Periscope of Pakistan
Jitters over Durand Line

For a fleeting moment in re-cent history the military dic-tatorship posing as a democracy in Pakistan was overjoyed that the US, by insisting on joint cordon-and-search operations against Al Qaeda and Taliban top brass in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, had helped extend its suzereignty to the hitherto "no-go" Pakhtoon tribal areas. Suddenly a 100-year-old skeleton tumbled out of the cupboard and instead of legitimizing the Durand Line the spectre of Pukhtoon self-determination stares Pakistan in the face.

Countering (former Pakistan Chief of Army Staff) Gen Aslam Beg's apprehension that the Pakhtun demand for Pakhtunnistan may be revived in context of Pakistan-Afghanistan tensions, Aslam Effendi (scion of Afghan royalty) in an article in NEWS, laments: "A result of a lot of misunderstanding and bungling by the bureaucracy over these issues, the NWFP is the only place on earth that has no name ... Keeping the foregoing facts in view, Gen Aslam Beg's fears can only become real if the wise bureaucrats in Pakistan deal in the same fashion as the wise men in Washington have been dealing with Afghanistan and Iraq.

"Not very long ago the Pakhtun areas that are a part of Pakistan today were a part of Afghanistan and all the Pakhtuns considered themselves as Pakhtuns first and everything else afterwards. My forefather King Sher Ali Khan and the British Indian government clashed over this very issue, for King Sher Ali claimed the territories of Bajaur, Chitral, Dir, Swat, etc as parts of Afghanistan, Lord Mayo, the British Viceroy, had verbally told Sher Ali that these territories would be returned to Afghanistan if and when the British quit India, but Mayo's successor, the arrogant British Viceroy Lord Lytton, said that he would not recognise what was agreed between Sher Ali and Lord Mayo. As a result, the Second Afghan War took place. Even before this, the British had deprived the Afghans of Peshawar and this was during the reign of my great grandfather King Dost Mohammad Khan, who used to say that Afghanistan is incomplete without its gateway, Peshawar.

Aslam Effendi adds: "And when the creation of Pakistan was most dramatically and unexpectedly announced, the Afghan government was shocked, felt betrayed by the British, and to express resentment, cast a vote against

Pakistan in the UN…. of including Afghanistan in the referendum which was to decide the future of the disputed Pakhtun areas, Afghanistan was not included and thus was laid the foundation of suspicion in the relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"But despite all these facts, ignorance about the background of the Durand Line and Pakhtunistan persists. The British, with the cooperation of their foreign Secretary Sir Mortimer Durand, created the Durand Line this artificial frontier is so named after him. The British had three aims by creating the Durand Line: First, to mark the boundaries of the Afghan Kingdom, using Afghanistan as a buffer between their Indian colony and Czarist Russia. Secondly, to weaken the volatile and unruly Pakhtunson both sides of the Durand Line. And thirdly, to force Afghanistan to give up its territorial claim over Chaman, Chagai, Khyber, Waziristan, Bajaur, Buner, Chitral, Chilas, Dir, Swat, Peshawar, etc. The Durand Line agreement was signed between the then Muhammadzai dynasty King, Abdur Rehman Khan, and British India in the year 1893. King Abdur Rehman had no way to refuse, for his refusal would have meant British Indian embargo on arms and ammunition supplies to Afghanistan.

"Today, according to international law, the Geneva Convention and the Charter of the UN, the Durand Line treaty is void because it was signed by an Afghan King under duress, However, whether one accepts the Durand Line or not, the Pakhtuns and gypsies have been crossing and re-crossing the long, porous and mountainous frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan, year after year, and century after century, without any visas and passports and it is impossible to seal such a border, No wonder, the famous Pakhtun leader Badshah Khan (Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan also known as the ‘frontier Gandhi’) expressed his desire to be buried inside Afghanistan rather than his hometown in Pakistan just to prove that the Durand Line is only an artificial wall like the Wall of Berlin and that Afghanistan is the mother of all the Pakhtun tribes Moreover, despite creating the Durand Line, the British did not enjoy a single peaceful night in the tribal areas."

