SACW - 10 Nov 2015 | Nepal Blockade / Myanmar Elections / Sri Lanka: Arms Scandal / Bangladesh: Islamists Kill / India: Keeping Praful Bidwai's Legacy Alive; Bihar Steals Modi’s Firecrackers; Overseas scholar's letter to Indian authorities / The Syrian war
Harsh Kapoor
aiindex at gmail.com
Mon Nov 9 18:58:51 EST 2015
South Asia Citizens Wire - 10 November 2015 - No. 2876
[since 1996]
Contents:
1. Bangladesh: Truth be damned - The ’Other’ is always the culprit | Mahfuz Anam
2. Progress fans flames of militant unrest in changing Bangladesh | Jason Burke
3. Keeping Praful Bidwai’s Legacy Alive - An appeal for contributions
4. Open letter to Indian authorities from historians and social scientists of India at academic institutions overseas
5. India: Bihar Steals Modi’s Firecrackers | Jawed Naqvi
6. India: JAM and the Pursuit of Nirvana | Jean Drèze
7. Recent On Communalism Watch:
- Bold protest in London by Awaaz Network ahead of Modi's visit starting 12 Nov 2015
- India: Modi bites the dust - Bihar did not fall for sectarianism (Edit, The Tribine, 9 Nov 2015)
- India: The Modi Presidency is Over (Harish Khare)
- UK: Modi Not Welcome large sized image project on the British parliament by Awaaz Network protesting Modi's visit to Britain starting 12 Nov 2015
- India: The making of a new politics of inclusion (P. K. Datta in The Hindu)
- India: Who Failed in the Bihar 2015 Election? Narendra Modi or Amit Shah (Seema Mustafa in The Citizen)
- India: Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh knickers in a twist
- India: When the Fringe goes Mainstream (Radha Kumar)
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
8. Can Myanmar’s New Government Control Its Military? | Jon Emont
9. Nepal Facing 'Humanitarian Crisis' as Fuel Shortage Continues | Fiona Broom
10. Sri Lanka Law and Order Minister resigns over Avant Garde controversy
11. India: Narendra Modi - the divisive manipulator who charmed the world | Pankaj Mishra
12. Pakistan: Raw deal for labour | Umair Javed
13. India: Bihar’s Message to the Indian Right | Vijay Prashad
14. The Price of Light: India's Huge Need for Electricity is a Problem for the Planet | Annie Gowen, The Washington Post
15. Patrick Cockburn on the state of the Syrian war
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1. BANGLADESH: TRUTH BE DAMNED - THE ’OTHER’ IS ALWAYS THE CULPRIT | Mahfuz Anam
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The PM blames Khaleda, the BNP chief blames Hasina, the killers continue to kill, the victims’ families live in fear, people remain confused and angry, friends of Bangladesh watch in disbelief and the smile of our enemies grow wider. So what more needs to happen to wake us up to the challenges we now face in our ’Sonar Bangla’?
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2. PROGRESS FANS FLAMES OF MILITANT UNREST IN CHANGING BANGLADESH | Jason Burke
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A wave of brutal killings has plunged Bangladesh into deep apprehension. Many fear endless political strife and economic exclusion will spur Islamic terrorism
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3. KEEPING PRAFUL BIDWAI’S LEGACY ALIVE - AN APPEAL FOR FINANCIAL CONTRIBUTIONS
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(sacw.net - 9 November)
Praful Bidwai, noted Indian journalist and author, who passed away in June 2015, was able to combine the qualities of being a public intellectual and activist with a rare distinction. For his many friends, admirers and readers, his premature death is a gap that is hard to fill. They continue to miss his incisive journalistic and scholarly observations on contemporary concerns, both in India and the world. His much acclaimed last book, ‘The Phoenix Moment’, is a magisterial look at the challenges confronting the Indian Left. We need to work together to keep that legacy alive and it is in that spirit that it has been decided to institute a Memorial Fund in his memory which will undertake, among other interventions, to institute an annual prize to recognize a promising scholar-journalist from the region, whose work is marked by a zest for investigation, a commitment to social justice and a capacity for critical analysis.
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4. OPEN LETTER TO INDIAN AUTHORITIES FROM HISTORIANS AND SOCIAL SCIENTISTS OF INDIA AT ACADEMIC INSTITUTIONS OVERSEAS
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(sacw.net - 9 November)
On October 26, a group of distinguished Indian historians issued a statement of concern about the damage being done in the current political climate to the traditions of tolerance, and freedom of speech, belief and practices, for which India was long applauded. We – historians and social scientists engaged in researching and teaching about the richness of Indian history and society in different locations overseas – write to express our solidarity with their statement. We share the deep concern over recent happenings in India, which are affecting freedom of artistic expression and historical and social science inquiry, and serving to produce a dangerously pervasive atmosphere of narrowness, intolerance and bigotry.
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5. INDIA: BIHAR STEALS MODI’S FIRECRACKERS
by Jawed Naqvi
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NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cow politics was put out to pasture on Sunday as the impoverished state of Bihar gave a resounding verdict against the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) campaign to pit Hindus against Muslims over beef eating.
The hefty score of 178 seats in the Bihar 243-member assembly for Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s grand alliance demolished virtually all poll predictions, including the highly acclaimed NDTV. The news channel was predicting a (...)
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6. INDIA: JAM AND THE PURSUIT OF NIRVANA
by Jean Drèze
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Reference is often made to the international experience with cash transfers, such as the Bolsa Família programme in Brazil. As it happens, Brazil spends a full 25% of GDP on the social sector (health, education and social security), of which less than 0.5 per cent goes to Bolsa Família. Brazil provides a wide range of services and facilities to its citizens (including universal health care) aside from income support. This is a general pattern in Latin America, not confined to Brazil. In India, by contrast, social spending is around 6% of GDP. Public expenditure on health is among the lowest in the world, as a proportion of GDP.
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7. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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- Bold protest in London by Awaaz Network ahead of Modi's visit starting 12 Nov 2015
- India: Modi bites the dust - Bihar did not fall for sectarianism (Edit, The Tribine, 9 Nov 2015)
- India: The Modi Presidency is Over (Harish Khare)
- UK: Modi Not Welcome large sized image project on the British parliament by Awaaz Network protesting Modi's visit to Britain starting 12 Nov 2015
- India: The making of a new politics of inclusion (P. K. Datta in The Hindu)
- India: Who Failed in the Bihar 2015 Election? Narendra Modi or Amit Shah (Seema Mustafa in The Citizen)
- [Bihar] State election in India delivers a significant blow to Modi’s popularity (Rama Laxmi in WAPO)
- Working to saffronize education in entire country: RSS ideologue Dina Nath Batra
- India: Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh knickers in a twist
- India: When the Fringe goes Mainstream (Radha Kumar)
- India: 'Religious places of Muslims, Christians in Odisha should be under state regulating authority' - RSS
-> available at: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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8. CAN MYANMAR’S NEW GOVERNMENT CONTROL ITS MILITARY?
by Jon Emont
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http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/can-myanmars-new-government-control-its-military
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9. NEPAL FACING 'HUMANITARIAN CRISIS' AS FUEL SHORTAGE CONTINUES
by Fiona Broom
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http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Nepal-Facing-Humanitarian-Crisis-as-Fuel-Shortage-Continues-20151109-0012.html
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10. SRI LANKA LAW AND ORDER MINISTER RESIGNS OVER AVANT GARDE CONTROVERSY
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(ColomboPage, Nov 9, 2015)
Nov 09, Colombo: Sri Lanka's Minister of Law and Order Thilak Marapana has decided to resign from his ministerial portfolio over the controversy surrounding the Avant Garde security firm.
