From Bofors scandal of 1987 to VVIP chopper scam in 2013: Investigations into defence scams are a sham

Paralysis grips the armed forces as justice remains elusive in cases of tainted defence deals, says Ramesh Ramachandran

Epiphany struck George Fernandes at 11,700 feet on the icy slopes of Siachen Glacier, the world’s highest battlefield, in the eastern Karakoram range of the Himalayas.

“If there is need for prosecution, there should be prosecution… no matter who. That alone will cleanse the system. In our country, we never prosecute. We institute a case and let it die or let the man (against whom there is a case) die,” Fernandes told Shekhar Gupta in the summer of 2003, when he was defence minister and the latter editor-in-chief of The Indian Express.

Fernandes was replying to a question about how and why there still was no closure to the decades-old Bofors scandal.

That was 2003, but what Fernandes said then rings true even today. There have been many cases, including, but not limited to, the Bofors scam, the HDW submarine scam, Barak missile scam and the Tatra trucks scam, but many of the guilty are yet to be punished, either on account of insufficient evidence or lack of political will or both.

The Price Of Delay

As someone who was caught in the eye of a storm following TEHELKA’s exposé, code-named Operation West End, in 2001, Fernandes claimed in his interview to Gupta that bureaucrats would delay making purchases for the armed forces for fear of inviting an adverse reaction or being guillotined, if there was even as much as a whiff of a scam.

It didn’t matter to them that the soldiers, guarding the icy frontiers in Siachen or the searing deserts of Rajasthan, and the defence capabilities could suffer on account of the delay in procurement of, say, a snowmobile or a multirole combat jet. (Compare the reluctance of the officials to make purchases that would help a soldier with the eagerness of the Assam Rifles personnel to take money in lieu of approving a tender.)

“There is hardly any official in the ministry who would like to put his signature for anything that has to be purchased. He would like to postpone it. He would like to put it off. He would like to do whatever he has to do because he thinks that is the best way for him to survive,” Fernandes said, explaining the “psychology” of the bureaucrats in the defence ministry.

But is it not for the political leadership to give the armed forces what they need without worrying about scandals and controversies? Gupta persisted.

To which Fernandes replied: “The court is not going to listen to that, and if a political activist or minister does it, then the man who is his rival is not going to accept that. It is a terrible world.”

The UPA’s decade-long rule saw two defence ministers in Pranab Mukherjee and AK Antony; as it turned out, the latter became the longest-serving defence minister in the history of India, having held the office from 24 October 2006 to 26 May 2014. Much like Manmohan Singh, Antony has the reputation of being honest to a fault, but it is one of life’s ironies that they presided over ministries where scams took place, especially in the UPA’s second term.

With Antony at the helm, the defence ministry was witness to an unprecedented situation when the chiefs of the armed forces were allegedly involved in one unsavoury incident after another.

If Gen VK Singh dragged the government to court over his age, he also claimed to have been offered a bribe of Rs 14 crore by a retired army officer for clearing the purchase of certain trucks for the army. Air Chief Marshal SP Tyagi, now retired, was accused of involvement in the purchase of VVIP helicopters, while Admiral DK Joshi decided to step down after a series of accidents aboard naval warships.

According to Admiral (retd) Raja Menon, Antony ruined India’s defence preparedness by stalling vital military acquisitions. All because he, like some of his predecessors, came to suffer from what is called the Bofors syndrome. “He was unable to take decisions. The problem was his own personality,” says Menon. The bureaucrats, taking a cue from Antony, chose not to decide one way or another. Consequently, no one spared a thought for the soldier at the frontier or cared for India’s national security imperatives.

Whither Justice

The investigation into various scams left much to be desired, too. Similar to the officers and contractors in Operation Hilltop, the Tatra trucks case allegedly involved certain unscrupulous individuals who pocketed a certain percentage of the total cost of the purchase.

Recently, the CBI filed a closure report in this case, involving the State-owned beml (Bharat Earth Movers Limited) and Tatra Vectra Motors Limited, a joint venture between the UK-based Vectra Group and Tatra Trucks of the Czech Republic, on the grounds of “insufficient prosecutable evidence”.

Similarly, the Sukna land scam was in the news four years ago for a no-objection certificate given to a private builder for constructing an educational institution on a plot of land near the Sukna cantonment area. An Armed Forces Tribunal, which inquired into the matter, recently quashed the court martial of an officer, but the controversy refuses to die down with the Union minister of state for development of north-eastern region (independent charge), Gen VK Singh, himself a former army chief, describing the verdict as “dubious”.

In the case of the VVIP helicopter deal, too, money had changed hands. In 2013, Antony accepted as much, saying: “Yes, corruption has taken place in the helicopter deal and bribes have been taken.” Antony didn’t hazard a guess on the outcome of the various investigations that were going on except for saying that defence procurement almost always seems to be beset with controversies and that even an Integrity Pact for vendors was proving to be inadequate for checking malpractices. He wanted the Central Vigilance Commission to be roped in along with independent external monitors to plug the loopholes in procurement.

The words of Sten Lindstrom, a former head of police in Sweden who investigated the Bofors deal, should serve as a chilling reminder to one and all. In an interview to Chitra Subramaniam, which was published by the New Delhibased website The Hoot, Lindstrom said, “Many Indian institutions were tarred, innocent people were punished while the guilty got away.”

Also, in an apparent reference to the Indian authorities, he told Subramaniam, who exposed the Bofors scam: “Can you imagine a situation where no one from India met the real investigators of the gun deal? That was when we saw the extent to which everyone was compromised. Many politicians who had come to my office claiming they would move heaven and earth to get at the truth if they came to power, fell silent when they held very important positions directly linked to the deal.”

India and its soldiers deserve better.

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Scam After Scam

A quick lowdown on defence scams in Independent India would take us back to 1948 when the Jeep scam took place. The focus was on VK Krishna Menon, the then Indian high commissioner in London, who finalised a deal with a foreign firm for around 1,500 jeeps without following the normal procedure. India required around 4,600 jeeps for its Kashmir operations. Nine months later, in 1949, 155 jeeps of poor quality reached Madras. The scam amount, which has not been officially revealed till date, was around Rs 80 lakh. The aftermath was ironic. In 1956, Menon was inducted into Jawaharlal Nehru’s Cabinet.

1987 - HDW SUBMARINE SCAM

Deal In 1981, India bought four submarines from the German company HDW. In 1987, it asked for two more

How was it exposed When India asked for a discount on the fresh order of two submarines, the shipyard declined, saying it had to pay a 7 percent commission. VP Singh heard about it when he was defence minister in the Rajiv Gandhi government. In March 1990, when VP Singh was the prime minister, he ordered an investigation

Kickbacks Rs 20 crore

Aftermath The case was closed in 2005

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1987 - Bofors Scam

Deal 400 155-mm field howitzer guns worth Rs 6,994 crore were bought from Swedish company Bofors

How was it exposed Swedish National Radio reported that bribes had been paid to top Indian politicians to secure the howitzer gun contract. Geneva-based journalist Chitra Subramaniam did an investigation

Kickbacks Rs 64 crore

Suspects AE Services, the shell company operated by Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrocchi, a family friend of Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi, who also represented the petrochemical firm Snamprogetti, suddenly intervened in the Bofors deal on 15 November 1985. At that time Bofors had existing contractual arrangements (going back several years, even decades) with two strands of companies in which arms agent Win Chadha and the Hinduja brothers — GP Hinduja and Srichand Hinduja — had interests

Aftermath Over two decades, 250 crore was spent in the investigation, but it was inconclusive. Swedish investigator Sten Lindstrom said Rajiv himself did not receive any pay-offs in the deal, but that Quattrocchi received commissions. Lindstrom also confirmed that Rajiv knew of and was complicit in the elaborate cover-up that his government orchestrated to protect Quattrocchi

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2002 - Coffin Scam

Deal The Central government bought 500 coffins, each costing $2,500

Scam It turned out the real price was $172 per coffin. To make matters worse, the quality was very poor

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2005 - Denel Scam

Deal Denel, a South African governmentcontrolled company, supplied antimaterial rifles to the Indian Army

How was it exposed Allegations emerged in South Africa that Denel had paid bribes to Varas Associates, the alleged intermediary, for the Indian contract

