad agreement with President Musharraf in January 2004, brought lasting peace on the LOC in Kashmir and begun the detente that led to the almost consummated Manmohan-Musharraf Delhi Agreement on Kashmir in 2005.

In the realm of economic policy it passed the Fiscal Responsibility and Budgetary Management Act and reduced the Centre’s fiscal deficit to 2.5 percent of the GDP before handing over to the UPA. It halved interest rates between 2000 and 2003 and set off the boom in the stock market that continued, almost without interruption, till January 2008.

All that the UPA had to do, when it came to power was build upon the foundation that Vajpayee and the NDA had built. It began well, but then gradually allowed everything to fall to pieces. In its relations with Pakistan, it dragged its heels over negotiating the details of the four point plan for settling the Kashmir dispute, ignoring warnings that Musharraf was losing power within his own country, till the Judges crisis took power out of his hands altogether. It also came close to settling decades long disputes with Bangladesh over the Ganges basin waters and the demarcation of the border, but then failed to live up to key commitments, leaving Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League government vulnerable to attacks from the BNP and the Jamaat-i-Islami. It persuaded the Maoists in Nepal to rejoin the mainstream of democratic politics but inexplicably withdrew its support from them just when their moderate, pro-India, leader Prachanda needed it most.

In 2013, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pulled out of the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Colombo, he humiliated the Sri Lankan President Rajapakse and severely damaged a relationship with Sri Lanka that had taken more than a decade to rebuild after the IPKF debacle. In order to appease Tamil nationalist sentiment in Tamil Nadu, he threw away the considerable capacity India had built for influencing Colombo’s policy towards its Tamil minority.

India’s two year tenure of a non-permanent seat in the UN Security Council was perhaps the most undistinguished of any in the post cold war period. Its hallmark was an unending search for ways to avoid taking a stand on key international issues that would offend the US, Europe, and the Islamist sheikhdoms of the Arab world. At a time when these countries were launching unprovoked wars upon sovereign members of the United Nations and thereby destroying every pillar of the UN charter upon which a multi-polar world order could be built, India never once voted against them. Instead it abstained in the Security Council as they planned their assaults upon Libya and Syria, and voted with them on non-binding general assembly resolutions to show that they did not need to take its abstentions in the Security Council seriously. It justified this to itself by claiming that it was taking a ‘balanced’ position when balance was the last thing that a world headed for chaos needed from a large, rapidly growing and uncommitted middle power.

Within the country it came within a hairsbreadth of ending the deep alienation in Kashmir, but then took a series of decisions, starting with the crackdown upon Kashmir in August 2008 and ending with the surreptitious hanging of Afzal Guru, that made it infinitely deeper. As if that was not enough, after having made a catastrophic mistake in promising separate statehood to Telengana, it did not have the courage to admit it, and rammed the division of Andhra through the Lok Sabha after throwing its opponents out of the house in the last days of its last session when it had already become a lame duck government.

But none of these failures has come close to matching its ruin of the economy. In 2004, the Congress inherited a nation was growing at more than 8 percent. Today that growth rate has slipped well below 5 percent. Industrial output grew by 8.4 percent in 2004-5 and rose to 13 percent in 2006-7. In April to December 2013 it contracted by 0.1 percent. Non–agricultural employment has been the main casualty. According to the 66th round of the National Sample Survey, this grew by more than 37 million between 2004 and 2009. A partially overlapping set of data collected by the ministry of Industry shows that between April 2008 and March 2013 it rose by only 2.3 million. This suggests that more than 30 million job-seekers failed to find jobs. Another, more recent, survey by the NSO has shown that rural womens’ employment has also fallen by 9.1 million.

Indian industry has taken a terrible beating. Relentlessly high interest rates have ensured that there has not been one IPO ( Initial Public Offer) of shares in the last four years. Instead large industrial houses have been moving their investment in what a Singapore based industrial consultant described as ‘a Lemming –like rush’ to Indonesia, Thailand, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and elsewhere.

