Rupee, Taka and Why India's Export Story is Floundering

When finance minister P Chidambaram last week pointed out that the rupee was not alone in slipping down a greasy pole, his officials quickly chimed in by pointing out that South Africa’s Rand, Brazil’s Real  and Indonesia’s Rupaiah were in the same boat.

BRICS Currencies Vs Dollar in Mid-August 2013

What they forgot to add was that in one year, while India's rupee fell 15 per cent and foreign exchange reserves depleted by 4 per cent, neigbouring Bangladesh's Taka rose 5 per cent from Tk 81.38 in August 2012 to Tk 77.75 in August this year, while its forex reserves rose a phenomenal 45 per cent from $ 11.32 billion last August to $ 16.21 billion now.
Where did the Indian government script its' story wrong and where did Bangladesh go right? Sheikh Hasina's  government managed to push exports, which when added to remittances from Bangladeshis working abroad, paid for Bangladesh’s import bill, leaving a surplus of $ 2.5 billion in the 2012-2013 financial year gone by.
In the last fiscal, 2012-2013, Bangladesh whose principal export to the world is garments accounting for 80 per cent of its exports, sold goods worth some $ 27  billion to the world,  a rise in earning by 11.32 per cent over the year before.  In contrast, India’s exports in that year, diversified between textiles, gems and jewellery, engineered goods and pharmaceuticals among other things was a mammoth $ 300.68 billion. But the other side of the Indian export story was earnings were 1.76 per cent lower than in the year before.
Despite an extremely poor track record in worker safety and labour standards raising the ire of local and global labour and human rights bodies, cheap labour, low overhead costs and a national commitment to Bangladesh’s sole dollar-earning business has seen the country muscling out rivals like India and China for the lower, mass-manufactured end of the world-wide garments business.
In its bid to be tailors to the world, Bangladesh has turned garments businesses into  privileged corporate citizens. Garments trucks are treated as VIP vehicles and police across the country has orders to clear road-blocks and traffic snarls to ensure trucks reach ports on time. Bankers have orders to make paperwork easy and to finish any banking transaction related to garments business before taking up any other work. Customs officials hassling export consignments have found themselves at the wrong-end of tongue lashings by cabinet ministers, who personally take up issues on behalf of garment-makers. All raw materials meant to feed into the garments sector comes in duty free. 
Unlike India which mainly imports energy, gold, electronics and capital good, Bangladesh imports virtually everything it needs to live – rice, wheat, meat and even eggs besides machinery, cars and petroleum products. Yet it has managed to contain its import in the year gone by at 2010-2011 levels.   
India by sharp contrast, has done precious little to raise its export story. Economic reforms in India have largely relied upon opening up the domestic market for imports to infuse competition, hoping it would help reduce cost and improve quality of domestic manufactures, leading to increased exports. A string of free trade pacts have been signed to help this along from an epoch making one with Asean to the latest with Japan. However, the pacts have seen imports from these economic powerhouses rising at a far faster pace than  Indian exports have managed to clip along at.

India's Trade Deficit

India’s overall exports rose to $300 billion in 2012-13, from $18.5 billion in 1990-91, while its imports rose from $ 24 billion in 1990-1991 to $ 498 billion in 2012-2013. Or to tell the story in a different way, India’s exports rose in these 22 years some 15-fold, while its imports rose 20-fold, widening the trade gap as well as the gap between India’s current account deficit or the foreign exchange earnings and spending and fuelling the fall of the Rupee.
At the sane time, red tape and poor regulation has increased the cost of doing business in India, turning sour the growth story for Indian manufacturing.  Clearances ranging from land acquisitions to shipping of manufactured goods overseas are constrained by cumbersome and expensive regulations.
Indian business has not bothered to go up the value chain or working to compress costs. Tirupur, in Tamil Nadu, a once thriving textile and garments manufacturing town, faces the grim prospect of becoming a ghost town, beaten at its game of supplying cheap garments to European and US labels by rivals in Bangladesh and Vietnam. Factory owners never bothered to try climb up the value chain to create more expensive designer clothes on which Spain, Hong Kong and China thrive. 
Nor did they individually or by banding together try to build the kind of clothing brands like Zara and Mango which have made Spain a by-word in the garments world. Zara’s owners Inditex SA   have increased global revenues four-fold in 5-years to nearly €16 billion ($20.65 billion) in 2012, even as recession in Spain slashed Spaniards' per-capita spending on clothing by 22 per cent between 2007 to 2011.
In fact officials running India Brand Equity Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation floated by the Indian government and Industry, agree that though India is the among the largest exporter of garments, textiles, jewellery and tea, it has not bothered to create any global brands in any of these industries. Tatas have tried to buck the trend by buying out a global tea brand.    
Trade policies are still skewed with inputs often taxed at rates higher than exports, as in the case of many electronic manufactures. No policy of disincentivising finished goods imports and incentivising finished value added exports has been designed. Chinese steel industry has grown from scratch to be the world’s biggest using Indian iron ore, while Indian steel has lagged miserably behind.
No well-thought out national policies of targeting growing markets have been wrought. Belatedly India has started using its diplomatic missions to push Indian business along abroad. However, trade and economics still remain low priority for India’s tiny and over-stretched foreign service, something which can be seen by the way China routinely manages to muscle into every other gas-field, highway or dam project which India bids for in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The Rupee's fall has sparked a lot of wry humour !

 

Vijay Divas – the Day We Miss out in our Celebrations’ List

by Jayanta Roy Chowdhury

The Pakistani Surrender at Dhaka, December 16, 1971

 

Forty one years ago on December 16, independent India won its finest victory, in a war which was not merely a necessity, but perhaps one of the few in the annals of modern history which could be described as righteous.

The victory was not merely won by military muscle but by a combination of outstanding diplomatic, intelligence and industrial effort. India managed to gain the moral high ground even before entering the battlefield through a sustained global public relations campaign which exposed Pakistan’s ghastly record of murdering 2 million Bangladeshi civilians, raping over a quarter million women and driving out a seventh of its population to Indian refugee camps.

