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Dr. Ms. Santishree and D.N.B. Pandit

The last few months have seen tremendous amount of instability in the global as well as the national scene. The issue of public versus private morality has dogged the American democracy as well as the obsession of the international media with the personal affairs of President Clinton. The other has been the bombing of Iraq and the question that in a global system that is anarchical, the strong tries to impose its will on the weak. It has always been a conflict between power and justice in the global affairs. The other major problem has been the ethnic break-up of Yugoslavia, especially the on-going civil war in Kosovo. Earlier it has been Bosnia and the NATO forces had to come in to bring in peace and legitimatise the eastward extension of NATO. There is also a growing sensitivity on the part of the USA that it has to accept India’s security fears but still there has been no real progress. There seems to be positive trends in the talks between Talbot and Jaswant Singh.

At the national level the coalition led by the BJP has been facing the problem of intolerance and attacks on minorities and Dalits as well as senseless damage to public property. This type of intolerance, which is slowly creeping into the political discourse in India, could prove to be disastrous to the secular fabric of the Indian civilisation. The attack by the ward classes on the Dalits in Bihar has been an ongoing affair. The question also has arisen as to how the ruling party will manage its own allies who have to be told time and again that one cannot be irresponsible when in coalition. What is needed is governance and not gimmicks and populism.

The topic that hogged all media headlines in the USA is the sexual affair and indiscretions of the President. The amount of time and money that is wasted on this is really mind­-boggling. This is not to say that a President can do anything in his office but rather this has been by consent of two adults and it is now the personal problem of Hillary and their daughter Chelsea who have to go through this mental trauma of an errant husband and indiscreet father. The question whether the President lied under oath could have been taken without going into a pornographic details which did boomerang at the Republicans at the mid-term polls. The whole thing could have been wound up but the Right Conservative forces in the Republican Party have assumed a “holier than thou� attitude. Now they have addressed themselves to more pressing issues after the trial was over and the impeachment agenda failed.

Bill Clinton is a product of a generation which was the post Second-World-War generation where promiscuity was a part of the lifestyle of many. If the same test is applied in India, it is for sure that politicians in all parties will have to give up public life.

President Clinton has taken very strong decisions like the bombing of Afghanistan and Sudan after the American embassies were bombed. But, here the USA seems to be short­sighted in her foreign policy. U.S.A. under President Reagan used Pakistan as the conduit to arm the Taliban and the anti-Najibullah forces and triggered an arms cultures in the region. Afghanistan has been the policy of all imperial powers from the British days onwards. Now it is the Americans who have taken over the role of the British. Most of this was given as charity to force the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. At that time Islamic fundamental groups got immense arms and material aid from the USA as the Cold War mentality of over-estimating the “Red Peril� was still the dominant mindset: Coincidentally the Iranian Islamic revolution under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeni brought disgrace to American power in the region by the hostage crisis and replacing a reliable ally and a long trusted friend, the Shah of Iran.

It is also said that Bin Laden is a creation of the U.S.A. And now, he is the brain behind the attacks against the U.S.A. The US has been short-sighted and naive in its policies in the region. This has been clear from the Saddam Hussein case, once the blue-eyed boy of the USA during his long-drawn war against Iran. Later, he turned against U.S.A and became too big. Then the Americans thought that they should cut him to his size. All these more or less validate the post-Cold­ War paradigm put forward by Samuel Huntington on the Clash of Civilisations. If this is taken seriously, the USA will always be the “other� for the Islamic world and incompatibilities in world-views are expected to continue. Saddam Hussein is still there much more popular despite the economic sanctions and continued air-strikes.

Do sanctions work in global affairs to get one’s will accepted by the other? It has at least shown that sanctions of any sort have not succeeded. Instead they have had the reverse effect. They have made that country stronger internally and become more self-reliant. This has happened with India which has had some sort of sanctions since 1974 after Pokhran-I, but India has built an excellent indigenous defence-industrial base which has made the country self-reliant in nuclear and space technology. So sanctions have always worked in the reverse direction and have not succeeded as instruments of intimidatory foreign policy.

The attack on the American embassies in Africa and recently the plan that was unearthed after arresting a Bangladeshi national about the Islamic groups targeting the American embassies in India should make American policy makers reassess their global policies. All this access to weapons has been made available to these fanatic Islamic groups due to their misguided munificence during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. These groups were financed and encouraged and they have now targeted their benefactor. For the religious fanatic who is exclusionist, the “other� is easily constructed and the USA fits into this as a predominant representative of the West and the Christian civilisation. It is said that Bin Laden was initially propped up by the Americans to fight the communists under Najibullah in Afghanistan. It is the same Bin Laden that USA now wants for masterminding the attack on the US embassies. The Indian reaction to this near panic reaction and the US attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan was classical. India has been crying ‘wolf� for so long about the infiltration of weapons into this sensitive area and the US turned a blind eye as long as it did not harm their own interests in the region. This has helped Pakistan to aid and abet terrorism in Kashmir and train groups even in the southern state of Tamil Nadu where Muslim fundamentalist groups had targeted the Home Minister as well as the American Consulate at Madras.