India’s road, rail and power infrastructure remains as starved of investment as it was a decade ago. Today not only are its bottlenecks even more forbidding to foreign investors than they were in the 1990s, but these have become the biggest hurdle to the diversification of agriculture out of cereals into high value fruit and vegetable crops. A simultaneous liberalisation of exports of the latter, under the mistaken impression that the free market cures all evils, has fed food price inflation and kept the cost of living index rising by more than ten percent a year for the past four years. This combination of joblessness and a relentless, supply side, inflation has created the mounting sense of insecurity that has proved the Congress’ undoing.

All this has happened not because the government was corrupt, or short-sighted, or sold out to the industrialists, but because of weakness and ineptitude. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in its attempt to achieve ‘inclusive development’. In the last decade it has quadrupled the annual expenditure on rural development and social welfare. There are now more than 80 schemes under which the rural poor have a right to the largesse of the State. But India has slipped down three places in the UN’s Human Development index.
Within the nation the balance of power between centre and states has tilted so far towards the latter that India is beginning to look dangerously like it did under the later Mughals. The UPA has enacted statutes on tribal welfare and land acquisition that predators in the state governments have contemptuously ignored or circumvented. It has enacted Rights to Food, Education and Employment that have built a permanent deficit into the central budget and will bankrupt the treasury.

It has set the dangerous precedent of allowing Mamta Bannerjee, a state chief minister, not only to sack a central minister but also choose his successor. As if that were not enough it has allowed her to veto an international agreement with Bangladesh over the sharing of the waters of the Teesta river. Today, as the Coalgate scam showed, there is hardly a central subject left on which the centre feels it can act without first securing the assent of the states.

The Congress is not solely responsible for this all-round deterioration. In India’s relations with its Pakistan, for instance, the weakness of governments in Islamabad is at least as much to blame. In an era of coalition governments it is also a moot point how far any central government could have kept the states in check. But there is one common thread that runs through all the changes described above for which the Congress party is solely to blame. This is a lack of statesmanship, and of decisive leadership, at the epicentre of government. This has given India a dysfunctional government.

In the last two years it has become fashionable to say that UPA-1 ruled well and to heap all the blame for its ineptitude after 2009 upon the prime minister, but the real damage was done when Mrs Sonia Gandhi led the Congress to victory in 2004, but then created a dyarchy by refusing to become the prime minister and appointing Dr Manmohan Singh in her place. Although she did this with the best of intentions the confusion it created in decision-making sowed the seeds of the ineptitude that has virtually paralysed the government in recent years.
This has made the last decade one of good intentions betrayed by sloppy implementation and oversight; of promising starts seldom carried to fruition, of opportunities missed and challenges ignored. In 2008 the Congress party almost buckled under the pressure of its ally, the Left Front, and decided to let go of the Indo-US nuclear deal rather than risk its withdrawal of support. Only late in the year, when President George W Bush’s tenure was about to end, did it muster up the courage to call the Left Front’s bluff. By then it was almost too late to get the 44-nation Nuclear Suppliers’ Group to accept the deal. It was only Bush’s tireless calling in of favours that made the NSG lift its embargo on the supply of dual use technology to India.

At the BRICS’ Delhi meeting in 2012 India joined Russia and China in strongly criticising NATO’s intervention in Libya and Syria, but failed to vote with them in the Security council. In the same year Delhi could not prevent Dinesh Trivedi from resigning as railways minister when Mamta ordered him to do so, but it could have made it clear to her that it would cost the Trinamool Congress a seat in the cabinet.

In September 2012, when RBI governor Subba Rao refused to heed finance minister P Chidambaram’s agonised pleas to lower interest rates after he had effected cuts in subsidies that would reduce the central and state deficits by around Rs 100,000 crores in a full year, the prime minister should have sided with his finance minister and forced the RBI to fulfil its tacit promise of July. Instead he did nothing and succeeded only in deepening the recession in industry.

In the end the decision-making vacuum at the Centre has consumed the Congress itself. Six years of relentless belt tightening, with only a small break at the onset of global recession, has given the poor neither growth nor price stability. It is their rage at being cheated of a future that the Congress has begun to feel today.