Our intelligence agencies had managed to gather vital intelligence on Pakistan’s war intentions, while fooling the rival army into believing we would not carry through the war effort to liberate the whole of East Pakistan.

The Indian military-industrial machinery had managed to manufacture and supply all necessary munitions and war materials despite a ban on arms sales by Western powers, imposed after the 1965 war with Pakistan.

The creation of a new nation Bangladesh, made the world sit up and look at India in a new light. Not only had India liberated a country, the size of Syria in fortnight’s time and taken some 92,000 Pakistani soldiers prisoners of war in the process, it had defied the most powerful nation in the world – the United States of America – through this war. As everyone knows, the United States famously sent its Seventh Fleet to threaten India’s intervention in East Pakistan, and asked allies Jordan and Turkey to send military aircraft to Pakistan’s aid.

Other western powers too were not exactly happy with the turn of events nor was Pakistan’s all weather friend – China – all of whom saw the emergence of Bangladesh under a new secular leadership as a challenge to their control of Asia. Not much reported, was the movement of a British naval group led by the aircraft carrier Eagle closer to India’s territorial waters in what could have been pincer movement in conjunction with the US Seventh Fleet and exhortations by US President Nixon and his secretary of state Henry Kissinger to the Chinese leadership to `threaten’ India on its northern borders.

Kissinger with Mao

By any account, this was a victory,which could be said to equal that of the Pandavas over Kauravas in the Mahabharatan era, of the Grecian wars against Persia or in more modern times of Rommel against the British in Libya.

Yet, strangely, India does not celebrate this victory outside its military cantonments, nor celebrate the men and women associated with this victory by building statues to them or through street naming ceremonies.

If India had been England or the US or even Australia, we would have been holding public commemorative services for those who died, victory parades with participation of defence forces, students and firemen, with floats and dancers on December 16. Statues of Field Marshall Sam Maneckshaw and Air Chief Marshall P.C. Lal would have dotted town squares along with Indira Gandhi’s. School history textbooks would have had whole chapters devoted to this one single decisive war.

But then this is India. Anything militaristic is frowned upon ever since Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s time, perhaps out of a sense of paranoia, fuelled by coups across Asia by Pakistani, Egyptian and Burmese Generals.

Gen J.N.Chaudhuri, who besides winning the 1965 war, also built up the Indian Army after a disastrous rout in 1962 from a 2.5 lakh-strong demoralised army to a three-fold larger and yet more professional national force, was sidelined without much ado by Mrs Indira Gandhi. Documents leaked now, reveal that his phone was probably tapped and that defence minister Y.B.Chavan even went to the extent of questioning him on the possibility of the army trying out a coup-de-etat!

Pt Jawaharlal Nehru with Gen Chaudhuri after 1962 war

Part of the downplaying of 1971 victory is this fear in the minds of India’s political elite that deifying the victory and the victors could result in the rise of a new military culture in this country, which has been an oasis of democracy amidst a continent where military coups have been more the rule than the aberration.

Compounding this fear, was a lack of appreciation on the part of independent India’s leaders of the positive role a modern military can play as an instrument of state policy and in actual policy formulation, especially foreign policy.

Possibly the only two leaders who understood the potential of the military as an instrument of state policy in the 20^th century were Subhash Chandra Bose and Indira Gandhi. Bose, as head of the Azad Hind government during the Second World War, of course, discussed politics and political solutions with the military leaders of the Indian National Army and even went to the extent of consulting them on such issues as whether to declare war on the US and other allied nations or to limit his war to combating Great Britain. Mrs Gandhi is well known to have taken the military leadership into confidence well ahead of the 1971 war and in ensuring a holistic approach to the war effort.
Nehru, on the other hand kept the army at bay by appointing his close aide Krishna Menon, an over-rated intellectual as defence minister and a buffer between himself and the army he rated so lowly.

Menon and Nehru had such a low esteem of the Indian military leadership’s abilities as advisors for their foreign policy, that they never bothered to take their inputs on India’s options in the border spat with China in the early years of the dispute. Rather they treated the army as a police force to be deployed on the border without questions.

Raising the Indian flag at Haji Pir Pass

Lal Bahadur Shastri, disregarded professional military advice after the 1965 war, to sign a disastrous accord in Tashkent after intense bullying by Soviet leaders, which gave back the hard-won Haji Pir pass in Kashmir and land up to Lahore in the Punjab, to Pakistan. A deal which was protested by many Indian military officers with resignations, including by BJP leader Jaswant Singh.
In more recent times, Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh is reported to have been on the verge of signing a deal which would have seen Indian forces vacating Siachen ! Luckily last minute consultations with the Army and apprehensions voiced by the military leadership, besides continued Pakistani belligerence, placed that proposal on the backburner.

Unlike in the US, India does not use policy inputs from its Generals’ in forming its foreign policy. Generals come into the picture as bit players asked to advise when issues related to the border are almost finalised!

On a more philosophical plane, the Indian state has formulated a policy which rejects the use of force as an instrument of politics in favour of a policy of strategic restraint that minimizes the importance of the military.

This is said to spring from Gandhian principles. But in reality stems perhaps from a strong lack of trust of the country’s military among its elected leadership. This anti-militarism despite the reality of conflict and war that followed independence, has effectively tied India’s hands in dealing with states like Pakistan, whose state policy lies in forcing India to part with territory through overt or covert use of its military-intelligence infrastructure.

As a result, India blindly searches for a way to manage Pakistan’s provocations, every time it is hit in the face by it. Whether it be a Kargil, a terror strike in Mumbai, bombings of marketplaces and mosques or nuclear blackmail at every stage.

Similarly, devoid of proper coordination in formulating foreign policy and military planning, India does not know how to proceed when Chinese forces test India with a Sumdrongchu or threaten Indian ships in the South China Sea.
 

Without game theorising involving all essential arms of the government, including the Armed Forces, India can never realise which move by its opponents is a bluff, which a blind, which a real threat. When Chinese forces supposedly threatened India in Arunachal Pradesh in the late 1980s, Pakistan’s bomb was ticking away towards fruition. Were we fooled into a defensive stand, so that Pakistan gained valuable time to complete its Nuclear Bomb, without risking a raid by Indian fighter jets?

