THE SAMJAUTA EXPRESS EXPLOSION: THE FOLLOW-UP

B.RAMAN

"According to American investigators, the LET (Lashkar-e-Toiba) and Al Qaeda were responsible for the Samjauta Express blast and the HUJI( Harkatul-Jihad-Al-Islami) for the Mecca Masjid blast (in Hyderabad).If the American investigators, who have better sources in Pakistan, are correct, how can our investigators claim that some arrested Hindus were responsible for these incidents? Justice and fairplay demand a thorough investigation into the two different versions that have emerged from Indian and American investigators. While the American investigators have blamed the LET, Al Qaeda and the HUJI, Indian investigators have blamed the Abhinav Bharat. Both cannot be correct." So I wrote in an article of August 7,2010, titled ARREST OF SOME HINDUS AS TERRORISTS: CURIOUSER & CURIOUSER at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers40%5Cpaper3971.html .

2.Since then, there has been a significant development in the investigation of the case relating to the explosion on the night of February 18,2007, in the Samjauta Express, a twice-weekly train service connecting Delhi and Lahore. There were 68 fatalities. While most of them were poor Pakistani nationals returning home after visiting their relatives in India, some Indian nationals were also killed. The incident took place a day before the then Pakistani Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri was to arrive in New Delhi to resume peace talks, which were disrupted as a result of the explosion.

3.The case has not yet been fully investigated. The investigation was initially being handled by the Haryana Police without much progress, but was subsequently taken over by the newly-created National Investigation Agency (NIA), which came into being after the Mumbai terrorist strikes of 26/11 by the LET. According to media reports, Swami Aseemanand alias Jatin Chatterjee alias Swami Onkarnath, said to be an activist of the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS), who has been arrested and was being interrogated in police custody, has confessed to a magistrate about his role along with some other activists in the explosions at Malegaon in Maharashtra,Ajmer Sharif, a Sufi shrine in Rajasthan, the Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh and the Samjauta Express. He is reported to have described them as acts of retaliation against Muslims triggered off by the attacks by jihadi terrorists in the Akshardam temple in Ahmedabad in 2002 and in the Sankatmochan temple in Varanasi in 2006. His confessional statement has reportedly been recorded by the Magistrate under Section 164 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) after following procedural formalities as laid down under the law to remove any effect of police pressure on him to confess. One of these formalities is to transfer him from police to magisterial custody for some time before recording his confession. Since he made the confession even after any possible police pressure on him was removed, it will be taken as a voluntary confession made without any pressure on him and with the full knowledge of the implications of his confession. This confession will remain an important piece of evidence unless subsequently, under the advice of his lawyer or on his own, he retracts from it.

4. Generally, courts do not convict a person on the basis of a confessional statement made to a magistrate unless independently corroborated by other evidence. The NIA has to collect further independent evidence---particularly about the others involved, the details of the training given, the procurement of the explosive material, the fabrication of the improvised explosive devices (IED) and their actual planting. But the significance of the voluntary confessional statement is that it will have greater credibility than the intelligence collected by the American investigators. What the Americans have collected is intelligence, which may or may not be correct. What the NIA has obtained is a confessional statement under the law by a suspect, which will be presumed to be correct unless proved otherwise by evidence adduced by the defence. The defence can still adduce the US reports blaming the LET, the HUJI and Al Qaeda to convince the trial court that it should not rely on the confessional statement, but it will be up to the court to decide on the acceptability of the confession.

5. The confession points the needle of suspicion for the first time at some extremist elements in the Hindu community supporting the Hindutva ideology for organising the explosion on the train. It cannot be brushed aside as of no value or as the result of a political conspiracy to malign the Hindutva groups. The value at present is limited till corroborative evidence is obtained, but it is an important break-through in the investigation.

6. The confession would create embarrassment both for the Indian investigating agencies and for the Hindutva groups. The investigating agencies will be embarrassed because they were initially projecting the train explosion as the work of Pakistan-inspired jihadi terrorists. The Hindutva groups will be embarrassed because the suspects who have come to notice so far in respect of all these four incidents were known supporters of the Hindutva ideology. Despite the embarrassment, the Indian investigating agencies should press ahead with the investigation till they come to a logical conclusion facilitating the prosecution of those arrested. We should not create an impression that we follow double standards----by condemning terrorism emanating from Pakistan and the Indian Muslim community and acting firmly against it and by playing down terrorism emanating from sections of the Hindu community. ( 8-1-11)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“A public awareness of science and design is a necessary tool to empower the positive collective feedback that we trust will help set the right substrate for creativity and innovation.” — Paola Antonelli

On Resilience

HOW MUCH DISTURBANCE CAN A SYSTEM WITHSTAND? WITH ROOTS IN ECOLOGY AND COMPLEXITY SCIENCE, RESILIENCE THEORY CAN TURN CRISES INTO CATALYSTS FOR INNOVATION.

http://seedmagazine.com/content/print/on_resilience/

In the 1930s the American art collector Albert Barnes commissioned Henri Matisse to produce a major painting for his private gallery in Merion, outside Philadelphia. Matisse was ecstatic: He rented an old cinema in Nice, where he lived at that time, and spent the entire next year completing the work, a dance triptych. He was pleased with the result. But when the piece arrived in Merion, Barnes wrote to Matisse explaining an unfortunate oversight: His collaborators had taken the wrong measurements, so the painting did not fit on the gallery wall. The difference in size was marginal, and Matisse could easily have tweaked the triptych to fit the wall, a technical fix. But instead he rented the cinema for another 12 months to complete a new painting with the right dimensions. Moreover, since he felt that mindless duplication was not real art, Matisse considerably changed the concept, effectively creating a whole new design. And in this process of reworking the piece, as he experimented with forms that would capture the dancers’ rhythmic motion, he invented the famous “cut outs” technique (gouaches découpés), what he later labeled “painting with scissors.” Whether consciously or unconsciously, Matisse turned a mistake into an opportunity for innovation. The new triptych not only pleased Barnes, but also served as the stylistic starting point for what would later become Matisse’s most admired works.