Kickbacks Rs 20 crore

Aftermath The CBI filed a closure report in September 2013. The agency claimed to have received responses of judicial requests from South Africa, the UK, Isle of Man and Switzerland, which did not show any evidence that could substantiate the allegations of corruption

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2006 - Barak Missile Scam

Deal Seven Barak missile systems costing Rs 1,150 crore were bought from Israel

How was it exposed Former president APJ Abdul Kalam, who was the scientific adviser to the prime minster when the deal was being negotiated, had opposed the weapons system. The CBI registered an FIR in the case, questioning why the system was purchased even after the DRDO had raised its objections in 2006

Kickbacks NA

Aftermath Former treasurer of the Samata Party RK Jain was arrested but no major breakthrough in probe till date. The CBI has closed at least one of the cases for lack of evidence

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2007 - NTRO Scam

Deal Hyderabad-based National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), an intelligence agency working under the National Security Adviser to the Prime Minister’s Office, bought Israeli unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)

How was it exposed The Comptroller and Auditor General said rules were flouted in the purchase of UAVs from Israel Aerospace Industries

Kickbacks Rs 450 crore

Aftermath A letter was sent to the then National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon complaining of the irregularities in the recruitment of officers in the NTRO. It was said the probe was handed over to the man who was accused in the first place

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2007 - Ration Supplies Scam

It was discovered that numbers were being fudged while supplying rations to army personnel posted in high-altitude areas. Army Service Corps chief Lt Gen SK Sahni was found guilty of corruption and dismissed from service

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2007 - Frozen Meat Scam

Army Service Corps officer Lt Gen SK Dahiya was indicted in a case involving irregularities in the procurement of frozen meat for troops posted in Ladakh and discrepancies in procurement of dry rations

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2008 - Abhishek Verma Scandal

Abhishek Verma, the son of former MP Srikant Verma, is in jail, and he and his wife are accused of stealing defence secrets and accepting bribes from defence firms. Investigations are continuing into the affairs of Verma, who may have also had a role in the VVIP helicopter deal. Over the past five years, Verma is said to have made a comeback to the defence consultancy business and re-established his contacts. Some highly classified defence ministry files have made their way to his firm Ganton. The secret files relate to the IAF’s acquisition plans. He has unsuccessfully tried to flaunt his proximity to several politicians from the top Congress leadership down to Jagdish Tytler

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2009 - OFB Scam

Deal Former Ordnance Factory Board (OFB) chief Sudipto Ghosh and several of his associates were accused of fixing contracts

Aftermath After the CBI found evidence of bribery, the government in March 2012 blacklisted six companies for 10 years: Singapore Technologies, Israeli Military Industries, Germany’s Rheinmetall Air Defence, Russian firm Corporation Defence, Indian firms TS Kisan & Company and RK Machine Tool

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2009 - Sukna Land Scam

Two senior lieutenant generals and a major general were accused of converting a 70-acre land adjacent to Sukna military station in Siliguri, West Bengal, into an educational institution by handing it over to a private trust. The controversy involved issuing of no-objection certificate for the private trust to buy the land for construction of the educational institution on the condition that wards of army personnel from the military station would get to study there. The then army chief Gen Deepak Kapoor’s military secretary Lt Gen Avadesh Prakash and the then 33 Corps commander Lt Gen PK Rath were indicted in the case. Lt Gen Rath has since been acquitted of all charges by an Armed Forces Tribunal Bench. A court martial dismissed Lt Gen Avadesh Prakash from service after finding him guilty in the case

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2010 - VVIP Chopper Scam

Deal In 2010, Anglo-Italian helicopter manufacturer AgustaWestland agreed to supply 12 VVIP choppers to the Indian Air Force for Rs 3,600 crore

How was it exposed An Italian intelligence agency started to investigate the deal on the suspicion of corruption

Kickbacks AgustaWestland paid a commission of more than Rs 350 crore to a Switzerland-based consultant

Aftermath The head of the company was arrested in Milan

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2011 - Adarsh Society Scam

In 2001, land was allotted to the widows of personnel killed in the Kargil War and retired defence personnel. Over a period of 10 years, top politicians and bureaucrats bent several rules, committed various acts of commission and omission, and finally, got themselves allotted with flats at a much cheaper cost

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2014 - Tatra Trucks Scam

Deal Bengaluru-based Bharat Earth Movers Limited (BEML) bought components from Czech company Tatra for its all-terrain vehicles, which are the backbone of the army’s artillery and transportation wings. The BEML was accused of flouting guidelines by buying components for the 6×6 and 8×8 trucks from a middleman in London

How was it exposed Army chief Gen VK Singh told the the defence minister that he was offered a bribe of Rs 14 crore

Kickbacks Rs 750 crore in bribes and commissions

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HOW A DEFENCE DEAL IS SIGNED

• Contracts worth more than Rs 500 crore have to be cleared by the Cabinet Committee on Security. The armed forces have financial powers of Rs 150 crore

• The military formulates a qualitative requirement of the weapon it wants

• The Defence Acquisition Council (DAC), headed by the defence minister, accepts or rejects the necessity for the proposed procurement

• The DAC approval is followed by the ministry floating a global tender

• The Technical Evaluation Committee studies the technical bids and shortlists them for trial

• Field trials are carried out by the user service, which then recommends those that meet requirements

• The Technical Oversight Committee scrutinises the procedure to ensure fair trial and selection was done

• The Contract Negotiation Committee recommends conclusion of a contract at a negotiated price. The proposal is sent to the Cabinet Committee on Security, headed by the prime minister, for approval after which a contract is signed

Nuclear disarmament: Will Bhagavad Gita inspire Modi to do his duty?

The first International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons will be observed on 26 September 2014. Will the Bhagavad Gita, which Robert Oppenheimer cited to explain his philosophy of life before and after the Trinity nuclear test of 1945, inspire Modi, Obama and their contemporaries in the comity of nations to do their duty by reducing the salience of nuclear weapons in international affairs?

New Delhi
25 September 2014

The redrawing of the boundaries of Ukraine may have come at an inopportune moment in the contemporary discourse on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament. Ukraine’s dismemberment at the hands of Russia, coming as it did after it renounced what was the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world at the time of disintegration of the erstwhile Soviet Union, could impel certain nuclear holdouts to retain and refine their nuclear arsenals or spur some nuclear threshold states to cross the Rubicon and seek to insure themselves against potential violation of their sovereignties. It didn’t help that Russia also signalled its intention to finesse its security strategy by further developing its nuclear capabilities, which, in turn, has forced the US and NATO to revisit some of the underlying assumptions of their extant policies in eastern Europe. At the same time, those developments have once again brought to the fore and highlighted the perils of indiscriminate nuclear sabre-rattling and the human and humanitarian costs of atomic pursuits. Already, there are in excess of 16 thousand nuclear weapons worldwide today. According to a latest data published by an American magazine Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the largest concentrations of nuclear weapons are residing in Russia and the US, which together possess 93 per cent of the total global inventory; while Pakistan is reported to be quantitatively and qualitatively increasing its arsenal and deploying its weapons at more sites. Also, the failure of the nuclear-haves to break free from the vice-like grip of “Pehle Aap” (Hindi for you first or after you) culture, which pervades their thinking insofar as delegitimising the use of nuclear weapons and reducing their salience in international affairs are concerned, stands exposed. The entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), for instance, is held up on account of the inability of eight countries – the US, China, Egypt, India, Iran, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea – to sign and/or ratify it. The US has signed but not ratified the treaty, which China cites to defend itself; Pakistan, in turn, finds in India’s reluctance to even sign the treaty, let alone ratify it, a convenient escape clause for itself. Possibly, an early US ratification could have a domino effect on the remaining seven countries.

