The Way I See It

In My View

Pakistan in trouble

With Pakistan, the USA is between a rock and a hard place. Now that Gen Parvez Musharraf has declared an internal emergency in Pakistan, the American policy pundits have suddenly discovered the virtues of democracy and rule of law. Demands for the George W Bush government to dump the general have reached a crescendo.

All the while when Pakistan military was bombing, strafing, gunning and abducting people in the northwestern part of the country – all without the emergency powers they now enjoy – the demigods of ‘democracy’ in Washington did not have any conscience pangs. Only when Gen Musharraf found himself in a legal tangle with the Pakistan Supreme Court on the verge of ruling his recent re-election void did the Bush Administration and its capper boys found him to be utterly unpalatable.

They now want him to write his own dissolution by handing over power to Benazir Bhutto after a cursory Parliamentary poll early next year. This is the same Bhutto who in her previous incarnation as the head of a kleptocratic regime had denuded the country of all fair play. Now that she is ready to do any one’s bidding – particularly that of the Americans – for her own anointment, the US strategic punditry has found in her the visions of liberal liturgy that would deliver them all Islamic terrorists residing in the region.

So, in other words, Washington is swinging from one bad choice to one worse, because they have no other. In the past 25 years, ever since Pakistan under Gen Zia-ul Haq decided to become a frontline state in the Cold War battle in Afghanistan, the Americans have joined hands with successive regressive regimes in Islamabad to systematically destroy all semblance of decency and progressivism in the country’s politics.

They have not allowed any institution in the country to survive barring the armed forces. They have fostered the feudal lords to thrive in the country in the guise of democratic politicians. And for more than decade, they let forces of Islamic radicalism grow just so that it could act as a bulwark of American interests – under the aegis of a Wahabi philosophy pioneered by the other American stooges, the Saudi royal family.

Now all those policies are coming home to roost. Gen Musharraf might not have been the paragon of virtue that the American policymakers expressly profess as their motto, but nor was he the embodiment of evil that the US’s pro-establishment, mainstream media is drumbeating about. Musharraf is a man who has shown his liberal instincts a number of times, though often obscured by his high showmanship.

For a long time, he struggled hard to maintain a balance between his necessity of confronting the Islamic radicalists and not going against the theological bent of the population. He did even try to shift Pakistan from the path of endemic anti-Indianism as a sine qua non of its existence as he realised that it was coming in the way of his attempts at modernising the country. Unfortunately for him, Pakistan’s ruling elite had been weaned away from sharing power with the people – evident in a limited way in the early days of Pakistan – and to a total dependence on the USA.

Having been bred in Pakistan army that has been the largest beneficiary of this American largesse, Musharraf was not in a position to make a clean break with the past. Moreover, after 9/11 he took the conscious decision of siding of with that section of world opinion, which was against religious obscurantism driving Islamic terrorism. Coincidentally a shade of this opinion was being led by the US and Musharraf decided to make this work to his advantage thus gaining legitimacy for his regime.

This attitude of his helped India also to deal with cross-border terrorism aimed at the country even though often the newly established systems failed to deliver. But for the first time in the sub-continent’s past did a ruler of Pakistan veer away from the path of the anti-India bandwagon. But curiously, neither the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance government nor the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government allowed him to garner some political mileage out of his endeavour that could gain him elbowroom in the politics across the borders.

Possibly, both the Indian regimes were keener to please their new friends in Washington, thus keep up an unrelenting pressure on him. The basic fallacy in this Indian strategic argument was the lack of a Pakistani civil society that could buttress a democratic push against the Islamic radicalists. India could at least have held Musharraf’s hand in putting up that kind of a political resistance and not have taken such a securo-centric stand on the whole complex relationship.

Now, it might already be too late for even India to salvage its Pakistan policy that goes beyond keeping the former’s borders benign. For whichever regime comes to power in Islamabad in a post-Musharraf phase would seek to hide their American apron strings under a radical verbiage targetted against India. They would try to balance their hardline stance against Islamic terrorists targeting the USA with a softer line against those that seek to destabilise India.

If anyone in New Delhi believes that the policy mavens of Washington would actually live up to their rhetoric about eliminating “all terrorism” launched from Pakistan, s/he should be given the highest honour, saved for utter naivete. The desperation levels of the US elite is too high for them to consider any view that does not cater directly to their immediate interests.