The Minister at a press conference held Monday morning at his residence announced his decision to step down from his post.
Marapana, who had represented the security firm in the center of controversy, came under fire for his remarks defending the firm during last Wednesday's parliamentary session.
Senior cabinet ministers and a number of civil society leaders expressed their opposition on Marapana's statement regarding the Avant Garde floating armory at the parliament.
Marapana defended the security firm dismissing that there is anything illegal about the Avant Garde vessel carrying unauthorized weapons and the whole controversy was due to lack of understanding about the floating armory creating confusion.
It has been reported that heated exchanges took place during Thursday's cabinet meeting with senior ministers criticizing Minister Marapana's stance on the controversial maritime security firm investigated for corruption.
Some ministers were of the view that Marapana could not be in charge of the Avant Garde case, when he had provided legal services to the company before he was appointed as the law and order minister in the UNF Government.
A special cabinet meeting has been convened under the patronage of President Maithripala Sirisena today to discuss the issue.
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11. INDIA: NARENDRA MODI - THE DIVISIVE MANIPULATOR WHO CHARMED THE WORLD
by Pankaj Mishra
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(The Guardian - 9 November 2015)
This week the Indian prime minister makes a triumphant visit to the UK after cosying up to everyone from Silicon Valley CEOs to Rupert Murdoch. What’s behind the uncritical embrace of a man who has presided over a rising tide of assassinations and religious zealotry, and driven the country’s writers and artists into revolt?
Modi’s speeches about his country’s cruelly postponed and now imminent glory have packed stadiums around the world with ecstatic Indians. Photograph: Javed Dar/Xinhua Press/Corbis
In 2005, when Narendra Modi was the chief minister of the wealthy Indian state of Gujarat, local police murdered a criminal called Sheikh Sohrabuddin in cold blood. At an election rally in 2007 for the ruling Hindu nationalist BJP, Modi assured his citizens that Sohrabuddin “got what he deserved”. What should be done, he asked, to a man found possessing illegal arms? The pumped-up crowd shouted back: “Mari nakho-mari nakho!” (Kill him, kill him!)
The lynch mob’s cry was repeated in a village near Delhi last month as zealots beat to death a Muslim farmer they suspected – wrongly – of keeping beef in his house. While Modi makes a triumphant visit to the UK after more than a year as India’s prime minister, the Hindu supremacists are, as the novelist Mukul Kesavan wrote last month, in “full hunting mode, head up and howling”. In recent weeks, activists and scholars have been shot dead amid a nationwide campaign against “Hindu-baiters” that targets secular intellectuals and “westernised” women as well as public figures with Muslim and Christian names, and western NGOs such as Greenpeace. The assassinations follow months of violence and intimidating rhetoric by Hindu supremacists. A range of public figures, from Shah Rukh Khan, Bollywood’s biggest star, to India’s respected central banker, Raghuram Rajan, have spoken out against the rising tide of sectarian hatred. More than 40 of India’s most distinguished writers have returned their awards to the Sahitya Academy, the national literature academy. Many others, including artists, scholars, filmmakers and scientists, have since joined the protests, which reached boiling point after Hindu fanatics lynched at least four people in connection with beef-eating.
Modi with David Cameron in Australia last year. Photograph: LUKAS COCH / POOL/EPA
Modi turned beef into an incendiary issue during his run for India’s highest political office; he and his party colleagues reinfused it with anti-minorities venom during recent local elections in the state of Bihar. The chief minister of one of India’s richest states declared last month that Muslims could only live in the country if they stopped eating beef. The house magazine of the RSS, the parent outfit of Hindu nationalists, cited ancient scriptures to justify the killing of “sinners” who slaughter cows. The culture minister Mahesh Sharma said of protesting authors: “If they say they are unable to write, let them first stop writing. We will then see.” On Saturday, Modi hinted at his own views on the subject by posing for pictures with organisers of a Delhi demonstration against protesting writers, where slogans such as: “Hit the fraudulent literati with boots” and, “Presstitutes suck up to Europeans” had echoed.
Why the 'Modi Toadies' are after Salman Rushdie
On the day of Modi’s election last May, I wrote in the Guardian that India was entering its most sinister phase since independence. Those who had monitored Modi’s words and deeds, noted their consistency, and feared that Hindu supremacism could deliver a mortal blow to India’s already enfeebled democratic institutions and pluralist traditions had come to much the same conclusion. Modi is a stalwart member of the RSS, a paramilitary organisation explicitly modelled on European fascist parties, whose members have been found routinely guilty of violence against Indian minorities. A pogrom in Modi-ruled Gujarat in 2002 killed more than 1,000 Muslims and displaced tens of thousands. (It was what prompted the US and UK governments to impose a visa ban on Modi). Whether or not Modi was personally complicit in the murder and gang rapes, they had clearly been “planned in advance”, as Human Rights Watch said in the first of countless reports on the violence, “and organised with the extensive participation of the police and state government officials”. Among the few people convicted was Maya Kodnani, Modi’s ministerial colleague, and a fanatic called Babu Bajrangi, who crowed to a journalist that he had slashed open with his sword the womb of a heavily pregnant woman, and claimed that Modi sheltered him after the riots and even changed three judges in order for him to be released on bail (Modi has not responded to these allegations).
Modi turned beef into an incendiary issue during his run for India’s highest political office
Though sentenced to dozens of years in prison, Kodnani and Bajrangi are frequently granted bail and allowed to roam free in Modi’s India. India’s foremost investigative body, the CBI, had accused Modi’s consigliere, Amit Shah, who is now president of the BJP, of ordering the execution of Sohrabuddin (among others), but withdrew its case against him last year, citing lack of evidence. Meanwhile, Teesta Setalvad, a human rights activist and one of Modi’s most persistent critics, is saved from arrest only by the interventions of the supreme court.
Modi conveyed early the audacity – and tawdriness – of power when in May 2014 he flew from Gujarat to the oath-taking ceremony on a private corporate jet emblazoned with the name of his closest corporate chum. In January this year he turned out in a $15,000 Savile Row suit with personalised pinstripes to hug Barack Obama. Launching Digital India (a programme to connect thousands of villages to the internet) in Silicon Valley last month, the eager new international player seemingly shoved Mark Zuckerburg aside to clear space for a photo-op for himself (the video has gone viral). One of his most fervent cheerleaders in India now complains that the prime minister is like a new bride remaking herself for her powerful and wealthy in-laws.
Narendra Modi calls for unity in wake of Muslim man’s murder for eating beef
Consequently, many in his own neglected family are turning against him. On Sunday, his party’s vicious and lavishly funded campaign in elections in Bihar, one of India’s largest and poorest states, ended in humiliating defeat. But Modi’s glossy makeover seems to have seduced many in the west; Rupert Murdoch tweeted after a recent meeting that Modi is India’s “best leader with best policies since independence”. Sheryl Sandberg declared she was changing her Facebook profile in honour of Modi’s visit to Silicon Valley in September. His libertarian hosts did not seem to know or care that, just as Modi was arriving in California to promote Digital India, his factotums were shutting down the internet in Kashmir, or that earlier this year his government advocated a draconian law that the Indian police used repeatedly to arrest people posting opinions on Facebook and Twitter. Nor did the Bay area’s single-minded data-monetisers fuss about the fact that Modi had launched Digital India in India itself with a private party for his most fanatical troll-troopers – people who are, as the magazine Caravan put it, “a byword in online terror, hate and misogyny”. In a dog-eat-dog world primarily organised around lucrative deal-making, the only value seems to be economic growth – albeit, for a small minority.