19th Century Cartoon on China-phobia

As strategic thinker Stephen Cohen once remarked in an essay “Indian leaders simply have not seen the use of force as a useful instrument of politics”, simply because they did not trust the use of force or those they would have to employ in the effort.

 

However, it is time our leadership gave heed to what Gen Chaudhuri is reported to have told Chavan when quizzed about the possibility of a military coup: (a) there was a deep-seated respect for constitutional government at all levels in the country. (b) The size of India and the degree of decentralisation of its government machinery made it impracticable for the Army to seize power from both the Union and the State governments in a single operation. (c) If the Army were to attempt a coup against the Union government without seizing power in the States simultaneously, the political machinery would remain operational and the coup would almost certainly be ineffectual. (d) Any coup attempt would place a critical strain on the loyalty of Army, since State loyalties and rivalries are a real factor in the Army.

Rather they would do well to understand that in the modern world as in the ancient, power and projection of power are ways to define and shape foreign policy. It was not for nothing, that Theodore Roosevelt, who was US President at beginning of the 20^th century formulated America’s foreign policy stance till the Second World War – “Walk softly, but carry a big stick.”

Kasab and The Terror Trail

Mumbai's Taj Hotel Under Attack  26/11

India has hung the infamous Kasab, sole survivor of a terrorist guerrilla team which attacked and held to ransom two 5-star hotels and a Jewish centre at Mumbai on 26^th November 2008, slaughtering more than 150 Indians and foreigners. Will that act of capital punishment, end terror strikes against India?

Even when the news that Kasab, the symbol of the dastardly attack on one of India’s most lived  and loved mega-cities, was being hung  flashed on television screens, I doubted we would have any  such luck in resolving the terror threat from across the border.

Sure enough, soon afterwards, the Pakistani Taliban and Lashkar-e-Toiba, the terror organisation to which Ajmal Kasab owed  his indoctrination and training vowed to hit India and Indians back.

Pakistan Taliban has spun out of the control of its creator – the Pakistani spy agency – ISI. However, Lashkar and its new avatar Jamat ud Dawa remain tied to the spymasters who see them as valuable assets to be used against India and Afghanistan, two nations, Pakistan has traditionally considered its enemies.   

Though a few liberal newspapers in Pakistan have called out for action against the masterminds behind 26/11, the threats made this week by Pakistani terror groups have not been condoned by the Pakistani state. Which seems to indicate that the threats may have the tacit support of sections of the Pakistani establishment, if not the blessings of the state machinery as a whole.  The logic for this is convulated and hard to understand, but it exists. More on that later.

India’s borders with Pakistan, despite fencing off of large chunks remain porous; Its coasts, vulnerable to landings on lonely beaches by small craft piloted by teams of the kind which attacked Mumbai.

The country’s borders with Nepal are totally open and those with neighbouring Bangladesh far less secure than the western one. The trails which terror sellers could take are many.  Indians could also be targeted abroad or on the high seas. At particular risk, would be Indian investments in Afghanistan, which Pakistan resents intensely as it considers this mountainous highland to be its strategic backyard where it hopes to impose its will in the future.   

Indian strategic thinker and former additional secretary in the cabinet secretariat, B Raman in a clinically analytical blog, too seems to feel that the threat would be highest for Indian establishments in Afghanistan and lists LeT, the Haqqani network, the Taliban and the Hizbe Islami as groups whch have the ground capability to launch those attacks.




US leadership watch live footage from the Osama raid

To deal with such probabilities, the Indian state needs to think out responses which will stifle terror. The American, Israeli and Russian state responses to terror perhaps hold lessons from which could learn.

The policy paradigm for these responses are the same, though the exact modus operandi differs. That policy, simply stated, is to attack and diminish the capability of groups which can threaten the countries concerned. The methods differ –  covert operations in some cases, huge state led responses across borders in others.  

With Pakistan shielding its terror groups by using nuclear blackmail – threatening nuclear strikes if India attacks terror camps in Pakistan, there are just two options. The best option remains covert, deniable attacks to finish off these camps. The other, albeit risky option, is to ignore the nuclear bluff, for it is a bluff, and to go in for limited military operations.

The second kind of operation,  will have to be met by Pakistan with some kind of official retaliation, which could escalate and is hence one which should be taken as a last resort. The first, will be grudged, but can hardly be met by official, overt military retaliation. Pakistan understands this kind of covert response, for it has come up with its own covert war against India and Afghanistan, using home grown terror groups, to avoid direct confrontation by denying all that happened.




Indian soldiers celebrate taking back a hill in Kargil ranges

When Pakistani Frontier corps soldiers dug into India’s then unguarded Kargil hills in 1999 and built bunkers from where they lobbed artillery fire onto a main arterial road connecting Ladakh with the rest of India, Pakistan simply denied they were its men. Indian soldiers eventually stormed those bunkers and killed the Gilgit tribal soldiers manning the `nests’. The bodies with their identity cards were offered to Pakistan, which  refused them, denying responsibility ! Though later, Pakistani leaders and generals gloated on their success in launching the sneak attack. 
   
When Kasab and his mates attacked Mumbai, again Pakistan denied they were Pakistanis. When confronted by telephone taps which showed they were being controlled out of Pakistan by men like LeT chief Hafiz Saeed and ISI officers, Pakistan officially claimed these were non-state actors who acted without the knowledge of the Pakistani state! The logic for such attacks is however, more difficult to understand.

Former Pakistani dictator Gen. Pervez Musharaf was recently in India, to address a gathering organised by a Delhi-based media group. He remained unfazed by questions on Pakistan’s attack on Kargil peaks in Kashmir and seemed to indicate that it was merely a tit for tat response for India’s involvement in the independence of Bangladesh!

What that comment revealed, was the mindset of the Pakistani establishment. It is still seeking revenge against India for perceived insults without either (i) introspection into either their role in Bangladesh or (ii) realisation of the high price being paid for the hatred of India which the Pakistani ruling elite nurses.