India’s own attempts at pushing for an international consensus on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament date back to 1954 when Jawaharlal Nehru became the first statesman to call for a “stand still” agreement on nuclear testing after the US conducted a series of nuclear tests, including the detonation of a nuclear device that was equivalent to a thousand Hiroshimas, in the tiny Pacific Ocean archipelago of Marshall Islands. That was followed by Indira Gandhi’s joining five other heads of state and/or government in issuing the Appeal of May 1984 to draw world attention to nuclear disarmament and Rajiv Gandhi’s now eponymously-named “Action Plan to usher in a worId order free of nuclear weapons and rooted in non-violence” that was unveiled on 9 June 1988 at the United Nations General Assembly. However, by then India had decidedly begun to embrace a foreign- and security policy that was dictated by realpolitik; and the nuclear tests by India in 1998 validated it. The consequent decline in India’s moral stature and political will ensured that her voice on disarmament remained feeble. However, it was around the same time that Kazakhstan was making itself heard, first by renouncing its nuclear arsenal and subsequently by forging a Central Asia Nuclear Weapon Free Zone Treaty, which was signed by all five Central Asian states – Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. On 2 December 2009, the 64th session of the United Nations General Assembly accepted Kazakhstan’s proposal for declaring 29 August as the International Day Against Nuclear Tests. On this occasion last month, the victims of nuclear tests such as a 46-year-old armless painter Karipbek Kuyukov and the Hibayushas (Japanese for survivors of an explosion) of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came together to shake off the international community’s inertia and to urge them to expedite disarmament talks which are otherwise progressing at a glacial pace. Kazakhstan’s efforts towards a global test ban, leading to an eventual ban on nuclear weapons, needs to be admired in India and around the world.

The way forward

Kazakhstan, Japan or Marshall Islands are not alone in their endeavours. Joining them in a campaign to showcase the humanitarian costs of nuclear tests and nuclear weapons are Norway and Mexico, which hosted the first two editions of a global conference. Austria will host a third in December this year. Considering India’s own past efforts at campaigning for disarmament, it would do well to consider making common cause with like-minded countries such as Japan and Kazakhstan. The essential features of the four-fold Rajiv Gandhi Action Plan are similar to the four specific steps that Japan’s foreign minister Fumio Kishida articulated recently in an article published by Foreign Affairs, a leading American magazine on international relations. For his part, Prime Minister Narendra Modi could use his talks with world leaders and his intervention at the United Nations General Assembly this year to signal his government’s intent. Mr Modi has already said in an interaction with Japanese journalists on the eve of his just concluded visit to Tokyo that “there is no contradiction in our mind between being a nuclear weapon state and contributing actively to global nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation.” Incidentally, the first International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons will be observed on 26 September, on the eve of Prime Minister Modi’s address to the 69th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. According to the United Nations, “As of 2014, not one nuclear weapon has been physically destroyed pursuant to a treaty, bilateral or multilateral and no nuclear disarmament negotiations are underway.  Meanwhile, the doctrine of nuclear deterrence persists as an element in the security policies of all possessor states and their nuclear allies. This is so despite growing concerns worldwide over the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of the use of even a single nuclear weapon, let alone a regional or global nuclear war.” In 2015, the NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty) Review Conference will take place; the year will also mark the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombings. Also, the United Nations plans to convene no later than 2018 a high-level international conference on nuclear disarmament to review the progress made in this regard. All these occasions could be used by the international community to discuss nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament. A push for a global no-first-use could be a good starting point of those talks, to begin with.

Although Mr Modi has iterated India’s commitment to a universal, non-discriminatory and global nuclear disarmament and a unilateral and voluntary moratorium on nuclear explosive testing, Japan’s special sensitivities continue to cause a delay in signing of a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with India. In such a situation, even a tentative first step in this direction would endear India to those sections of the Japanese society that remain sceptical of civil nuclear cooperation with a non-NPT and non-CTBT country such as India. Towards the end of his visit to Japan, Mr Modi had said that he had gifted copies of the Bhagavad Gita to his Japanese interlocutors, including the Emperor. He explained his actions thus: “I have nothing more valuable to give and the world has nothing more valuable to get.” Hopefully, going forward, the Bhagavad Gita would help resolve the moral dilemmas confronting many a world leader and stir their collective conscience to do their duty. As for Mr Modi himself, he maintains that he is an incorrigible optimist. “Some people say a glass is half empty; some people say a glass is half full. I say the glass is half filled with water and half filled with air,” he had told the BJP Parliamentary Party, by way of an explanation, soon after he led the party to a historic win in the May 2014 parliamentary elections. That personal philosophy of Mr Modi could come in handy for India as it negotiates a minefield that is the contemporary global discourse on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament.

Will the Bhagavad Gita do to the leaders of India and the United States what Lord Krishna did to Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra in the Mahabharata? Will the Bhagavad Gita, which Robert Oppenheimer cited to explain his philosophy of life before and after the Trinity nuclear test of 1945, inspire Modi, Obama and their contemporaries in the comity of nations to do their duty by reducing the salience of nuclear weapons in international affairs?

An Early Warning

New Delhi
18 September 2014
It may be too early to conclude that the results of the recently concluded bypolls in nine states, particularly Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan and to a lesser extent Gujarat, are a referendum of sorts on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 100-odd-day-old government or, conversely, signal a Congress recovery after its humiliating loss in the recent General Election.

At best, they could and probably should be seen as an early warning for the BJP and its affiliates whose impulse has been to pick the low-hanging fruit in the form of, say, appealing to the baser instincts of man a la ‘love jihad’ than to making a concerted effort to build on attempts by BJP patriarchs Atal Bihari Vajpayee and LK Advani to make the BJP the natural party of governance.

Bypolls have now been held in 54 Assembly constituencies across 14 states (Uttarakhand in July; Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab and Karnataka in August; and Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Assam, West Bengal, Tripura and Sikkim in September) since the BJP-led NDA government came to power on 26 May. The BJP and its alliance partners had held 36 of those Assembly seats but they have managed to retain only 20 of them.

Whither Modi wave?

The BJP rode on Modi’s popularity to an unprecedented win in the General Election when it won 71 out of 80 seats in Uttar Pradesh, all 25 seats in Rajasthan and all 26 seats in Gujarat. Amit Shah, who has since taken over as BJP chief, was largely seen as the architect of the party’s strategy in Uttar Pradesh. Cut to September and the party suffers a setback in varying degrees in each of those states, which is why the contrast is that much starker.

In Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Gujarat, which together account for 24 Assembly seats where bypolls were held, the BJP retained only 10 seats (it had 23 seats going in to the bypolls) while its ally, Apna Dal, lost the Rohaniya seat — which falls in the Varanasi parliamentary constituency held by Modi — to the Samajwadi Party (SP).

Apna Dal national president Krishna Patel only managed to garner 61,672 votes, whereas in the Lok Sabha election, Modi had polled 1.19 lakh votes from this Assembly segment alone. (Krishna Patel’s daughter Anupriya was the sitting MLA from Rohaniya when she was elected as the MP from Mirzapur.)

In Rajasthan, the Congress wrested the Nasirabad, Weir and Surajgarh seats from BJP, leaving the latter with only one win in Kota. Similarly, in Gujarat, the Congress won three seats and the BJP six.

The only consolation for the BJP was that it made its debut in the West Bengal Assembly by winning the Basirhat Dakshin seat.

Predictably, BJP spokespersons maintain that the bypolls results are not a reflection on Narendra Modi’s government or governance. They are quick to point out that bypolls in Assembly constituencies, as opposed to Lok Sabha seats, are generally fought on local issues and therefore too much should not be read into the results.

The Congress, on the other hand, claims that the verdict is a clear indication that voters have rejected the divisive politics practised by the BJP. Although some Congress office-bearers went overboard in their assessments of the party’s performance in the Rajasthan and Gujarat bypolls, the only sobering voice was that of Shakeel Ahmad, a general secretary and a spokesman of the party, who sought to suggest that although the verdict is more against the BJP than for a particular party, it would be incorrect to write it off or to say that the BJP has been rendered inconsequential. What Ahmad leaves unsaid is that the Congress was in a similar situation 10 years ago when it performed badly in the bypolls that were held immediately after the UPA came to power in 2004.

History bears it out, too. The party that wins a Lok Sabha election tends to perform below par in the Assembly bypolls immediately afterwards, especially if the Centre and the state(s) concerned are ruled by different parties or coalitions. That may, therefore, explain the BJP’s less-than-impressive performance in Rajasthan and Gujarat, where it is in power, and also its particularly disappointing tally in Uttar Pradesh, which is ruled by the SP. It is not to say that there are no other factors, or a combination thereof, that could be at play here: complacency, a lack of motivation, local issues holding sway over regional or pan-national concerns or even the choice of candidates are also known to have affected the outcome of a bypoll.