Modi’s speeches about his country’s cruelly postponed and now imminent glory have packed stadiums around the world with ecstatic Indians. At Wembley this weekend, some more grownup men and women chanting “Modi, Modi!” will embarrass themselves in history. The seemingly unembarrassable Tory government discovered new muscles while kowtowing to Xi Jinping, and will no doubt find them useful for some Indian style-prostration, sashtanga pranam, before Modi.
Modi was always an odd choice to lead India into the 21st century. Meeting him early in his career, the distinguished social psychologist Ashis Nandy assessed Modi as a “classic, clinical case” of the “authoritarian personality”, with its “mix of puritanical rigidity, narrowing of emotional life” and “fantasies of violence”. Such a figure could describe refugee camps with tens of thousands of Muslim survivors of the 2002 pogrom as “child-breeding centres”. Asked repeatedly about his culpability in the killings, Modi insisted that his only mistake was bad media management. Pressed repeatedly over a decade about such extraordinary lack of remorse, he finally said that he regretted the killings as he would a “puppy being run over by a car”.
With Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg. Photograph: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images
More importantly, Modi was a symptom, easily identified through his many European and Asian predecessors, of capitalism’s periodic and inevitable dysfunction: he was plainly the opportune manipulator of mass disaffection with uneven and unstable growth, who distracts a fearful and atomised citizenry with the demonisation of minorities, scapegoating of ostensibly liberal, cosmopolitan and “rootless” people, and promises of “development”, while facilitating crony capitalism. To aspiring but thwarted young Indians Modi presented himself as a social revolutionary, the son of a humble tea-seller challenging entrenched dynasties, as well as an economic moderniser. He promised to overturn an old social and political order that they saw, correctly, as dominated by a venal and unresponsive ruling class. His self-packaging as a pious and virtuous man of the people seemed especially persuasive as corruption scandals tainted the media as well as politicians and businessmen in the years leading up to 2014.
Modi’s earliest supporters in his bid for supreme power, however, were India’s richest people, lured by special favours of cheap land and tax concessions. Ratan Tata, the steel and car-making tycoon, was one of the first big industrialists to embrace him in the wake of the anti-Muslim pogrom. Mukesh Ambani, another business magnate and owner of a 27-storey home in the city of slums, Mumbai, soon hailed his “grand vision”. His brother declared Modi “king among kings”. Even the Economist, reporting on Modi-mania among “private-equity types, blue-chip executives and the chiefs of India’s big conglomerates” was startled by the “creepy sycophancy”. It shouldn’t have been: in Modi’s India the Ambanis are fast heading towards a Berlusconi-style domination of both news and entertainment content and delivery mechanisms.
Media management has ceased to be a problem for Modi; the television channels and press owned by loyal supporters hectically build him up as India’s saviour. Modi also attracted academics, writers and journalists who had failed to flourish in the old regime – the embittered pedantocrats and wannabes who traditionally serve in the intellectual rearguard of illiberal movements. Predictably, these victims of ressentiment – who languished, as Nietzsche wrote, in “a whole tremulous realm of subterranean revenge” – are now taking over Indian institutions, and filling the airwaves with their “rabid mendaciousness and rage”.
Many non-resident Indians, denied full dignity in the white man’s world, also hitched their low self-esteem to Modi’s hot-air balloons about the coming Indian Century. The Modi Toadies, as they are widely referred to on social media, have turned out to be an intriguingly diverse lot: they range from small-town zealots campaigning against romantic love between Muslim and Hindus to a publicist called Swapan Dasgupta, a former Trotskyite and self-proclaimed “anglophile”. But it should not be forgotten that a variety of global elite networks went to work strenuously on Modi’s behalf: the slick public-relations firm APCO that works with Central Asian despots and suave technocrats as much as the rented armies of cyberthugs rampaging through social media and the comment sections of online articles.
Protestors after the murder of a Muslim who was beaten to death for allegedly eating beef. Photograph: Rupak de Chowdhuri/Reuters/Corbis
A former special adviser to Tony Blair authored a hagiography for English-speaking readers. The Labour peer Meghnad Desai helped alchemise Modi’s record of assisting big corporations into an electorally potent myth of “efficiency” and “rapid development”. Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya – two Ivy League Indian economists charged with “poverty-denialism” by the recent Nobel laureate Angus Deaton – said in a letter to the Economist that the anti-Muslim pogrom in Modi’s Gujarat was actually a “riot”. As Modi appeared likely to become prime minister, the intellectual grunts at American thinktanks churned out op-eds hailing Modi as the man to accelerate India’s neoliberalisation, and reorient its foreign policy towards America and Israel. Many foreign correspondents and “India hands” lost their intellectual confidence and judgement before such diligently manufactured consensus.
Thus, Modi rose frictionlessly and swiftly from disgrace to respectability in a world where money, power and status are the measure of everything, and where human beings, as Balzac bitterly wrote, are reduced to being either fools or knaves. He may be very far from fulfilling his electoral promise of creating adequate jobs for the one million Indians who enter the workforce every month. He still deals mostly in fantasy, gushing about “smart cities” and “bullet trains”, and a digital India in which fibre-optic cables will bring remote villages online. But among global elites who see India as a fast-growing economy and counterweight to China, poverty-denialism shades easily into pogrom-denialism. A tweet by a New-York-based venture capitalist responding to protests by Indian writers sums up the prevailing morality: “The icons of new India are the wealth creators. Nobody gives a rat’s ass anymore about the writers.”
He still deals mostly in fantasy, gushing about “smart cities” and “bullet trains”
Modi’s ascent through a variety of enablers, whitewashers and wealth-creators invites us to probe our own complicity as fools and knaves in increasingly everyday forms of violence and dispossession. For Modi’s ruthless economism is a commonplace phenomenon, marked everywhere by greed, sophistry and a contempt for human life and dignity – symptoms, as GN Devy, one of India’s most bracing thinkers, put it last month, of a worldwide transition into a “post-human” existence.
In India itself, the prostration before Mammon, bellicose nationalism, boorish anti-intellectualism, and fear and hatred of the weak predates Modi. It did not seem so brazen previously because the now supplanted Indian elite disguised their hegemony with what Edmund Burke called “pleasing illusions”: in this case, reverential invocations of Gandhi and Nehru, and of the noble “idea of India”. Thus, the Congress party, which first summoned the malign ghosts of Hindu supremacism in the 1980s and presided over the massacre of more than 3,000 Sikhs in 1984, could claim to represent secularism. And liberal intellectuals patronised by the regime could remain silent when Indian security forces in Kashmir filled up mass graves with dissenters to the idea of India, gang-raped with impunity, and stuck live wires into the penises of suspected militants. The rare protestor among Indian writers was scorned for straying from literature into political activism. TV anchors and columnists competed with each other in whipping up patriotic rage and hatred against various internal and external enemies of the idea of India. The “secular” nationalists of the ancient regime are now trying to disown their own legitimate children when they recoil fastidiously from the Hindu supremacists foaming at the mouth.