The French master’s ad hoc ingenuity captures the essence of an emerging concept known as resilience. Loosely defined, resilience is the capacity of a system—be it an individual, a forest, a city, or an economy—to deal with change and continue to develop. It is both about withstanding shocks and disturbances (like climate change or financial crisis) and using such events to catalyze renewal, novelty, and innovation. In human systems, resilience thinking emphasizes learning and social diversity. And at the level of the biosphere, it focuses on the interdependence of people and nature, the dynamic interplay of slow and gradual change. Resilience, above all, is about turning crisis into opportunity.

Resilience theory, first introduced by Canadian ecologist C.S. “Buzz” Holling in 1973, begins with two radical premises. The first is that humans and nature are strongly coupled and coevolving, and should therefore be conceived of as one “social-ecological” system. The second is that the long-held, implicit assumption that systems respond to change in a linear—and therefore predictable—fashion is altogether wrong. In resilience thinking, systems are understood to be in constant flux, highly unpredictable, and self-organizing with feedbacks across multiple scales in time and space. In the jargon of theorists, they are complex adaptive systems, exhibiting the hallmark features of complexity.

A key feature of complex adaptive systems is their ability to self-organize along a number of different pathways with possible sudden shifts between states: A lake, for example, can exist in either an oxygenated, clear state or an algae-dominated, murky one. A financial market can float on a housing bubble or settle into a basin of recession. Conventionally, we’ve tended to view the transition between such states as gradual. But there is increasing evidence that systems often don’t respond to change in a smooth way: The clear lake seems hardly affected by fertilizer runoff until a critical threshold is passed, at which point the water abruptly goes turbid. Resilience science focuses on these sorts of regime shifts and tipping points. It looks at incremental stresses, such as accumulation of greenhouse gases in combination with chance events—things like storms, fires, even stock market crashes—that can tip a system into another equilibrium state from which it is difficult, if not impossible, to recover. How far can a system be perturbed before this shift happens? How much shock can a system absorb before it transforms into something fundamentally different? How can active transformations from an undesirable social-ecological state into a better one be orchestrated? That, in a nutshell, is the essence of the resilience challenge.

The resilience line of thinking helps us avoid the trap of simply rebuilding and repairing flawed structures of the past—be it an economic system overly reliant on risky speculation or a health-care system that splits a nation at its financial seams and yet fails to deliver adequate coverage. Resilience encourages us to anticipate, adapt, learn, and transform human actions in light of the unprecedented challenges of our turbulent world.

Arguably the most urgent of these tasks is the nested set of global environmental crises we now confront: climate change, ocean acidification, pandemics, water scarcity, overfishing, and loss of ecosystem services. The tremendous acceleration and expansion of the human enterprise, especially since World War II, is pushing the Earth dangerously close to the limits of the human activity it can sustain, and beyond which abrupt environmental change is increasingly likely. Obviously, global sustainability demands that humanity remain within these planetary operating boundaries. The relevant question then becomes: What will it take?

To begin, we need to put our role on this planet in perspective by placing humanity and the Earth’s systems in a geological context. If you graph the range of global temperature variations over the past 100,000 years, most of it forms a wild, erratic sawtooth pattern as climatic variations have at turns scorched or frozen the world. But, about 10,000 years ago, temperature variation stabilized, and we entered what geologists call the Holocene epoch. This is the stable period during which agriculture and complex societies, including our own, developed and flourished.

Considering the fact that our modern globalized society has developed within these unusually stable conditions, it might come as no surprise that today’s hospitable environment is often taken for granted in investment decisions, political actions, and international agreements.

Before the Holocene period, the climatic conditions on Earth were likely too unpredictable—with temperatures fluctuating wildly—for humans to settle down and develop in one place. Clearly, the only rational strategy now is to try and ensure that we remain in the human-friendly Holocene phase, that human development does not kick us into an unknown geological era.

The big challenge for humanity, then, is to begin working with the processes of the biosphere, instead of against them. This is not merely an environmental strategy—it is about sustaining our own development on planet Earth. And there are countless pathways for such development, as long as the biophysical preconditions for a functioning Earth system are respected.

This global resilience perspective stands in stark contrast to development paradigms and global policies that treat environmental issues as external to society, that offer only minor adjustments of current behaviors, and that tend to concentrate on technical quick fixes to get rid of the problems. It also runs counter to the philosophies of many traditional conservationists; they tend to see the world as environmentally stable, and seek to “save the environment” by limiting or excluding human activity. Both perspectives treat human and nature as two separate entities.

Embarrassingly, in a few generations we seem to have created a mind-set that either assumes that the economy is at the very center of the universe, or that nature needs to be saved from us humans. This is a dangerous mental trap, one we must escape as soon as possible in order to seed a prosperous future for humanity.

Luckily, the climate crisis has kick-started a new kind of mental revolution: We are slowly reconnecting with the planet. We are beginning to recognize that humans are part of the biosphere, simultaneously shaping it and fundamentally dependent on its functioning. This thinking is present in an accumulating body of work on ecosystem services, like the 2005 UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, that surveys the capacity of the world’s natural systems to support human development.