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The Aam Admi Party (AAP) is riding a wave. Ever since it hurled the Congress out of power in Delhi and chipped away a sizable chunk of the BJP’S vote, it has been making the headlines every single day. To its leaders nothing seems impossible – they are confident of enrolling one crore members throughout the country and talk openly of replacing the Congress as the second tent pole of Indian politics. To the millions of ordinary people, living increasingly harsh lives in our congested cities, who are queuing up to join it, it has become a beacon that promises to guide them to a better future.

But the wave they are riding is a wave of anger. It has been generated by the growing injustice of a political system that is dominated by a corrupt, criminal and predatory class that has somehow seized democracy by the neck and turned into an instrument of disempowerment, when it should have been the precise opposite. The anger has been visible and has been growing for the better part of four decades. Exceptionally high growth between 2003 and 2010 held it in check for a while. But the collapse of growth, the disappearance of jobs, and the return of acute insecurity in the past four years, has made it erupt again. When he decided to form a political party and fight the Delhi elections Kejriwal opened a new channel for the dispossessed to express this anger through. The Delhi vote shows how strong it was. Its electrifying aftermath shows that this anger is turning into a virtual Tsunami. If it is not controlled; if it is continuously stoked, it will not reform Indian democracy but destroy it.

Unfortunately, despite its good intentions, this is exactly what the AAP is leading the masses into doing. To say that victory has caught the party unprepared would be an understatement, for apart from announcing highly populist cuts in electricity tariffs and water rates, all it has done in the past four weeks is to feed the self righteousness of the underprivileged masses and lead, or encourage, them to take shortcuts in their search for redress.

One episode, that occurred within hours of their accepting power, reflects just how unfit the party is, at least at this moment, to govern a city let alone a country. Late in the night of January 21 the AAP’s new law minister Somnath Bharti led a mob that broke into a house in south Delhi inhabited by four (or five) Ugandan women, accused them of running a drugs and prostitution racket, forced them to provide samples of their urine, stormed to a police station and demanded their arrest without a warrant.

Had Kejriwal allowed the law to take its course, Bharti’s attack could have been dismissed as an aberration, but instead he summoned a ‘Khap Panchayat’ of his own senior party men, who decided that Bharti had done nothing wrong and, instead put the blame on the central government for insisting upon retaining control of the Delhi police. As if that was not Kejriwal personally led a ten day Dharna demanding that the central government hand over control of Delhi’s police to his government forthwith. And in a supreme act of contempt for the Indian State and Republic, he chose to hold his dharna in a manner calculated to disrupt the Republic day parade. When asked why he was bent upon doing so one of his lieutenants retorted “parade ko Goli Maro”. He withdrew his remark only when he remembered that TV anchors and audiences do not have a sense of humour.

This single common strand in this chain of actions was an utter contempt for the Indian State. Its institutions and legal processes can be brushed aside because they have all been perverted into instruments for protecting the power of this class. It showed that while Kejriwal talks of reform his purpose is to destroy the present edifice of the State and replace it with an ad hoc ‘peoples’ rule masquerading as democracy.

One swallow, his defenders may argue, does not make a summer. But when many swallows take to the air at the same time, a change is definitely in the air. On February 3, the AAP cabinet took two decisions: the first was to prosecute former Chief Minister Sheila Dixit on the grounds that she had hurriedly regularised 1200 unauthorised colonies in order to curry favour with the electorate, and to favour slum landlords and corrupt builders. The second was to pass a Jana Lok Pal bill for Delhi state that would pointedly include the sitting chief minister within the ambit of this seven member body’s investigative and prosecutorial powers. What is more, knowing that the bill is unlikely to receive the President’s assent because it goes against the recently enacted Central Lok Pal act which explicitly keeps the prime minister and the judiciary out of its purview, Kejriwal announced that he would not ask for the president’s assent to the bill but would call a special session of the Delhi state assembly to bring it into law.

The Jana Lok Pal bill is clearly intended to show up the cronyism of the centre. Sheila Dixit’s prosecution will, Kejriwal hopes, force the Congress to choose between backing her and leaving her to her fate. The former option will brand Mrs. Dixit as corrupt in the popular mind; the latter will brand the entire Congress.