One can only hope that the barefaced viciousness of Hindu supremacists will jolt the old elites out of their shattered dogmas and pieties while politicising a cheated young generation. It is true that Modi and his Toadies embody without shame, ambivalence or euphemism the brutality of power; they don’t give a rat’s ass about pleasing illusions. Yet their assaults on the authorised idea of India are creating a fissure in the unfeeling monolith through which a humane politics and culture might flow. The alternative, as recent weeks show, is a post-human India, where lynch mobs roused by their great leader shout: “Kill him! Kill him!”
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12. PAKISTAN: RAW DEAL FOR LABOUR
by Umair Javed
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(Dawn, November 09, 2015)
AT the time of writing, more than 30 labourers were reported dead due to the collapsing roof of an under-construction polythene-bag manufacturing unit in Lahore’s Sundar Industrial Area. Almost 100 are injured, and the chances of rescuing over 20 still trapped underneath the rubble are decisively slim.
Two months ago, Sept 4, the roof of a garments manufacturing unit located in the residential area of Nishter Colony caved in killing four, and injuring 18. Three years ago, a factory fire in a two-storey shoe-manufacturing unit (set up in a house) killed at least 30 workers. There was only one entry-exit point for the entire building. Earlier in the same year, a boiler blast in a pharmaceutical factory in Hassan Town killed 15, and injured at least 60 others. Of those killed, seven were women, and four were children.
That’s almost 100 workers killed in accidents during the last three years in the provincial capital. This list is not exhaustive. It’s what a quick Google search throws up on the first few pages.
There are few, if any, diligent labour inspectors carrying out their work in Lahore, let alone in other cities.
The reason why I’ve focused on incidents only in Lahore is because this is a city that commands the greatest amount of political and economic attention from the Punjab government. It has the greatest amount of resources thrown at it, it is frequently referred to as the economic and cultural heart of the province and is flaunted as a shining beacon of good governance, proactive administration, and efficient service delivery. Its track record of guaranteeing workplace safety and rights for the poorest strata of workers, however, is pathetic.
This is not due to a lack of legislation or frameworks. Pakistan has ratified 33 out of 35 ILO conventions on various aspects of worker rights. Chapter III of the Factories Act 1934 provides a comprehensive strategy for combating all kinds of industrial hazards. It also forbids the employment of children under 14 in any kind of factory. Relevant sections of the Punjab Factories Rules 1978 lists procedures required to minimise workplace accidents. Building codes and by-laws enshrined in industrial acts and construction regulation frameworks provide detailed guidelines for commercial and industrial building safety. The provincial government has a Labour and Human Resource Department, and several laws — such as the Factories Act, and Shops and Establishments Ordinance — which allow for factory inspections.
And yet despite all the tons of paper wasted publishing these conventions, and legislative effort put in the past 100 years, working conditions for low-income labourers are nothing less than terrible. The crisis, therefore, is not one of legal lacunae, or at least of law per se. The crisis is structural, deeply rooted in the political-economy of this country.
To understand this better, imagine a world with two actors and a neutral umpire. Both are trying to influence the umpire to give decisions in their favour. One has greater resources, is more well connected, better organised, and is thus able to buy off the umpire. At some point down the line, that more powerful actor is so dominant it’s hard to distinguish him from the umpire.
This is what has happened not just in Punjab but also across the country. With no unions, no political party relevant enough to take up their cause, and no important social networks to tap into, industrial and service-sector workers find themselves at the bottom of this country’s social and political food-chain. Just like the 30 who’ve died in Lahore, more than 90pc of this toiling mass is employed informally, on verbal contracts, with no recourse to the 180 days of injury pay, or health and social security insurance guaranteed by government legislation.
At the other end, businessmen eke out greater profits by continuously keeping labour costs low, paying out less than half the minimum wage as daily rates, ignoring health and safety guidelines, and undertaking illegal construction on already unstable structures. This is currently being marketed as our great gift and enormous potential to manufacturers based in China. All of it will be guaranteed by a pliant state machinery, bought off where necessary, or kept starved by a business-state nexus where needed.
In the last fiscal year, the Labour and Human Resource department of Punjab was allocated a budget of Rs539 million. The figure was later revised downwards to Rs113.6m — a sum that the government normally spends on uprooting and reconstructing neighbourhood roads three times a week.
Given the proximity between all mainstream parties in Punjab and the business elite who fund them and function as candidates for them, it also comes as little surprise that under the aegis of a now-revolutionary sugar industrialist, who served as advisor to the chief minister and subsequently as federal minister for industries, labour inspections were done away with completely in the 2003 Industrial Policy. They were called “archaic and cumbersome”, and the “self-declaration” system introduced in their stead was heralded as “modern”.
Ten years later, the Supreme Court intervened and had inspections restored, but the governance structure to carry them out has suffered irreversibly. There are few, if any, diligent labour inspectors carrying out their work in Lahore, let alone in other cities. Most are on retainers of businessmen both large and small, just like the rest of the state structure.
Shahbaz Sharif rushed to Sundar Estate when the accident happened, and announced compensation packages for those who perished or sustained injuries. He rushed back as quickly and is now probably giving his attention to some grand development scheme for the city. A paltry 100 union workers protesting at the Press Club are not enough to pressurise anyone into giving sustained attention to a wholly avoidable factory accident. Rest assured, things will continue as before even after the next accident happens.
The writer teaches politics at Lums.
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13. INDIA: BIHAR’S MESSAGE TO THE INDIAN RIGHT
by Vijay Prashad
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(counterpunch.org - November 9, 2015)
India’s elections are always a massive enterprise. In the Bihar state elections, more than half the sixty-seven million eligible voters took to the ballot to reject the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its alliance. Instead, it gave a comfortable mandate to the Mahagathbandhan (Grand Alliance), made up of the former socialist Janata parties (JDU and the RJD) and the Congress Party. The result is significant because it means that the BJP – which rules the Indian government – has been deeply embarrassed in North India, its main bastion. The Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not campaign here on issues of development, which had paid off in the national elections of 2014. He went into the gutter – dredging up the worst of his ideology (Hindutva) to cast aspersions at Muslims and at minorities in general. Modi, and his lieutenant Amit Shah, gambled on hatred. The people of Bihar rejected them.
Modi cleverly manipulated the message for the 2014 national parliamentary elections. The BJP muted its core ideology – at its center, the hatred of religious minorities – and crafted itself around the theme of development. Corruption became its adversary and development was its promise. Beneath the surface of the BJP’s Delhi press statements, more nefarious messages went to its base.
Nawada, Bihar.
Nawada is one of the southern most districts of Bihar, in the badlands of the fight between dominant caste landowners and the dispossessed. Denied of dignity and the ability to make a living, backward castes and dalits pushed their agenda to the fore from the 1970s. In reaction to this assertion – which manifested itself in socialist and communist victories at the ballot box from 1977 to 1991 – the landlords went on the warpath. It was a brutal attack against the dignity of the people and against any political opposition. The rise of the BJP in wretched Nawada can be calibrated through the warlike conditions produced by the landlords to their benefit. The data tells the story. The dominant caste landowners, who make up less than a third of the population, own ninety percent of the land. This is the BJP’s political base. Most dalits are landless and live below the poverty line. Their right to vote is often constrained by violence. The social condition of the entirely of the population is produced by the landlords’ toxicity – only twenty-eight per cent of the residents of the district can read and write. The rest – even some children of the dominant castes – are shut out from literacy.
