South Asia Citizens Wire | 22 April 03

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire  |  22 April,  2003

#1. India's hand of friendship? (M.B. Naqvi)
#2. Indian right hopes Billy Graham is wrong (Jawed Naqvi)
#3. A River Diverted, the Sea Rushes In (Erik Eckholm)
#4. 'Paradigm shift' in history? - I and II  (Michael Witzel)
#5. People Against War, in Mumbai, is holding a Lamp -light Peace 
March to protest against the occupation of Iraq (April 23)

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#1.

21 April 2003 , Karachi

India's hand of friendship?

By M.B. Naqvi

Some of the knee jerk reactions to the Indian Premier AB Vajpayee's 
April 18 offer of unconditional negotiations on all contentious 
issues between India and Pakistan, including Kashmir, have been 
sceptical or negative. More so, because he mentioned the usual Indian 
line about negotiations being impossible while cross border terrorism 
from Pakistan's side goes on. Isn't it proof that the symbolism of 
Friday's offer of unconditional talks was bogus? Well, Pakistanis 
have to remember some background facts.

Mr. Vajpayee is India's Prime Minister and his politics is that of an 
old and tried BJP-RSS man. He has in fact returned to 1999 when his 
new government, soon after the two sets of nuclear tests and some 
brutal murder of Hindus in Kashmir decided to open negotiations with 
Pakistan. Mr. Vajpayee then rode a bus to Lahore and signed various 
documents there with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. There were 
indications that the talks had gone well. But the Kargil adventure 
sabotaged whatever progress had been made and Nawaz Sharif was forced 
to beg peace in Washington and agree to basically Indian conditions. 
And a freeze returned to Indo-Pakistan relations.

Vajpayee made yet another overture and Agra talks resulted. These 
failed miserably because Pakistan expected the Indians to climb down 
on Kashmir while the military hostilities around Kargil had been a 
dismal failure. The rest of the story is known.

Following the October attack on Srinagar Assembly, there were another 
on Indian Parliament itself in December 2001. After Agra's failure 
the BJP government started a furious propaganda campaign against 
Pakistan and continued it for over a year. The Indian authorities 
have kept on talking about a war during it and later defining it as a 
preemptive one. None of it can be forgotten or erased from the 
record. The official Indian campaign has created a vicious 
anti-Pakistani climate of opinion in India in which a real war, 
preemptive or not, would naturally be supported by a lot of Indians 
and also to enable BJP to remain in power, perhaps winning another 
national election a year hence.

Pakistanis cannot expect Mr. Vajpayee to talk like an impartial 
observer or a foreigner. He has to keep his political rear safe. He 
has also to keep his line of retreat open, with a viable line of 
action in case the overture this time also fails. It is optional to 
expect that the Indian government will, on encountering another 
failure in India-Pakistan talks, fall back on more of the same: what 
it has been doing since December 2001 or may be it might actually go 
to a war. Nothing can be said for sure.

A word in parenthesis about the next and easily possible war between 
the two countries is in order. The conditions, based on both 
countries oft-repeated stances, are propitious enough for a war, 
although a comforting conclusion can be drawn that the reasons why 
the Indians did not actually go to war with Pakistan last year still 
largely apply.

Insofar as the war itself is concerned, a little realistic thinking 
is in order. India's preemptive war cannot now be a simple 
conventional foray in merely Azad Kashmir. Why? because Pakistanis 
have long held that it would mean an all out war and that they would 
fight a full fledged war with whatever they have. Therefore, the 
preemptive strike will have to be such as to cripple Pakistan's 
ability to retaliate with nuclear weapons. In other words, the Indian 
preemption is predicated on a sudden massive nuclear strike. 
Conversely also, should Pakistan find itself cornered and decides to 
make a strike, it too will have to be preemptive with all that it has.

Therefore war is no longer a mere deadly cricket. The nuclear 
dimension now ensures mutual defeat and totally unacceptable 
destruction. Whatever India decides it is its business. Pakistan has 
no rational reason to countenance any war whatever. Ergo, it must do 
everything humanly possible to avoid a war. It is no time for macho 
talk of professional soldiers; it is time to be realistic.