For the BJP in particular, Modi’s absence would have affected its political fortunes in the recent bypolls, too, which sends out another equally worrisome message to the party rank and file: that Modi is still the BJP’s (only?) best bet; that the BJP’s organisation and leadership in certain states are not as strong as it would like them to be; and that going forward, the services of Modi and a battery of other leaders would be required if the party wants to come good in the Assembly elections in Maharashtra, Haryana, Jharkhand and Jammu and Kashmir this year, Bihar in 2015 and Uttar Pradesh in 2017, among others. (In the bypolls held in Bihar in August, the alliance between and among Janata Dal (United), Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Congress won six out of 10 seats.)

BJP campaign backfires in UP

So what went wrong for the BJP in Uttar Pradesh? At the outset, the BJP’s campaign in the run-up to the bypolls in the state saw the party employ some of the same rhetoric or tactics that one saw in the Lok Sabha election. That gambit may have worked for it then but not this time; on the contrary, it benefited the SP as the minorities voted en bloc for it even as the Dalits remained indifferent towards the BJP.

For a party that was voted to power at the Centre on a hugely popular poll plank of development, the BJP chose to whip up communal passions. For instance, Sakshi Maharaj, the sitting BJP MP from Unnao, described madrasas as a breeding ground of terrorists while Yogi Adityanath, the BJP MP from Gorakhpur, was accused of making inflammatory statements. Union minister Maneka Gandhi, in turn, claimed that money from meat trade was being used to fund terror activities. The BJP had also staged a month-long drama at Kaanth town in Moradabad after the district administration removed a loudspeaker from a temple frequented by the Dalits living in a predominantly Muslim village during Ramzan in the month of July.

Looking back, the law of diminishing returns appears to have put paid to the shrill campaign orchestrated by the likes of Yogi Adityanath and Sakshi Maharaj as it clearly failed to enthuse even the BJP's own supporters. Drafting Adityanath as a star campaigner proved to be another fatal flaw as the SP conveniently exploited it to its advantage. Fearing communal polarisation, the SP and the Congress fielded few Muslim candidates; the Congress fielded two Muslims and SP one. As it turns out, the SP’s lone Muslim candidate won from Thakurdwara, defeating the BJP candidate by more than 27,000 votes.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the BJP singularly failed to capitalise on the strong anti-incumbency against the Akhilesh Yadav government, whose tenure has been marked by an unprecedented power crisis; a record number of incidents of communal tension and riots, including, but not limited to, Muzaffarnagar; and a steep rise in crimes against women.

Pramod Kumar, a professor at Lucknow University, says that the BJP probably misattributed its performance in the Lok Sabha elections in the state to communal polarisation when it was actually the development plank, strongly marketed by Modi in his inimitable style of communication, which influenced the voters.

On balance, if a political obituary for Modi and the BJP is premature, so are the assertions by a section of the political parties ranged against the NDA, particularly the SP, that the results of the bypolls indicate a strong voter preference for their respective leaderships or programmes. The SP wrested seven out of the 10 seats held by BJP (and one seat held by Apna Dal). It won the Charkhari Assembly seat, in Bundelkhand region, vacated by Union minister Uma Bharti, with a comfortable margin of more than 50,000 votes; the Congress came second and the BJP third. Incidentally, the bypolls were necessitated in the state because the BJP MLAs from all 11 seats have since been elected to Parliament.

Akhilesh Yadav, who completed 30 months in office on 15 September, says that the voters have reposed their faith in the SP in spite of the criticism heaped on the party and the government by its political rivals and media alike.

“Communal forces should draw a clear lesson from the poll verdict… the voters have rejected them and endorsed the development agenda of the Samajwadi Party government,” says Yadav.

A senior SP leader, in turn, says, “It is the end of the so-called Modi magic or wave… For the BJP, the party is over.”

However, AK Verma, who teaches political science at Christ Church College in Kanpur, counters by saying that the results of the bypolls to 11 seats can neither be interpreted as an indictment of the Modi government nor an endorsement of the Akhilesh Yadav government.

An analysis of the SP’s performance would also not be complete without first understanding the consequences of the BSP’s decision to keep away from the bypolls. In the March 2012 Assembly election, the BSP had finished second in six out of the 11 Assembly constituencies where the bypolls were held. This time, the SP managed to get some Dalit votes, particularly in the Bundelkhand region (Hamirpur and Charkhari seats) and eastern Uttar Pradesh (Sirathu seat in Kaushambi and Balha in Bahraich).

In Bundelkhand, the victory margins of the SP candidates — with more than 66,000 votes — gives a clear indication that this would not be possible without a chunk of the Dalit votes voting for the SP. Also, the Congress did not have winnable candidates in the bypolls. That meant that the BJP was in a direct contest with the SP as compared to the four-cornered contest in the parliamentary election. Therefore, the victory of the SP, whose record of governance has been uninspiring from the word go, needs to be seen in its proper context.

Verma explains that the SP’s vote share fell by only 1 percent, from 22 percent in the 2009 parliamentary election to 21 percent in the 2014 parliamentary election, but its tally of seats plummeted from 21 seats in 2009 to a mere five seats in 2014.

“The SP was wiped out by a Modi wave as it was Modi versus the rest,” says Verma. “Also, the people of Uttar Pradesh had overwhelmingly voted for Modi’s development plank and not as much for the BJP. However, Modi was missing in the bypolls and the BJP did not enthuse the voters that much. Moreover, the BSP was not in the race and the Congress’ candidates were too weak to pose any challenge to anyone. Therefore, it became a straight contest between the SP and BJP. The voters were left with not many options, so they voted for SP; it not only won by default but it almost got a walkover in eight of the 11 seats.”

The road ahead

The message from the results of the bypolls is clear: the BJP and Modi (not necessarily in that order) were elected to power by the development- and good governance-starved voter who hopes to have more of the two over the next five years. Veer away from the straight and narrow and the Modi-Shah duopoly runs the risk of committing the same mistakes first made by Manmohan Singh and the Congress and then by Arvind Kejriwal and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).

If the slew of scams in UPA-2 came as a disappointment to a section of the middle classes that swore by Manmohan’s Teflon image, those who voted Kejriwal and AAP to power in Delhi in the hope of getting for themselves an efficient administration felt let down when he quit within 49 days.

Modi and BJP have their task cut out for them and there is neither room for complacency nor scope for hubris. As one who excels in micromanagement and pays attention to detail, Modi knows only too well that he cannot take the voter for granted or insult their intelligence. Belie their hopes and expectations and the unforgiving voter will strike back.

NUCLEAR FRISSON !

Why India could join hands with Japan and Kazakhstan to push the world on the road to nuclear disarmament

Astana and Semey in Kazakhstan
29 August 2014

On 29 August, Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with a group of Japanese journalists ahead of his visit to Tokyo and sought to reassure them about India’s commitment to universal, non-discriminatory and global nuclear disarmament and a unilateral and voluntary moratorium on nuclear explosive testing. The same day, in the far-away steppes of Kazakhstan, former Japanese diplomat Yasuyoshi Komizo joined the locals of Semey, a small town located on the banks of the Irtysh river, bordering Russia, to mark the International Day Against Nuclear Tests by observing a moment’s silence in honour of all victims, living and dead, of nuclear tests.

Komizo, 66, who now serves as the chairperson of Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation and the secretary general of Mayors for Peace, also planted a sapling of the Gingko Bilopa tree, which survived the 6 August 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

Present on the occasion was armless Kazakh painter Karipbek Kuyukov, 46, who is a second-generation victim of the nuclear tests at Semey and the face of the anti-nuclear movement in Kazakhstan.

Kuyukov, who holds a brush in his mouth or between his toes to give expression to his creative spirit, was born near Semey and is one of more than 1.5 million people, as per a United Nations estimate, who suffered the consequences of nuclear testing.

Today, he divides his time between painting and campaigning for a global ban on nuclear tests as an honorary ambassador of The ATOM Project (an acronym for Abolish Testing. Our Mission), which Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev launched on 29 August 2012.

The coming together of the victims of nuclear tests such as Kuyukov and the Hibayushas (Japanese for survivors of an explosion) of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only victims of atomic bombings, is instructive for India and the world.

A Study In Contrast

The Republic of Kazakhstan was not even born when the late Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi unveiled his now eponymously-named “action plan to usher in a world order free of nuclear weapons and rooted in non-violence”, on 9 June 1988 at the UN General Assembly.