The BJP’s Giriraj Singh is the sitting Member of Parliament from Nawada. During the 2014 election, he said – on many occasions – that anyone who dissents from Modi should go to Pakistan. India is not for them. The BJP managed the press very well. Its well-heeled spokespersons talked about development, while its candidates on the hustings fulminated against minorities and dissenters. During the parliamentary election, Modi went to Nawada, where he warned against the Pink Revolution – the expansion, he said, of India’s meat industry, including beef exports. Modi had already raised the politics of beef in the redoubts of Nawada. After the parliamentary election, Modi’s followers would hound dissenters – the murder of Communist leader Govind Pansare and the scholar M. M. Kalburgi forms part of the outcome of Modi’s politics. So too does the lynching of Muslim men alleged to have been part of the cattle market. All this happened in the lead-up to the Bihar Assembly polls. At no time did Modi come out and criticize his followers. How could he? He, and his confrères, had after all pushed the message in places like Nawada. They are implicated in the violence.
The Grand Alliance came to the polls with a great deal of confidence. Bihar’s greatest political orator, Laloo Prasad Yadav, and its most respected former chief minister, Nitish Kumar, joined forces to fight the BJP. They are both products of the now largely defunct socialist tradition in India – which was born in Bihar through the good offices of the great socialist firebrand, Karpoori Thakur. One of Thakur’s legacies has been the demand for reserved seats in colleges and in government jobs for historically oppressed castes. While Laloo Prasad Yadav and Nitish Kumar betray little of Thakur’s socialism, they nonetheless defend the right to democracy through reservations. The BJP – which opposes reservations in theory – has generally held that element of its politics in check. Demography goes against its landlord bias. But, in the campaign for Bihar, Mohan Bhagwat of the RSS (the main ideological arm of the BJP) questioned the utility of reservations. When dominant caste landlords burned to death two Dalit children, Modi’s cabinet member, V. K. Singh, compared the children to dogs. The dominant caste and landlord face of the BJP emerged. It provided the former socialists with the necessary means to push forward their main democratic demand. The dividends came easily.
Most of the Nawada assembly segments came to the Grand Alliance. They could not wipe out the BJP entirely, but they certainly dented their control over the countryside. The BJP and its leader, Narendra Modi, have without question been defeated in Bihar.
The Left
Bihar’s socialists, led by Thakur and Jayaprakash Narayan, once had a strong commitment to land reform, local democracy and social equality. Much of that agenda has vanished in the various Janata parties that inherit the socialist legacy. Their main link to the masses is through the idea of reservations and democracy through caste assertion. There is something powerful about this message. People who have been long denied dignity based on ideas of caste hierarchy have fought to overturn both prejudice and the material structures of inequality. The language of caste democracy is now the main plank of the Janata bloc.
Communism in Bihar has had old roots. Land struggles – led by the Communists – disturbed the Right. In 1938, Sardar Patel – Gandhi’s adjutant and a hero to the BJP – went to Bihar and said, “Comrade Lenin was not born in this country and we do not want a Lenin here.” He did not get his way. A decade later, in the early years of independent India, the local administrator in Munger, wrote in a secret dispatch, “Congress workers and leaders come to us for their personal work, while communist workers and leaders come with the problems of the common man and regarding the problems of farmers and workers” (from the research of Professor A. K. Mandal of Hazaribagh). The Left was in the hearts of the people. But, a mechanical understanding of caste and questions of dignity hampered the Left’s ability to be the natural leader of the people. Such a mechanical attitude is now no longer in the Left’s framework.
For several election cycles over the past two decades, the various Communist parties in Bihar joined with the Janata bloc as a way to defeat the Right. The dividends from this unity have been limited. Out of its peasant and worker struggles, the Left built up pockets of support in northern Bihar and in southern Bihar, but this support had been divided amongst the many Communist parties – the CPI, the CPIM and the CPIML (Liberation). In the early 1990s, the Communists developed mass land struggles across the state that challenged not only the BJP’s base (amongst the large landlords) but also the base of the Janata bloc (amongst the small holders and local power brokers). The governments of the Janata bloc have frequently used violence against the land seizures led by the Communists. In 1998, a CPI-M leader and member of the State Assembly, Ajit Sarkar, was killed on the orders of Pappu Yadav. Yadav had warned the Left that violence would be the answer if there were “any attempt to redistribute rural land.” These land struggles could not – for various reasons – be converted into electoral gains (except the Nawada parliamentary constituency, which the CPIM held in 1989 and 1991). Nonetheless, they brought the various Left parties together in the fields and in the factories. In 2009, for the first time, the United Left Bloc decided to contest the parliamentary elections together. That unity has held, and this year, the Left Bloc fought in this election against both the BJP and the Grand Alliance.
Certainly the Left Bloc knew that it would not win the election. On the other hand, the Left Bloc won three seats (each won by the CPI-ML) and it came second in a number of other seats. What this shows is that the Left has built spaces of hope for the struggles that will doubtless come – after all the Grand Alliance, which combines commitment to caste democracy and neoliberalism, will not be able to address the challenges of the Bihari people. It will be left to the Communists to raise these issues.
On the national stage, Nitish Kumar will put together a Grand Alliance to confront the BJP. That is already on the cards. The Left, on the other hand, will pursue its policy of Left Unity and build influence in its bases. Further south, in Kerala (population: 35 million), the Left Democratic Front handily won the local elections last week – beating both the Congress and the BJP easily and setting up the stage for the assembly elections for next year. The Indian Right thought that the dynamic of history had resolved the political questions to its benefit. Seems that it will have to rethink its arrogance.
Vijay Prashad, director of International Studies at Trinity College, is the editor of “Letters to Palestine” (Verso). He lives in Northampton.
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14. THE PRICE OF LIGHT: INDIA'S HUGE NEED FOR ELECTRICITY IS A PROBLEM FOR THE PLANET
Annie Gowen, The Washington Post
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(ndtv.com, November 09, 2015)
CHOWKIPUR, INDIA: Dusk descends on a village in the eastern Indian state of Bihar as residents start their evening chores. Women walk in a line, balancing packets of animal fodder on their heads.
Others lead their water buffalo home before dinner.
Overhead loom bare utility poles - built but never wired for electricity - casting long shadows across the landscape.
Of the world's 1.3 billion people who live without access to power, a quarter - about 300 million - live in rural India in states such as Bihar. Nighttime satellite images of the sprawling subcontinent show the story: Vast swaths of the country still lie in darkness.
India, the third-largest emitter of greenhouses gases after China and the United States, has taken steps to address climate change in advance of the global talks in Paris this year - pledging a steep increase in renewable energy by 2030.
But India's leaders say that the huge challenge of extending electric service to its citizens means a hard reality - that the country must continue to increase its fossil fuel consumption, at least in the near term, on a path that could mean a threefold increase in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030, according to some estimates.
When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi talked climate change with President Obama in September at the United Nations, he was careful to note that he and Obama share "an uncompromising commitment on climate change without affecting our ability to meet the development aspirations of humanity."
Here in this little village, a single solar light bulb gleams.
It belongs to the family of Satish Paswan, 35, a farmer who sold a bit of his family's land to purchase a solar panel and light a few months back for about $88. He wanted his five children to be able to do their homework.
"We feel very ashamed and bad that other neighboring villages are enjoying power facility and we don't have it," Paswan said.
"Whenever a small leader or a big leader belonging to the ruling party comes here, they promise their first priority is to provide electricity to the villages. But they have never fulfilled that promise."
Fossil fuel generation of electricity is the largest single source of greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide. Yet demand for inexpensive power will rise in a great tide in the decades to come, especially in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, the two regions of the globe with the least access to electricity. All the countries of Africa, taken together, have twice as many people without electricity as India does - 622 million. No country is content with that.