Indian troops being welcomed by Bangladeshis

Pakistan as a nation, especially its leadership, suffers from amnesia when it comes to Bangladesh. It forgets that Indian troops were forced to intervene in a messy civil war because Pakistani soldiers carried out one of the biggest genocides in the history of mankind – killing some 2 million of their own citizens and raping 200,000 helpless civilian women. The reign of terror which the army, to which Gen Musharaf belonged,  let loose on the civilian population of what was then East Pakistan, forced some 10 million Pakistani citizens to seek refuge in India. If India had not intervened, more millions would have perished. More millions would have been pushed into India to live as penniless refugees.

Yet, the Pakistani leadership instead of introspecting on its crimes, blames India for its “loss” and still demands revenge. Kargil and Mumbai 26/11 are seen as “revenge”.

Hans Kiessling, German researcher working for the Munich based Hanns-Seidel-Foundation estimates that ISI has an annual budget of about $ 300-400 million. The budget for the entire state of Pakistan is $ 39 billion, nearly $ 6 billion or a sixth of that budget is spent on its armed forces.

This extraordinarily high proportion of budget spent on defence is because Pakistan keeps needling India and Afghanistan with sneak attacks and consequently fears retaliation.
 
Pakistan has since the 1950s also tried to fund and arm small rebel groups such as the Naga within India, at great cost to itself.  Pakistan’s spy agency also spend huge sums to try undermine the Indian economy by pushing narcotics and spurious India currency. This massive spending on trying to undermine the Indian state translates into that much less left for Pakistan to spend on its own citizens.

The costs are obvious – deteriorating law and order has already turned Pakistan’s largest city,  Karachi, once touted along with Beirut as the `Paris of the East’, into being one of the world’s most dangerous cities; lack of investment has made Pakistan the slowest growing nation in South Asia; lack of spending on healthcare, education, sanitation and other civic amenities has meant Pakistan has kept slipping every year on the human development index. With little money to spend on the mainstream regions of Pakistan, marginal areas on the border – Balochistan, Gilgit have received even less funds, leading to a sense of deprivation which has fuelled separatism there.   
    
This brings one to consider whether India’s reaction, covert or overt, will actually bring some kind of closure to Pakistan’s export of terror. It may not, till Pakistan changes fundamentally and starts believing as does a section of its intellectual elite, that peace and friendship with its neighbours is the only way forward.

But in the interim, covert action designed to diminish the capability of Pakistani groups to launch against Indian interests, should deter the Pakistani ruling elite and the terror groups it has spawned. In this world of outsourcing, even covert wars can be outsourced. There are quite a few   groups within Pakistan who are struggling against that nation. India's work could be easily outsourced to them in return for training, arms and funding.

The lesson that has to be driven across is that even covert actions begets retaliatory actions and those with more money and men, which India does have, usually win in the end.   

Pakistan and The Idea of India

When India and Pakistan were born in 1947, many in the sub-continent hoped the cycle of hatred which partition of the sub-continent had unleashed would  like most conflicts, come to an end. That has as yet not happend, perhaps because of the nature of the theory which gave birth to Pakistan.

What many fail to understand is Pakistan, India's twin brother, was born as an anti-thesis of all that India stood for. India’s leadership envisaged the nation would be a federal, multi-lingual, multi-racial, secular state. The Pakistan theory envisioned just the opposite – a unitary state where one religion and one language and left unsaid – one race - would determine nationhood and citizenship.

Its founder, the otherwise secular in his personal life, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, tried to undo some of the damage that this theory could wreak on the child he was giving birth to by trying to `secularise’ state policy.  In a remearkable speech to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, Jinnah said “You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place or worship in this State … no distinction between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed and another. We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State.”

However, his death soon after Pakistan’s creation put an end to that start.

The Pakistan theory’s raison-d’etre was in negating all that India stood for. If Muslims and Hindus could get along together, then Pakistan’s logic was lost. To undo the enmeshed twinning of the two faiths’ adherents, Muslim League and its ideological followers, worked overtime, helped, many allege by Britain, the  fading power which wished to continue its rule through a policy of `Divide et Impera'.

Through the 1930s and ‘40s, in Bengal and Bihar, Muslim women were asked to replace wearing red bordered saris with green bordered ones, in Western and Northern India to replace saris with salwarkameez. Bindis were frowned upon. Muslim boys were asked to stop wearing dhotis and opt for Payjamas. (How these were deemed more `Pakistani' is still a mystery). The idea was to create separate identities.

In 1947 it seemed to work. Identity politics reinforced by communal violence saw the country partitioned.Three fifth’s of the sub-continent’s Muslims lived in the Punjab, Sindh and in the North West Frontier Province or in East Bengal. They opted out of India to follow Jinnah into Pakistan. Those who said otherwise, such as Badshah Khan or the Baloch of Kalat, saw their voice and reasoning drowned by the voluble cries for Pakistan.

Millions more caught on the `wrong’ side of the border, followed the paths of the greatest human migration in history. Post-partition, non-Muslims were less than 5 per cent in West Pakistan and about 29 per cent in East.Through the 1950s and 1960s, with increasing marginalisation and occasional progroms, minorities kept migrating from there to India, bringing down their numbers to about 14 per cent in East Pakistan by late 1960s and two and a half per cent in West Pakistan.

Indian Muslims : Indians first

Yet a third of the sub-continent’s Muslims chose to stay on in secular India in 1947. Some because that was where their lands and businesses were. Some like that of the family of actor Shah Rukh Khan or that of Nawab of Pataudi, because they believed in the Congress and its vision of a secular state. Except for a few stray cases of rich landowners or business tycoons who migrated to save taxes in the 1950s and 1960s, none migrated to the neighbouring `Land of the Pure (Pak-i-stan).’ From 9.9 per cent of India’s total population in 1951, this community’s percentage of the total population went up to 11 per cent by 1981 and 14 per cent by 2011.

Pakistan after coming into being,had started defining who was a Muslim. Ahmedias and Bohras lost out early in this search for the `Pure’. Later Shias were discomfited by questions of how true their Muslim identity was and in recent years subjected to ethnic cleansing attacks.

Ethnicity was also a moot question. Pakistan defined itself as nation which inherited India’s Arab and Central Asian heritage. This, seemed to suggest that Pakistanis were descendants of the `Golden hordes’, the Arab, Turkic and Moghul armies which came to India in medieval times.