Resilience consists of three features—persistence, adaptability, and transformability—each interacting from local to global scales. How can societies persist and adapt in order to avoid tipping over critical thresholds into undesirable situations? When a shift into an undesired regime appears inevitable (or has already occurred and is irreversible), how can social-ecological systems transform to fit the new circumstances? One example of such “transformability” is the recent shift in governance of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Here the challenges of climate change, eutrophication, and overfishing have led Australians to begin treating the reef as an invaluable, embedded part of their economy, and to begin managing it through collaborations between citizens, scientists, and policymakers. The current search for alternative energy sources to build a society that is less dependent on fossil fuels is another example. Overturning petroleum—the very foundation of human development thus far—will require unprecedented creativity and social innovation. In other words, it will demand a new ethic of social-ecological resilience.

Don’t be too alarmed by unexpected events, be prepared for them, and make use of them to improve negative circumstances. These actions will require trust and collective effort, a theme brought into focus with the awarding of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics to Elinor Ostrom, a key player in resilience thinking. Ostrom’s work gives evidence that grassroots, cooperative action can be enormously successful when it comes to caring for public commons—resources that benefit all, and that are traditionally vulnerable to exploitation. This message is at the core of the resilience framework. That the global community is now recognizing it provides hope that resilience will be the new lens through which we face the turbulence, and opportunity, of the coming decade. Like that great French painter, with the right vision, we too can adapt to adversity, rethink our approach—and perhaps create a masterpiece in the process.


Carl Folke is the science director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University and director of Beijer Institute of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Protecting Critical Infrastructure in the EU

By Andrea Renda and Bernard Haemmerli

• Regulatory Policy
• CEPS Task Force Reports

Date of publication:

16 December 2010

Pages:

107

Free download (pdf, 2650.88 Kb) Can't download? Try here.

Critical infrastructures such as energy, communications, banking, transportation, public government services, information technology etc., are more vital to industrialized economies and now than ever before. At the same time, these infrastructures are becoming increasingly dependent on each other, such that failure of one of them can often propagate and result in domino effects.

The emerging challenge of Critical (information) Infrastructure Protection (C(I)IP) has been recognized by nearly all member states of the European Union: politicians are increasingly aware of the threats posed by radical political movements and terrorist attacks, as well as the need to develop better response capacity in case of natural disasters. Responses to these facts have been in line with the available resources and possibilities of each country, so that certain countries are already quite advanced in translating the C(I)IP challenge into measures, whereas others are lagging behind. In the international arena of this policy domain, Europe is still in search of a role to play. Recently, CIIP policy has been integrated in the EU Digital Agenda, which testifies to the growing importance of securing resilient infrastructures for the future.

This important and most topical Task Force Report is the result of in-depth discussions between experts from different backgrounds and offers a number of observations and recommendations for a more effective and joined-up European policy response to the protection of critical infrastructure.

The Task Force was chaired by Bernhard Haemmerli, President of the Swiss Informatics Society. CEPS Senior Research Fellow Andrea Renda served as Rapporteur.

Rise of Tibetan Soft Power

Tibetan ‘soft power’ has ensured that we are going to see a continued rise in Tibetan nationalistic aspirations along with the flourishing of Tibetan culture and civilization, in tandem with the rise of China as a global power.

By Tsering Namgyal for openDemocracy

http://www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/Current-Affairs/ISN-Insights/Detail?lng=en&id=125917&contextid734=125917&contextid735=125916&tabid=125916

---

Many Tibetans these days are rightfully feeling dismayed, believing that their culture and identity is increasingly being eclipsed and their hopes for a resolution to the Tibetan question dashed by the rise of China.

But hold on a minute. Though China is already on the path to being an undisputed economic and military power, Tibet has also become a superpower in its own right.

Tibet has become an international ‘soft power.’

The idea of ‘Tibet’ has enormous import in the minds of the international public: people all over the world are recognizing that Tibetan civilization needs to be preserved, supported and protected.

The idea of ‘soft-power’, coined by American political scientist Joseph Nye, is the ability of nations to use moral and cultural capital to persuade and inspire others.

All governments engage in exercises in soft power. Obvious instruments of this process include Alliances Francaise of France, the Fulbright Scholarship of the United States, the Goethe Institute of Germany, the British Council in the UK. The Beijing Olympics itself was a showcase for China’s own attempts at soft power.

Many of these exercises amount to propaganda, though there are more subtle and more effective forms of soft power. In the case of India, the philosophy of non-violence, democracy – Yoga and Ayurveda – are sometimes more convincing than the Incredible India campaigns.

Cultural power is not necessarily linked to economic supremacy, as is evident in the case of current Japan. Even though the Japanese economy has been in the doldrums for decades and its economic prowess is nowhere near the peak of the 1980s, Japan continues to remain a major cultural power. As any youth these days would testify, the whiff of Japanese cool is hard to ignore, be it in fashion, food or, high-tech.

Good news is that something similar is happening to Tibet, thanks of course to the leadership of the Dalai Lama. On the one hand, Tibetans are fighting against being assimilated into China. But on the other hand, a whirlwind of Tibetan cool has been spreading around the world for the past few decades. Exhibitions, teachings and seminars about Tibet have been held in places as farflung as Toronto, convincing even the most hardened cynic that Tibetan culture – rather than being lost as a result of the Chinese oppression – is in fact thriving in spite of the displacement.

Monks these days are seen not only strolling the night markets of Taipei but also creating Sand Mandalas in Paris. Tibetan poems are propagated not only on the Internet but also recited in the salons of New York and London. Tibetan history is also in vogue amongst scholars, however ignored by the national powers. In the summer of 2010, nearly a thousand Tibetan scholars gathered at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver to discuss everything about Tibetan civilization, from the history of Tibetan banditry to the tales of Tibetan ogresses. Not your average Buddhist retreat.

