No U.N. or third party intervention in Kashmir

By N.B. Menon

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan urged India and Pakistan to resume their bilateral dialogue during his South Asian tour. At the same time, the U.N.'s top diplomat ruled out the option of the U.N. role in resolving the Kashmir issue. While in Islamabad, he left the Pakistani media gasping with a few home truths regarding the U.N. resolutions on the Kashmir issue. The Pakistani media has for long been fed on a diet stressing the relevance of the old U.N. resolutions. But in a bit of polite plain-speak, he explained that the U.N. resolutions were not "self-enforcing" unlike some resolutions of the U.N. Security Council. He stressed the Lahore Declaration as the best way forward, which has the effect of placing the ball firmly in Islamabad's court.

Mr. Annan's attempt to make the Taliban regime see reason over its edict to destroy all statues in Afghanistan was a complete failure. In recent days it has been brought home to Islamabad that it is totally out of sync with the rest of the world over its policy with respect to Afghanistan. Some of the fallout of the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha statutes has wafted onto Islamabad, where most of the activity to stop the wanton demolition took place. The Americans and the western world may have been slow to wake up to the destructive intentions of the Taliban regime and their efforts were a measure that it was too little and too late. But the Asian world has been shaken by the destruction of the statues. While the majority of the South-East Asian governments were fairly muted in their condemnation of the demolition, partly since they had no linkages of any sort with the government in Afghanistan, the Buddhists around the world have been deeply distressed by the destruction.

The Sri Lankan government had taken the lead to try and save the statues. It was the Sri Lankan government that made the most active efforts to muster support by contacting other countries. Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar, who was visiting Abu Dhabi when the edict was announced, contacted the governments of UAE, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the three countries that recognise the Taliban regime. There was hasty activity in Islamabad, as envoys of several countries, including Japan, Thailand and the European Union tried to put pressure on the Pakistani government to intervene with the Taliban authorities. The Taliban edict had come barely a week after the American authorities had ordered the Taliban office in New York, which was its window to the United Nations, to be closed down as part of the U.N. Security Council sanctions. The Taliban regime had shut down the U.N. office in Kabul in retaliation. The Taliban embassy in Islamabad therefore became the only connection with the outside world and hence served to focus attention on Pakistan. After initially pleading helplessness in the matter to the group of envoys, the Pakistan government was eventually forced to appeal to the Taliban authorities, saying that it shared the concern of the international community. The Taliban regime follows its own percepts derived from a particularly harsh, fundamentalist view of Islam, with no regard for international opinion.

The majestic Bamiyan statues have been destroyed. It was not an easy job for the Taliban militia which had to use anti-aircraft guns, missiles and explosives to blast the huge figures carved into the sandstone rock face of the mountain. But there are hundreds of historic sites that still remain within Afghanistan, a country that was once the crossroads on the ancient silk route. The actual destruction of the gigantic statues of Buddha had its effect within Pakistan itself: With the exception of the more fundamentalist groups, it has shaken a sizeable section of the people and has brought home the effects of extreme radicalism to the more liberal section of the population. Many Pakistanis have not appreciated their being lumped together with the Taliban in international perception over this issue.

Islamabad has had to close its border with Afghanistan after more than 50,000 Afghan refugees had crossed over into Pakistan. There are reports that about half a million persons have been displaced within Afghanistan because of the effects of the bitter winter and the worst drought in three decades to hit the war ravaged country. But it has got too closely tied up with the Taliban regime in international perception.

At the same time, it must be acknowledged that the Pakistani chief executive, General Pervez Musharraf was prompt in offering aid to India after the devastating earthquake in Gujarat; he then followed it up with a telephone call to Prime Minister Vajpayee in Delhi. In his various statements in the recent weeks he has said that he was prepared to meet Delhi halfway. "The issue of Kashmir should be solved, whether he (Mr. Vajpayee) comes here, or I go there, or we meet at a third place," he said. He told a Dubai paper that it was his dream to be remembered as the person who brought peace to Kashmir. But the suspicions that cloud the air in both Islamabad and New Delhi had their effect in reducing the positive atmospherics, by quibbling over who called whom first, to placate various domestic lobbies. However, in the midst of all the fervent offers of talks, the Pakistani leader delivered a belligerent speech at the Kashmir Solidarity Day meeting in Muzaffarabad. It can be said that the Kashmir Solidarity Day is a traditional occasion for spewing vitriol against India on the Kashmir issue and General Musharraf could not make too drastic a change from past patterns. But it is an indicator of the hold that the anti-India sections exercise on the Pakistani establishment. Nor has he made any statement to tone down the public statements and threats that keep emanating from the jihadi groups based in Pakistan.

When his Interior Minister, Moinuddin Haider tried to rein in the jihadi groups by banning them from carrying arms in public and collecting funds in masjids, he was forced to back down as a result of the furore it generated.

