[sacw] [ACT] sacw dispatch 19 Jan 2000

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Web Dispatch
19 January 2000
(http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex)
___________________
#1. Lahore declaration be implemented: Retd Pak General
#2. Agenda for change in Pakistan
#3. Deterrence Unaffordable by India
#4. Harvest Hate
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#1.
Indian Express
Thursday, January 20, 2000

Lahore declaration be implemented: Retd Pak General

CALCUTTA: Lt General (Retd) Mohammad Nasir Akhtar of the Pakistan army
said here today that Lahore declaration should be implemented in letter
and spirit to bring about a lasting peace between India and Pakistan as
the relation suffered a serious setback following Kargil conflict and
recent hijacking of Indian Airlines flight. Taking to newsmen after
taking part in a 'peace march' in the city, the retired General said
''if Lahore declaration fails to serve the desired purpose, the two
countries will have to find out a new way to normalise bilateral
relations that suffered serious jolt after the Kargil conflict and the
hijacking of the Indian Airlines Airbus to Kandahar'', reports PTI.

He, however, denied Pakistan's hand in the hijacking. Brigader (Retd) R
A Hamid of Pakistan army said ''there is no alternative to peace efforts
which will have to be initiated afresh because the two nations can't
live with wars'', he added. Asked if Islamabad's hand was proved in the
hijacking, he said ''I will be ashamed if Pakistan's involvement is
proved on inquiry. However, I don't feel that our country was in anyway
involved in such an act''.

Tahed Mohammed Chaudhury, former minister in the erstwhile Z A Bhutto
cabinet in Pakistan, admitted that the Kargil conflict caused
considerable damage to the move to normalise bilateral ties, but
squarely blamed Indian media ''for spreading hatred campaign against
Pakistan''.
__________
#2.
The News International
Wednesday, January 19 , 2000
Opinion

Agenda for change
by M Asghar Khan
The ouster of Mian Nawaz Sharif by the military, which was the fourth
interruption in the affairs of the country by the army in 53 years, should
be seen in the light of the circumstances that prevailed on October 12.
Every political party in the country except the Muslim League was wanting
Mian Nawaz Sharif out. It must be remembered that the large collection of
parties called the Grand Democratic Alliance as well as almost all the
religious parties were not suggesting any alternative after Nawaz Sharif's
ouster. They were aware of the fact that if the prime minister was to be
removed, the armed forces would be inevitably involved. The naive amongst
them may have hoped that having brought about the change that they desired,
the army would hand the government over to them. They should therefore not
have been surprised when the chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee and
chief of the army staff having taken over, decided to stay for a while. The
nation was relieved and except for half a dozen women, no one made any
attempt to show that they disapproved of this change.

The manner in which Mian Nawaz Sharif tried to assume dictatorial powers is
common knowledge. His unbridled ambition eventually brought him down. The
lack of participation of the people in the elections of 1997 had been
clearly proved. In the words of a former prime minister of Australia, who
had came to Pakistan as the head of the Commonwealth team to monitor the
elections, "it appears that the people of Pakistan have lost faith in
political parties and probably in democracy itself". The voters' turnout
was only 26 per cent of which the Muslim League received about 15 per cent
of the votes. Not more than 5 per cent of the adult population of the
country turned out to vote. If one can reject elections held recently in
Indian occupied Kashmir with a slightly higher turnover, one cannot accept
the results of Pakistan's last general elections as representing the will
of the people. In spite of his rejection by the people, Mian Nawaz Sharif
was accepted as the head of a so-called democratic government and it is
this democracy that our western well-wishers have been asking General
Musharraf to restore.

It will be major lapse of judgement on the part of General Musharraf if he
was to reach an understanding with the politicians who had been a part of
the system that has brought Pakistan to its present state of bankruptcy.
The country deserves a new beginning and the people want, what General
Musharraf has called, 'real democracy' introduced. What is this 'real
democracy' to be and what should be its agenda?

Elections for the rich: Success in elections in Pakistan is possible only
for the rich. To make it possible for the ordinary people to be elected, a
number of changes in the system of elections are essential. Banning of
election posters and banners would reduce the cost. Use of transport on
elections day alone costs at an average, anything between Rs1.5m and Rs2m.
If constituencies are doubled--and population has doubled since 1973 when
the constitution was framed--the area to be covered by a candidate and the
number of people to be contacted would be halved and expenses will be
reduced. If the number of polling stations doubled, expenses would be
further reduced and polling stations will be more easily accessible to
voters. Transport which is an expensive item should then be completely off
the roads on polling day.

The Election Commission could be made responsible for arranging a number of
introductory meetings for candidates in their constituencies and a
candidate or his political party need not hold its own public meetings.