"It's a matter of shame that 68 years after independence we have not been able to provide a basic amenity like electricity," Piyush Goyal, India's minister of state for power, coal and new and renewable energy, said recently.
The Indian government has launched an ambitious project to supply 24-hour power to its towns and villages by 2022 - with plans for miles of new feeder lines, infrastructure upgrades and solar microgrids for the remotest areas.
If India's carbon emissions continue to rise, by 2040 it will overtake the United States as the world's second-highest emitter, behind only China, according to estimates by the International Energy Agency.
Yet the Indian government has long argued that the United States and other industrialized nations bear a greater responsibility for the cumulative damage to the environment from carbon emissions than developing nations - with Modi urging "climate justice" and chiding Western nations to change their wasteful ways.
Total carbon dioxide emissions for India were 1.7 tons per capita in 2012, the most recent complete data available, compared with 6.9 tons for China and 16.3 tons for the United States, according to the World Resources Institute. Officials say they are keenly aware of India's vulnerability to the impacts of climate change: rising sea levels, drought, flooding and food security.
Yet the government says it must depend on fossil fuels to bring an estimated 30 percent of the population out of extreme poverty.
"We cannot abandon coal," said Jairam Ramesh, the former environment minister and climate negotiator, and author of the book "Green Signals: Ecology, Growth, and Democracy in India." "It would be suicidal on our part to give up on coal for the next 15 to 20 years, at least, given the need."
- - -
Although 300 million Indians have no access to power, millions more in the country of 1.2 billion people live with spotty supplies of electricity from the country's unreliable power grid. The grid failed spectacularly in 2012, plunging more than 600 million people into total blackout.
In the country's high-tech capital of Bangalore, for example, residents have recently had to endure hours of power outages each day after repairs and a bad monsoon season prevented the state's hydroelectric and wind power plants from generating enough electricity.
Many of the giant IT companies have their own generating systems - Infosys, for example, is building its own solar park - but small businesses and residents in rural and urban areas are suffering, said Harish Hande, the chairman of Selco-India, a social enterprise that provides solar power in Karnataka.
"How do we manage our supply and make sure we put money aside for infrastructure? If you look at the future, it's what we need," he said, "but there's not a single thing that's moving ahead."
Estimates show that India's power woes cost the economy anywhere from 1 to 3 percent of gross domestic product - an impediment to Modi's hopes to expand the economy and make the country more hospitable to manufacturing, according to Rahul Tongia, a fellow with Brookings India. Electricity demand will increase sevenfold by mid-century as the population continues to grow, experts say.
Energy access is worse in rural areas. Bihar, one of India's poorest states, has a population of 103 million, nearly a third the size of the United States. Fewer have electricity as the primary source of lighting there than in any other place in India, just over 16 percent, according to 2011 census data. Families still light their homes with kerosene lamps and cook on clay stoves with cow-dung patties or kindling.
In Bagwan village, students at the local middle school swelter in concrete classrooms without fans. A diesel generator rattles and spews black smoke outside the offices of the Union Bank of India.
"Electricity touches each and every sector of life," said Rajesh Kumar Singh, a farmer who is the village sarpanch, akin to a mayor. "I can't see TV properly. I can purchase an air conditioner, but I can't run an air conditioner. Every piece of equipment that runs by electricity we can't have. So life is not good for us. We are just surviving."
Singh, 44, lives with his large extended family in a spacious home around an open-air courtyard where most of the cooking is done in a clay oven fueled by cow dung. He shows off his small refrigerator, which cannot be used to store food for any length of time because of the uneven electricity supply.
"I have a refrigerator, but it's just sitting there. It's just a showpiece," he said, and sighed. "We are cursed to live in Bihar."
- - -
In Bihar, the average per-capita electricity consumption is 203 kilowatt hours per person per year, compared with about 1,000 kilowatt hours for India as a whole, about 4,000 for China and about 12,000 for the United States, according to estimates from the World Bank and India's Central Electricity Authority.
Pratyaya Amrit, the secretary of the energy department for Bihar, said that the state is about seven to 10 years behind the rest of the country, a fact that is not lost on his constituents. His office is trying to link the last remaining 2,000 villages with power and improve conditions for 40 percent of the rest that have bad infrastructure.
"They will ask you: 'My village. By when? Please get it done,' " Amrit said.
The state's power-generating capacity is expected to increase in the next few years as work is completed on two new coal-fired power plants, among hundreds of such plants planned throughout India.
Most of the country's power-generating capacity still comes from about 125 coal-fired power plants, but the government has mandated that plants constructed after 2017 be built with more efficient "super critical" technology. As many as 140 coal-fired plants are planned or in the pipeline, according to Arunabha Ghosh, the chief executive of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) in New Delhi.
Led by Modi, an early proponent of solar technology, India is in the midst of a huge drive to expand its solar and wind capacity, with plans for dozens of mega-parks that the government hopes will move the country closer to its goal of 100 gigawatts of solar-generating capacity by 2022, plus 75 gigawatts of other renewable energy, predominantly wind. The government wants to expand its hydroelectric and nuclear power capacity, as well.
The ambitious goal - which some think is unrealistic - would essentially require the country to double its installed solar-generating capacity every 18 months from its current capacity of four gigawatts, according to the CEEW estimate.
India also wants to double its coal production in the next five years, to more than 1 billion tons annually, with plans to open 60 more coal mines. India has the world's fifth-largest coal reserves, and officials say cheap, plentiful coal will make up the lion's share of the country's energy budget well beyond 2030.
"India could be consuming as much as 1.8 billion to 3 billion tons of coal annually by 2050," Ghosh said, noting that this is a "business as usual" calculation and does not factor in India's new push for renewable energy. "This is still lower than the amount of coal that was burnt in China on an annual basis in the last four to five years."
At the same time, the Indian government says it wants to develop its economy using green technology, setting up 100 smart cities and touting its work with energy efficiency in industrial buildings and making LED light bulbs affordable.
"Two-thirds of our buildings have yet to be built, and half of the roads and infrastructure have yet to be created," said Samir Saran, a senior fellow and vice president at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi. "There's an opportunity to build at least some of them right for the first time - if we can create the right financial ecosystem."
- - -
In recent months, the Indian government has announced plans to modernize its national grid and is preparing to address the financial woes of the country's state-owned utility companies, some of which are mired in debt, to the tune of $66 billion. The rescue plan is likely to include power tariff hikes - a politically unpopular concept in a country where many residents are used to heavily subsidized power.
In 2010, according to a World Bank estimate, 87 percent of all electricity consumed by domestic customers was subsidized.
In Bihar, 30 percent of power is lost to transmission and distribution as well as theft, Amrit said, although independent analysts say the number may be higher.
Dark comes quickly in Chowkipur village, a small community about two hours from Bihar's capital of Patna. Parents pull out kerosene lanterns as soon as the sun goes down so their children can study. The young men gather in the grass to play a board game called Ludo, lighting the board with their mobile phones, which they charge for 5 rupees per hour - about 8 cents - in town.
At the home of Rada Krishna Paswan, a 26-year-old bricklayer, his wife and other members of his extended family cooked pumpkin for dinner over a fire as nephew Pran Kumar, 6, tried to read his Hindi homework under a dim, battery-powered light.
The 100 or so families of the village took to the streets in August to protest the lack of power, Paswan said. Villagers blocked the main road for hours, chanting, "No power, no vote!" They were chiefly concerned about 70 students from their village and a neighboring community who failed to pass their Class 10 exams - it is difficult for them to study without light, he said.