DAWN article by Ghayoor Ahmad gives the contra view: "In July 1947, the Afghan government informed the British government that the tribesmen in the ‘free tribal territory’ desire to dissociate themselves from India, meaning thereby Pakistan which was then in the offing.

"Tribesmen, on both sides of the Durand Line, who shared a common ethnic identity, had always enjoyed close economic and political ties with the major states of the Indus valley and regarded Peshawar, which was the hub of their economic activities, as their capital.

"When Pakistan appeared on the map of the world, as an independent and sovereign state, the Afghan government opposed its entry into the United Nations on the plea that the newly born state could not inherit the rights of British India.

"The UN General Assembly resolution 2625 (1970), accordingly, enjoins the nations to ‘refrain from any action aimed at the partial or total disruption of the national unity and territorial integrity of any other state or country’. It follows from this that the Durand Line, established more than 100 years ago, unquestionably remains the international border between Pakistan and Afghanistan and constitutes the integral part of Pakistan's national territory. Its validity, sanctified by the international law, is not open to question." Kamal Matinuddin stresses in an article in NEWS: "To prevent this (stopping the anti-Karzai elements from taking shelter in Pakistan and for operating from Pakistan soil) happening the sanctity of the Durand Line must be strictly observed.

"A drawback of the Afghan Jehad against the Soviet Union was that the Durand line lost its sanctity, as those fighting against the Soviets crossed the border" at will. Afghan Mujahideen including many Pakistanis from the tribal areas moved freely into Afghanistan and back. Pakistan did not try to enforce the sanctity of the Durand Line as the Afghan Mujahideen, who were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, were based in Pakistan. When a question was put to one of the mujahideen leaders at the Institute of Strategic Studies, which used to carry out a briefing on the events in Afghanistan those days, he replied that there is no border between Muslim states".

DAWN reports from Washington: "Pakistan is believed to have asked the Bush administration to prevent the Afghan government from reopening the Pakhtunistan issue sources said.

"Some Pakistanis see Washington's dark influence behind new agitation for the creation of Pakhtunistan "an attempt to unite the Pukhtun tribes divided by the Afghan-Pakistan frontier," writes Washington-based British journalist Martin Walker in a recent column published in several US newspapers.

"The sources said that Pakistan's complaints began after a new map published in Kabul showed­ NWFP and Balochistan, including the cities of Peshawar and Quetta, incorporated into Afghanistan.

"Walker's column also mentioned ‘secret talks’ with USA blessing, between Afghan leader Hamid Karzai and Khan Abdul Wali Khan, whose father coined the term Pakhtoonistan. Diplomatic sources in Washington said that while the Americans deny any involvement in the Pakhtoonistan issue, they are not averse to the r­e-emergence of Pukhtoonn nationalism in Pakistan's Pukhtoon belt."(ADNI Bureau)

Should pre-and-post-poll opinion polls be banned ?

By Kedar Nath Pandey

Television viewers and newspaper readers are flooded with pre-polls forecasts. The elections are to be held in Delhi, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Mizoram. Now only voting trends are on the air. No sooner the voting takes place Psephologists will rush for analysis forecasting results and the percentage of votes polled by various parties. In ways more than one, viewers will have a sense of if not for anything else then because the programmes would feature virtually the same personalities. Studio guests would hop from one studio to another, often even carrying a change to present a different profile on different channels.

The grand finale, however, is slated for December 4, when the votes "locked" in tens of thousands of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) are tabulated and results start trickling in. Starting from early morning, all television news channels will be going "live" and present a host of television news anchors, studio guests and "professional analysts" who have become an absolute must during election time. Though the bulk of results would have poured in by afternoon, marketing demands would ensure that politics is discussed on prime time. The discussions would be steered by professional news anchors and the central concern would be the nature of government being formed in various states. But the channels would also give adequate time to Psephologists who would provide a barrage of data to explain, "How the states voted".

Inexorably linked to the "electoral season" profundity is the Ayodhya issue that also began its dominance of Indian politics from the time that election coverage on television and the print media came into its own in the late 1980s. But just as the national discourse around the Ram temple has changed from the time it first emerged, a lot has changed in the world of psephology– most important of which is the lack of professionalism that has pervaded the stream.

