PERISCOPE ON PAKISTAN
Cowering behind the nuclear shield

It remains to be seen whether Pa-kistan can blackmail the US Sec-retary of State Colin Powell into turning the nuclear proliferation issue into one of profit and geostrategic gains just as its partner-in-crime North Korea is trying to do. Nonetheless there is a sense of widespread apprehension at the likely consequences that can visit Pakistan for dishing out nuclear weapons to all and sundry. Will A.Q. Khan be an adequate scapegoat?

Pinpointing that "we wanted the bomb so badly we made Khan Emperor of Kahuta Emperors make mistakes but then they are not alone in making them", Ayaz Amir, in an article in DAWN, observes: "In trying to convince the world he acted on his own, we may save a skin or two but at the cost of imperilling the future of what we once considered our most sacred possession. This choice made in a moment of national weakness is likely to haunt Pakistan for years to come.

"In his confessional statement made on State TV, accepting full responsibility for proliferation, Khan hasn’t named any country. But the international chargesheet circulating against Pakistan suggests his reach extended to Libya, Iran and, on the other side of the compass, North Korea.

"The North Korean angle, however, doesn’t fit the ‘glory of Islam’ line. What was Khan doing with North Korea? Or were the guardians of Pakistan’s nuclear capability in he dark about that too? It is widely suspected Khan had some sort of a North Korean connection. What did intelligence specialists in Islamabad think this connection was for? To promote cultural exchanges?

"In the register of nuclear crimes, the one unpardonable sin is proliferation, and Pakistan, Khan or no Khan, stands accused of that. Khan’s confession can be played on TV a thousand times but sceptics will still ask whether he could have proliferated without official support or connivance.

"Even if the confession story is bought (an unlikely possibility), questions are bound to be asked whether a country incapable of guarding nuclear secrets can be trusted with nuclear weapons."

DAWN adds: "Suppose in the fullness of time the USA takes the matter before the UN Security Council and we are asked to open up our uranium enrichment labs for inspection, what will we do? Our protestations that we are not a signatory to the Non-proliferation Treaty won’t cut much ice then because we’ll be told the charge of proliferation against us stands proven.

"Qadeer Khan’s past activities are therefore woven into Pakistan’s memory and trying to de-link the two is an exercise in futility. It’s also an exercise in some dishonesty for what it shows is a whole phalanx of once-eminent men scurrying for cover as the blame for a large slice of national history is shouldered by one individual."

Ikram Sehgal, in an article in NATION, cautions: "To stop further damage to national security, there must be a swift closure by decisive punitive action against those found culpable on this grave, national security issue. Presently the situation is fluid, a cover-up will open a Pandora’s Box for an inimical western media waiting to exploit our weaknesses."

"A nuclear device is a nuclear device but is of no consequence without a delivery system. We do not have to make any apologies for the underworld apparatus AQK set up, it gave us invaluable military goodies that were denied to us by sanction or otherwise, more importantly a potential missile capability, no better demonstration of this combined non-conventional deterrent than during the military stand-off with India during the better part of 2002. Our dilemma was how to give the world its pound of flesh while cutting our hero down to size for this damaging compromise of our national security? Whatever the future may hold for AQK and his fellow nuclear proliferators, the man had a major role in preserving the sovereign integrity of Pakistan. AQK’s achievements were a prime consideration in treating him with kid gloves in giving him a pardon.

"Mohammad EI Baradei the head of the IAEA, spoke in Davos about a nuclear ‘Wal-Mart’ in the underworld, AQK being only the tip of the nuclear iceberg. After all our hero was not the only one peddling his wares. Pakistan’s credibility can be somewhat restored by having AQK outline the whole structure he dealt with in this ‘export-oriented’ nuclear racket, how he will do this while protecting our ‘import’ conduit is a mind-boggling Catch-22!

"While one cannot condone what AQK and his scientist colleagues have done for personal benefit, their punishment can be ‘plea-bargained’, at the very least including confiscation, of all assets obtained illegally.

"A detailed multi-faceted inquiry must purge the establishment of those who have obtained personal benefit from the ‘nuclear exports’ by helping directly and indirectly in this illegal activity, whether the person is from the government or from the private sector. Unless all those in the supply chain are taken to task we are no better than old South/Latin American ‘banana republics’ of yesteryear.