Kejriwal is therefore clearly spoiling for a fight. His goal is to force the Congress to withdraw support from his infant government in Delhi and further tarnish its own image while sparing the AAP from having to fulfil its populist promises. Had he stopped there he might have got away with it, for it is possible conceive of an Indian Union in which State governments pass more stringent laws than the centre advocates. But Kejriwal wants to bring the Delhi Lok Pal Act into being without any reference to the central government. And that is not an attack on corruption, or even on the Congress: it is a direct attack upon the Indian State. For if one state succeeds in dispensing with presidential assent for its enactments, all will follow suit. That will be the end of the Indian Union.

What Kejriwal has no inkling of is the power of the wave he is riding and the near certainty that if he loses control he will be its first victim. For this wave has built up when India is at the dangerous point in the transformation from a traditional to a capitalist market economy at which it can either build the political and economic institutions that are necessary to make the transition acceptable to the common people, or fail to do so and regress into violence, anarchy and disintegration.

Other countries have come to the same critical point and not all have been able to negotiate it successfully. In Europe Britain, France, Belgium and Holland did so with relative ease. Spain, Portugal, Italy, Hungary, and Rumania did not. Germany succeeded initially, but regressed into failure in the 1930s under the combined onslaught of defeat in war, hyperinflation and the great depression of 1929.

The challenge that all of the above countries faced was the same as the one India is facing today. The most salient feature the early and middle stages of the capitalist transformation is that it creates a profound sense of insecurity. This arises from a growing desire to accumulate wealth – the key to prosperity in the market economy, rapid urbanisation and the consequent dissolution of the social bonds and relationships of traditional society. In India this change is visible in the inexorable dissolution of the joint family system, and the network of caste and community obligations that provided the social safety net for people in the past. In absolute terms, while this change has physically impoverished only the bottom ten percent of Indian society, the insecurity it has created now permeates its entire spectrum.

The acceleration of growth in the nineties and 2000s increased the pace of dissolution and therefore heightened the insecurity of the masses, but in the rapidly growing urban areas the resulting feeling of helplessness was held in check by the plenitude of jobs and market opportunities that the growth created.

However, when growth stalled in 2008, and Dr Manmohan Singh and his advisers deliberately sacrificed growth for the next six years as they chased the will-o-the-wisp of inflation, this urban, very recently empowered, population saw its businesses failing and jobs disappearing and realised that it had been robbed of its future. This is why the corruption, cronyism and lack of accountability that people had lived with for decades, suddenly became unbearable and unacceptable.

The Aam Admi Party has been able to tap into this vein of anger. But if Indian democracy is to survive it has to be assuaged, and the feeling of helplessness it breeds has to be removed. If the AAP does not pull itself together and offer a well thought out and ‘do-able’ programme of political and economic reform that both restores their future and makes it more secure, the disillusionment that will follow will make huge swathes of the people lose faith in democracy altogether. History is full of examples of rebellions arising from economic distress — the most recent being the chaos unleashed by the so-called Arab Spring. But the precedent that Indians should consider most closely is the death of the Weimar republic is Germany.

World war I destroyed most of German industry and the German hyperinflation of 1923-24 destroyed the purchasing power of the old German middle class. By 1928, however, Germany had begun to struggle back on its feet with the help of a new class of small entrepreneurs – the Mittelstand – when it was struck, like a bolt from the blue, by the Great Depression. In less than three years industrial production fell by 42 percent and unemployment rose from 8.5 to 30 percent. This second collapse destroyed the Mittelstand and caused armies of small bourgeoisie and workers to flock to the standard of the Nazi party. Between May 1928 and March 1933 its share of the vote rose from 2.6 percent to 43.9 percent and Hitler came to power.

The AAP is bent upon inflaming the expectations of the people. But the more it does so the more surely will disillusionment follow. Should that happen voters will have only one place left to go. And Narendra Modi, who is promising an industrial renaissance and a culturally homogeneous Hindu India, will be waiting to receive them.