To repeat, Mr. Vajpayee is not suing for peace from a position of 
weakness. What he has said on Friday in Srinagar is an offer of 
unconditional talks. It was happily seized by Pakistani PM and FM as 
such. They were right. There is no point in insisting on looking too 
sceptically into the gift horse's mouth. Mr. Vajpayee can comfortably 
live with the success in the talks as well as failure in them. 
Insofar as can be seen, his calculation seem to be to win a national 
election at the crest of an admiring wave for having befriended a 
long lost brother. But he can go back with equal ease in the case of 
the talks failure and redouble his anti-Pakistan vitriol to win 
another election by in some way repeating a Gujarat. Is Pakistan 
equally well-prepared for failure?

This is not Pakistan's finest hour. It has had a constitutional 
breakdown in 1999 and a personal dictatorship of a General has 
obtained since then. The General is now claiming to make a slow and 
rather halting transition to a democracy with which he can live with 
with all his jobs and powers intact as a COAS and an all-powerful 
President. He means to keep an upper hand over the Parliament and 
keep the Prime Minister as his man Friday doing what he wants him to 
do. The opposition is fighting against it. There is a deadlock 
between the government and the opposition. The President is in no 
mood to make any serious concession and the opposition has probably 
burnt its boat by over commitment and probably cannot retreat. It is 
an unpromising background for serious Indo-Pakistan negotiations, no 
matter whether the famous centrality of Kashmir is actually respected 
by India or not.

Even so, Pakistanis have to remember that they carry a terrible 
burden --- of the failure of their Kashmir policy: After the 
sacrifice of 70,000 young men's lives and horrible human miseries in 
Kashmir, the Kashmiris' cause has not been advanced an inch by what 
is called Jihad and which the Indians call terrorism. If Pakistanis 
can see with a clear eye, they would find all their own trusted 
foreign friends in India's corner. One means Iran and China both; the 
Chinese too want Pakistan to negotiate with India if necessary on 
India's terms. The Americans and the British have already pitched in 
on the Indian side. It is a time when Pakistan has to change its 
basic policies, both in the sphere of foreign affairs and the main 
features of its domestic politics.

While foreign policy would naturally take care of itself after the 
main domestic issues have been sorted out, the central issue concerns 
the amplitude of General Pervez Musharraf's powers. If he is not 
willing to make any patriotic sacrifice by shedding some of his 
powers that are foreign to a democracy, the outlook would be dreary 
and bleak. That would not be the ambiance in which a creative 
reformulation of foreign policy would be possible in accordance with 
the main thrust and sanction of a vibrant democracy. What chance can 
then be of India and Pakistan succeeding or avoiding sterile arms 
races and possible nuclear war?

Mentioning weaknesses of Pakistan at this stage and in this context 
is not promoting defeatism and pessimism. Let's face the fact that 
the world views Pakistan as an unstable and brittle state; it must be 
factored in. The need is for constructive thinking and seizing 
whatever opportunities there might be in this situation. Can the 
Jamali-Musharraf team rise above the puerile and dated formulations 
on Kashmir and think of a paradigm shift?

_____


#2.