"You see with your own eyes how we are suffering," Paswan said. "There is a sense of urgency now. We need power. This is the moment. This is the time."
Story First Published: November 09, 2015
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15. TOO WEAK, TOO STRONG
PATRICK COCKBURN ON THE STATE OF THE SYRIAN WAR
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(London Review of Books - Vol. 37 No. 21 · 5 November 2015)
The military balance of power in Syria and Iraq is changing. The Russian air strikes that have been taking place since the end of September are strengthening and raising the morale of the Syrian army, which earlier in the year looked fought out and was on the retreat. With the support of Russian airpower, the army is now on the offensive in and around Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city, and is seeking to regain lost territory in Idlib province. Syrian commanders on the ground are reportedly relaying the co-ordinates of between 400 and 800 targets to the Russian air force every day, though only a small proportion of them come under immediate attack. The chances of Bashar al-Assad’s government falling – though always more remote than many suggested – are disappearing. Not that this means he is going to win.
The drama of Russian military action, while provoking a wave of Cold War rhetoric from Western leaders and the media, has taken attention away from an equally significant development in the war in Syria and Iraq. This has been the failure over the last year of the US air campaign – which began in Iraq in August 2014 before being extended to Syria – to weaken Islamic State and other al-Qaida-type groups. By October the US-led coalition had carried out 7323 air strikes, the great majority of them by the US air force, which made 3231 strikes in Iraq and 2487 in Syria. But the campaign has demonstrably failed to contain IS, which in May captured Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria. There have been far fewer attacks against the Syrian branch of al-Qaida, Jabhat al-Nusra, and the extreme Islamist group Ahrar al-Sham, which between them dominate the insurgency in northern Syria. The US failure is political as much as military: it needs partners on the ground who are fighting IS, but its choice is limited because those actually engaged in combat with the Sunni jihadis are largely Shia – Iran itself, the Syrian army, Hizbullah, the Shia militias in Iraq – and the US can’t offer them full military co-operation because that would alienate the Sunni states, the bedrock of America’s power in the region. As a result the US can only use its air force in support of the Kurds.
The US faces the same dilemma in Iraq and Syria today as it did after 9/11 when George Bush declared the war on terror. It was known then that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, Osama bin Laden was a Saudi and the money for the operation came from Saudi donors. But the US didn’t want to pursue al-Qaida at the expense of its relations with the Sunni states, so it muted criticism of Saudi Arabia and invaded Iraq; similarly, it never confronted Pakistan over its support for the Taliban, ensuring that the movement was able to regroup after losing power in 2001.
Washington tried to mitigate the failure of its air campaign, officially called Operation Inherent Resolve, by making exaggerated claims of success. Maps were issued to the press showing that IS had a weakening grip on between 25 and 30 per cent of its territory, but they conveniently left out the parts of Syria where IS was advancing. Such was the suppression and manipulation of intelligence by the administration that in July fifty analysts working for US Central Command signed a protest against the official distortion of what was happening on the battlefield. Russia has now taken advantage of the US failure to suppress the jihadis.
But great power rivalry is only one of the confrontations taking place in Syria, and the fixation on Russian intervention has obscured other important developments. The outside world hasn’t paid much attention, but the regional struggle between Shia and Sunni has intensified in the last few weeks. Shia states across the Middle East, notably Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, have never had much doubt that they are in a fight to the finish with the Sunni states, led by Saudi Arabia, and their local allies in Syria and Iraq. Shia leaders dismiss the idea, much favoured in Washington, that a sizeable moderate, non-sectarian Sunni opposition exists that would be willing to share power in Damascus and Baghdad: this, they believe, is propaganda pumped out by Saudi and Qatari-backed media. When it comes to keeping Assad in charge in Damascus, the increased involvement of the Shia powers is as important as the Russian air campaign. For the first time units of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard have been deployed in Syria, mostly around Aleppo, and there are reports that a thousand fighters from Iran and Hizbullah are waiting to attack from the north. Several senior Iranian commanders have recently been killed in the fighting. The mobilisation of the Shia axis is significant because, although Sunni outnumber Shia in the Muslim world at large, in the swathe of countries most directly involved in the conflict – Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon – there are more than a hundred million Shia, who believe their own existence is threatened if Assad goes down, compared to thirty million Sunnis, who are in a majority only in Syria.
In addition to the Russian-American rivalry and the struggle between Shia and Sunni, a third development of growing importance is shaping the war. This is the struggle of the 2.2 million Kurds, 10 per cent of the Syrian population, to create a Kurdish statelet in north-east Syria, which the Kurds call Rojava. Since the withdrawal of the Syrian army from the three Kurdish enclaves in the summer of 2012, the Kurds have been extraordinarily successful militarily and now control an area that stretches for 250 miles between the Euphrates and the Tigris along the southern frontier of Turkey. The Syrian Kurdish leader Salih Muslim told me in September that the Kurdish forces intended to advance west of the Euphrates, seizing the last IS-held border crossing with Turkey at Jarabulus and linking up with the Syrian Kurdish enclave at Afrin. Such an event would be viewed with horror by Turkey, which suddenly finds itself hemmed in by Kurdish forces backed by US airpower along much of its southern frontier.
The Syrian Kurds say that their People’s Protection Units (YPG) number fifty thousand men and women under arms (though in the Middle East it is wise to divide by two all claims of military strength). They are the one force to have repeatedly beaten Islamic State, including in the long battle for Kobani that ended in January. The YPG is lightly armed, but highly effective when co-ordinating its attacks with US aircraft. The Kurds may be exaggerating the strength of their position: Rojava is the safest part of Syria aside from the Mediterranean coast, but this is a measure of the chronic insecurity in the rest of the country, where, even in government-held central Damascus, mortar bombs fired from opposition enclaves explode daily. Front lines are very long and porous, so IS can infiltrate and launch sudden raids. When in September I drove from Kobani to Qamishli, another large Kurdish city, on what was meant to be a safe road, I was stopped in an Arab village where YPG troops said they were conducting a search for five or six IS fighters who had been seen in the area. A few miles further on, in the town of Tal Abyad, which the YPG had captured from IS in June, a woman ran out of her house to wave down the police car I was following to say that she had just seen an IS fighter in black clothes and a beard run through her courtyard. The police said there were still IS men hiding in abandoned Arab houses in the town. Half an hour later, we were passing though Ras al-Ayn, which the Kurds have held for two years, when there was the sound of what I thought was shooting ahead of us, but it turned out to be a suicide bomber in a car: he had blown himself up at the next checkpoint, killing five people. At the same time, a man on a motorbike detonated a bomb at a checkpoint we had just passed through, but killed only himself. The YPG may have driven IS out of these areas, but they have not gone far.
Lumiere, Durham. The Conference
Innumerable victories and defeats on the battlefield in Syria and Iraq have been announced over the last four years, but most of them haven’t been decisive. Between 2011 and 2013 it was conventional wisdom in the West and much of the Middle East that Assad was going to be overthrown just as Gaddafi has been. In late 2013 and throughout 2014, it was clear that Assad still controlled most populated areas, but then the jihadi advances in northern and eastern Syria in May revived talk of the regime’s crumbling. In reality, neither the government nor its opponents are likely to collapse: all sides have many supporters who will fight to the death. It is a genuine civil war: a couple of years ago in Baghdad an Iraqi politician told me that ‘the problem in Iraq is that all parties are both too strong and too weak: too strong to be defeated, but too weak to win.’ The same applies today in Syria. Even if one combatant suffers a temporary defeat, its foreign supporters will prop it up: the ailing non-IS part of the Syrian opposition was rescued by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey in 2014 and this year Assad is being saved by Russia, Iran and Hizbullah. All have too much to lose: Russia needs success in Syria after twenty years of retreat, while the Shia states dare not allow a Sunni triumph.