=46air Elections: To ensure that elections are free and fair, the election
commission should be made completely independent of government control. The
government should not be allowed to interfere in anyway in the electoral
process. The Inter-Services Intelligence directorate which since 1976, has
been directly under the prime minister and has been used to finance
candidate and political parties in order to influence the results of the
elections, should have no political role and should be placed under the
control of the chairman of Chiefs of Staff Committee.

Elections to the national and provincial assemblies should be on the basis
of proportional representation with political parties giving their list of
candidates and voters being asked to vote for a party and its programme
rather than for individuals. Excepts for one or two honourable exceptions,
no political party in Pakistan holds its party elections and yet they pose
as champions for democracy. Political parties, in order to qualify for
participation in national elections should be required to hold elections
within the party and these elections should be monitored by the Election
Commission.

Rights of citizens: All citizens irrespective of religion or race should
have equal rights and should not be discriminated against in any service
appointment including the judiciary and the armed forces. Non-Muslims
should have the same opportunities and privileges as Muslims.

The narrow-minded approach of some of us in this matter, is misguided and
misplaced. I know of six non-Muslim officers of the Pakistan Air Force who
were awarded the Sitara-e-Jur'at for gallantry in the 1965 war and of one
non-Muslim who volunteered to destroy an enemy radar station which he knew
was heavily guarded and from which he was not likely to return. He
completed his mission successfully but lost his life in the process. If
minorities are reduced to the level of second-class citizens, their loyalty
to Pakistan will also be second-class.

I have served with and have known non-Muslim officers and men whose loyalty
to Pakistan and whose competence was of a very high order. I consider them
to have been better Pakistanis than those otherwise good Muslims, who in
this matter, fail to see the need to keep the nation united. To weld the
people of Pakistan into one nation, joint electorate without any
discrimination of religion is essential and the sooner we get back to
Quaid-i-Azam, Muhammad Ali Jinnah's concept of Pakistan, the better.

Another problem that we face is the degrading spectacle of armies of
beggars on the streets of Pakistan. It is said that this has developed into
an organised business in which the police is involved. Whether the police
is involved or not, it is an unfortunate sight that needs to be remedied.
Moreover, it is a problem that can be tackled effectively. Destitutes
should be the responsibility of the state and beggary in any form should be
forbidden.

Rehabilitation centres should be set up for beggars where they should be
taught skills and made to work so that the able bodies amongst them can
earn enough to meet the cost of running these centres and meeting the needs
of their handicapped companions. Loss of a leg or even both legs need not
be an obstacle to earning a living. One of the highest decorated officers
for gallantry in the Royal Air Force in the second world war was Douglas
Bader, who had no legs. After the war, during his retirement, he continued
to play a good game of golf with his wooden legs. If the will is there a
human being can be motivated to do great things.

Rights of women: All laws, customs and practices which are discriminatory
against women should be abolished and adequate legal protection provided
for women's rights. It should be a requirement that only those political
parties will qualify for participation in national elections that have at
least 10 per cent women in their party lists.

In order to give women their proper place in society, the following
additional steps should be taken:

* At least 50 per cent of judges in family courts should be women who are
naturally more sympathetic to problems that are familiar to women.

* Provision should be made by law for all cases of divorce filed by women
to be decided by family courts within six months, including the question of
custody of children, maintenance and haq mehar.

* All cases relating to property arising out of divorce should be entrusted
to family courts and should be settled within one year.

* Changes should be made in the family law to provide greater protection to
women against exploitation and social injustice in such matters as divorce,
maintenance after divorce and the maintenance and custody of children.

* Special measures should be adopted to protect the rights of women and
minor children in matters of inheritance and effective steps should be
taken for this purpose.

* Steps should be taken to protect the interests of widows and children in
such matters as possession of urban property and agricultural land and to
ensure that they get their proper share in agricultural yield.

* All government posts should be open to women on the basis of similar
emolument as for men.

* Women should be provided facilities for education in all branches of
knowledge and profession.

* Nurseries should be established especially for children of working women.

* Facilities for women travelling in public road and rail transport should
be improved and increased.

* Facilities provided under the ILO Convention should be provided to women
workers in the private and public sector industries.

Constitutional structure: The federal structure of Pakistan, wherein one
province has outnumbered the collective parliamentary strength of all the
other provinces, has not changed with the separation of East Pakistan. Just
as East Pakistan has a larger population than the other four provinces of
West Pakistan put together, Punjab today outnumbers the combined strength
of the remaining three provinces. Unfortunately, narrow parochial
considerations, political exploitation and decades of authoritarian rule
and palace intrigues have further increased the mistrust and
misunderstandings between provinces.