Major trade surplus in spirituality

Departments and institutes have been created in major universities aimed mainly at researching the Tibetan science of mind and Buddhist psychology - as if these systems of knowledge, refrigerated and code-protected in the cold mountains of Tibet for centuries, were finally released to heal the despondent souls of the post-9/11 world. Frequent listeners to the Dalai Lama’s teachings would know how often he mentions the fact that Tibetan scholars have preserved for centuries these texts which have all but disappeared from India.

This traditional education not only continues, but efforts are also made to modernize the system. Leading Western institutions, such as Atlanta’s Emory University, are joining with monastic communities to teach science to young monks. Indeed, these days, thousands of monks pursuing their studies in hundreds of odd monasteries in India – technology parks of Buddhist psychology – have become the premier manufacturers of mental peace.

In less formal ways, dharma centres and retreat institutes have been flourishing in North America and Europe, resulting in norms of spiritual practice and rituals that even strike Tibetans as quite strange. This spiritual exchange has resulted in a whole new vocabulary, injecting phrases like ‘compassionate warrior’, ‘spiritual materialism’ and ‘mindfulness’ into our daily conversations.

Indeed, Tibetan Buddhism has begun to speak back to us in American-English. If meditation were denominated in real currencies, the Tibetan diaspora would easily run a major trade surplus with Europe and the United States.

It is no secret these days how popular Tibetan religion and spirituality has become amongst the Chinese public, helping compensate for the loss of Tibetan culture caused by its government’s policies. Those who think that this is all some new age mumbo-jumbo might want to check out the back issues of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States (PNAS), arguably the leading science journal in the country, which has published empirical findings of the experiments carried out with Tibetan monks at several top American universities.

Books based on these studies have become national bestsellers.The deregulation of the spiritual markets in the past twenty years has indeed fuelled no resentment in the meditative markets of the West. That is because the world has outsourced to Tibetan masters the work of achieving mental peace and meditative technology for which there is no easy substitute.

In the high-end market of practical neuroscience, Tibetan Buddhists have faced little competition. As the new media economy has led to the unlocking of the value chain across all industries, the Tibetan Buddhist communities have become a ‘gold standard’ against which all spiritual organizations are compared.

The extent to which Tibetan culture has travelled around the world can be seen in the strangest of the places. On December 17, the New York Times picture about a memorial for recently deceased US diplomat Richard Holbrooke showed a Tibetan Buddhist thangka serving as a poignant backdrop to the image of former US President Bill Clinton comforting the widow of Mr. Holbrooke.

The fact that recent teachings by the 17th Karmapa in Bodhgaya were translated live into half a dozen languages and telecast over the Internet underscores the extent to which Tibetan Buddhism has become globalized and hybridized. During July 2011, the Dalai Lama will also bestow Kalachakra (Wheel of Time) teachings, highly sought after by Buddhists, not in the state of Bihar but in Washington DC.

Potent sites of resistance

These events no doubt help expand the Tibetan spheres of influence and assert Tibetan identity. Yet a less nuanced understanding might lead to a failure to fully grasp the ways in which this performance of Tibetan religiosity, while not so overtly political in content, also creates potent sites of resistance. To say that faith is a marker of identity risks tautology. It is not without reason that religion bears the brunt of Chinese policies inside Tibet.

In a much circulated and a highly-innovative “I am Tibetan” video released by Tibetans inside Tibet last year, many participants point to “Buddhism” as the reason why they think they are Tibetan. Thus denying that spirituality has a role to play in resistance is as simplistic as saying that hip-hop music concerts have no role in social movements or that the Olympics cannot be appropriated as tools of nationalism.

These are all external manifestations of culture. In the end, however, Tibetan ‘soft power’ – for lack of a better phrase – survives beyond culture and religion, or for that matter, spirituality.

On the contrary, defining it in these terms flies in the very face of the idea of the word ‘Tibet’, which, like the best of the Tibetan spiritual transmissions, is simply beyond words.

Therefore, there is indeed a need for an awakening of sorts and a recognition of what Tibetan ‘soft power’ and its allures have to offer a world disillusioned with ‘hard power.’

Still, we live in a real world where geopolitics is the name of the game and cultural capital can travel only so far. In the years ahead, we are going to see a continued rise in Tibetan nationalistic aspirations along with the flourishing of Tibetan culture and civilization, in tandem with the rise of China as a global power.

---

The writer is a journalist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.

Editor's note:

To view the original article, click here.

---

openDemocracy
This article originally appeared on openDemocracy.net under a Creative Commons licence.

Pakistan-Multiple Crises

Vikram Sood

2011-01-06 17:50:00

Two to three years has been the average life span of elected governments in Pakistan ever since Z A Bhutto was PM from 1973 to 1977. His daughter Benazir alternated with her rival Nawaz Sharif from 1988 till 1999 when the Mian Sahib was overthrown by yet another saviour in Khaki, General Pervez Musharraf. And both former Prime Ministers were forced into exile.

Thus, going by past precedents the present combine of President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousef Raza Gilani would now seem to have run out of its allotted time. Several crises confront the PPP led government and there are no easy solutions, quite a few outside the range of the PPP leadership's capabilities to solve them.

The Commissar and the General

Apart from the ongoing turmoil in FATA and the tussle between the US and the Pak Army over North Waziristan is well known. An exasperated US administration finds itself unable to push the Pakistan Army led by Gen Kayani into launching operations in North Waziristan as it prepares for its draw down of forces later in the year. Each time the Americans press this issue or launch their drone attacks they slip in their popularity rating among the Pakistanis and each time Gen Kayani stonewalls he shines as a patriot.