At best this was but a scatter-brain theory which chose to ignore  that most Indian Muslims were descendants of converts to the new,  attractive monotheistic religion, which gave many Indians an alternate to the decadent, caste-ridden form of Hinduism which flourished when Islam entered India. However, this` hypothesis' at one stroke, immediately marginalised the already poor, dark complexioned émigré’ from India and the Bengali Muslims of East Pakistan.

The search for `Purity’ threw up an oligarchical leadership in the neighbouring state – a coterie of Punjabi-Pathan and high born émigré’ from North India feudals who controlled the top rungs of the army, bureaucracy, industry and politics in that country.

Challenges to the Idea of Pakistan

Racial discrimination, insistence on one language, Urdu, economic colonisation of the East by the West, lack of democratic outlets to grievances, led to Pakistan breaking up and giving birth to Bangladesh. Ethnic identity politics still remains a bitter divide in Pakistan, with poor émigré’ Bihari Muslims living in Karachi slums often erupting in violence against real or perceived discrimination.

The challenge whch the formation of Bangladesh gave to the theory that Pakistan, was the sole  refuge for Muslims of the sub-continent, who in the eyes of Pakistan's founders were a separate people set apart from their neighbours, was met by a stricter interpretation of the `Pak (Pure)’ theory. Children were taught through official textbooks from the 1970s onwards, that Hindus were their enemies and that history started  with the Arab invasion of Sindh, which saved people from a despotic, harsh Hindu rule. Earlier eras and civilisations were simply forgotten.

Non-Muslims and Muslims, not deemed to be Muslim enough, were further marginalised and laws and regulations changed to ban liquor, cabarets, Hindi movies, shared festivals, in short anything which was shared fun.

If India was successful as a secular nation, then Pakistan’s logic was lost. Hence Pakistan’s need to challenge the accession of Kashmir, India’s only Muslim majority state. Two wars by Pakistani armed forces could not detach the state. Rather, the state through repeated democratic elections seemed to renew its faith in a life with India. In the late 1980s, Pakistan therefore started fomenting trouble in Kashmir valley.  The result was not really in favour of Pakistan, but it was against Indian unity.

 A secessionist, Islamist, movement took roots in the valley, partly because of Pakistan’s proxy war, partly because of genuine long standing discontent arising from a series of corrupt state governments, economic deprivations, Central neglect, etc.. A challenge, the Indian state has tried to meet partly by using military force and  partly by a mix of talks with separatists and steps to better the economy of the state.

However Kashmir represents just 10 million of India’s more than 160 million Muslims and Kashmiris seem to believe more in their Kashmiriat than their religious identity. Radicalising  the larger body of Indian muslims and using this  mass as a bulwark against India was therefore always an even more attractive option for those who wished to reinforce the two-nation theory.

Unfortunately for them, this proved to be a difficult option. Most Indian Muslims thought of themselves as Indians first and Muslims afterwards and certainly had little or no sympathies for Pakistan. The valour of Indian Muslim soldiers in 1948, 1965, 1971 and more recently in Siachen and Kargil are testimony to that as also the immense contribution of that community to India’s administration, politics, theatre, the arts, literature, academia and sciences.

More recent attempts of using morphed images of Thai, Tibetan and Chinese to represent Rohingya and Assamese Muslim riot victims to inflame passions through India, too seems to have fallen flat on its face.

The unity of multi-racial and multi-ethic India was also a challenge to Pakistan which was trying to create a single Pakistani Muslim identity with links to an Arabic-Central Asian heritage. Hence, Pakistan’s support to rebel groups from the North East. First, when Pakistan was a united entity, through camps in Chittagong Hills and later when a `Pak-friendly’ military government was established in Bangladesh through a coup, by using other border safe havens. Unfortunately, for Pakistan and luckily for India, Bangladesh in the 21^st century realised the dangers of allowing these groups which brought drug peddling, money laundering and arms running into that state, a free run. A clampdown by Bangla authorities helped save that nation from a growing threat to its own safety and security, not to mention its relations with its single largest neighbour.

Pakistan - Which Road Will It Take

As India becomes economically more successful and  Pakistan sinks into troubled times with Baluchistan and Gilgit demanding autonomy at the least and independence at the best, Sindh turning more restive and Hill Pathan tribes dreaming of a greater Pashtunistan with their Afghan cousins, the idea of Pakistan will come under greater challenge. Desperate to reinforce its unity, that nation may well then continue on the path it chose earlier – challenging India’s unity and secular credentials to prove that the opposite of Pakistan does not mean success. India has her faultlines and these could well be exploited. Chosing this path will probably be concurrent with greater Islamisation or in effect even eventual Talibanisation of the Pakistan state.

If Pakistan, choses this path, then it could mean more terror strikes at Indian targets, psy-warfare of the kind witnessed in the recent sending of bulk SMSs to people of North Eastern descent, threatening them with attacks by Muslim groups.  The radicalisation of that nation will also mean reinforcement of the feeling of victimhood in Pakistan, greater intolerance towards other religions and people and greater support for ideas of crusade or Jihad against not only India but also those perceived as Christian nations.

However, there is a different path that nation may chose. One of cooperation. It may chose to befriend its twin brother to bring not only peace, but also prosperity within its borders. One would hope it would chose that path. But, yes, that choice will in time kill the idea of Pakistan as an anti-thesis to India. A new identity will then have to be forged for that nation or else it would, in time, wither.

American strategic affairs writer Robert  Kaplan has pointed out that down the ages, nebulous border states have often existed in the sub-continent, encompassing border races and tribes, even as India proper has prospered as a single entity. Perhaps Pakistan would like redefine itself as such a confederacy. The path it choses in the next half a decade will be crucial for its existence and well-being, indeed the well-being of the whole sub-continent.

Once the choice is clear, India and other powers interested in Pakistan would react. If Pakistan choses overt or covert confrontation as well as increasing Talibanisation, India will have to rethink its peace propositions. These have been made on the calculation that it is better to have one united neighbour, with whom peace can be forged at some date on its western border rather than a Balkanised, unstable region.