In the circumstances in which one province has a greater population than
that of all the other components of the federation combined, it is
imperative that the smaller provinces be provided safeguards ensuring that
their vital interests would not be jeopardised. Only thus can a repetition
of the unfortunate events of the past be avoided and a lasting basis
established for a united and stable Pakistan in which people of all the
provinces can live in equality and brotherhood. Accordingly:

* The federal government should be entrusted with responsibility for
foreign affairs, defence, currency, inter-provincial trade and
communications and foreign trade.

* The federal government should have the power to levy and collect taxes
for the purpose of the federation.

* The provinces may entrust to the centre such additional responsibilities
as they may decide individually or collectively.

* Interprovincial and inter-district restrictions on the movement of goods
or interprovincial taxes of any category should be forbidden and
unnecessary road barriers removed.

* Powers of the Senate should be enhanced.

* The voting age should be reduced to 18 years.

Judiciary: The judiciary should be completely independent of the executive
and the appointment of judges should be free of executive control.

* A system of elected jury for the courts should be adopted up to the
district court level. The law of procedure and evidence should be
simplified.

* The judicial system should be reviewed and brought in line with the needs
of a progressive society ensuring expeditious disposal of cases in that:

* If a criminal case is not decided within six months by the court from the
first presentation of the challan before the Court, the accused should be
released on bail and the case should be decided within six months
thereafter.

* Civil cases should be decided within one year.

* Separate family courts should be established.

To be concluded
The writer, a retired air marshal, is the chief of Tehrik-e-Istaqlal. This
is his first article in a four-part series on governance reforms.

____________

#2.
The Economic Times Online
JAN 19 2000
OPINION

Unaffordable deterrence

Guest Column / Prabhu Ghate

Kargil is about to take its unfortunate toll in the forthcoming budget,
strengthening the upturn that started last year in defence expenditure as a
proportion of GDP. How strong its fiscal impact is going to be in the next
few years will depend not just on our adversaries, but on the creativity
and vigour of our own diplomacy. However, the danger of a much more
protracted and potentially crippling burden on the economy is lurking in
the shadows =97 that arising from the cost implications of the Draft Nuclear
Doctrine.
These need to be widely debated before any irrevocable decisions are taken.
It is hard to cost minimum deterrence partly because, as the DND itself
recognises, there is no such thing as a ``stable minimum posture=92=92, and
partly because the DND is so open-ended it excludes nothing in principle.
Explicitly or implicitly it includes triadic deployment in operational
readiness, a second-strike capability against large nuclear weapons states
such as the USA, ballistic missiles, `space-based assets=92, tactical nuclea=
r
weapons, and continuous research. The best a member of the panel that
produced the DND has been able to do is place these direct costs in the
range of Rs 70,000 to 700,000 crore (a factor of 10, so great is the
uncertainty).
The indirect costs include the opportunity cost of basic social services
foregone, the autarky the country will be driven to because of export
controls on dual-use technologies the G-8 countries will almost certainly
impose, the secrecy and centralisation of powers in the nuclear bureaucracy
and loss of democratic control that the nuclear program will lead to, the
ever present danger of accidents, and so on.
As Praful Bidwai and Achin Vanaik point out in their wide-ranging and
incisive critique of nuclearisation, "South Asia on a Short Fuse", the
size of nuclear arsenals everywhere has tended to defy rational
calculations of security risk and ways of meeting them. Even the Chinese
`minimum=92 has so far cost well over 100 billion dollars. The bombs
themselves cost around 10 per cent of the total cost. Command, control,
communication, and intelligence mechanisms cost around a third, and
delivery systems around 50 per cent of the total cost. Besides, there are
constantly recurring annual costs for maintenance and replacement or
improvement, which can constitute 30 to 50 per cent of total costs again. A
no-first-use posture actually increases costs by requiring enough bombs to
allow some of them to survive for the second strike.
Some commentators have compared highly optimistic annualised costs of a
`minimum=92 deterrent with the costs India incurs on subsidies. This ignores
the fact that subsidies are not real costs but transfer payments (about
half of which are spent on `merit=92 goods which do reach the poor) and do
not represent the expenditure of real resources. Developing a nuclear
arsenal on the other hand entails the expenditure of real resources, and
that too totally unproductively.
It would pre-empt scarce scientific and engineering manpower to re-invent
the wheel in a whole host of technologies already extant elsewhere but
denied to us. It is one thing to explode a bomb but quite another, for
instance, to develop nuclear submarines, considered to be an essential part
of the triad to ensure survivability. We are several years away from being
able to produce strong enough hulls, or the nuclear propulsion systems, or
communication systems, to give our submarines sufficient range, payload,
and ability to ply at sufficient depth to evade detection and ensure
survival. The Kandahar hijacking showed how dependent we were on systems
controlled by others even to communicate with our negotiators.
Even underground silos for land-based weapons, another means of
survivability, represent a non-trivial technology, in which we have no
experience. Hiding them is not easy in these days of satellites. If India
fully develops the extended-range version of the Agni missile, China is
likely to feel impelled to factor India seriously into its strategic
calculations, relaunch its Dong-Feng 25 intermediate-range missile
development programme, and perhaps overtly target Indian cities. There is a
serious danger of getting into a ruinous arms race to maintain the
credibility of the deterrent (you either deter of you don=92t, in that sense
too there is no such thing as a `minimum=92). The path of wisdom clearly lie=
s
in engaging our adversaries in serious negotiations not just on
confidence-building measures but on the possibility of capping further
development before it is too late.
____________
#4.