M.B. Naqvi, in an article in NEWS, observes: "the better course for President Musharraf is to put his money where his mouth is: Let democracy be given a chance to decide upon the future of this otherwise ‘useless and costly (N) deterrent’ Let all the schools of thought in the country be consulted openly and freely: Do Pakistanis still want to keep it after its relevance to the real defence of Pakistan was shown to be nil in 2002? May be they will want to sign CTBT, NPT, May be they will invite India for a dialogue on the future of the two deterrents - on pain of going it alone in denuclearising Pakistan.

"The current military regime has tried to deflect the pressure of the USA and UN to take punitive action, by formally parading Dr. Khan as the fall guy, while the case of his seven associates hangs fire for engaging in the business of buying and selling the nuclear contraband in the international blackmarket.

"Let no one forget that this is a proven case of nuclear proliferation - to Iran, Libya and North Korea, all members of Mr. Bush’s Axis of Evil - by the government employees of a satellite state that is so dependent on the munificence of Mr. Bush or his successors. They would naturally want to get to the bottom of the affair. No foreigner will take Qadeer’s mea culpa and Musharraf’s pardon, at face value. They may not reject the affair out of diplomatic etiquette, but would want new probes, ostensibly on other aspects of the matter. It is unlikely to remain a closed chapter — unless of course the Musharraf regime can do the unimaginable thing: Defy the USA, UN and all others.

DAILY TIMES article by Ejaz Haider:" Now that he has managed the episode as welt as it could be managed, given the domestic and foreign pressures, Musharraf must realise the importance of opening up the system and allowing political parties to play their role. He also needs to appreciate that much of Pakistan’s troubles emanate from the imbalance in civil-military relations. The Army’s insistence that it should run defense policy and, in the process, reduce foreign policy to being a subset of this, cannot be accepted, because of the rising costs of such a course. (ADNI)

Cynical corporatisation of politics for power

By Srinivasan K. Rangachary

Contemporary electoral poli-tics is a game of striking right permutations and combinations, more so in a country life India, with religious and caste diversities. One may call it a corporate managerial skill for a cynical power chase. If the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, is the senior mascot of the BJP’s liberal political ideology, if there is any one, his deputy is progenitor of Hindutva politics with ambitions for the first slot blessed by Nagpur. In between there are hatched men entrusted with the responsibility to implement the winning agenda of the BJP. You may like to call them by any name like general secretary or hard-selling ideologue or "think tank" to carry out the wishes of their senior colleagues in the party so as the BJP reaches the magic figure in the 14th Lok Sabha. But if wishes were horses beggar would ride. But the moot question is: Will BJP achieve the magic figure or slide down the 181 mark achieved in 1999?

The BJP "think tank" has done hard work in identifying the details of voting intentions across age groups, occupations, ethnicity, religion and castes for every parliamentary constituency. The issues that agitate the people, their satisfaction levels, their attitude to governance and their preference for chief ministerial and prime ministerial candidates have all been collated and classified across local, regional and national levels and differentiated among social groups. For each constituency, major issues agitating the votes have been identified and lists of notables with influence over religious, ethnic and caste sub-groups prepared.

The party general secretary, Pramod Mahajan, is not alone in collating such information or conducting pre-poll surveys. In the BJP’s central election committee meetings, leaders bring their won independent poll surveys. Instead of relying on information from the party channels, they rely more readily on what market researchers tell them about selecting candidates, possible political alliances and electoral strategies.

Does a political party require a pollster to suggest political strategy? Let us assume that a pollster suggests to a party, which cannot hope to get the Muslim vote in the North-east, ways of spoiling the prospect of its rivals. Suppose it suggests that this can be done by either aggressively communalising the election in select constituencies, or by splitting the Muslim community between immigrant Muslims and indigenous Muslims. And it suggests that floating a political front against "foreigners" can easily achieve this.