An easy way to judge the performance of practitioners of the "statistical study of votes and voting behaviour" would be to do a statistical analysis of the success rate of various pollsters in various elections over the years. Even if one takes into account the fine print at the end of each poll (declared error margin ranging from 3-8 per cent), it is clear that each pollster’s guess is as good as coupled with a methodology that can at the best of times be called suspect has made the bulk of opinion polls open the charge levelled by the Election Commission marshalled by J.M. Lyngdoh that the bulk of so-called surveys were politically biased and intended to influence the voters.

In 1999, when the EC clashed with the media on the issue, it was presented as an issue involving the freedom of information. At a principled level the argument was valid, but little thought was given to introducing a self-corrective clause insofar as pollsters were concerned. At the moment, there is no way to prevent any agency that wishes to influence voters in the garb of presenting the findings of a survey. There are also no checks and balances as far as media houses and television channels are concerned. Freedom of the press has also come to mean having the right to politically influence voters. Whether that is happening or not is a different question, but the moot point is that the present scenario provides a scope for such misuse.

Psephology, however, did not suffer from its present anomalies in the mid 1980s when the trio of David Butler, Ashok Lahiri and Prannoy Roy introduced the subject into middle class homes. But it was Roy’s innovative approach that brought the subject out from the realm of textbooks to popular television programming. Starting out with the print media, Roy soon faced the pulls and pressures of television programming. However, it goes to Roy’s credit that he never abandoned the rigours of the subject.

That rigorous approach is now not to be seen. Opinion polls are now often conducted in the manner of a market survey without understanding the political nuances and the factors that need to be taken into account before drawing up a sample. Moreover, the size of the sample is also a crucial issue. Consider this: A pollster this time surveyed 10 Assembly segments interviewing 10,000 voters in each state, which have many seats. Any need to apply deductive logic to this? Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case but appears to be the general trend.

It is not just a question of sample size alone; there is also the related issue of intellectual honesty: How many pollster can vouch that the "surveyors" picked up from colleges and sent to the "field", do the job in the manner they have been directed to. The capital abounds in hundred of youngsters on the threshold of completing college who can regale select audiences on how they filled up the forms sitting in hotel rooms while on field duty. In their defence, pollsters will obviously cite "budgetary constraints" as the main reason behind the limited sample size and this would give rise to bigger question about why media houses commission polls whose authenticity cannot be guaranteed.

Nonetheless a peculiar situation has arisen by now where prior to various rounds of polls, television channels and publications are on the lookout for someone to provide the "psepho" input while pollsters do the rounds in search of a broadcast or print platform. The relationship is borne out of necessity as channels feel that any programme sans Psephologists would not have the requisite credibility while for the pollsters, a programme or the survey could mean avenues opening to other assignments.

It is not in India alone that pollsters have been accused of bias, though on the count of honesty there are not many who are similarly doubted. Several independent experts had accused the three top pollsters in UK who made predictions of return of Tony Blair to office for the second time of having a pronounced pro-Labour bias.

Bias, subjective selection of data, gloating over significant facts and over simplification, has become the bane of the bulk of election analyses. Without batting an eyelid of caste politics and demographic changes pollsters predict results without any serious analysis.

There is also the issue of electoral data being available in tonnes when compared to the situation some years ago when the Election Commission had not computerised date of previous poll and put it on the web. At that point, data was available with a select few individuals and institutions and this "intellectual capital" was often used to build other forms of capital. Now previous electoral data and analysis is available not just on the Internet. But, even the data put on the sites of major channels and media houses is suspect as there are several discrepancies with the data on the Election Commission site.

Only media houses and television channels can take corrective steps to the decline in psephological analysis during polls. There is need to do a "hot switch" not just from the studio to a regional centre but also from a cosmetic supplementation to genuine value addition to election coverage.

Given that India is close to the next general election early next year the prime time season begins with the run up to the issue of competent psephology is only going to be in greater focus. Whether or not the pollsters are willing, the media – both print and television – needs to be more demanding because if the present system continues, there will be few takers among the public for the fare that is dished out. Fly-by-night operators, who flit between surveys for FMCGs and poll time surveys, need to be asked to go back to their drawing boards if election coverage is to be saved from becoming trivial. INAV