Outlook
24 January 2000

Harvest Hate
Irrational, spiritless polemic

Harvesting Our Souls
by Arun Shourie
ASA
Price not stated
Pages: 432

By Neera Chandhoke

I must confess that plodding through the 432 pages of
Shourie's latest offering to political polemics left me not with a
questioning mind, which is the expressed objective of most polemics, but
with considerable regret and even more puzzlement. Regret because Shourie
does not emerge through the pages as a reasoned and informed scholar
willing to persuade, or as someone who intends to engage others who may not
share his views. Rather, he comes out much like one of the preachers from
the Old Testament of the very religion he attacks, condemns, and
dismisses-full of thunder, fire and brimstone, demanding a tooth for a
tooth and an eye for an eye.

Why would a man of his intellect stoop to the level of the pamphlets
issued by right-wing fringe elements of Christianity, and write a book that
obtains as a mirror image of the pamphlets he denounces? Why would an
otherwise savvy politician see a conspiracy under every metaphorical stone?
Why would he warn us in some detail against the mammoth conspiracies of the
Christian missionaries to convert all Hindus at best, and break up the
country at worst, when all they've succeeded in doing is to convert about
roughly a little over two per cent of our population in the 200 years of
British colonialism?

Above all, why would he take the trouble to point out historical and
logical inaccuracies and fallacies in representations of Christianity, when
every human being with a little common sense knows that religion is all
about mythology and belief, and that it can never be proved to be either
logical, scientific, or historically authentic? And finally, why would he
see Christianity as a unified and monolithic religion when sects of this
religion have done nothing for years except declare war on each other?

I accepted the invitation to review the book because I wanted to know who
Shourie actually targets. As my eyes were glazed by the sheer ire that
comes out pouring through the pages, it became clear that Shourie=EDs prime
enemy is not the Christian missionary, though that may well be the
(un)intended consequence of his tirade. His enemies are the secularists who
battle communalism. His enemy is the tradition of religious tolerance that
lets people be with their beliefs. His enemy is ultimately, democracy, for
in the last pages of this book he invites us to follow the example of
China, which has taken a strict line against missionaries. The result is
utter insensitivity and even lack of humanity. Shourie=EDs so busy trying to
show that the burning alive of Staines and his sons was not a conspiracy
hatched by the lunatic elements of the Sangh parivar, that there is neither
a word of regret nor any condemnation of the dastardly act.

The second casualty of his tirade is lack of theoretical rigour. He does
not even wonder why people who presumably belonged to Hinduism-and whether
the adivasis are Hindu has proved an irresolvable problem for
anthropologists for sometime now-feel the need to convert. Surely, all of
it cannot be coercion and bribery. And if people are readily bribed to
convert, isn=EDt there something wrong with the body politic? He would do
well to ponder this point. The problem is Shourie doesn=EDt argue out his
case, elegantly or otherwise. He declaims, he denounces and leaves no space
for dialogue or persuasion.

Sorry Mr Shourie, the days when writers laid down absolute truths have
been over for some time now. The postmodern moment today tells us that all
notions of ultimate truth may be pure fiction. All we can do is search for
the truth, but this can be done only when we engage with others by
respecting their points of view. As to why he writes this book, the
accompanying note in the book may give us some insight: "The author alone
is responsible for the views expressed in this book. They do not in any way
reflect the views of any unofficial or official organisation with which he
may be associated." Methinks the gentleman doth disclaim too much. The
overlap between his purpose to legitimise our gods, our scriptures and that
of the political formation that speaks in these words, cannot be all sheer
coincidence.
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non-profit citizens wire service run by South Asia Citizens Web
(http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex) since1996.