In My View

Soft Head, but a Hard Heart

Not so long ago (only it seems a world away!), a young colleague at my previous employment with the CNBC-TV 18 had told me about ‘speaking softly but carrying a big stick.’ While at that time I had nodded my head sagely towards her, I could now safely confess I did not know then who she was quoting. A little research later, I was edified with the knowledge that it was a motto prescribed by one of the USA’s most underrated presidents, Theodore Roosevelt – the 26^th in line and Nobel Peace Prize winner to boot.

A few years after my colleague brought my attention to the comment, Joseph S. Nye, an American strategic thinker based a whole theory of political power upon it. Soft power, as Nye envisioned, is based on popular legitimacy that is earned through a process of cultural, social and ideational interaction, as opposed to the brute force of military and economic might.

My current experiences in Hawai’i at the East West Centre (EWC) and the University of Hawai’i, Manoa (UHM) fall in the category of Nye’s rubric. This is where the Yankee Uncle Sam is your avuncular Uncle Joe playing a benign guardian to a region of the Pacific. This is a place where a recalcitrant island acquisition is sought to be integrated with unconcealed humility, overt respect and boundless compassion. This is where mainland, white America is in the minority and wishes to win hearts and minds. And not in the way it was won in South Vietnam, a few decades ago; or in Iraq now.

In Hawai’i one witnesses a self-assured imperial power that is aware of its station in life. It does not suffer from the driving need to underscore its power all the time. So the Mcdonalds, Coca Cola and Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) – symbols of the US’s neo-imperial, commercial hegemony - seem submerged in the happy diversity of Thai, Japanese, Chinese and Korean eateries. Mainstream WASPish (white, Anglo Saxon, Protestant) America seems quite at peace with the cultural smorgasbord that is not a victim of internecine battles, which mark the unhappy assimilations of the US mainland.

Of course, at a rather sublime level there is Pearl Harbour at the edge of Honolulu, the capital city of Hawai’i in the island of Oahu. As much as it symbolises the history of the first time the American homeland was attacked, it also holds the truth of its current primacy in military might, embodied in the headquarters of the US Pacific Command, located there.

But the sights, smells, sounds and breeze of Hawai’i tends to make you forget that you are living on the lands of a nation that believes in “killing people” to uphold its beliefs and its self-interest. No she was not talking about Stalinist Russia. But this rather pithy statement was made by a senior colleague at the East West Centre the other day on a social occasion. Yet, ask a Hawai’ian – quite in contrast to the American Indians – whether they had to lay down their lives alongwith their sovereignty when the island was annexed, almost universally they would reply in the negative. In fact, if the fortnight long ‘orientation’ that all EWC and the UHM students and fellows have to go through, is any indication, an immersion in the Hawai’ian history and culture is full and complete.

Indeed, it is made out to be a rite of passage. Integral to the exercise is the attempt to build a regional community that shares common goals and aspirations. Considering that East West Centre is principally funded by the US Congress and the American Department of State is the pivotal agency looking after it; and presumably keeping in mind that its Public Diplomacy desk under Karen Hughes has oversight, the approach in Hawai’i seems an experiment in laboratory humanism. Hughes, many would recall, was an early convert to neo-conservatism and less famous (than Karl Rove or Donald Rumsfeld) exponent of George W. Bush presidency.

But then these are also days when Indian people are being confronted with the Hobson’s choice of being a ‘strategic partner’ of the USA. This is a choice not couched by the desire of the country to secure its operational autonomy – as was the case with the Russian strategic partnership of the 1970s – but it is fraught with the country’s sense of threat of economic and political isolation (as a recent newspaper column by a renowned journalist held out) in the case of refusal.

So it may be a good time to remember its own man who “spoke softly and carried a big stick.” This old man did speak so softly that millions would strain to hear what he said; and he carried a big stick so naturally that it seemed like an extention of his hand, never raised in anger, but always raised in persuasion. This was the man, bent with the weight of Indian civilization on his shoulders, showed us when you need to take long strides, the big stick helps to put your feet firmly on the ground. We need to remember him again, in the context of the quote.

Pinaki Bhattacharya, currently located in Kolkata, is a Special Correspondent with the Mathrubhum, Kerala. He writes on Strategic Security issues. He can be contacted at pinaki63@dataone.in . He is presently in Hawai’i, the USA at the East West Centre as a Student Fellow of the Asia Pacific Leadership Programme of the Centre.