At some stage, India, and other powers such as the US and Russia who face threats from this rising tide of Talibanisation, will weigh the pros and cons of such a stance and decide whether to risk a Talibanised Pakistan or to support the process of Pakistan unravelling itself, risking the aftermath as a lesser evil.

 

 

Bangladesh's Coming Out Party

Its 8.00 am on February 29, in fog-encased Dhaka – Asia’s latest boomtown - and a traffic snarl has built up from the centre of the city to a sprawling downtown conference hall named Bangabondhu International Conference Centre, after the founder of India’s eastern neighbour.

It's Bangladesh’s coming out party. As India’s economy slows down, its smaller neighbour, whose economy this year expanded to $100 billion, has decided to reach out to international investors by hosting American Marketing `Guru’ Philip Kotler’s World Marketing Summit, which promises to bring global marketers and managers to debate ways of "solving socio-economic problems" and to network with Bangladesh’s new crop of aggressive  businessmen.

Sheikh Hasina, who agreed to host the conclave and pay for it with her countrymen’s hard-earned foreign exchange, was clear that behind the lofty themes of the conference, it would “help us project strengths and capabilities of Bangladesh, the dynamism of the private sector … and the strong points of our economy and polity.”

Kotler who wrote his seminal theory on Social Marketing with Gerald Zaltman in the year Bangladesh was born after a bloody war of independence which saw 2 million citizens dead and the country’s economic assets all but destroyed by a retreating Pakistan army, hopes the conference will promote his theory of Marketing 3.0, which will bring `humane spirit' to business by creating a corporate culture of being “ecologically and socially responsible citizens”.

In some senses it's ironic that Bangladesh, whose economy is growing at a spanking 6.3 per cent, boosted by remittances and strong garment exports, should host an American `Guru’s” dream conference, just 41 years after another another American iconic `Guru' Henry Kissinger dismissed the newly born nation as “a basket case.”

But it is doing so and doing it at a time when it's turning into a new Asian economic `tiger’. Bangladesh is part of a list of 11 developing countries ranked by Goldman Sachs as having the best potential to emulate the success stories scripted by BRICS nations. Unemployment is at a low of 5 per cent and per capita income at over $700, though large swathes of poverty, double digit inflation and a tanking stock market are worries for the South Asian economy. Said Hasina :“If we can act … many of our callenges would be easy to address.”

Though Bangladesh’s challenges will take time to be solved, it still remains a success story. Garment exports are booming despite slowdown in Bangladesh’s major markets, boosting total exports to $ 24 billion. Software exports, a new business for the young nation grew by 30 per cent to $ 100 million last year. Entreprenuers are springing up in a nation accustomed to laid back traditions of punditry and safe bureaucratic jobs.

Asian Tigers Capital Partners, a fund management firm. says in a report that Bangladesh has turned into a highly attractive investment destination with a young demography of 150 million people, low capital costs coupled with high level of specific skill development, Large natural resources in gas and coal and a geographical location where it’s at the cross roads of India and China.

Said Altamash Kabir, whose family runs several tea gardens, a newspaper and a consultancy and engineering firm, “Bangladeshi business houses are open to tie-ups with Indian and other foreign partners in all fields. We have skill and labour cost strengths in the garment sector which have brought large numbers of Indian firms here … but those skills and costs could be used to set up joint venture light engineering firms whose market could not only be Bangladesh but also India.”

Bangladesh government wants to attract Indian , East Asian and western investment to expand its garments business, build a base for light engineering and develop infrastructure. The state wants to boost investment to 30 per cent of GDP, up from a current annual of 24 per cent and has set up a $700 million fund for building roads, ports and other infrastructure.

However, even as it dreams big, smaller problems nag. The much touted global conference opening saw many glitches. Excessive security for a prime minister who faced a coup attempt last December and a mutiny by border guards in the first few weeks of her rule, shut out delegate vehicles and threw out coffee machines from the venue. Several delegates suffered missing laptops, passports and wallets.  Kotler's aides were not exactly a happy lot at the end of the three-day conference and refused to commit to bringing the summit to Dhaka again next year as the country's foreign ministry demanded.

But then as one delegate pointed out, it was going out of its way to attract the world to Dhaka, whereas neighbouring Calcutta, a city with pretensions of being London had yet to get its act together in attracting and retaining fresh capital. In any case, the benefits from Kotler's jamboree may well be doubtful for a nation which needs to get the maximum bang for its dollar spending and an early exit by the `Guru's' clan may well be a blessing in disguise for Bangladesh.

HatTrick Mamata

Pandemonium in the Rajya Sabha over Lokpal Bill

Bengal’s mercurial chief minister Mamata Bannerjee has scored a hat trick of sorts – she has stalled three major measures which her senior ally - the Congress had sought to bring in this year.

But this time round, it may be Congress which may be cheering the self goal she scored through her lieutenants in Delhi by stalling the Lokpal legislation in the upper house of Parliament.

First, was the Teesta pact with Bangladesh, which she scuttled by disagreeing with a very basic and simple sharing of river waters in order, so say Congress leaders, to arm twist the centre into giving more funds to her cash strapped state government.

Her brash and extremely un-diplomatic act at the penultimate hour, left Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and India as a whole, red faced on the Prime Minister’s maiden visit to Dhaka.

The Teesta river which starts out as a mountain rivulet in Sikim flows down as a broad river through North Bengal to enter Bangladesh as a tributary feeding into the mighty Brahmaputra.

The deal promised water sharing on an equitable 50:50 basis at Gajoldoba barrage near Siliguri in West Bengal. With the deal falling through, despite Singh’s other gifts for Bangladesh – duty free garment exports, border enclave swaps which gave Bangladesh large tracts of Indian land etc. - India was painted a fickle friend.

Her second, was to force the ruling alliance to place in cold storage Commerce Minister Anand Sharma’s move to bring foreign direct investment in retail. She left a loophole in her protest against the move, by uttering something about doing what was good for farmers. Again a signal, Congress Mandarins say, that she wanted more funds.