The military stalemate will be difficult to break. The battleground is vast, with front lines stretching from Iran to the Mediterranean. Will the entrance of the Russian air force result in a new balance of power in the region? Will it be more effective than the Americans and their allies? For air power to work, even when armed with precision weapons, it needs a well-organised military partner on the ground identifying targets and relaying co-ordinates to the planes overhead. This approach worked for the US when it was supporting the Northern Alliance against the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001 and the Iraqi peshmerga against Saddam’s army in northern Iraq in 2003. Russia will now hope to have the same success through its co-operation with the Syrian army. There are some signs that this may be happening; on 18 October what appeared to be Russian planes were reported by independent observers to have wiped out a 16-vehicle IS convoy and killed forty fighters near Raqqa, Islamic State’s Syrian capital.
But Russian air support won’t be enough to defeat IS and the other al-Qaida-type groups, because years of fighting the US, Iraqi and Syrian armies has given their fighters formidable military expertise. Tactics include multiple co-ordinated attacks by suicide bombers, sometimes driving armoured trucks that carry several tons of explosives, as well as the mass use of IEDs and booby traps. IS puts emphasis on prolonged training as well as religious teaching; its snipers are famous for remaining still for hours as they search for a target. IS acts like a guerrilla force, relying on surprise and diversionary attacks to keep its enemies guessing.
*
Over the last three years I have found that the best way of learning what is really happening in the war is to visit military hospitals. Most wounded soldiers, eyewitnesses to the fighting, are bored by their convalescence and eager to talk about their experiences. In July, I was in the Hussein Teaching Hospital in the Shia holy city of Karbala, where one ward was reserved for injured fighters from the Shia militia known as the Hashid Shaabi. Many had answered a call to arms by the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani after IS captured Mosul last year. Colonel Salah Rajab, the deputy commander of the Habib battalion of the Ali Akbar brigade, who was lying in bed after having his lower right leg amputated, had been fighting in Baiji City, a town on the Tigris close to Iraq’s largest oil refinery, for 16 days when a mortar round landed near him, leaving two of his men dead and four wounded. When I asked him what the weaknesses of the Hashid were, he said that they were enthusiastic but poorly trained. He could speak with some authority: he was a professional soldier who resigned from the Iraqi army in 1999. He complained that his men got a maximum of three months’ training when they needed six months, with the result that they made costly mistakes such as talking too much on their mobile phones and field radios. IS monitored these communications, and used intercepted information to inflict heavy losses. The biggest problem for the Hashid, which probably numbers about fifty thousand men, is the lack of experienced commanders able to organise an attack and keep casualties low.
Omar Abdullah, an 18-year-old militia volunteer, was in another bed in the same ward. He had been trained for just 25 days before going to fight in Baiji, where his arm and leg were broken in a bomb blast. His story confirmed Colonel Rajab’s account of enthusiastic but inexperienced militiamen suffering heavy losses as they fell into traps set by IS. On arriving in Baiji, Abdullah said, ‘we were shot at by snipers and we ran into a house to seek cover. There were 13 of us and we didn’t realise that the house was full of explosives.’ These were detonated by an IS fighter keeping a watch on the house; the blast killed nine of the militiamen and wounded the remaining four. Experienced soldiers, too, have been falling victim to traps like this. A bomb disposal expert in the ward told me he had been examining a suspicious-looking wooden bridge over a canal when one of his men stepped onto it and detonated a bomb that killed four and wounded three of the bomb disposal team.
The types of injury reflect the kind of combat that predominates. Most of it takes place in cities or built-up areas and involves house-to-house fighting in which losses are high. Syrian, Kurdish and Iraqi soldiers described being hit by snipers as they manned checkpoints or being injured by mines or booby traps. In May, I talked to an 18-year-old Kurdish YPG fighter called Javad Judy in the Shahid Khavat hospital in the city of Qamishli in north-east Syria. He had been shot through the spine as his squad was clearing a Christian village near Hasaka of IS fighters. ‘We had divided into three groups that were trying to attack the village,’ he said, ‘when we were hit by intense fire from behind and from the trees on each side of us.’ He was still traumatised by finding out that his lower body was permanently paralysed.
For some soldiers, injuries aren’t the only threat to their survival. In 2012, in the Mezze military hospital in Damascus, I met Mohammed Diab, a 21-year-old Syrian army soldier who a year earlier in Aleppo had been hit by a bullet that shattered his lower left leg. After making an initial recovery he had gone back to his home village of Rahiya in Idlib province, which was a dangerous move since it was under the control of the opposition. Hearing that there was a wounded government soldier in the village, they took Diab hostage and held him for five months; they even sold his metal splint and gave him a piece of wood to strap to his leg instead. Finally, his family ransomed him for the equivalent of $1000 but his leg had become infected and so he was back in hospital.
In one sense, the soldiers and fighters I spoke to were the lucky ones: at least they had a hospital to go to. Thousands of IS fighters must have been wounded at Kobani, where 70 per cent of the buildings were destroyed by seven hundred American airstrikes. In Damascus, whole districts held by the opposition have been pounded into rubble by government artillery and barrel bombs. Since March 2011, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 250,124 Syrians have been killed and an estimated two million injured out of a population of 22 million. The country is saturated by violence. In September I went to the town of Tal Tamir outside Hasaka City, near where Javad Judy was shot. Islamic State had retreated, but people were still too terrified to return to their houses – or those houses that were still standing. A local official said he was trying to persuade refugees to come back. Their reluctance wasn’t surprising: the previous week an apparently pregnant Arab woman had been arrested in Tal Tamir market. She turned out to be a suicide bomber who had failed to detonate the explosives strapped to her stomach under her black robes.
The Russian intervention in Syria, the greater involvement of Iran and the Shia powers, and the rise of the Syrian Kurds has not yet changed the status quo in Iraq and Syria, though it has the potential to do so. The Russian presence makes Turkish military intervention against the Kurds and the government in Damascus less likely. But the Russians, the Syrian army and their allies need to win a serious victory – such as capturing the rebel-held half of Aleppo – if they are to transform the civil war. Assad won’t want his experienced combat units to be caught up in the sort of street-by-street fighting described by the wounded soldiers in the hospitals. On the other hand, the Russian air campaign has an advantage over that of the Americans in that it has been launched in support of an effective regular army. The US never dared to attack IS when it was fighting the Syrian army because Washington didn’t want to be accused of keeping Assad in power. The US approach has left it without real allies on the ground, aside from the Kurds, whose effectiveness is limited outside Kurdish majority areas. The crippling weakness of US strategy in both Iraq and Syria has been to pretend that a ‘moderate Sunni opposition’ either exists or can be created. For all America’s fierce denunciations of Russian intervention, some in Washington can see the advantage of Russia doing what the US can’t do itself. Meanwhile, Britain is wrestling with the prospect of joining the US-led air campaign, without noticing that it has already failed in its main purpose.
23 October
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South Asia Citizens Wire
Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. Newsletter of South Asia Citizens Web:
www.sacw.net/
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DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.
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