In My View

Acts of Desperation

One can only watch with amazement the levels of desperation the Indian elite are exuding for being permanently allied to their ‘land of promises,’ the USA. The other week Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh was ready to sacrifice his government for keeping up his covenant with the US president, George W Bush – a sentiment that was clearly in variance with his party colleagues. This week the Left allies of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) are being vilified for supposedly committing a cardinal ‘sin’ – loving thy neighbour i.e. Pakistan and China.

Even the level of rhetoric from the side of the US cohorts have touched new depths. One can easily sample one of those at the personal blog of a senior colleague with the Hindu newspaper, Siddharth Varadarajan. Commenting on his piece, Deal breather, not deal breaker, posted on the blog, India’s venerable author, commentator and a former senior intelligence officer, B Raman wrote these immortal lines, “After joining the IB (Intelligence Bureau) in 1967, I went on a visit to Kolkata. Those were the days of the Cultural Revolution in China. The Marxists were not yet in power in West Bengal, but were very active. As I was travelling in a taxi from the Dum Dum airport to downtown, I saw the following slogan painted by the Marxists on the walls everywhere: "China's Chairman is our Chairman."”

Reading these lines, as a Kolkatan one realized why the Indian State needed to deploy the Indian Army to quell the rebellion of a handful of youth in West Bengal, going in the name of the CPI (ML), colloquially termed Naxalites. This was exemplified by the abysmal intelligence the State had about the country, signified by Raman’s statement that the ‘Marxists’ had annointed China’s chairman as their own.

Because in this extant case, he must have been referring to the CPI (M) and the CPI for their opposition to the nuclear deal. And that rather churlish slogan was a product of the fevered imagination of the CPI (ML), under the leadership of Charu Mazumdar. For the CPI, Mao was an anathema at that time. And even the CPI (M), which had split the party on one of the reasons reflecting the Sino-Soviet split in international communism had treated the slogan with the disdain it deserved.

But enough of edifying desperate rants with factual comments. Let us focus on the issue at hand – the necessity for India to embrace the USA. One of India’s prime systems analysts and commentator Dr G Balachandran argued in the Indian Express, of course with a lot of equivocations of the, “On the one hand…On the other,” that by concluding this treaty, the Manmohan Singh government has not bartered away India’s strategic nuclear programme. Well, Bala has got it wrong this time atleast.

For power is not just about having the option to exercise options, it is more about having an intent to act. India’s elitist class, softened up over decades, first, on public largesse and private patronage, and now, reaping the benefits of the thrust towards flagrant marketisation, have lost the will to resist. Indian history has recorded that civilizations have been decimated because overweaning enervation, be it the Indus Valley (the ruins of which bear testimony of a War, as some historians believe) or the Mauryas or even the Guptas. Of course, on almost all occasions there was the fifth column. But the main reason had been the inability of the courtiers of a feudalist system to rise up to an intellectual challenge posed to them.

If one has to take Balachandran seriously, then one will have to acknowledge that India from now on would have to survive on the generosity of one American regime to another. For most of India’s continuing peaceful nuclear programme would have to depend on US presidential waivers if India takes steps to scientifically validate its nuclear weapons arsenal.

In one part of his contrite analysis, Balachandran has rather expansively written that no Indian analyst believes the country needs more testing nuclear weapons. But despite being evidently well connected to the Indian strategic science establishment, Balachandran has not assured his readers – by extention his countrymen – that India has the scientific ability to undertake cyber simulations for validating designs of bombs, warheads and other paraphernalia. Or whether India has the ability to make sub-critical tests, even if it is allowed under the various US legislations that would now come into play after this treaty.

Finally, a word about the charge that Indian Left parties were opposing the Indo-US treaty on grounds of helping China and Pakistan. The people who make these comments obviously need a lesson in history of the Chinese Bomb. When in the 1950s, Mao Zhe Dong decided that China needed a nuclear arsenal of its own, it was at the teeth of opposition from a then Soviet Union. In fact, Mao had taken the decision of an independent nuclear weapons programme because the latter had been dragging its feet in transferring technology and material to China.

So he had told his countrymen that they were alone in this nuclearised world and needed to develop reactors in each of their backyards. Of course, that was hyperbolic, much in the way of his call to make steel in every backyard. But it had helped in raising a mass upsurge of national power. One wonders whether the late Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had remembered that about its ally when he had urged upon his countrymen that they should rather eat grass than not have nuclear weapons.

Does any of the Indian elite leadership now has the ability to give out such a call to their countrymen?