The General has been driving a hard bargain with the Americans successfully as he silently strengthens his hold both on the system and the armed forces. Quite obviously, General Kayani has an agenda that goes beyond just refurbishing the image of the Army with generous assistance from the US. A professional Army does not need three year extensions in service to its Chief beyond the stipulated term unless the agenda is wider and political or ominously, even military and strategic.

Setting aside the economic crisis that engulfs Pakistan, there are two other crises that are brewing a political crisis in Islamabad and an ethnic-religious crisis in Karachi of grave dimensions that no one really wants to talk about.

A Political Crisis Unfolds

Zardari and Gilani are resigned to having to deal with an over bearing Army since this is the way of political life in Pakistan. But they have other disadvantages compared to their main political rival, Mian Nawaz Sharif and his PML (N) or even their ally the MQM led by Altaf Hussain both of who command personal loyalties and have strong cadre based parties.

Nawaz controls the Punjab, while Altaf controls Karachi. Gilani and Zardari are comparative lightweights in the PPP and do not command that kind of respect that these two do within their parties and people. Nawaz is a Punjabi, has close links with the Saudis and the Jamaat Islami, which has a following in the Pak Army. He himself has strong right wing religious leanings, which endears him to a section of the Army and the religious parties. Yes his attempts to manipulate the Army in the past despite being originally a protigi of the Army, and his religious leanings would make him unacceptable to the Army and the US.

In a free and fair election, Nawaz could possibly sweep Punjab and he who wins Punjab rules Pakistan. This is possibly Kayani's threat to the Americans at this juncture a few months before they plan their pull out. In the present crisis, perhaps Nawaz himself would not want to take over the reins of office so it suits him to see the government further weakened. He would rather wait it out unless an election is thrust upon him.

The MQM's Complaints

The MQM crisis is somewhat different. While the world's attention has been focused on the war in FATA against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the NWFP (Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa) ethnic and religious violence has been increasing alarmingly in Karachi. The MQM has for years complained and feared that the ingress of Pushtuns from the frontier many of whom are Talibanised would tilt the balance away from them while the activities of religious parties like the Deobandi parties like Lashkar e Jhangvi would further erode its hold in urban Sindh especially Karachi and Hyderabad. There is another complication in that politically the Mohajirs support the MQM, the Sindhis support the PPP and the Pushtun support the Awami National Party. The latter two invariably combine against the MQM.

Politically motivated targeted killings in Karachi have been increasing alarmingly. The Daily Times of Lahore reported that last year about 780 people were killed in ethnic, religious and political violence in Karachi which is similar to the suicide killings in the NWFP (797) and more than in the rest of the country (427). While the MQM may have its own political objectives in complaining to Gilani about the worsening law and order situation in Karachi the fact is that the metropolis has become a hot bed of rivalries between various competing and conflicting interests with strong overtones of a Talibanised culture and MQM fears it may have to cede ground to Wahhabi-Salafi beliefs brought in by more and more Pushtun leaving their homes for Karachi. Islamabad's failure to redress the MQM's complaints is the real reason for the threat of MQM to walk out although it is camouflaged in economic demands to bring in support from the Sindhis as well. To make matters worse for the MQM, its leaders have been trading insults with the PML (N) leadership. Consequently, the political situation looks very uncertain and the PPP looks extremely weak. And enter General Kayani centre stage?

The Assassination and the Islamic Fundamentalist Fervour

There is another development that could make the Army even more indispensible to the situation in today's Pakistan - the assassination of Salman Taseer the Punjab Governor and a close ally and friend of President Zardari, by one of his own guards for his opposition to Blasphemy Laws. It is not the first time that the religious right has resorted to punish those opposed to its creed. While Pakistan's liberal elite may mourn Taseer's death a wide section of the religious right has actually approved the killing.

The comments that were visible on Twitter and Facebook supporting the assassin were a chilling indicator of the direction Pakistan had taken in recent years. Killing for religion is frightening enough but the reaction that has been visible is even more frightening. The diktat by the Jamaate Ahle Sunnat Pakistan that no Muslim should attend Taseer's funeral sends a chill down every liberal spine.

The JASP is the largest body of the Barelvi group and considerate moderate in comparison to the Deobandhi-Wahhabi-Salafi Sunnis. Gen Zia's dream has become Pakistan's nightmare. The message to the liberal elite is - shut up and put up. The comment by the well known Pakistani commentator Cyril Almeida that, "Conservative forces are not just on a roll in Pakistan, they're pretty dominant. And liberal forces are not just on the back foot, but, really, they are extinguished," sums up the despondency and the gravity.

This is not the first time that a prominent Pakistani leader has been assassinated by suspected Islamic hardliners or attempts have been made. Benazir was killed by three years ago at the second attempt. They almost succeeded in killing Gen Musharraf in 2003 when he turned his back to the Taliban and some religious extremists in response to American demands. Then there were several attacks on the symbols of Pak power since September 11, 2001 including the Army and obviously the rot had set in but all this was swept away in the larger interest of preserving the peace and fighting the larger American war.

Teacher's Pets

In the midst of all this one would continue to have doubts about Pakistani leadership's commitment to fight terror. It is believed that, the well-known senior Pakistani terrorist Qari Saifullah Akhtar from the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami with links to both the ISI and Al Qaeda was released from custody in early in December 2010. He had been taken into custody in August 2010 for trying to recruit five Americans for Al Qaeda when they had visited Pakistan in November 2009.