DAWN, 21 April 2003

Indian right hopes Billy Graham is wrong
By Jawed Naqvi

It is indeed true that if most of India's majority 82 per cent Hindus 
were not secular, the country would perhaps be a theocratic state. At 
the same time had its Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and other smaller 
groups not subscribed to secular politics, it would be impossible to 
run a country as complex and massive as India. And yet religious 
atavism abounds in every nook and corner of this vast nation.
Sometimes it surfaces as religious violence and it then becomes 
readily palpable. But the national outrage is not equally 
distributed. For example, everyone has expressed their anger at the 
massacre of 24 Kashmiri Pandits in Pulwama on March 24 by suspected 
Muslim militants. But few are moved by the equally horrendous murder 
in Assam of 30 Hindu Dimasa tribals by suspected Hmar tribesmen, who 
are predominantly Christian, which took place on March 31.
How is it that a massacre of one set of Hindus leads to a nuclear 
flashpoint with a culpable neighbour, but the killings of Hindus 
elsewhere does not even find a brief shelf-life in the newsroom, much 
less in public sensitivity? Is it the linguistic affinity with Delhi 
that determines the degree of outrage? Or is Kashmir the only real 
issue, and hence a greater sense of outrage when killings happen 
there? Or is it "handling Pakistan" that matters most? The question 
is complex.
Not so complex for right-wing politicians, who feast on the 
culpability of Muslim or Christian groups in the killings in Kashmir 
and Assam, as they did with the Sikhs at the height of the problems 
in the Punjab. They will go to any length to fish in such troubled 
waters. Sometimes they are devious, sometimes they are amazingly 
naive.
For example, after years of glorifying Hitler and his extermination 
of Jews as worthy of emulation _ with a different target group, of 
course _ the Hindu right has been snuggling up to Israel, hoping this 
would enable them to fix their main quarry, India's Muslims.
One remembers the relentless campaign in the Indian media in 1991-92 
about the instant benefits that would accrue from the resumption of 
diplomatic ties with the Zionist state. We were told that the 
Israelis would send their invincible commandos to sort out the 
Kashmiri militants and sort out the problem once and for all.
Israeli diplomats would in private shake their heads over the 
Kashmir-centric logic that coloured much of the public enthusiasm 
behind New Delhi's handshake with Tel Aviv.
Similarly, there has been tacit backing for the American-led bombing 
of Iraq. The overt support has come from the trident waving Praveen 
Togadia of the Vishwa Hindi Parishad, despite the public posturing 
against it. This is in line with the thinking of the Hindu right 
which blindly subscribes to the "clash of civilizations" thesis and 
sees the invasion of Iraq as a war against Muslims.
A potential problem with this line has gone unnoticed by the right 
wing in India, which is that the American Christian right, so far 
viewed as an ally against Islam, is now training its guns on the 
Hindus. American evangelist Franklin Graham may warm the hearts of 
the fanatical lot among them when he denounces Islam as evil, but 
what happens when he visits his brimstone and fire on the Indian 
government for attacks on Christians?
Which makes for a piquant situation since Franklin Graham is the 
presiding religious intermediary of the Pentagon and the White House, 
besides being the son of the famous Billy Graham who used to be the 
preferred priest in the presidency of George Bush Sr. So what did 
ripe octogenarian Graham Sr say to complicate the Hindu right's 
favourite thesis on the clash of civilizations?
"Despite their valiant efforts," says Graham senior, "Nagaland 
remains an occupied territory. The Indian government empowers its 
soldiers to arrest, shoot and even kill at will anyone suspected of 
subversive actions against the government. It is said to be the most 
unreported area of civil conflict in the second half of this century, 
with estimates of up to 300,000 casualties."
Graham says that all the underground organizations in Nagaland are 
led by and made up of Christians, predominantly Baptists. "There are 
well-documented cases of Naga women being raped or assaulted, crops 
being destroyed and women and children dying in concentration camps 
of malnutrition, torture and forced labour."
I suppose once we are through with sorting out Pakistan over Kashmir, 
and finish dealing with Bhutan and Bangladesh over their alleged 
indiscretions in Assam and elsewhere, our right-wing cultural 
nationalists, who prey on religious atavism, will be sufficiently 
battle-ready to take on the world's remaining superpower for daring 
to support a religious insurrection in our own backyard, if the 
northeastern states could be called that.
* * * * *
How do you fight communalism when communalists are getting armed 
everyday? Muslim communalists are experts at the use of RDX, blowing 
up everything in sight, or so we are given to understand. Hindu 
groups are forming their own suicide squads and they are distributing 
trishuls, or tridents, that look pretty menacing in the hands of the 
thousands of young men being trained to use them.
Maverick politician and a frontline champion of secularism Laloo 
Prasad Yadav has come up with a simple formula to take on the 
fanatical hordes. Beat them with a stick is his simple recipe to fend 
off the communal menace.
Laloo has planned a rally of his lathi-wielding supporters in Bihar 
later this month to kick off the mother of all battles against 
nascent fascism. The increasingly rotund former chief minister says 
he is inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's famous lathi which he used as a 
walking stick.