Pinaki Bhattacharya, currently located in Kolkata, is a Special Correspondent with the Mathrubhum, Kerala. He writes on Strategic Security issues. He can be contacted at pinaki63@dataone.in. He is presently in Hawai’i, the USA at the East West Centre as a Student Fellow of the Asia Pacific Leadership Programme of the Centre.

Penblunt & Hogwash

Democles' in waiting

Sholay is our evergreen, undying film.

Now when I see and hear the commotion over content code controlling TV news, I often think of Gabbar Singh nee Priyaranjan Dasmunshi.

“Jab door gaon mein bacchaa rota hai to maa kahatee hain, beta so jaa… so ja nahin to Gabbar Singh aa jayegaa” a la Sholay. (When a child cries at night in a faraway village, the mother says, son, go to sleep…go to sleep or Gabbar Singh will come.)

Dasmunshi has banned two TV channels so far, and threatens to do more.

And to the news channels, especially those showing Taslima Nasreen being beaten black and blue for umpteen hours, and feel like telling them, Betey sudhar jaa, sudhar jaa nahi to Gabbar Singh aa jayegaa. (Children, change your ways, change your ways or Gabbar Singh will come.)

The content code is hanging like a very loose Damocles’ Sword on a tenuous wire over the news channels. Last week, they had a noisy meeting at the ministry of information & broadcasting and said they want nothing to do with it.

But you may not want anything to do with it and yet, it may want and may actually do what it feels like with you. I do not think Harish Thawani needs to be told that Gabbar ‘DM’ Singh aa jayegaa. (Das Munshi, the Gabbar Singh will come)

Gabbar Singh has already gobbled Neo Sports and scattered its cricket show across the India through DD and the DTH players have dipped their finger in the DD pie and shown all of Neo cricket on their platform, arguing that their licensing conditions say they must show all DD channels, and Neo’s purse got just a few nickels in!

Likewise, Gabbar DM Singh will enter the arena with his famous pistol and ask any news channel, Kitaney golee hai is bandook mein, Sambha? (How many bullets are there in your gun, Sambha.)

This is serious. We have a government empowered by the people, though it is neither of the people nor for it, which has all the powers and will act through an Act in the name of the people.

And the news channels would keep telling each other in disbelief, “But we said we want nothing to do with it!”

The government has a singular tool. Airwaves.

Gabbar will come with his content code and the TV news channels can do either of two things: defy or oblige.

If they oblige, that would be OK.

If they defy, the government will say: we shall not take action, neither penalise nor arrest you, but just stay off our airwaves. Airwaves, most of you must be knowing, are public property.

In India, ‘public property’ means government property, and the Supreme Court and courts below it have repeatedly asserted that airwaves are public property, so the government can say, stay off it.

That is, de-licence a channel.

Why do the news channels resist coded functioning? They say we are a mature democracy and have done without government controls for so long, so why now? We know what needs to be done, and where to draw the line!

But they don’t.

I have been talking to senior media managers, editors and such species who have been asserting that they are mature democrats.

They have been telling me that there has to be a line drawn, but who will draw it? And who will abide by a line drawn by a rival channel?

Or will the editors sit together and draw a line on mutual consensual basis? Is that possible?

When the editors of TV news channels cannot agree upon what is news, and got to each other’s jugulars last month during a debate at the News Television Awards (on stage, in full view of the public as well as the public servants, in a posh hotel) who would care about lines.

If one channel says, well here it is, this is the line, the other channel would draw another one cutting across it, and say, but this is the real line, you see and annul each other.

Thirty news channels and 100 more coming. 24 hours a day. Seventy one million cable households. Rs 6,000 crore advertisement pie annually. That is the limit. It will not likely grow, the ad pie. So if there is scramble when we are 30, what will happen when we are 130?

The average running cost of a moderate news channel is about six crore a month, or Rs 72 crore a year. Let’s calculate:

Rs 6,000 crore divided by 72 crore, that is, at the most 83 odd channels can survive and some may make a little money from this market as it exists.

Rupees 72 crore multiplied by 130, that is, Rs 9,360 crore would be the money needed to allow 130 channels survive and may be let a few make some money. Where is that going to come from?

If that does not, the channels would have to gouge the rival channels’ eyes out to get that number of eyeballs to find the revenue from the limited share of ad pie, and that would mean more cheap programming (both in terms of money spent on and quality of programming), which means more crude, crass content.