Qari Akhtar has a colourful jihadi history. Qari and the HUJI have been very close to the Taliban and Al Qaeda; he was involved along with some jihadi Army officers in an assassination attempt on Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and Gen Abdul Waheed Kakkar in 1995 and over throw the government in 1995. Released in 1996, Akhtar fled to Afghanistan and then plotted the assassination of General Musharraf in 2003; he fled again to the UAE, deported in 2004 and released from custody again in 2007; was suspected to have been involved in the abortive attempt on Benazir in October 2007; detained in February 2008 and released in June 2008; and he was one of the main conspirators in the attack on the Marriott hotel in Islamabad in September 2008.

The ease with which Akhtar has been able to change residence only adds to suspicions that when the trail gets too hot the Pakistani establishment pulls in its assets for the trail to go cold and then release them when it is considered safe. This happens ever so often to Lashkar e Tayyaba leader Hafiz Saeed and the Jaish e Mohammed leader Maulana Masood Azhar.

Indian reactions

Some of us worry that this could have an adverse reaction in India. There is an overreaction in some sections about intolerance in India. We must learn to trust the Indian Muslim instead of assuming he will be influenced by events and thought processes or ideologies in Pakistan. In so doing we challenge his intelligence and doubt his loyalties. In Pakistan they demanded the funeral of Taseer be boycotted because he was a liberal, in India the Indian Muslim leaders refused to allow the killers of Mumbai 26/11 be buried on Indian soil because they were terrorists. That is the difference between them and us.

True there is a fringe element in India as in most democratic societies but it does not endanger the state in the manner it has in Pakistan where it is no longer a fringe element but may well have become mainstream. In fact, extreme belief has been state sponsored in Pakistan; not so in India. The trick is to marginalise the extreme fringe but not to frighten the mainstream. Reaction here tends to lose touch with Indian realities and creates more discord. Careless off the cuff remarks are more responsible for this sort of thing and do not make for responsible commentary.

By Vikram Sood(ANI)

Attn: News Editors/News Desks: The views expressed in the above article are those of Mr. Vikram Sood.

SPREADING ROOTS OF EXTREMISM IN PAKISTAN

B.RAMAN

The roots of extremism are spreading in Pakistan. This is obvious from the assassination of Salman Taseer, the Governor of Punjab, by a policeman belonging to the Elite Force of the Punjab Police at Islamabad on January 4.

2.The event is even more worrisome than the brutal assassination of Benazir Bhutto at Rawalpindi on December 27,2007, because of the mixed reactions that it has evoked. Benazir's assassination evoked widespread shock and grief all over Pakistan. There were no reported incidents of people welcoming her assassination. The assassination of Taseer has been condemned by some and welcomed by others. Many---not necessarily confined to the clergy--- have welcomed it as a well-deserved punishment by God because of his criticism of the blasphemy law.

3. Was Mumtaz Qadri, the assassin of Taseer, acting alone or was he part of a conspiracy? It is too early to know the answer to this question. Will we ever know? Will the truth behind the assassination of Taseer ever be found out or will it be covered up as were the assassinations of Benazir in 2007 and her brother Murtaza Bhutto in 1996 or the death of Zia-ul-Haq under mysterious circumstances in a plane crash in 1988? Many instances of death and destruction at the hands of extremists in Pakistan remain undetected either because of poor investigation or because of a lack of courage to investigate lest the investigator himself become a target of the extremists or because of a deliberate cover-up.

4. The result: The difficulty in identifying the roots of extremism and eradicating the problem and in quantifying the extent of the threat posed by extremism to Pakistan itself in the first instance and then to the rest of the world. The winds of Islamic extremism generally blow from Pakistan. There are pockets of Islamic extremism in other countries too---Yemen, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Indonesia to give some examples. There are more instances of extremism spreading to other parts of the world from Pakistan than from these countries. If one has to counter Islamic extremism ideologically one has to start destroying its roots in Pakistan. Islamic extremists from all over the world tend to look upon Pakistan as the ultimate sanctuary not only because of the favourable terrain in the tribal belt, but also because of their confidence that they will enjoy public and state support in Pakistan.

5.Many institutions in Pakistan have turned out to be the spawning grounds of extremism and terrorism---- mosques, madrasas, the Army, the Air Force, the US-trained Special Services Group (SSG), the Elite Force of the Punjab Police etc. Some of these such as the SSG and the Elite Force were specially raised and trained to deal with extremism and terrorism and to protect the VIPS. They have turned out to be the breeding grounds of the evils they were meant to fight. Ilyas Kashmiri, the head of the so-called 313 Brigade allied with Al Qaeda, reportedly started his career in the SSG before he gravitated to terrorism.

6. One has reasons to worry as to which are the other institutions which might have already been infected, though not detected so far. How about Pakistan's nuclear and missile establishment? What faith can one place in Pakistan's assurances that this has remained unaffected by extremism. Tomorrow, if a threat erupts unexpectedly from the nuclear and missile establisment, what form will it take? Leakage of material and technology to the terrorists? Seizure of material and establishments by extremist trojan horses in order to use them for intimidation? Both possibilities are there, but a definitive assessment is rendered difficult because of a lack of data.



7. While the Pakistan Army has taken some action against the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in the Pashtun belt, the Pakistani authorities have not taken any action to confront extremism ideologically. Their pretense of reforming and modernizing the madrasas has allowed the madrasas to continue to produce extremism and terrorism. Their education system has received very little attention. More money has flown from the US for providing arms and ammunition to the Armed Forces than for improving and expanding the education system. The interest taken in the initial months after 9/11 in the modernization of the madrasas and for improving the education system has petered out.