______


#3.

The New York Times
April 22, 2003

A River Diverted, the Sea Rushes In

By ERIK ECKHOLM

KHARO, Pakistan - Abbas Baloch gazed ruefully at a wide,
shallow bay of the Arabian Sea. "This used to be our land,"
he said. "And now it's covered by the sea."

When Mr. Baloch was born, 38 years ago, this watery expanse
was at the center of his family's estate on the Indus River
delta. But after decades of dam and canal projects
upstream, his farmland has largely been swallowed.

The dams and canals were built in India and other parts of
Pakistan to provide irrigation and power. But little
thought was given to the consequences downstream.

Here at the mouth of the Indus, the river has dried up and
sea water has rushed in to replace its flows, inundating
2,000 acres of the Baloch family's land. (The family has
received no compensation, said Mr. Baloch, who is now
trying to make a living in the overcrowded business of
coastal fishing.)

And for millions of smaller-scale landowners, tenant
farmers and river fishermen, the losses of land and the
water shortages caused by water diversions upstream have
been even more devastating. Many have moved to the slums of
nearby Karachi; others remain in desolate villages, stunned
by the sight of empty canals.

  From its glacial origins in the Himalayas to its mouth at
the Arabian Sea, the Indus and its tributaries support the
world's largest system of irrigation canals. The region has
fertile soils but little rain. The waters of the Indus
basin sustain scores of millions of people in northwest
India and literally underwrite the nation of Pakistan,
population 145 million and growing.

But the progressive blocking and consumption of those
waters have also provided a stark example of the ecological
havoc such projects can cause.

"It was just a race for the water, with no expert
planning," said Sikander Brohi, a development expert at the
Center for Information and Research of the Bhutto Institute
in Karachi.

When so much is squeezed from a finite resource, conflicts
are inevitable. No one has fully measured the economic and
environmental effects of half a century of water
developments on the Indus, or shown what a different
pattern of management may have achieved.

By now, the pitfalls of large dams are notorious, and donor
agencies like the World Bank have become more wary, at
least requiring detailed environmental and social
assessments. A few decades back, the engineers were less
constrained.

The largest single project on the Indus is the Tarbela Dam,
in northern Pakistan, which was completed in 1976. As a
report in 2000 by the World Commission on Dams put it, in
damning understatement, "the ecological impacts of the dam
were not considered at the inception stage as the
international agencies involved in water resources
development had not realized this need at that time."

Yet in parched regions like this, the pressure for new,
perhaps dubious projects remains intense. Residents of
Punjab Province in central Pakistan, who have enjoyed major
benefits and suffered relatively few of the damages of past
projects, are pressing for another major dam. Pakistan is
forging ahead with a disputed new canal in Punjab that will
divert still more water to bring new desert lands under
cultivation.

"A lot of the engineers and politicians consider any flow
of water into the sea to be a waste, and they consider the
mangrove swamps of the delta to be a wasteland," said
Mohammed Tahir Qureshi, coastal ecosystem director in
Pakistan for IUCN/The World Conservation Union, a global
scientific body.

The division of Indus basin waters has been a source of
friction between Pakistan and India, largely but not
entirely salved by an international treaty in 1960. Even
more, it is a source of bitter conflict in Pakistan, with
Sindh Province here in the south claiming that the more
politically powerful Punjab Province of Pakistan is
grabbing more than its share.

"Upstream, they are demanding more water for canals, but we
are demanding water to save our coastal area," Mr. Brohi
said. "The dams are not giving proper benefit to Sindh," he
added, expressing a view that is universally held in Sindh
and rejected by officials in Punjab. "When our crops need
water, they are filling the dams to meet needs in Punjab."