I cannot for the fear of God (or Gabbar, or Dasmunshi) figure out where we are headed. Dog eat dog meat for sure. Cultural mayhem, nay apocalypse guaranteed, if the news channels are not reined in.

So I say, Betey, sudhar jaa, nahi to Gabbar Singh aa jayegaa aur kahegaa: bahut maal kamayaa hai… ab golee khaa! (Son, reform otherwise Gabbar Singh would come and say; you have made enough money…now have bullets.)

The Bubble is Bursting Again!!

In My View

1…2…3: Reading Tea Leaves

India concluded the peaceful nuclear cooperation agreement with the United States after a short, tough, and sweet interregnum of negotiations. The two countries finally found the text that could embody the commonalities of interests, while finessing the areas of contradictions between two positions in a highly nuanced document. As has been speculated in both countries, this would form the bedrock of future US-India relations in the times to come, as has been stated by the US Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, who is not normally known for diplomatic prescience.

The text of the agreement was released last week, presumably after a cooling off period when the key political segments of the two countries were appraised of the deal. And the unrecorded sub text of the agreement appears more important than the language of pious cooperation that has been agreed between the two governments.

The three tasks the two countries had were onerous, fulfillment of which could not have been completely devoid of diplomatic theatre. They were (a) to resolve the issue of whether India was a nuclear weapon state within the purview of the Treaty of Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), thus exempting New Delhi from all kinds of punitive restrictions under US law, and by extension the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG); (b) to untie export of enrichment and reprocessing technology from the restrictions imposed upon it by the Hyde Act; and (c) unentangling the issue of cessation of nuclear cooperation and return of exported nuclear material to the USA, as sought by the Hyde Act, in the event of India exploding a nuclear device.

The first of those were resolved by shifting the emphasis on India’s nuclear status to a fulfillment of the provision of peaceful nuclear energy cooperation under the Art IV of the NPT. But considering that the country was not a signatory of the NPT, the burden of monitoring the Indian nuclear programme was thus shifted away from the multilateral nuclear regime, to the provisions of American laws like the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act and the Atomic Energy Act.

This is more so because India is the primary recipient of this agreement and does not have either the commensurate laws to regulate US nuclear activity nor the power to enforce such regulations. India’s status as a non-nuclear weapon state, now established by the new Indo-US deal makes the country particularly vulnerable to manipulations through interplay of American laws.

Hence, the agreement fulfills elements of the most important strategic consideration of Washington – that of creating the architecture of an alternative nuclear regime, which stretches beyond the current material and technology denial sub structure that the NPT upholds.

Problem of the West with the NPT and other attendant regulations has been their enforceability as they had been far too multilateral for its comfort. By creating an indicative parallel structure with an important hold-out country like India, Washington could now be the unilateral commissar of a nuclear realm, with New Delhi as its first entrant.

In case of nuclear fuel cycle-related transfers of technology and material, the agreement has effectively postponed taking a decision, seeking to add an amendment to the agreement at a later date. In case of dual use items it has upheld the paramountcy of national laws. Presumably, application of those laws would be guided by the precepts of the cooperation agreement. Similarly, by defining the parametres of the fuel cycle activity, the US is seeking to lay the foundations of an eventual, internationally mandated ceiling on fuel cycle-related activities.

Within the ambit of the agreement, India has sought to maintain that all monitoring mechanisms are governed by the multilateral, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). But New Delhi has significantly lost ground on Art 10 of the agreement by which it has had to accept that “if the IAEA decides that the application of IAEA safeguards is no longer possible, the supplier and recipient should consult and agree on appropriate verification measures,” as held in sub section 4 of the article.

The upshot of the agreement will be an increased engagement of India in the nuclear arena, thus setting the stage for a certain world order which addresses issues of global concern, as defined by the dominant forces of world politics, in a predetermined way. Nuclear politics may not be as divisive and sectarian as the confrontation with Islamist radicalism, but it still remains a tool of maintaining hegemonies and assertive policies.

This agreement that India has struck with the USA does not ameliorate any concerns that stem from internationalist interests of maintaining equity. At this stage some might argue that a bilateral agreement do not necessarily address such agenda as it caters to mutual interests of the two parties. This argument is patently wrong in this case as the nuclear cooperation agreement India has signed holds much wider ramifications. If the Indian elite thinks that they have stolen a march in the nuclear arena by signing this agreement, they should sober down their triumphalism with the attendant realisation that they have conceded far too much of ground on aspects of global power, to really begin the celebrations just yet.