In a sense, the Congress was not really unhappy with her tantrums that time as it gave them an opportunity to cold store a necessary but unpopular move which would have hit millions of mom and pop stores ahead of  key assembly elections to Uttar Pradesh state, India’s most populous province.

The move to open up to the Walmarts and Tescos of the world would surely have been used by opposition parties such as the pro-trader Bharatiya Janata Party and regional outfit Bahujan Samaj Party to accuse the ruling alliance of selling out to transnationals and turning the issue into an election trump card.

The Congress rather cleverly used this stalling as a chance to tell farmer-voters of how mindless opposition had nixed a chance to bring a legislation which could have helped them sell produce at better prices.

This time round Mamata’s party, after making noises of unhappiness with the Lokpal bill ended up supporting it in the Lok Sabha or the lower house of India’s Parliament by not seeking divisions on amendments moved by it.

Later, on her express instructions, Trinamool Congress MPs in the Upper house or Rajya Sabha made it clear that they would seek a vote on their key amendment to the bill which seeks to set up an independent Ombudsman.

The bill suffers many defects, but as one Central Minister said at least it was being enacted and later Parliaments would have the luxury of improving upon it. Trinamool’s amendment in the name of defending federalism, sought to keep out a clause which would have allowed states to set up their own Ombudsmen to be called Lokayuktas.

Trinamool’s stand, encouraged a clutch of parties such as Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party and Rashtriya Janata Dal, which had earlier in the week walked out in the Lok Sabha or lower house making it easy for the ruling alliance to pass the bill, to decide to stay and vote against the bill.

This meant the ruling coalition did not have the numbers to pass the bill, forcing the Congress to stall for time and take the cover of an ensuing chaos in the house to put everything on the backburner and prepare for another day.

Congress did not specifically blame its ally but rather pleaded helplessness as  some 189 ammendments had been brought by lawmakers from among opposition and allied parties which needed study nd scrutiny.

India's Parliamentary affairs minister Pawan Bansal said he needed more time to respond, arguing “If we want to be true to the cause we need more time to go through the (opposition proposed) ammendments."

But the Congressman on the street is already whispering `Mamata does not want any oversight body to look into the affairs of her government.’ Till now, they had little ammunition to attack her. Her popularity seemed teflon coated and every little thing they said against her seemed petulance on the part of an ignored partner in a stale marriage.

Mamata’s honeymoon period after her landslide victory earlier this year will soon be over. People at large and newspapers in particular will soon start asking more critical questions. Who slept over lack of safety measures at AMRI hospital? Why are farmers unable to get announced support price for their grain?

At the same time, repeated bids to trash the Congress while asking for more money, may see the Congress coming up with more procedural wrangles which reduces the flow of mullah through the federal pipeline.

Turning an uneasy ally into a hidden enemy may not exactly be a great strategy for Trinamool in the long run.  The Communist Party of India (Marxist) learnt that the hard way in the last elections.

See Also:  Anna Checkmated

14 Day War - A Soldier Remembers

This is the 40th anniversary of the liberation of Bangladesh. I am reproducing below excerpts from a piece written by my School Senior - Col Pradeep Saxena (Retd) on his personal experiences during the 1971 Campaign for Dhaka, which the Indian Army and Bangladesh's Mukti Bahini won. Pradeep was a young 2nd lieutenant then :

Col Saxena and friends atop a captured enemy tank

On 3^rd Dec we heard the news of the Pakistani air attack on our airfields. Soon a flurry of orders reached us and at 8 PM that night our Artillery unit posted at the akhuara border opened with a barrage of 100 guns across in to East Pakistan amidst cries of `Bharat Mat ki Jai' (Victory to Mother India). Similar barrages opened all around East Pakistan from West Bengal to Tripura. THE WAR HAD BEGUN.

By 10 PM our infantry had captured early  objectives with very few casualties and there was a general sense of achievement.

The morning of 4 Dec saw the first Pak Sabres overhead attacking us with their machine guns and rockets. Our IAF MiGs arrived soon and the Pak Sabres disappeared as we cheered from down below. It was my first experience of being under an air attack.

By noon two of my course-mates as well as an  Artillery officer with an assaulting Infantry battalion had also made the supreme sacrifice. I was immediately asked to hand over my charge and leave to replace him.

I crossed in to East Pakistan 30 mins later amidst firing and bursting shells. Sticking to the road wasn’t a good idea, driving across  paddy fields was even worse and invited getting stuck. So I got on to the railway track and drove astride the rail track in between my jeep’s wheels, my driver cribbing all through about  the damage it would cause to the tires, even as we kept getting shot at by Pak bullets.

I joined the Paltan by 1.30 PM and moved along with them to capture the last Pak post holding out.

We now had our first Prisoners of War (POWs), some 30 or so, surprisingly no Pak officer amongst them. We had broken the crust and were on our way to Dacca.

We were then asked to move towards Brahmanabaria which was some 25 kms away enroute to Dacca. As we got moving on foot, we were attacked by 2 Pak Sabres.  The IAF was ready and waiting for them and they disappeared only to be seen by us after the war at the Dacca airfield. 

The Pak Army had meanwhile blown up the only rail-road bridge that existed over the Meghna River (as the Brahmaputra is called in Bangladesh). As we entered that town, my Commanding Officer drove up with another officer of our Artillery unit as my relief. He felt that I needed a rest, as I had been in battle since 3 Dec. I told him no way, was I going back.

My CO then said, "So you want to make History”, I replied "Sir aren’t we already doing that?” He burst out laughing, hugged me and said "OK son go ahead and make the most of it.” He then told me that I would be part of the first ever Heliborne Assault by the Indian Army in a War.    

The heli-lift over Meghna starts

By 12 noon, the first Mi-4 helicopters had landed in the town’s stadium and by 1 PM, we were on our way. As the choppers formed up in to two inverted “V” formations, we found that they were open from the back and we had to hold on to whatever we could to avoid falling-out; so much for air safety, but then  this was War. We were joined by a fighter escort of 4 MiGs who flew around us in circles.

The Meghna is nearly 5000 yards wide, a width most of us couldn’t swim despite knowing how to, and most certainly not in battle gear with 25 kgs on our backs, besides our weapons.