The social and environmental damage is most visible in the
Indus delta itself, which used to be a vast network of
creeks surrounded by rich silt that yielded abundant rice
crops for export. The traditional year-round flow into the
sea was drastically curbed a few decades back, and more
recently, with ever more withdrawals topped by years of low
precipitation in the river headlands, it has disappeared
altogether.

"At least we used to get water through here for two or
three months of the year," said Muhammad Ali Shah, chairman
of the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum, during a visit to
half-abandoned villages just above the delta. "But for the
last four years there has been no flow at all. The fields
can't be planted and now drinking water has become the
biggest issue."

With no river to push it out, the sea is pushing in. Along
the coast, studies show, at least 1.2 million acres of
farmland have been covered by sea water. Millions more
acres inland have been impaired or destroyed by salt
deposits.

The coastal marshes, where fresh water and salt water
mixed, were filled with the mangrove forests that are vital
to spawning of fish and shrimp and to protection of the
shoreline. Long under pressure from timber and fuel-wood
collectors and grazing camels, these forests now suffer the
greatest threat yet, a lack of incoming fresh water.

Once more than 850,000 acres, the area of mangrove swamps
in the Indus delta has shrunk to less than 500,000. Trees
are stunted in many of the remaining forests, and the
number of species has dropped to three from eight.
Fisheries have suffered accordingly, with catches of some
of the most valued species nearly disappearing. Overfishing
is another problem: driven out of farming by the absence of
water, thousands of people have switched to offshore
fishing, putting enormous pressure on the stocks.

The flood plains banding the Indus along its lower hundreds
of miles were covered until recently with rich forests,
occupied by more than 500,000 people who engaged in animal
husbandry, farming and forestry. But now the river so
seldom overflows that the riverine ecosystems are failing.
At best, the mix of tree species is changing and in some
areas, vegetation is dying out, leaving ghostlike skeletal
remains of forests and abandoned settlements.

Could it be different? Scientists in Sindh want more water
released upstream, and in seasonal patterns more attuned to
ecological needs of the lower basin. They also note that an
estimated 40 percent of the diverted waters are lost to
seepage from dirt canals and evaporation, losses that can
be curbed only with large investments in concrete and
modern irrigation methods.

"I realize that we can't turn back the clock and restore
the original flow of the river," said Mr. Qureshi of the
IUCN. "But we need to have rational water management."

At the same time, the demands on the Indus climb steadily.
Bitter competition for its waters and ecological costs seem
unlikely to wane. Pakistan's population, which was little
more than 30 million when the country was formed in 1947,
is projected to reach 250 million by 2025.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/22/science/earth/22RIVE.html?ex=1051964964&ei=1&en=cda5fee9a47d759c


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#4.


The Hindu, Apr 01, 2003

'Paradigm shift' in history? - I
by MICHAEL WITZEL

Frawley may `love' India all the way he wants, but if he really wants 
to understand, he must at least begin to study the required sciences, 
be they anthropology, linguistics, philology, biology or geography. 
Of course, he does not see the need as he already knows the `secrets' 
of the Veda.[...].
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/op/2003/04/01/stories/2003040100110200.htm


The Hindu, Apr 08, 2003

`Paradigm shift' in history? - II
by MICHAEL WITZEL

Scholarship is not local but universal. Those who want to turn it 
back in indigenous fashion may succeed for a while but their 
pronouncements will eventually be thrown out on the dung heap of 
history. The history of a great civilisation such as the Indian one 
does not deserve to be hijacked by narrow parochial, nationalistic, 
chauvinistic or political interests. A truly international approach 
is needed, with input from many sides.[...].
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/op/stories/2003040800010200.htm


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#5.

People Against War,
a coalition of human rights and public interest groups, unions and 
concerned citizens in Mumbai, is holding a Lamp -light Peace March to 
protest against the occupation of Iraq.

Wednesday, 23rd April 2003

Nariman Point to Girgaum Chowpatty

Assemble opposite the Oberoi Hotel at 6.00 p.m. or join along the way

Bring lanterns and torches to spread the light of peace

Say No to An Unjust Occupation!

Join us there.  Remember - one more does make a difference



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