8. No attempt has been made to reduce the influence of Wahabi clerics in the Armed Forces and the Police. The clerics were introduced by Zia-ul-Haq. Their influence remains strong. The Wahabised clergy provide the religious justification for acts of extremism and terrorism. In 1993, the Clinton Administration placed Pakistan for six months in a list of suspected state sponsors of terrorism and forced Nawaz Sharif, the then Prime Minister, to sack Lt.Gen.Javed Nasir, the then chief of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and some of his colleagues, who were suspected of being mixed up with the Afghan Mujahideen. In October 2001, before starting the operations against Al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban under Operation Enduring Freedom, the administration of George Bush forced Gen.Pervez Musharraf to remove from the post of ISI Director-General Lt.Gen.Mahmood Ahmed, who was suspected of being mixed up with Al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban. Since then, there has been no action against any other officer of the ISI despite strong suspicions of their being mixed up with the Jalaluddin Haqqani group and despite evidence of the role of the ISI in the terrorist attacks against the Indian Embassy in Kabul and the 26/11 terrorist strikes in Mumbai.



9. As a result, the ISI has gone back to its old ways of inaction against extremist and terrorist organizations and the breeding grounds of extremism. The administration of Barack Obama might have stepped up the Drone strikes in the tribal belt, but it has not been able to make the Pakistan Army and intelligence act firmly against the breeding grounds of extremism. There has hardly been any action by the Pakistani authorities to counter extremism ideologically. Factories of extremism and jihad are once again sprouting, providing a never-ending flow of new recruits to the extremist and terrorist organizations.



10. The assassination of Taseer is a wake-up call not only for the Pakistani authorities, but also for the international community. Extremism is again on the forward march in Pakistan.A comprehensive strategy to force Pakistan to act firmly against the breeding grounds of extremism is the urgent need of the hour. ( 6-1-11)



( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

US decision to impose taxes affecting Indians unjustified: CII

New Delhi, Jan 5 (PTI)

http://www.deccanherald.com/content/126453/us-decision-impose-taxes-affecting.html

Indian industry today voiced serious concern over the US decision to extend hiked visa fees and impose additional taxes that will impact Indian companies, saying such ''unjustified'' protectionist steps are making the environment difficult there for businesses of this country.

In a statement issued here, business chamber CII hoped that the US would revise its stance on targeting Indian companies, especially given the increasing volume of investments and jobs they are creating for the US economy.

"CII is deeply concerned over the rising costs and increasingly terse business environment for Indian companies operating in the US, particularly in the pharmaceutical and IT sphere," said the statement issued by CII Director General Chandrajit Banerjee.

The Industry body referred to the new US Health Bill that provides for imposition of two per cent excise duty on goods and services imported by the US government from countries, like India and China, which are outside the purview of WTO's Agreement on Government Procurement and said it "unfairly" targets foreign companies to pay for domestic imperatives which is "unjustified".

Quoting "several critics", it said the provisions in the bill amount to "absurdity" as it would be akin to India requiring US companies to pay for healthcare compensation of victims of the 26/11 terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

The CII was also critical of the US government decision to extend the hiked visa fees under the Border Security Bill that would impact Indian professionals."The provisions clearly go against the Indian companies," Banerjee said.

US President Barack Obama signed the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act on January 3, which provides compensation for treatment of victims of 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The estimated budget (USD 4.2 billion) will be funded by continuation of an increased fee on certain categories of H-1B and L1 visas up to 2015. In August, the visa fee hike, under the US Border Security provisions, was valid till 2014.

The move would mainly impact Indian IT companies, which earn about 60 per cent of there USD 50 billion revenue from exports to America.Banerjee said that apart from internal laws, the US has also been a strong proponent of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

Under ACTA, the border and customs authorities can seize goods "suspected" of violating intellectual property related laws, even if such goods are in transit to another destination where they may be acceptable.

The CII DG said that in the last two years, there has been a "barrage of protectionist measures" proposed and enacted against foreign companies like measures restricting iron and steel imports in the American Recovery Act, Ohio’s ban on offshoring projects, among various others.

MY THOUGHTS ON SALMAN TASEER’S ASSASSINATION

B.RAMAN

The assassination of Salman Taseer, the liberal Governor of Punjab, by one of his police security guards at an Islamabad shopping centre on January 4 because of the Governor’s criticism of the blasphemy law draws attention once again to the penetration of the Pakistani security forces by Islamic extremist elements.

2.Earlier, evidence of such penetration came in the involvement of low-level army and Air Force officers in the two unsuccessful attempts to kill Gen.Pervez Musharraf in Rawalpindi in December 2003, and in the assassination of 19 officers of the US-trained Special Services Group (SSG) by a Pashtun Army officer belonging to the SSG, whose younger sister was reportedly among the 300 girls killed during the SSG raid on the Lal Masjid in Islamabad between July 10 and 13, 2007.

3.The Pashtun officer blew himself up during dinner at the headquarters mess of the SSG at Tarbela Ghazi, 100 kms south of Islamabad, on the night of September 13, 2007. An army soldier Naik Arshad Mahmood was among those sentenced to death in the case relating to the attempts to kill Musharraf . He was executed. The investigation brought out that some of the plotting against Musharraf was carried out in Air Force barracks in the Islamabad-Rawalpindi area. While a joint Al Qaeda-Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM)—Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) team motivated by Abu Faraj al-Libbi was suspected in the attempts to kill Musharraf, the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) was suspected in the assassination of the SSG officers by one of their colleagues.

4.In 1995, a plot by the HUJI led by Qari Saifullah Akhtar to assassinate Benazir Bhutto, the then Prime Minister, and Gen.Abdul Waheed Kakkar, the then Chief of the Army Staff, with the complicity of some commissioned officers of the Army was discovered and neutralized in time.