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.

In My View

Shining China

Chinese scholars are now debating whether the country could invest some of its trillion dollar plus foreign exchange reserve into a new “Asian fund” that would focus on building infrastructure in poorer Asian countries. The fund would be managed by an international organisation, specially created for administering it.

If this sounds like Beijing’s first foray into challenging the established international financial institutions like the western dominated International Monetary Fund, the World Bank or the Japanese financed, Asian Development Bank, just ask Prof Wu Jianmin, a consummate diplomat; a former ambassador to the France, besides an UN body in Geneva. He is now the president of the Chinese Foreign Affairs University in Beijing.

He told us in a talk that “anti-globalisation protests are not popular in China.” For the country’s growth is wedded to East Asia’s growth and “globalization.” As if to buttress his point he quoted the IMF stating that China contributes 25 per cent to the globe’s economic growth.

That self-confidence does not seem misplaced when one travels through the country. A 36-hour boat ride through the Yangtze beginning at Yi Chang and ending in Chongqing, tells a story of a nation on the rise and very near the top. The goal for the new cities, which have grown after the inundation of the Three Gorges dam put the old into a watery grave, seem to be to touch the sky. Literally, the cities and towns are dotted with skyscrapers as the innumerable Chinese seek to save on living space. But they have abundant opportunities, and are now coming into real money.

Post-Soviet socialism does not have a template for evolution. Marxism never told its adherents each step of achieving a socialist society, but instead had merely detailed the nature of capitalism and created the goal of socialism as a step forward leading to communism as the highest form of human condition.

China’s post-revolutionary ideologues are shaping a capitalist nation that could lead the people to the final stage socialist emancipation. Interestingly, despite being the third largest economy of the world, consumption levels of the Chinese is still quite low. They save more than 30 per cent of their income. They still do not throng the shopping plazas in as many numbers as their population should entail.

But in the process it is redefining many of the familiar signposts of socialism. As Dr Xiang Yao, director of a research institute attached to China’s apex State Council puts it: “In the past, our wrong policies have ended the lives of hundreds of thousands. In the past we followed poor socialism as opposed to rich capitalism. Previously, we put too much emphasis on class struggle.” Almost 35 per cent of the country’s top 500 millionaires are members of the Communist Party of China.

Now Hu Jintao’s China is full of words like “scientific harmonious socialism.” Like any other democratic nation - though ruled by one party – in China a governing idea first needs to become a part of the popular lexicon. The Chinese president had been saying those words for the past five years – since he came to power. Only this month, the CPC enshrined the word “scientific” into its constitution, giving the necessary direction to its socialist dicta.

The city-dwellers now openly talk of the “great divide” between the well-off urbanites and the poor rural folks. Dr Xiang even talked about another divide – the regional divide – that separates the more developed east from the less developed west and central China. He says financial resources and investments need to be diverted to those parts of the country as “eastern China should support the growth west and central China.”

So instead of “distributing poverty” – as socialism was long thought to do – the Chinese state is seeking to redistribute the national wealth. That wealth is being generated by the people of the country whose boundless energy has been unleashed by the party-state.

And how does China view its tri-lateral relationship with Russia and India? Prof Wu says that the relationship is based on the precept of “cooperation,” which is contrary to the notion of “confrontation” amongst neighbours.

“We will not follow our unilateral interests,” he says, “We want to be a prosperous, democratic and a civilised country.” Apparently, he is not just addressing an Indian but indeed his intended audience was others, further west. Clearly, China had decided to have a new kind of stable engagement with the major powers; its neighbours; and with the “developing countries,” as Dr Wu Jianmin elucidates.

The sense of Chinese civilisation abounds the country in many of the symbols chosen to make the nation attractive to its own people and outsiders. While the Chinese revolution - led by the CPC – entailed a clear disconnection with the country’s rather difficult past, now an attempt is being made to uphold some of the cultural artifacts of the same past so as to give the people a sense of history. The natural concomitant of that is the rise of Chinese nationalism, that can reach a high pitch in the years to come. Especially with China hosting the greatest sporting spectacle of all, the Onlympics next year. How this colour their worldview would be an interesting thing to watch?

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.