To what extent should democratic politicians solicit such suggestions from market researchers, leave alone accept them? Adopting their recommendations may provide certain tactical benefits to the party concerned in a few constituencies. However, the polity would have been damaged, perhaps permanently. This is likely to happen if the leadership of our political parties goes into the hands of those with blind faith in the corporatisation of politics.

There is no doubt that the party managers have been emboldened by their success in using such a paradigm in the assembly elections of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. A market research agency polls suggested strategies of politically neutralising rivals in specific constituencies. Nowhere was the strategy more successful than in the Jat dominated constituencies, the traditional turf of the Congress. The BJP made spectacular gains.

While there is no argument against careful planning of elections and electoral campaigns, there is a case against the wholesale managerialisation of politics where "managing" the election becomes more important than contesting it on issues, ideology and programmes.

The BJP has always had faith in its backroom boys. Traditionally, they came from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. These former pracharaks saw themselves as strategists and thinkers. Although they themselves never contested elections, they worked the cadre network of the RSS in favour of the BJP.

However, today, managerialism is being encouraged by the BJP to a greater extent than before as a substitute for the political experience to be acquired from working as the people’s representative in Parliament. Today, almost the entire younger leadership of the party does not want to undergo this essential electoral internship. Instead these would-be prime ministers are cutting their teeth on a managerial apprenticeship – of "managing" elections scientifically – and expect to be rewarded with important political posts in the government and the party.

But the neglect of the political process damages democracy. In a democracy, the political parties serve as a bridge, a communication channel between the people and the state. Their mediation constitutes the self-correcting mechanism of democratic governance. Managerialisation of politics removes this essential element of democracy and replaces it with manipulativeness.

In societies where institutions are still weak, managerialisation threatens to damage democracy. In the democratic societies of the West, where social and economic development has reduced the role of the state and where institutions are strong, parties can essentially be run by managers. If people are certain that the bureaucracy, the police, the security apparatus and the judiciary will be impartial and responsive to their needs, the role of the state diminishes by itself. The mediatory role of political parties also goes down as a consequence. In the USA, for example, virtually the sole objective of the political parties is to throw up a presidential candidate every four years. For such limited political activity, the use of opinion polls or market research is understandable. The party infrastructure there does not have to be widespread and permanent.

As it is the information network that the market represents, the institutions of democracy and the state do not provide equal access to people even in the best of circumstances. This inequality gets further accentuated in developing countries like India where the market is not fully developed, where income disparities are phenomenal and where the state can still be persuaded to play a role to protect the vulnerable sections of society.

In such societies, the local politician or representative of the people assumes an importance different from that in developed democratic societies. Here, no representative of the state can be presumed to behave in a fair manner – a woman can be raped in a police station; legitimate passengers thrown out of running trains by Railway Protection Force personnel and bribes extracted from even those who are starving by a corrupt bureaucracy. Much as the urban elite may hate the political class, the mediatory and corrective role of political parties and politicians cannot be underestimated in societies such as ours.

Under such circumstances, the managerialisation of politics contributes to making democratic politics cynical – merely the most efficient and effective way of grabbing power. In the long run, the managerialisation of politics removes ideology from politics and celebrates the cynical pursuit of power. It knocks the political stuffing out of democracy. If coming into power requires dividing people instead of uniting them around an ideology, it would recommend such a course of action without any qualms. Managerialisation of politics will use religion and caste to define and refine vote-banks rather than uniting and mobilising people around issues and programmes.

Indeed, this is already happening in the BJP. Here was a party which was against Mandalisation of politics because it saw V.P. Singh’s emphasis on backward and intermediate caste politics as dividing "Hindu society". Today, its party managers have recommended an intensification of Mandalisation.

Kalyan Singh was brought back to break the solidarity of castes controlled by Mulayam Singh Yadav by weaning away groups such as Lodhs, Gadariyas (shepherds), Malis (gardeners and vegetable growers), Badais (carpenters) and Kevats and Mallhas (boatmen). Rajnath Singh, a former chief minister, similarly tried to create divisions within the backward castes by attempting to bring in legislation for the most backward castes among the backward castes to deepen the caste divide among them. This kind of manipulation of backward caste solidarity indicates the triumph of a managerial manipulative strategy over an ideology of nation-building that the BJP swears by. INAV