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After pushing up interest rates yet again by another quarter percent our flamboyant governor of the Reserve Bank, Raghuram Rajan said, “ we are vigilant owls , not hawks or doves”. Owls he pointed out were wise. The RBI, by which he meant himself, was doing what was necessary for the economy. This was to control inflation. When asked whether the hike would not further impair economic growth he said “ the juxtaposition of growth and inflation is not correct …. Higher levels of inflation cut into household budgets and constrict the purchasing power of individuals. This discourages investment and weakens growth. Therefore inflation has to be brought down first, in order to create the environment for growth”.
Rajan’s reasoning has so many flaws that one does not know where to start pointing these out. Inflation does constrict consumption as he claims, but only if the consumers’ money income remains unchanged. Rajan therefore starts by assuming that purchasing power in the economy will remain static. This means that he starts by assuming that there will be no growth in the economy. Since high interest rates reduce consumer spending on durables and Capital expenditure, they inevitably slow down growth. Raising interest rates to curb inflation therefore automatically ensures that consumers’ money incomes will remain unchanged. This turns Rajan’s policy into a self fulfilling prophecy.
The truth is that it is the RBI’s policy since March 2010 of ‘targeting inflation’ without regard for growth that has created the conditions that are ‘constricting the purchasing power of individuals’. That is why industrial growth has turned negative in the past seven months after having been nearly static during the previous two years.
The most Rajan should have claimed was that price stability creates a better environment for sustained industrial growth and that he was prepared to sacrifice short term but unsustainable growth for long term, sustainable growth. But to be valid, this argument needed to show that high interest rates were indeed curbing inflation. But data for the last seven, and not just four years show that raising interest rates has had absolutely zero effect on prices. In fact for the entire period inflation and interest rates have moved in the same direction! So all that Rajan is doing now is to put the gloss of academic jargon on a policy that has failed since January 2007 !
But just suppose , for the moment , that he might prove right this time – that conditions now exist in which high interest rates can indeed bring down consumer cost of living. Then why has Dr Manmohan Singh set up the 7th pay commission exactly one week after Rajan tightened the reins on credit? For another pay commission means another Rs 100,000 crores added to the centre’s non- development expenditure and another huge surge of purchasing power in the economy two years hence. Therefore, if Dr. Rajan’s reasoning is right, to another jump in consumer price inflation.
The havoc that former pay commissions have wreaked on the Indian economy has been documented over and over again. The fifth Pay commission increased the combined central and state government expenditures between 1997 and 2,000 by 80 percent to the then colossal sum of Rs.133,381 crores. This wrecked the finances of the state governments and brought all maintenance expenditure , on roads power transmission lines, dams and canals to a grinding halt. The World Bank called this the single most adverse shock to the Indian economy.
When the Left front, now a UPA partner, raised the demand for a sixth pay commission in 2004 Dr. Manmohan Singh set up a committee under the cabinet secretary to study it. The committee turned down the proposal stating that the Centre might not be able to bear the additional burden. The 12th finance commission went a step further and recommended that the government should stop appointing Pay commissions every ten years.
Inspite of this Manmohan Singh succumbed to the pressure of the Left ( and populists in his own party , and appointed the 6th Pay commission. This led to another sudden jump in the country’s consolidated fiscal deficit of one percent over the 1.5 percent caused by the fifth Pay commission.
This time, undaunted by the huge fiscal deficit and the faltering of revenue growth because of industrial stagnation, Dr. Singh has announced another Pay commission, and he has not waited even 10 years to do so!
It does not take a genius to figure out why. The Congress is in a panic: every opinion poll taken so far, not to mention its disastrous showing in the December state elections, shows that it is on its way out. The more optimistic predictions suggest that it will win around a hundred seats. The setting up of yet another Pay Commission only seven and a half years after the last one is its desperate bid to woo the votes of its 80 lakh central government and public sector employees. It has done so now because in about six weeks the election code will come into operation and the time for handing out candy to the voters at the taxpayers’ expense will run out.
This raises an important question: does the left hand of government know what the right is doing? Did Rajan know when he raised interest rates last week that the government was going to announce a measure that would shortly put another 1.5 percent of GDP worth of purchasing power into the hands of its central and state employees barely two years hence. And if he did know then how, last week, could he claim with a straight face that he was raising interest rates to control inflation?
Now that Rajan knows, and since he will still be around what will he do when the Pay commission releases another flood of money into the economy,? Will he ratchet up the interest rates again and again to control “inflationary expectations” ? And when that kills industry instead of merely putting it to sleep , while continuing to push consumer prices up and, will he raise interest rates to control inflation again , and again , and again? The plain truth is that while Rajan may consider himself to bean owl, Dr. Manmohan Singh has turned him into a jackass.