After the U.S. Presidential visit last year, when President Bill Clinton lectured the Pakistani authorities over national television, Mr. Kofi Annan's remarks are the second instance when it has been made clear to Islamabad that it cannot expect the U.N. or third party intervention on the Kashmir issue. The Hurriyat Conference leaders had expressed their surprise at Mr. Kofi Annan's comments regarding the U.N. resolutions and in Delhi., Mr. Annan declined to meet the Hurriyat representative, Mr. Abdul Ghani Lone. External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh told the visiting U.N. Secretary General that India favoured bilateral negotiations, but for that first conditions conducive to holding bilateral talks had to be created. The message is clear: Islamabad's efforts to attract outside intervention or mediation on the Kashmir issue are not drawing much response. INAV

Congress does a volte face on reforms

By Sisir Basu

The recent Congress jamboree in Bangalore might have passed off without the customary pomp and ostentation but its dismal import for the nation would be difficult to underestimate. For a great political organisation that nurtured parliamentary democracy in its most fragile formative period to have embarked upon a patently obstructionist course of frustrating the constructive forum of the national Parliament in the wake of the Tehelka expose of suspected irregularities in defence purchase deals, is perhaps an unpardonable crime against national interests. For a party which has, for decades, been seen as a fraudulent delinquent, siphoning off public funds and kickbacks from vendors of defence equipment into the party's coffers for funding election expenses, the Congress is certainly unworthy of invoking Dharmic sanctions against the NDA Government.

Far more than the political significance of the Congress now announcing its willingness to cohabit with all non-BJP elements in prospective coalition arrangements it is the economic formulation from the Bangalore Congress that provides serious cause for concern. It is not that the principal Opposition party in Parliament is exactly waiting for an opportunity to be called upon to form the Government at the Centre in the foreseeable future.

The question that would puzzle a wide section of the not-so-politically committed public is whether the virtual recantation by the Congress of its USP (unique selling point), to borrow a marketing clich' , of its progressive pro-reform commitment, is a declaration of bankruptcy of thinking or an admission of fear that economic reforms which were initiated in 1991 by the Narasimha Rao Government have already unleashed unmanageable political confrontations even apart from irreconcilable economic contradictions.

Has the Congress developed "cold feet" about the staggering dimensions of economic restructuring or is it simply pretending, for reasons, purely of political tactics and exigencies, that if only the BJP-led Government had not mismanaged the reforms, India would have been on course with the "tryst of destiny", of abolishing mass poverty and unemployment?

The widespread discontent among farmers arising from the plummeting commodity prices is obviously a rallying point for the Opposition. That it is a real problem and a manifestation of cumulative distortions in the mismanagement of the agricultural economy is too obvious to warrant a treatise. The Congress formulation in Bangalore seemed, however, much too illogical to attribute all the distortions to the Vajpayee Government. To say that the NDA Government is guilty of neglecting the interests of farmers does not chime with the accusation that the Government has been guilty of mismanaging the agricultural economy. One need not be a learned agronomist to know that the decline in the growth rate of agricultural output as a whole during the last two years has been caused mainly by the vagaries of the weather. That there is no "Vajpayee factor" in agricultural output but only agro-climatic factors and production-decisions by millions of farmers induced or deterred by the regime of support / procurement prices must be known to the Congress stalwarts who ought not to have indulged in the rather crude form of coarse criticism.

It is an amusing fact that no less an economist (now turned a consummate politician) than Dr. Manmohan Singh referred specifically to the vast stocks of foodgrains with the Government and thereby, by implication, to the growing paradox of huge mountains of foodstocks and poor offtake from the public distribution system. Is the country to believe that this situation could have been caused except by a long course of gross mismanagement of the food economy of which the momentum for the mismatch between stocks and offtake was provided by the Congress governments at the Centre which made a fine art of pampering the rich farmers of Punjab and Haryana, through procurement prices that were far above those recommended by the Agricultural Costs and Price Commission? Dr. Singh now says that his party always believed in food for work as the way out of the situation. How was it then that during 1991-96, with so many hundreds of Centrally-sponsored schemes and the verbal chant of "reforms with a human face", there was no national agenda for food for work linking even rural infrastructure with the project?

Congress leaders in confabulation in Bangalore have discovered that agriculture is the mainstay of the Indian economy and that the agonising problems of the farmers have been engendered largely by declining public investments in this sector. Is it a new phenomenon or something that has persisted for decades? What was the Narasimha Rao Government's response during the heyday of economic reforms? That it was nothing much to write home about is the truth. Of course, the Government then had its constraints which continue to this day. The Bangalore resolution is not forthcoming on this factor. The economic surveys of the period (1991-96) particularly spoke about this constraint. And that is the looming fiscal deficit of the Government.

To put it in a nutshell, the problem of declining public investments in agriculture was closely linked to the implicit and explicit subsidies given to the farming community through power, water and fertilizers apart from remunerative prices. The Bangalore economic recipe talks about increasing public investments in agriculture without altering the package of subsidies and without frowning on fiscal deficit - a combination that can only help magnify the distortions in the economy!

It was a joke when the BJP came up in 1996 with its mixture of Swadeshi and globalisation. The party paraded "calibrated globalisation" as its special strategy even if it is still searching for a calibrating instrument! It apparently is time for the Congress to inflict an even more cruel joke on the nation - the restoration of the mixed economy with all its state monopolies, politicisation of decisions on investments, "the commanding heights" for the public sector, state-directed bank credit through loan melas, the ruling politicians picking and choosing directors for corporate boards of PSEs and so forth. The danger is not that the Congress will emerge from a state of wilderness to form the government at the Centre within a viable timeframe but that the semantic subterfuge called the mixed economy may mislead some unwary future historians into believing that India over the Congress rule during 1947-77, strictly adhering to a statist controlled economy, was able to banish poverty and usher in universal welfare! INAV