Pinaki Bhattacharya, currently located in Kolkata, is a Special Correspondent with the Mathrubhum, Kerala. He writes on Strategic Security issues. He can be contacted at pinaki63@dataone.in. He is presently in Hawai’i, the USA at the East West Centre as a Student Fellow of the Asia Pacific Leadership Programme at the Centre.

Penblunt & Hogwash

Balls and Bloodimindedness

Taslima Nasreen was, pushed, bullied and beaten, from morning till evening.

Taslima Nasreen was, pushed, bullied and beaten, from morning till evening.

Breaking News, Breaking News,

Breaking News,

Breaking News,

Breaking News,

Taslima Nasreen was, pushed, bullied and beaten, from morning till evening.

Taslima Nasreen was, pushed, bullied and beaten, from morning till evening.

Taslima Nasreen was, pushed, bullied and beaten, from morning till evening.

Where? In Hyderabad Press Club?

No, there she was pushed, bullied and beaten, but for a few minutes

Taslima Nasreen was, pushed, bullied and beaten, from morning till evening on a Hindi news channel.

The same four minute shot was shown from noon till night, again and again and again, and when it had been shown the zillionth time, it was still Breaking News…. You know the format

And mind you Taslima Nasreen will be pushed, bullied and beaten, from morning till evening on a Hindi news channel next year as well, when the same news channel would showcase its last year’s International Coverage with pride…

… and send the footage for the national News Television Awards, and if it did not win a prize, the executive producer would stage a walkout.

I have said this about Hindi news coverage many times, so ask me what is new that I am speaking on this time, or am I just being a good old journo recycling old words in new edition of a hackneyed column?

The big news, the Breaking News for the readers of this column is I just learnt that the Hindi news channels do this not because they lack creativity (which they do) have not enough money (which they don’t, compared to say CNN), or because the average Indian viewer wants crude and crass stuff (which they enjoy flipping through but do not necessarily demand).

They tell me this is an Indian invention in the TV news space, a proper Indian patentable intellectual property to catch maximum eyeballs over the largest amount of time!

I will skip all the laments of how eyeball journalism is killing off news, for that I have said often enough and none of my readers have handed me a kerchief ever.

The point to go to, sans lament, is that because the Hindi channels do not have enough money and creativity, and because they know (sic) “that there is the basic animal in all of us, however much varnish we apply on our outsides”.

What value does that animal create for the TV channels?

Well, there are 30 news channels already existing in the country, and there are more than a hundred coming up with licenses (official figures given by the Secretary, Information & Broadcasting), the scramble for the ad pie is break neck, and so everyone needs those precious of all things: eyeballs.

So sans creativity and money, they have developed an Indian model to use repeated images of violence, sex, myths, ghosts and dismembered limbs, with a massive calculation.

It goes like this:

If a channel is watched by 10 people for 10 minutes each, it will give it a certain figure of 100 eyeballs (actually 200, if some are not one-eyed viewers). People watch serious news channels for 10 minutes or more, so this is the index for serious news channels

But if a channel has 100 viewers who flip by it for just three minutes, it has 300 (or 600, as you wish) eyeballs, and then, the TV viewers of this kind keep coming and going, so that means, the new viewer that comes in will also stay for another three minutes if shown that Taslima Nasreen is being beaten black and blue at the Press Club of Hyderabad.

That new viewer will skip the channel the moment s/he sees that the news channel is playing the fool with her / his time and insulting her / his sensibilities, but by then someone new would come in.

This is the great Indian intellectual property contribution to the TV news space.

The TV news world is today divided into two parts, those who give what we knew as news, and those who call themselves a news channel and give eminently avoidable trivia as news.

The ad pie?

The trivia channels are free to air and hence accessible to all and sundry, and in a poor country that means a vast majority.

The serious guys in the market feel building a brand that is respectable will get them the better product brands, the upmarket stuff that comes with a monetary premium.

The real fear that is stalking the latter group is, if the trivia channels keep getting such massive eyeballs for years, the big brands might just shift from the decent to the indecent channels.

So they floated a debate that there should be two types of channels: news channels and reality channels, which should not be allowed to call themselves ‘news channels’.

Very well, said the big tall guy from the nastiest of the trivia channels, so be it, call us an entertainment channel, tabloid channel or what you might. But the eyeballs will stay with us.

Which amounts to saying that the average Indian eyeball is looking for the crude the crass and the ugly?

If I may say so just this one time: “Balls”.