However, since then, while India’s moral heft and political will to pursue the twin issues of non-proliferation and disarmament to a logical conclusion have seen a decline, Kazakhstan — undaunted by the prospect of a David versus Goliath battle or unfazed by the criticism of not making enough progress towards genuine media and political freedoms — has taken upon itself to champion the cause of a global test ban leading to an eventual ban on nuclear weapons. And it has all the right credentials, to boot.

On 28 February 1989, a poet-activist by the name of Olzhas Suleimenov, now 78, founded the Nevada- Semey anti-nuclear movement to mobilise public opinion against the nuclear explosions conducted by the then USSR at the Semey (formerly Semipalatinsk) test site and to show solidarity with similar movements in the US for closing down the Nevada nuclear test site.

A groundswell of public opinion following the launch of the movement ensured that the erstwhile USSR did not conduct another nuclear test at Semey after 19 October 1989 (although it would not be until after the 24 October 1990 test at Novaya Zemlya, an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, that the erstwhile USSR completely stopped all nuclear tests.)

On 29 August 1991, Nazarbayev, president of what was then the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, officially shut down the Semey nuclear test site. (Kazakhstan became an independent country on 16 December 1991.) It brought to an end a 40-year-long history of nuclear tests at Semey, which began on 29 August 1949; a total of 456 tests (including 116 above-ground tests) were conducted at Semey. He followed it up by announcing that Kazakhstan would voluntarily renounce its nuclear arsenal — the fourth largest in the world at the time — that it had inherited from the erstwhile USSR.

That process was completed by 1996 but his ambitious endeavours didn’t stop there. Next on his agenda was a Central Asia Nuclear Weapon Free Zone Treaty, which was signed by all five Central Asian States — Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan — on 8 September 2006 at Semey and came into force in 2009. This May, all five permanent members of the UN Security Council signed the protocol to this treaty, giving negative security assurances and committing themselves not to use nuclear weapons against the Central Asian States.

On 2 December 2009, the 64th session of the UN General Assembly accepted Kazakhstan’s proposal for declaring 29 August as the International Day Against Nuclear Tests. The Resolution 64/35, which was adopted unanimously, called for increasing awareness “about the effects of nuclear weapon test explosions or any other nuclear explosions and the need for their cessation as one of the means of achieving the goal of a nuclear-weapon-free world”. (India and seven other countries — China, Pakistan, the US, Iran, North Korea, Israel and Egypt — are still to sign and/or ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear- Test-Ban Treaty or the CTBT.)

During his visit to Semey in April 2010, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged the leaders of all countries, especially the nuclear powers, to follow the example of Kazakhstan on disarmament and non-proliferation.

Among the latest to join countries such as Kazakhstan and Japan in a concerted campaign for a global test ban leading to eventual disarmament is Marshall Islands, a tiny archipelago in the Pacific Ocean, where the US had conducted a series of nuclear tests, including the detonation of a nuclear device that was equivalent to a thousand Hiroshimas. (In April this year, Marshall Islands filed a lawsuit against India and eight other nuclear-armed countries at the International Court of Justice at The Hague for not disarming themselves.)

In comparison, India’s quest for a nuclear-free world dates back to 1954 when the late prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru became the first statesman to call for a “stand still” agreement on nuclear testing. Three decades later, the late prime minister Indira Gandhi joined five other heads of state and/or government in issuing the Appeal of May 1984 to refocus the world’s attention on nuclear disarmament. However, by then a combination of circumstances and national security imperatives had already begun impelling India towards effecting a shift from a foreign and security policy based on moral considerations to one that was dictated by realpolitik; the nuclear tests by India in 1998 are a case in point.

As Rajiv Gandhi had said in his 1988 speech, “Left to ourselves, we would not want to touch nuclear weapons. But when, in the passing play of great power rivalries, tactical considerations are allowed to take precedence over the imperatives of nuclear non-proliferation, with what leeway are we left?”

Reconciling Dilemmas

To the proponents of non-proliferation and disarmament, the discourse in India today, unlike the time when it sought to punch above its weight in the international arena, has markedly shifted away from a moral self-righteousness to the pursuit of a foreign policy bereft of a moral compass. Yet, there is an overwhelming body of opinion, both within the government and without, that India can and must play an effective role in working towards attaining the goal of disarmament. As Prime Minister Modi himself said in his interaction with the Japanese journalists in New Delhi, “There is no contradiction in our mind between being a nuclear weapon state and contributing actively to global nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation.”

He iterated India’s position a second time, this time during the course of an interaction with the students of Sacred Heart University in Tokyo, that India’s commitment to non-violence is total; it is ingrained in the “DNA of Indian society and this is above any international treaty”. Modi went on to assert that “India is the land of Lord Buddha. Buddha lived for peace and suffered for peace and that message is prevalent in India.”

On the face of it, Modi’s remarks are consistent with those of his predecessors, particularly Manmohan Singh, who had wrestled with the pros and cons of disarmament in the light of the relevance (or lack thereof ) of the Rajiv Gandhi Action Plan and India’s moral stature in pushing for a global consensus on the issue.

A committee constituted in the second term of Manmohan Singh had recommended, among other things, that India should lead the campaign for disarmament because over the decades, it has been in the forefront of such efforts and its emergence as a power to be reckoned with would further enable it in this endeavour.

The Road Ahead

What Rajiv Gandhi said in his 1988 speech rings true even today: “Humanity is at a crossroads. One road will take us like lemmings to our own suicide. (The) other road will give us another chance.”

Surely, the latter road passes through Semey. The least India can and must do is to lend its voice and weight to the efforts being championed by Kazakhstan and Japan alike. The essential features of the four-fold Rajiv Gandhi Action Plan are similar to the four specific steps that Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida articulated recently in an article published by Foreign Affairs, a leading American magazine on international relations. In the article, Kishida, who, incidentally, hails from Hiroshima, hoped that a consensus could be reached at the 2015 NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty) Review Conference on a new plan of action to reduce nuclear weapons and ensure non-proliferation.

The year 2015 would also mark the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombings. New Delhi and Tokyo would do well to dovetail their efforts for greater synergy. Doing so will also endear India to those sections of the Japanese society that remain sceptical of civil nuclear cooperation with a non-NPT and non-CTBT country such as India.

For its part, Kazakhstan has listed nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation among its key foreign policy priorities in the event of its election as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council for the 2017-18 period. As for India, Prime Minister Modi’s talks with the leaders of China and the US and his intervention at the UN General Assembly this month should be a good starting point for it to lay out its vision for reducing the salience of nuclear weapons in international affairs. Therefore, going forward, there is ample scope for India, Japan and Kazakhstan to coordinate their positions.

For if, as Modi said, the friendship between India and Japan will determine what the “Asian century” will look like, then it behoves of them to partner like-minded Asian countries such as Kazakhstan for an alternative universality. A 2012 strategy document, titled ‘Nonalignment 2.0: A foreign and strategic policy for India in the 21st century’, published by the New Delhi-based think-tank Centre for Policy Research, had concluded that “India should aim not just at being powerful. It should set new standards for what the powerful must do.”

In a similar vein, Jonathan Granoff, president of the US-based Global Security Institute, had said on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Rajiv Gandhi Action Plan in 2008 that “the world needs the compass point of leadership”. Will India, and Modi, oblige?

The Armless Crusader

Painter Karipbek Kuyukov is a living testimony to the damage caused by radioactive fallout from nuclear testing, says Ramesh Ramachandran

Trailblazer Karipbek Kuyukov
Pix courtesy: Ramesh Ramachandran

The remoteness of Semey (formerly Semipalatinsk) proved to be its undoing. A land that was once home to Kazakhstan’s most famous poet, Abai Kunanbayev, or the place where Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky of Crime and Punishment fame was exiled to, is today infamous for the nuclear pursuits of the erstwhile Soviet Union. The Cold War saw the Soviets use the vast steppe around Semey for conducting a series of nuclear tests. Consequently, this nondescript town, which today has a population of only a little over 300,000, has seen some of the worst human, man-made tragedies.

Karipbek Kuyukov, 46, is a living testimony of the damage caused by radioactive fallout from the explosions. He was born in 1968 in the village of Yegyndybulak, about a 100 km away from Semey, where the former Soviet Union tested its nuclear weapons between 1949 and 1989. Little did his unsuspecting parents know that years of indiscriminate nuclear testing during the Cold War would rob their son of the simple pleasures of life that you and I, who are far removed from the steppes of Kazakhstan, would take for granted. Kuyukov was born without arms — an unwitting victim of his parents’ exposure to nuclear radiation.