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The one thing that anyone being interviewed on television should not allow is for his interviewer to take control of the interview. This is doubly true for the head of a government: it is quadruply so for an aspiring head of government facing a general election in three months. But that is precisely what Rahul Gandhi allowed Arnab Goswami to do from the first moments of his hour –long interview. Television is not about what people say, but how they look and how they behave. Unlike the print media and radio, less than 20 percent of its message is carried by the spoken word. Eighty percent is conveyed by gesture and expression, and this 80 percent is not received by the cognitive 10 percent of the brain but the more primitive 90 percent, where intuition and reflex reside.

Arnab Goswami knows this for he spends half his waking life in front of the camera. And he used every trick in the book to establish his total dominance over Gandhi—the relaxed, sitting-back stance, the white pencil held negligently close to his eye ready to swing down as he asked his next question; the gentle, respectful tone and the condescending smile as he relentlessly repeated questions that Gandhi could not answer. Goswami left nothing to chance. As for Rahul, it became painfully apparent within minutes that he had come to make a campaign speech, not to engage in a candid exchange of views. It was apparent that he had been coached to death on what to say and what not to say; that he had been instructed never to show any doubt, to concede any mistake by his party, and never, never, to admit the possibility of a defeat for the Congress, inspite of the growing mountain of evidence of its loss of support in the country.

As a result the ‘debate’ became a dialogue of the deaf in which Goswami and he spoke but did not hear each other. Rahul was determined to speak about the future. Goswami was determined to keep the debate firmly anchored in the past. Rahul kept repeating set piece remarks about the closing of democracy to the people, of the entrenchment of corruption, about the need for deep structural reforms in order to save not only the Congress but democracy itself and what he was doing and wanted to do to bring the youth fully into politics. But Goswami kept asking him questions about what the Congress had said about Narendra Modi at various points in the past, how its allegation that Modi had abetted the communal riots in Gujarat in 2002 had been disproved by Judgements of the Gujarat High court, and how the Congress, had abetted the anti-Sikh riots in 1984 in Delhi.

The mutual declamation would have turned into a debate if Rahul answered Goswami’s questions, or Goswami had chosen to follow up Rahul’s leads into the future. But this is where the innocence, not to mention inexperience of Rahul Gandhi and the utter cold-blooded cynicism of Goswami came starkly into view. Goswami was not interested in the future, only in the present ratings. Also, having made up his mind that Modi was likely to become the next prime minister, he was intent only on safeguarding his eat in the next Rajya Sabha.

As for the difference between Rajiv Gandhi’s response to the Delhi riots and Modi’s response to the Godhra train burning it can be summed up in a single contrast: On hearing, during the afternoon of February 28, 2002 that the Vishwa Hindu Parishad had called for a bandh to protest the killing of kar sewaks in the Sabarmati express, Modi promptly announced that the State would sponsor the bandh. This immediately tied the hands of the police and prevented them from arresting VHP and Bajrang dal activists as a precautionary measure. As a result, on the night of the 28th, while the neighbouring governments of Andhra, Maharashtra, and Rajasthan put tens of thousands of “history sheeters” in jail for the next few days the tally of the Gujarat police was just two, and both were muslims! What can be said in Modi’s favour is that he probably did not realise what the full consequences of his action would be, because this was the first communal carnage shown live, every hour on the hour, by India’s rating –hungry TV channels. He could not, therefore, anticipate what TV’s impact would be. But this is at best a mitigation, not an exoneration.