Pak MMG and Arty fire was soon on to us after the drop, and we raced across the open fields towards whatever cover we could get behind, even as we fired back at them. A fire-fight soon developed which lasted for nearly an hour, but then the Pak troops surrendered.

Mercifully neither side had any injured, so we tied them up, blind folded them and put them in the only space available which was the waiting room of the nearby railway station called Methikanda. The ferry-in of more troops followed all through the night and by 4 AM next morning we were all in.

The Infantry CO, had flown in the second batch and called for a briefing in the evening, sitting in the open on the platform. At the end of it, we heard Pak radio make two absurd pronouncements, i) that they were on the outskirts of Agartala and were about to capture it and ii) that a “desperate attempt by the Indian Army to heli-land troops in the interiors had been thwarted and all those involved in it had been killed; bodies were being counted. Two choppers had also been downed”.

The CO therefore felt that a drink was called for to honour our death and soon a few bottles of whisky, brandy and rum materialized from nowhere. We all had our choice of drink poured in to our white enameled mugs, used not only for our daily cup of tea, but also for shaving, bathing as also certain unmentionable acts!

Next morning we were on our way to Narsingdi, some 30 kms away, this time marching along the railway track as no road existed. Midway we found a few empty railway wagons, so we loaded our guns and ammunition on them and pushed them along the tracks. Our march was uneventful except for the few times we had to dive for cover when we heard aircraft overhead, only to realize that it was the IAF heading for Dacca.

A few kms short of Narsingdi, we came across an abandoned diesel engine in running condition. One of the officers knew something about rail engines and soon the bogies we were pushing were attached to it and we were chugging along towards our destination, some of us running ahead to change signals and tracks or to ensure unhindered movement. We captured the town around 4 AM, having virtually walked 30 km non-stop. We had by then walked nearly 80-85 kms from Agartala and were still 42 kms North East of Dacca. Sleep overcame the brave and  we dropped off where we could in the open.

We the Arty (Artillery), were now required to reach the outskirts of Dacca at the earliest and so I took temporary leave of the Infantry Paltan and its CO. We boarded a so called `fleet’ of tractors, buses and local vehicles borrowed from the neighbourhood, and we were soon on our way towards Dacca, hoping to be the first to get there. A few IAF Caribou aircraft did fly overhead but we gave no thought to them. We were on the outskirts of Dacca’s by that evening and dug down in preparation for orders that were to follow. It was 12 Dec 1971 and Dacca was just a few km across the River.

That same night, we got our first letters, the Caribous had dropped the mail. I got two letters, one from my Mom and another from my Dehradun uncle informing me that my younger brother (also an XFAPSIAN) was now in the thick of things at a God forsaken place called Hilli and that my Uncle also an Army doctor had moved in to Bangladesh at some undisclosed location. So now it had became a family affair too !

Nothing much happened till midnight when the Pak Army made an unsuccessful bid to attack our guns position. Our battle continued till early hours of the morning when the remnants of the Pak Army withdrew across the River leaving behind about 20 dead and another 10 wounded. As they withdrew across the river, I lined up one of my guns and fired at the ferry in which they were escaping. We scored a bulls-eye and the ferry sank. The surviving Pak troops then swam back to the other side. The wounded told us that they had numbered about 90 and were shocked to learn that only 30 of us had driven them back. That was to be my last face to face encounter of the war.  

By next morning all the big-wigs had arrived to congratulate us and my CO took me aside to tell me that he was recommending me for the Vir Chakra. I took it in my stride as I had missed getting one earlier too and wasn’t surprised that I did not get one after the War either; others probably deserved it more, I guess.

We also learnt shortly thereafter that the US 7^th Fleet led by its biggest aircraft carrier the USS Enterprise, had steamed in to the Bay of Bengal in support of Pakistan. My men looked at me for answers; so I told them plainly “From now on we do not wave at every aircraft we see”; we had been doing that the last few days taking every aircraft to be the IAF. Fortunately we did not get to see the USAF overhead.

By 13^th Dec over 200 guns had been lined up from North of Dacca to its South and we opened up a barrage with them around 6 PM. The Battle for Dacca had begun. We fired 5 rounds every 15 mins from each gun till next morning. The lighter guns fired quicker while the heavier ones fired slowly. Consequently, it resulted in a virtual non-stop barrage on Pak positions through the night. It was truly a most beautiful sight as the whole sky remained lit all through the night, the cacophony really deafening.

We stopped at 6 AM, just as the first IAF aircraft swopped down to deliver their bomb loads.  They kept up their non-stop attacks all through the day till 6 PM. The moment they left we opened up and continued through the night. This continued for the next two days, IAF assaults during day and Arty assaults through the night; aimed at breaking the Pak will and forcing them to surrender.

We received orders around midnight 15/16 Dec that “Surrender Talks were in Progress and all firing was to cease by 06.00 AM next day, viz 16 Dec”. We knew the end was near and worked over time to pump in as many shells as we could in to Pak positions even as our guns grew red hot in color.

We stopped firing at 06.00 am though the IAF did carry out a few sorties till 09.00 AM. There was total silence thereafter and one could hear even a pin drop then. We were a little disappointed that it all ended so suddenly, but the truth was that WAR was OVER.

We were soon buoyed when we were told to get ready for the Victory parade in to Dacca at 1 PM that afternoon. We entered Dacca, led by PT-76 tanks, some infantry troops, my guns and me, followed by the others. I rode atop a flat-bed tractor trolley. The parade was accompanied by the entire Press Corps from across the world, with quite a few riding atop my tractor trolley.

We reached the Race Course shortly before 3 PM and formed a semi-circle on to one side as we waited for the surrender ceremony to unfold. People wept openly as we were mobbed, hugged and kissed by every one alike, shouting Joy Bangla and waving flags. Garlands were thrown at us and we threw them back to the crowds bringing in more shouts of Joy Bangla. There was nothing but a human sea as far as an eye could see. It looked as if the whole of Bangladesh  had converged on to Dacca.

Sheikh Mujib being recieved by an Indian guard of honour at Dhaka after his release from Pakistan in January, 1972

See Also: 1971:Vignettes from the Past