“When I was a child, my parents used to tell me stories about how the ground trembled,” Kuyukov recalls. “Growing up, I remember the armoires shaking and the rattling of dishes.”

He spent an early part of his life at an institute in St Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), where his father hoped he would learn to use prosthetic arms. The young Kuyukov tried but failed to master the prosthetic; he wouldn’t tell if it militated against his aesthetic sensibilities but he lets you in on his intimate thoughts and how and why he chose art to give expression to his creative talent. “My soul was looking to create something beautiful,” he reminisces.

What began as a painfully slow and exhausting attempt at redeeming himself eventually transformed into a cathartic, and almost transcendental, experience — one that would not only give meaning to his life but hold him up as a conscience-keeper for generations to come.

“I will be the happiest if I am among the last victims of nuclear tests,” says the diminutive painter, who has made it his life’s mission to encourage people, as opposed to governments, to seek a ban on nuclear tests and to make a world free of nuclear weapons a reality. Left to themselves, governments will forever cite reasons for holding on to their nuclear arsenals but people can turn the tide when they force governments to sit up and take notice of the will of the people, he reasons. And that is the message he seeks to convey through his paintings. Holding a brush in his mouth and between his toes, Kuyukov has painted on themes ranging from fear and loneliness to the mushroom cloud and nature.

“Through my works, I want to share with the people the horrible consequences of nuclear tests, the pain and suffering of the victims of nuclear tests and the agony of mothers,” he says. Today, he spends a considerable part of his time campaigning for a ban on nuclear tests in his capacity as an honorary ambassador for The ATOM Project. (The ATOM Project is a global petition drive to mobilise international public opinion against nuclear tests and to deliver those petitions with signatures to the leaders of the countries with nuclear weapons.)

“The last 25 years of my life have been a battle. When I joined the movement, I remember that in those days when neither the Internet nor mobile phones existed, we collected signatures on sheets of paper from every region,” Kuyukov says. “I don’t have arms to hug you but I have a heart and it belongs to you!”

According to The ATOM Project, “Today, many in the area around the former Semipalatinsk nuclear test site (or The Polygon, as it was known) do not live past 60 and, as a result of exposure to radiation, the genetic code of those parents and grandparents was permanently altered, resulting in horrific birth defects to this day. According to the UN, in all, more than 1.5 million people in Kazakhstan are believed to have suffered premature death, horrible radiation-related diseases and lifetimes of struggle as a result of birth defects.”

The ATOM Project has designated 11.05 am (the local time in respective countries) on 29 August of every year as the occasion to observe a moment’s silence in honour of all victims of nuclear tests. At 11.05 am, the hands of a clock form a ‘V’ for victory and it therefore chose this time to signify a victory of common sense over fear and for global efforts towards a nuclear weapons-free world.

Will Modi's swearing-in set off a new SAARC-wide precedent? Will he spring a surprise again and attend the new Afghan president's inauguration?

New Delhi

6 July 2014

We will know soon. Other things being equal, India can be expected to be represented at the 2 August inauguration of the new president of Afghanistan. It is reliably learnt that Afghanistan has drawn up a list of 40-odd countries and heads of state and/or government that would be invited for the ceremony to be held at the Presidential Palace in Kabul. Incidentally, all SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) members are invited, which has got some asking: Will Mr Modi travel to Kabul given that he himself made the unprecedented move of inviting SAARC leaders to his 26 May swearing-in ceremony?

President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan was among the SAARC leaders who graced Prime Minister Narendra Modi's swearing-in ceremony. If Mr Modi, and some or a majority of his SAARC counterparts, indeed make the journey to Kabul for the inauguration of the new Afghan president-elect, then they would have well and truly established an unwritten SAARC-wide convention for the SAARC heads of state and/or government to grace each other's inauguration. Security will be a consideration, as would protocol, but given Mr Modi's penchant for the unconventional, it should not come as a surprise if he indeed decides to attend the ceremony in Kabul. That said, protocol has never come in the way of the time-tested ties between India and Afghanistan. Most recently, Vice President Hamid Ansari was the senior-most foreign dignitary to attend the funeral of Afghanistan's First Vice President Marshal Mohammad Qasim Fahim, who was a close lieutenant of the late charismatic Northern Alliance commander Ahmad Shah Masood.

However, if the past is any indicator, it could well be that the external affairs minister will represent India at the inauguration of an Afghan president. In UPA-2, a former external affairs minister of India, Mr SM Krishna, represented India at the 19 November 2009 inauguration of Mr Hamid Karzai's second consecutive five-year term as President. (Incidentally, New Delhi had initially planned to nominate Vice President Ansari to attend the inauguration but decided against it because Mr Ansari was required for chairing the proceedings of the winter session of Parliament.) About 800 invitees, including foreign dignitaries, government and military officials and tribal representatives, were present. On the occasion, Mr Krishna had a separate meeting with his American counterpart, Ms Hillary Clinton, and got to exchange pleasantries with his Pakistani counterpart, Mr Shah Mehmood Qureshi.

Going further back, former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh dispatched Prithviraj Chavan, Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s Office, as his personal emissary in a special plane for Mr Karzai's inauguration on 7 December 2004. Mr Chavan was among the representatives from 27-odd foreign delegations who attended the event. The invitees included, among others, the then US Vice-President Dick Cheney and the then Defence Minister Donald Rumsfeld, the then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's special adviser Lakhdar Brahimi, the then Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi and the then Pakistani Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao.

If Prime Minister Narendra Modi deputes his external affairs minister, Ms Sushma Swaraj, for representing India at the inauguration, her visit to Kabul would come almost immediately after conclusion of her talks in New Delhi with visiting US foreign minister John Kerry. Mr Kerry is expected to visit New Delhi for the annual India-US strategic dialogue, to be held on 31 July. This year it was Washington's turn to host the Indian delegation for the strategic dialogue, which is held alternatively in Washington and New Delhi. However, Mr Modi's ascension as Prime Minister in May prompted Washington to change tack -- and quickly at that -- given Washington's unofficial boycott of Mr Modi for close to a decade. The US imposed a visa ban on Mr Modi in 2005 for his alleged role in the 2002 Gujarat riots and it remains in place to this day. Washington, accordingly, thought it fit to first send a bipartisan delegation to call on Mr Modi in New Delhi before hosting him at the White House in September this year. John McCain of the opposition Republican Party called on Mr Modi on 3 July. Kerry's aide William Burns will be in New Delhi soon before Kerry himself comes calling on Mr Modi -- something that would not have been possible if Washington had hosted the India-US strategic dialogue.

Dr Abdullah Abdullah and (on the right) Mr Ashraf Ghani

The only on-the-record comment so far has come from Mr AmarSinha, India's ambassador to Afghanistan, who has said that the swearing-in ceremony of the new Afghan President would be attended by India at duly appropriate level. He pre-empted speculation about India's preference (between Ashraf Ghani, a former World Bank economist, a former adviser to the Bonn Process and a former finance minster in Mr Karzai's transitional administration, and Dr Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister) for President by saying that "either of the candidates become President they both are good friend of India and will work very closely with them (sic). They look towards India as a true friend[.] Our policy towards Afghanistan transcends political differences and each government work very closely both in India as well as here."

Key dates*:

5 April 2014: First round of Afghan presidential election

14 June 2014: Presidential run-off

7 July 2014: Preliminary result of the presidential run-off

24 July 2014: Final result of the presidential run-off

2 August 2014: Inauguration of the new President-elect of Afghanistan

(* as on 6 July 2014)

Online or E-voting in India: An idea whose time has come

If we are banking and shopping online, why can’t we vote online?

For the largest and vibrant democracy that is India, we have made a smooth transition from paper ballot to electronic voting machines (EVMs.) The EVMs were first used on a trial basis in 50 polling stations of Parur Assembly Constituency of Kerala in May 1982. Since November 1998, EVMs have been used in each and every general- and bye-election to Parliamentary and Assembly constituencies in the country. India can proudly claim to have turned into an e-democracy in the 2004 General Elections when 10.75 lakh EVMs were used across all polling stations in the country. Today, EVMs are used in all elections without exception.