By contrast, whatever individual Congressmen may have done after Mrs Gandhi’s assassination, on the night of October 3 while Delhi was burning after her funeral, a grief stricken and jet-lagged Rajiv Gandhi, exhausted by walking for miles behind his mother’s cortege and then lighting her funeral pyre, got into a jeep and spent most of the night driving from one riot-struck area to the next, directing the police, chasing the rioters, and angrily exhorting them to stop their murder and pillage. That is the difference between Delhi and Ahmedabad; between Rajiv Gandhi and Narendra Modi; between secularism and communalism, between democracy and fascism. Rahul Gandhi could have destroyed Arnab Goswami if only he had known what to say. But it seems that along with its capacity to govern the Congress has also lost its collective memory.

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Many people have warned against an attack on Syria because it could ignite a sectarian bloodbath in the entire middle east. But I have seen no exhaustive analysis of precisely what could happen. In the paragraphs that follow I have tried to follow the logic of current developments to their logical conclusion and see where it leads. Comments will be welcome.

On Thursday September 5 the Daily Telegraph of London carried the headline “Obama will strike Syria to end war”. Only the heartlessly cynical could make such a statement; only the hopelessly naive will believe it. For the strike on Syria will be not be the end of war but a beginning. What it will end is the Syrian government’s capacity to stave off the waves of al Qaeda linked Jihadis who are flooding into Syria through Turkey from over 40 countries. And it will be the beginning of a larger civil war that will plunge the entire eastern Mediterranean littoral into a sectarian holocaust.

The Syrian people are fully aware of this: in Damascus they are mobilising for war: young men are acquiring arms; tailors are working night and day to sew uniforms for them; and families are stockpiling food and water for the grim days that lie ahead. Christians and Alawis who can afford to, are sending their families to Lebanon. “After the Americans finish bombing the Jihadis will come”, said one young man to BBC as he waved his pro-Assad wristband in front of the camera lens. We will be waiting for them. I am prepared to die for my country.”

Shias are mobilising in neighbouring Iraq. “This is Iraq 2003 all over again”, an Iraqi told the Guardian. “We will not leave our Syrian brethren to fight alone”. In Lebanon the Hezbollah is geared for battle. Its cadres have decimated fleeing Jihadis who have sought shelter in Lebanon. Today they are preparing to flood into Syria with the full backing of the bulk of the Lebanese population.

Syria’s Kurds are also being drawn into the war. Fazel Hawramy, an independent journalist from Iraqi Kurdistan reported in his blog on August 28 that about 70 Kurds belonging to the Al Qaeda linked Ansar-ul-Islam, had joined the Jabhat al Nusra and were fighting Kurds belonging to the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) in Syria. The Syrian Kurds therefore already know that Al Qaeda has no intention of respecting their autonomy. This suggests that the wider war that the bombings will unleash is likely to engulf Syrian Kurdistan as well. Lastly since the PYD is the Syrian affiliate of the powerful Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey, the fighting can spread not only to sections of Turkey’s 22 million Alawites but to its 11 million Kurds as well.

Obama’s administration cannot be unaware of these dangers, but believes that it will be able to extract a win-win result for itself and its principal ally, Israel. A strong but limited missile strike on Syria, it believes, will weaken the Assad regime without giving the Jihadis an outright victory. The prolonged civil war that will follow will eliminate most of the Jihadis, weaken the Hezbollah and bleed Syria into impotence, leaving Israel the undisputed master of the eastern Mediterranean. It will also send an unambiguous signal to Iran on what will happen to it if it pursues its nuclear weapons programme.

The arrogance that underlies these calculations is breathtaking: indeed this is power gone berserk for it presupposes a capacity to control the outcome of war that, history has shown, does not exist. How can Obama and his planners be so confident that their air-cum-missile strike will draw no response from the Syrian armed forces? How can they be so sure that it will be ineffective? Iraq’s response was ineffective because 12 years of sanctions had left its armed forces without aircraft, guns, ammunition, and missiles. Libya’s was ineffective because the country was tiny, militarily isolated and taken by surprise.