One of the best things done by the present government which no other government has done during the last fifty years was the 20th February, 1999 bus trip of Prime Minister Vajpayee to Pakistan through the Wagha border. It is a gesture of goodwill to the neighbour with whom there have been nothing but mistrust and animosity all these years. This may not resolve the Kashmir issue but it will certainly help in improving ties in areas of mutual agreement. What is surprising is that a government that is termed to be communal and right party is the one that made this gesture when the so-called “secular� governments of the past did very little. This is indeed a paradox and it is time that stereotypes must be revised and blanket generalisations avoided.

It took a party and a Prime Minister labelled as Hindu Right to take a unilateral move to improve relations with Pakistan. By this, India has achieved two very important goals that foreign analysts have to be careful about when they make straight-jacketed stereotypes between ‘national� and ‘communal�. There are areas of grey and in Hinduism it is this grey area that is extremely wide and an analyst from a monotheistic ground is unable to understand. The Lahore Declaration was a step in the right direction though many are cynical. The Indian reality between the national and communal is very ambiguous and very complex for most parties are mixture of both. Some are overt and the others are covert.

The arrest of the Kurdish leader Octvlan in Kenya after he was made to leave the Greek embassy and was arrested by the special Turkish squad, brings to the fore the problems of autonomy to minority groups within Islamic countries. This is in a modem state like Turkey. As most of us know the Kurdish have been one of the few unlucky people who have been divided in four countries and so far have not been able to get the demand of their homeland. The Palestinians have been luckier as they have been able to achieve it as they were predominantly fighting against a government that was from a religious group different from their own. The Kurdish people they are oppressed by fellow Muslims of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. In Turkey their separate identity is also denied and they are called “Mountain Turks� and hence this movement of liberation is treated as a terrorist movement. But, of late, the West has evinced some interest due to the huge Kurdish refugees� inflow into Europe and Canada. Now that Octvlan is in Turkey, it is to be seen whether he will be given a free and fair trial. The Western world, especially the USA and its NATO allies, have been playing it down as Turkey is a NATO member. This is where there is a difference. The Turkish occupation of Cyprus is overlooked as their ally has violated the international law. If an independent non-aligned country does the same, it is violation of ‘human rights�! One should just recall the ranting of the former US official Robin Raphael on Kashmir.

All over the world one sees unpeace and intolerance leading to a lot of misery, violence as well as displacement of people. One sees that the West that is Europe (especially the Balkans) is still mired with these divisions. It seems to be a never-ending process, Bosnia then and Kosovo now. Thousands of people are being killed among the Christian Serbs and the Muslim Albanians. Surprisingly, India hit the headlines for the wrong reasons. In comparison to all civilisations, India has seldom exterminated a race or committed genocide. It is known for hospitality and religious tolerance.

What should be condemned is the brutal murder of Staines and his two sons who were burnt alive. This is a gory murder and all right ­thinking people, irrespective of their religious affiliations, should condemn it. This excuse of conversion is indefensible. Is Hinduism in trouble if some twenty or fifty Dangs convert to Christianity or there are Christian missionaries working in rural areas? The way to prevent conversions is to build structures where the selfless workers as guardians of the religion will work among the lowly and the downtrodden.

Government should not discriminate between religions. The concessions, that is, educational and cultural rights which are now enjoyed by minorities should be extended to the majority as well. For minority fundamentalism may appear to be less dangerous but this, over a period of time, can breed majority fundamentalism which then disturbs the political fabric as well as the civil society. In Kashmir one sees that the Jamaat-­I-Islami has precisely done this and made the madrasas which are run by them into training camps of terrorists. Unless there is some reconciliation, a secular democracy cannot be run on accepting certain primordial identities and discarding the others. It is time to devise ways and means of building a more egalitarian society.

The Indian state has to re-establish its authority and see that such incidents do not occur. Of late there has been tremendous insensitivity o the problems of the people and we have politicians who have come to make a fast buck. Politics is no longer seen as a service to the people but rather a vocation where one can enrich oneself without being accountable. This is what has happened in a state like Bihar where one has a ward classes government. But, does this mean that the downtrodden get justice? One sees the highest number of killings of the Dalits in Bihar and this has gone on with impunity. What is more surprising is the great “secular third front� leaders do not condemn these acts.

Democracy has its own perils and the present coalition government has been more worried about its own survival and has had no time for governance. This has been very clear with the Central Government hesitating to use Article 356 to dismiss a state government for failing to protect the life and liberty of particular group of citizens, in this case the Dalits. What is surprising is that most political parties are treating it as a political issue rather than as a law-and-order issue where the state government has miserably failed in maintaining law and order. What is surprising is the Left and the Congress feel that the Bihar government did not deserve dismissal. The Congress has just to go in history and remember that they have dismissed democratically elected governments on flimisier grounds and several times there has been no reason at all! India is still to learn orun coalitions and in future to avoid the frequent elections, a luxury for a poor country like India.