If we could embrace EVMs long before the world did, there is no reason why we cannot graduate to e-voting now. It goes without saying that it cannot be accomplished overnight, not least because internet penetration is not uniform throughout the country yet. Only about 200 million of the 800-odd million voters in India today have access to internet and only half of the 200 million are reported to be active on social media. But it is in vogue in some countries and it could become a reality in India, too. Switzerland and Estonia are good examples of how technology can be put to best use for voting. Estonia, in particular, introduced online voting in 2005: All that voters there had to do was to prove their identities using an electronic national identity card in order to be able to vote online. Norway is another European country that harnesses the power of technology in conducting elections; it even allows the less tech-savvy voters among them to vote telephonically.

In the UK, its Electoral Commission has said that reforms such as allowing internet voting should be considered to engage younger voters who are turning out in declining numbers. Only about 44 per cent of the eligible voters in the UK under the age of 25 exercised their franchise, according to some polls. Jenny Watson, the head of the Electoral Commission in the UK, is reported to have said that “we plan to look at a variety of options [such as e-voting], assessing how they will help citizens engage more effectively.” She explained her decision thus: “By doing so we could by proxy help address some of the issues with turnout, particular amongst an increasingly disenfranchised younger generation[.] Unless our electoral system keeps pace with the way many voters live the rest of their lives – where the way they bank and the way they shop has been transformed – it risks being seen as increasingly alien and outdated, particularly to young voters as they use it for the first time.” The Electoral Commission in the UK plans to launch online voter registration this year.

Online voting has its benefits: For instance, it could encourage more young voters to exercise their franchise, thereby increasing the voter turnout. The Election Commission of India is already overseeing the implementation of the Systematic Voters Education and Electoral Participation (SVEEP) scheme for the last few years in order to encourage more voters, particularly women, first-time voters and voters living in remote areas, to exercise their franchise. According to the Election Commission, more than two crore voters in the country are aged between 18 and 19 years. Out of a total of 81-odd crore voters in the country, 2.3 crore are between 18-19 years, thus constituting 2.8 per cent of the national electorate. Also, e-voting could come in handy for the defence personnel who otherwise have to rely on postal ballot. “Transmission time can be cut down if blank ballot papers are sent electronically, providing more time for their return. Better still would be to develop online voting and what better way than to provide it to the group that deserves it the most? We certainly owe it to our Armed forces personnel to do all that is possible to enable them to exercise their franchise,” wrote Mr N Gopalaswami, a former chief election commissioner, in a signed newspaper article. He was referring to the Supreme Court directing the Election Commission (EC) to allow defence personnel to vote as general voters in peace stations. In the future, online voting could benefit non-resident Indians (NRIs), too, after making the required legislative and/or logistical amendments.

Online voting is not without its concerns, though. Fears of rigging or manipulation abound. Also, insulating it from hackers and cyber-criminals could pose a challenge but it is not insurmountable. The Aadhaar card devised by the Unique Identification Authority of India can be among other things a valid proof of identity for online voting.

Fortunately for India, its Election Commission has not been one to shy away from putting technology to use. According to reports, it plans to webcast voting live from some of the 1.4 million-odd polling stations in the country in this year’s general elections. The move will help the EC to keep a check on sensitive polling stations. In the past, it has co-opted technology to make Indian elections free, fair and transparent.

So to come back to my original question: If we can bank and shop online, why indeed can’t we vote online?

Declassify 1962 India-China war report, reappraise the civil – military relations

The release of a portion of the ‘top secret’ T.B. Henderson Brooks – Premindra Singh Bhagat inquiry report on the 1962 India-China war by an Australian journalist Neville Maxwell has come at a time when the civil – military relations are under the scanner all over again, due in no small part to the allegedly inappropriate conduct of a former Chief of Army Staff who dragged the government to court over his age row and how an otherwise routine movement of troops coinciding with the date of court hearing gave rise to fears in the government of a possible ‘coup’; the unseemly controversy surrounding the frequent crashes by Soviet-era MiG fighter jets; and most recently, a series of naval mishaps that eventually led to the resignation of the Navy chief Admiral DK Joshi.

Let us look at the substantive portions of the 126-page section of the report that was released online by Neville Maxwell, who was the Delhi correspondent of the Times of London during the war. For one, the report squarely attributes the debacle to an unsound military plan. It goes on to blame the then army leadership, the intelligence apparatus, the bureaucrats in the ministries of defence and external affairs, and the political class, not necessarily in that order, for the humiliating defeat at the hands of the Chinese. The army leadership, for overruling the field commanders; the intelligence chief, for assuming, erroneously, that the Chinese would not resort to use of force; and the then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s leadership, for pushing for a ‘Forward Policy’ of establishing military outposts in areas claimed by China and launching aggressive patrols without the necessary army wherewithal.

The report notes, among other things, the following:

* The government who politically must have been keen to recover territory advocated a cautious policy whilst Army HQ dictated a policy that was clearly militarily unsound.

* The Chief of Army Staff did not present the correct military assessment to the political leadership on the forward policy in spite of the fact that the military intelligence believed that China would retaliate against any move by India to reclaim territory.

* A meeting was held in the Prime Minister’s Office on 2 November 1961 which was attended among others by the defence minister, the foreign secretary, the Chief of Army Staff and the director Intelligence Bureau (DIB). It appears that the DIB was of the opinion that the Chinese would not react to our establishing new posts and that they were not likely to use force against any of our posts even if they were in a position to do so.

The Ministry of Defence has sought to take refuge under the pretext that the inquiry committee report remains top secret because of the extremely sensitive nature of its contents “which are of current operational value.” Some scholars have debunked the government’s claim, saying that declassification of the report would not hinder or jeopardise in any manner the contemporary political and military attitudes and affairs. On the contrary, they have argued, it was necessary in the interest of generating an open and honest debate in the country about the circumstances leading up to the war so that the right lessons could be drawn. It has been pointed out that the government ought to take the nation into confidence and encourage a critical analysis of what went wrong and how to avoid a repetition in the future. As a newspaper editorial said, “There needs, instead, be a thorough reading of the report and the manner of its eventual public availability for a tutorial on India’s inexplicably ostrich-like approach to archival material. If today we are reacting to the report as if it were still 1963, given the lack of clarity on military assessment of operational details, it reflects the state’s reluctance to allow access to material essential for proper history writing, the kind of history without which there cannot be coherent and informed public debate.”

The release of a section of the report is a wake-up call of sorts for the Indian political and military leadership. To quote a former diplomat Hardeep S Puri, “The contents of the report point to three extremely disturbing trends that were in evidence in the 1960s. Some of these have continuing relevance even 52 years later. These merit a full national debate in order to prevent the recurrence of a 1962-type fiasco. They relate to a continuing civil-military disconnect, serious gaps in training and provisioning of equipment, inadequate or flawed intelligence which contributed to bizarre decision-making at the army headquarters and by the political leadership in the ministries of defence and external affairs, and at the PMO.”

India would do well to reappraise its civil – military relations unless, of course, it wants to go down the path that George Santayana so eloquently warned against: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 exposes limits of technology?

The tragedy that struck the Malaysian Airlines aircraft MH370 with 239 passengers and crew on board it on 8 March 2014 has been worse compounded by the fact that there is still no certainty as to what caused the aircraft to simply disappear or where the plane’s wreckage probably is. With every passing day, the families of the passengers on-board the ill-fated flight have to battle the pain and trauma of not getting closure even as, at last count, 26 countries had pooled their resources to search for the remains of the aircraft.

This one incident alone has brought home the limits of what technology can do to make aviation industry safer or resolve the unanswered questions that continue to bedevil investigators in Malaysia and beyond. Is it even possible in the 21st century that technology is failing us in locating the wreckage of the aircraft or in piecing together the circumstances leading up to and after its disappearance? Several conspiracy theories have been doing the rounds, almost on a daily basis: Could it be a terrorist act, sabotage, hijack or a technical glitch? There are no immediate answers to these puzzling questions. For his part, Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia has said that the aircraft’s main communications and transponder had been deliberately shut off. “… these movements are consistent with deliberate action by someone on the plane,” Mr Najib said.