Syria, by contrast has had days of warning. It has a battle hardened army, an array of sophisticated Russian missiles including an upgraded version of the Yakhont anti-ship missile and, just possibly, a few operational batteries of the S-300. What is more, unlike Libya, it will not be cyber-blind. Seven Russian warships are stationed along the Syrian coast, ready to feed it real time information on American ship movements and missile launches.

Can Obama be sure that Syria will not succeed in sinking a single American ship or bringing down a single aircraft? And if it does, how will a President who feels too politically weak to disregard taunts about his inability to enforce an imaginary ‘red line’, face the taunts that will be hurled at him when American soldiers are killed and ships or aircraft destroyed ?

Can he be sure that Iran will not join in the battle; that Baghdad will not give safe passage to Iranian and Iraqi fighters, and Russians will not send ships loaded with S-300 and other deadly missiles to Syria, daring the US to stop them?

To forecast what is likely to happen in Syria one needs to look not at Iraq or Libya but Kosovo . When NATO first drew up plans for bombing Yugoslav forces in Kosovo it had expected to use 40 aircraft and bomb Kosovo for two weeks. But when its supposedly deadly precision bombing damaged or destroyed no more than 20 percent of Yugoslavia’s guns and armour in Kosovo the NATO commander General Wesley Clarke was compelled to seek permission to widen his attack. As a result by mid-April, 1999, three weeks after the bombing began, NATO had committed 1000 aircraft to a non-stop bombing of Kosovo and the rest of Serbia.

In the next fifty days, NATO bombers flew nearly 6,000 bombing missions, dropped 20,000 bombs, knocked out half of Serbia and Montenegro’s airports, all of their oil refining capacity, 31 bridges (including all but two over the Danube), seventy percent of its power supply, two railway systems that linked Serbia to Kosovo, and most of its telecommunications system. By early May 1999 these raids had already killed 1200 civilians and seriously injured another 5,000. The total number of bombs dropped exceeded those dropped on Iraq during the 1991 gulf war. The result: an independent Kosovo —a semi criminal state whose revenues are derived largely from the trans-shipment of narcotics from Asia to Europe.

The longer that Obama bombs Syria, the more certain will a Jihadi victory become. This will upset the US and Israel’s calculations and become the starting point of a much more intense terrorist war that will engulf Jordan, Egypt and, ultimately Israel itself. The precedent for understanding this is Afghanistan 1991. Between 1980 and 1991 around 16,000 Arab Mujahideen graduated from Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri’s Beit al Maqtab. After the Russians withdrew, some 2,800 to 3,000 remained behind in Pakistan and around ten thousand headed for home. Within months these plunged Egypt, Libya, and Algeria into civil wars that have still not ended. Many of them , however, became the first mercenaries in the new global army of Islam and headed for Bosnia and Chechnya.

A Jihadi victory in Syria willleave 10,000 to 15,000 foreign jihadis ( John Kerry’s estimate) unemployed penniless and unwanted. With shattered economies and little chance of finding a job at home few will wish, or be allowed, to return to their home countries. Their only option will be to find another holy war to fight. As Osman, a Kurdish member of Jabhat al Nusra, wrote to his brother in Halabja shortly before his death, “Once the fight is over here [in Syria], we will go anywhere the kuffar are fighting against Muslims.”

Al Qaeda and its numerous affiliates, like the Hizbut Tahrir, have never made any secret of their ultimate goal, which is to liberate Al Quds (Jerusalem) and the Al Aqsa mosque. This requires the destruction of Israel. The easiest way to Israel lies through Jordan and the Sinai. So these Islamist mercenaries will target the strongly pro-west half-British monarchy in Jordan and the tottering, army-backed, secular regime in Egypt. In both countries the influx of several thousand battle-hardened fighters who are willing to die for Islam will tilt the scales against the survival of the government.

Obama’s intervention will not therefore ‘end the war in Syria’ but ignite a far larger bloodbath. The death toll will not be counted in thousands but millions. And when it ends there is a more than even chance that the entire region will be under Al Qaeda’s sway. Should this happen Israel’s survival will become doubtful, for it will be surrounded. Its hostile borders will be ten times longer and will therefore become well-nigh indefensible. Iran will then be the least of its worries.

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