On the face of it, the Indian government has treated the incident as another airline crash, although five Indian nationals were aboard that MH370 flight. What is disconcerting is not the manner in which the Indian government has chosen to respond to the tragedy but the apparent, cavalier, handling of the incident which could have ended in an even worse tragedy if, as a former United States diplomat Strobe Talbott has argued, the plane could have been hijacked for a 9/11-type attack on an Indian city. Talbott said on his Twitter account: “Malaysian plane mystery: Direction, fuel load & range now lead some to suspect hijackers planned a 9/11-type attack on an Indian city.” He then tweeted a second theory to say that the hijackers were headed towards India but crashed just like the third plane involved in the 11 September 2001 attacks in the US. “Malaysian#370 as hijack: 1 of many theories. Speculation: hijackers headed toward India but crashed like UA#93 on 9/11,” Talbott tweeted.

The mere possibility of someone actually pulling off such an audacious attack on India should be reason enough for alarm bells to ring in the Indian security establishment. “What if,” is a question that cannot and must not be rejected out of hand. There is also the larger issue about how little aviation authorities worldwide have learnt from the 2001 attacks in the US. In a chapter on aviation security written for the book “How did this happen?” published by the Washington-based think tank Council on Foreign Relations a few months after the 2001 attacks in the US, American writer Gregg Easterbrook highlighted the vulnerabilities in the way aircraft transponders operate. “If the transponders had not gone silent on 9/11, air traffic controllers would have quickly realised that two jetliners en route to Los Angeles had made dramatic course changes and were bound straight for Manhattan. Instead, controllers lost precious time trying to figure out where the aircraft were. At the time, I would have bet my life’s savings that the transponder, which broadcasts an aircraft’s location and identity, would be re-engineered to prevent hijackers from turning such units off. But nothing was done. Almost 13 years later, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 sparked a lengthy worldwide search when, it appears, another transponder was turned off. The issue today is exactly as it was on 9/11,” Easterbrook wrote in a recent article.

At the time of writing, the international team hunting for the aircraft in the southern Indian Ocean has not recovered anything.

Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has spoken. But is India listening?

The public discourse in some parts of India today has tended to centre around the politics of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), the apparent failure of the ruling Congress-led UPA to revive the economy and the likely consequences or implications of Narendra Modi as Prime Minister, not necessarily in that order. Add to it the talk of a third, fourth or a federal front, and you have a veritable cornucopia of political expression. Lost somewhere in all of this was a “wish” made by a gentleman who answers to the name of Amartya Sen. The 80-year-old Nobel Laureate, who admittedly has no love lost for the Modi brand of politics, said in his keynote address at the Jaipur Literature Festival last month that he would like to see a secular right-wing party emerge in the country. To quote a media report, he said: “My big political wish is to have a strong and flourishing right-wing party that is secular and not communal.” Another media report quoted him extensively, in which he seeks to explain himself by saying: “There is an important role for a clear-headed, pro-market, pro-business party that does not depend on religious politics, and does not prioritise one religious community over all others...the Swatantra Party for example...but the party died. I wish it would be revived.” Sen wished for more: For instance, he said that he would like the “Left parties to be stronger, but also more clear-minded and much more concentrated on removing severe deprivations of the really poor and downtrodden people and not obsessed with American imperialism”; and “the media to be more responsive to the needs of the poorest people, and less single-minded in their coverage of the world of glitzy entertainment and shining business opportunities. They are right to grumble about the way subsidies waste economic resources, but largely fail to denounce subsidies for the better off, in the way subsidies for the unemployed and the hungry are savaged in the press.”

Now, one may or may not agree with Sen’s political views; one may quarrel with his choice of words and their implication; one may even question their own convictions; but it would not be prudent to reject his remarks out of hand. At the very least they merit a careful consideration. Here’s why:

* To begin with, it is not enough for the AAP to claim that it is neither Left nor Right or that it is not anti-enterprise. For a political party that claims to offer an alternative to the centre-left Congress-led UPA and the centre-right BJP-led coalition, the AAP hopes to be all things to all people all the time. Sample the following statements attributed to AAP’s ideologue Yogendra Yadav, which were published in various publications:

“Unlike traditional political parties, we are not based on the idea of one ideology, we are here to solve problems.”

“[Our] political programme is evolving, that programme refuses to typecast itself into standard ‘Left’ or ‘Right’.”

“Our Constitution talks of socialist principles.”

The AAP remains hydra-headed and ambivalent on certain issues, in spite of its leaders’ recent attempts to clarify their political- and economic vision. “We are not against capitalism, we’re against crony capitalism... It’s a wrong perception that AAP is against business. Of course we need businesses,” AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal said while addressing corporate leaders at a Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) meeting in Delhi. Yet, during his 49-day stint as Chief Minister of Delhi, Mr Kejriwal not only rejected FDI in retail but also increased the subsidies on electricity and water.

* The right-wing politics espoused by the BJP; its ideological mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS); and its affiliates such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Bajrang Dal has its own limitations. The lines between what is communal and what is secular may get blurred due to political realignments in the run-up to, or after, an election but the greatness of Indian democracy lies in its ability to moderate or temper any major deviations from the idea of India or its identity as a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-religious society. Yet every now and then certain fringe elements do manage to raise their ugly head but only so much before they are overcome. It owes much to the fact that the nature of the Indian democracy is such that it militates against such extremist and fissiparous tendencies. The BJP’s Hindutva brand of politics particularly challenges the sense and sensibilities of some sections of the society, who then make common cause with the likes of, say, Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party.

Between, say, a Modi and a Mulayam, there is enough space for a secular centre-right political party to grow and flourish – a party that can harness India’s demographic dividend; give voice to the youths, students and young professionals alike; encourage and promote enterprise; create jobs, wealth and value; and bring out the entrepreneurial spirit in them. If one were to take Sen’s remarks at face value, the India of today could do with a new political entity that reflects the hopes and aspirations of the young people. One need only look at the latest data from the Election Commission in which an estimated 1.79 lakh new young voters would exercise their franchise on an average in each parliamentary constituency. The Swatantra Party founded by C Rajagopalachari gave us a glimpse of how a party that encourages enterprise and liberalism can offer a political alternative. Perhaps it is time for a similar initiative?

India’s first social media election

If Barack Obama was described by a section of the US media as the first social media president, whoever wins the 2014 general elections in India could well earn the moniker of being the first social media prime minister this country has seen. It would be no exaggeration to say that the 2014 elections are well and truly India’s first big social media election, inspired in no small way by the manner in which Obama successfully tapping into the power of social networks to win the 2008 US presidential election. An indication of the influence social media wields can be had from the fact that for the first time in India, the Election Commission will monitor social media spends of the candidates. One possible reason for the exponential rise in the use of social media is that an estimated 1.79 lakh new young voters would exercise their franchise on an average in each parliamentary constituency, as per the latest Election Commission data. (However, it needs to be pointed out here that internet penetration is not uniform throughout the country; therefore, social media would have an influence only in certain pockets.)

I recall reading a New York Times article that published the following quote explaining the phenomenon: “Thomas Jefferson used newspapers to win the presidency, F.D.R. [Franklin D Roosevelt] used radio to change the way he governed, J.F.K. [John F Kennedy] was the first president to understand television, and Howard Dean saw the value of the web for raising money[.] But Senator Barack Obama understood that you could use the web to lower the cost of building a political brand, create a sense of connection and engagement, and dispense with the command and control method of governing to allow people to self-organise to do the work.” That was in 2008. Today, social media has become ubiquitous in India and around the world. So much so that according to a study carried out by Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and IRIS Knowledge Foundation, social media such as Facebook and Twitter are likely to influence at least 160 Lok Sabha constituencies out of 543 during the next general elections. According to some estimates, the number of social media users in India can be expected to rise exponentially by the middle of this year to several tens of million; it may not be much in absolute terms but when seen in the context of the reach of social media and its power of exponential influence it could make all the difference between winning and losing.

Sample the following statistics:

·      The internet population in India is among the largest in the world;

·      In India 30 new internet users are added every minute and a new Facebook user every second; and

·      Nearly half of all internet users in India use social media to keep themselves abreast of political developments.

These statistics only go to prove that there is a paradigm shift unfolding in the way elections are fought and political parties engage voters. Already we are seeing candidates and political parties alike experimenting with Google Hangouts, live broadcasts, audio-visual presentations on YouTube and online debates, besides making use of Facebook and Twitter. (The advent of social media in Indian election campaigns is not the only innovation going around. This election has also seen the entry of American-style “primaries” and “town hall” meetings to select candidates and engage with voters, respectively.)