5.Thus, the involvement of personnel of the security forces in plots against political and military leaders is nothing new in Pakistan, but there are some significant differences between the earlier incidents and the assassination of Salman Taseer. In the earlier three incidents, the security forces personnel involved came from the Armed Forces and were from the Deobandi-Wahabi-Salafi sects. In the assassination of Taseer, the culprit is from the Elite Force of the Punjab Police specially raised and trained to fight against terrorism and to protect VIPs. Media reports from Pakistan claim that he is from the Barelvi sect, which has till now been considered more tolerant than the Deobandi-Wahabi-Salafi sects.

6.One extremist organization in Pakistan which has recruits from all sects, including the Barelvis, is the Hizbut-Tehrir(HT) which is believed to have many followers in the Armed Forces as well as the Police. Though the Pakistani intelligence agencies apprehend a major threat to their national security and to the security of their VIPs from the HT, there has so far been no instance of the actual involvement of the HT in such plots. All of those involved in such plots in the past, came from either Al Qaeda or the TTP or the JEM or the HUJI or the 313 Brigade of Ilyas Kashmiri against whom also there was some suspicion in connection with the unsuccessful attempts to kill Musharraf.

7.All fundamentalist elements in Pakistan----whether Deobandi or Wahabi or Salafi or Barelvi---- consider it as their religious obligation to kill those opposing the blasphemy law and the law declaring the Ahmediyas as non-Muslims. Many individual Muslims also believe so even if they do not belong to any of these organizations.

8.Salman Taseer and Senator Sherry Rehman, both of the Pakistan People’s Party and both close friends of Benazir, had incurred the wrath of the extremist elements because of their public criticism of the blasphemy law in the wake of a sentence of death passed against a Christian woman for allegedly insulting the Holy Prophet. Senator Sherry Rehman has in fact moved a private member’s bill--- which has not been supported by any political party, including her own--- to amend the blasphemy law in order to remove its obnoxious features. Taseer was the only liberal leader of the PPP to have supported her in public.

9.Sherry Rehman had said in a message circulated through the Internet as follows: “The mullahs have announced a million man march and given me a public deadline of 6th Jan to take back the amendment bill, or else. They said they will stop at "nothing then to protect namoos I risalat". (honour of the Prophet).I do not have state security but am quite clear that I will not take the bill "back" as demanded by some extremists, most recently when they openly declared myself and Taseer waajibul qatl. ( meaning “deserve to be killed” ) .” One feels concerned for her security.

10.The” Daily Times” of Lahore has reported as follows: “The killer of Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer has revealed that some of his colleagues were also involved in the plan to assassinate the governor, a private TV channel reported on Tuesday. Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri told a joint investigation team that some of his colleagues were aware of his plan and he had asked them to arrest him alive. He told the team during investigation that he had no remorse on killing Taseer and that was why he laid down his weapon after shooting him. The channel reported that he was removed from the Punjab Police Special Branch three years ago for having extremist views. He belongs to the Barelvi sect and is the disciple of Golra Sharif. It is learnt that some former security squad officials would also be questioned. Qadri had joined the Punjab Police five years ago and was inducted into the Elite Force some time ago. After obtaining clearance from the authorities, he was put on the security squad of VVIPs and of the governor.”

11.The “Dawn” of Karachi has reported as follows: “’ The Elite Force guard who gunned down Punjab Governor Salman Taseer is said to be associated with ‘Dawat-i-Islami’, a non-political and non-violent religious group with Barelvi leaning. This was disclosed by a colleague of Mumtaz Qadri, the self confessed assassin. Qadri, 26, son of Malik Bashir, joined Punjab police and got Elite Force training in 2006-7. He was posted to the Elite Force wing in Rawalpindi in 2008. …A police officer said Qadri had been assigned guard duty with Mr Taseer during the governor’s visits to Islamabad and once with Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani. On Tuesday, Qadri left the Police Lines at around 7.30am to report for duty. Police took his five brothers and father into custody from their house soon after he had confessed to the crime. In addition, 25 police officers and a muharar (record-keeper) of Elite Force who had prepared the list of personnel, including Qadri, for duty during the governor’s visit were also taken into custody and shifted to Islamabad for investigation. Investigators also confiscated the cellphones of the security personnel deployed for the governor’s security. A police party went to the house of Qadri in Muslim Town late in the night and found some religious books in his room.”

12.It is unMuslim to be a liberal. That is the message that Qadri and those behind him in the conspiracy (if there was a larger conspiracy) have sought to convey through the assassination of Taseer. It is unlikely to have any major impact on the political situation in Pakistan, but it will have an impact on the will of the Pakistani political leadership and civil society to confront the extremists. The fight against extremism in Pakistan will remain a losing battle unless and until all political forces and the civil society come together on this issue and the Army whole-heartedly backs them. One sees no sign of that. (5-1-11)



( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

China makes Russian calculations

SREERAM CHAULIA
Posted: Tuesday, Jan 04, 2011 at 0042 hrs IST

http://www.financialexpress.com/news/china-makes-russian-calculations/732845/0


On New Year’s Day, a Chinese bureaucrat pushed a button in the northeastern border province of Heilongjiang to inaugurate a monumental oil pipeline between Russian Siberia and the Chinese city of Daqing. Built at a cost of $25 billion, the 1,000-kilometre-long conduit ties the world’s largest oil producer—Russia—and the second largest oil consumer—China—into an ever tighter relationship that has significant implications for energy cooperation and world order.

Russia will export as much as 15 million tonnes of crude oil per annum for two decades to China through this pipeline, adding $8 billion to the already roaring annual bilateral trade of around $60 billion between the two BRIC nations. That China financed the construction of the pipeline through a massive oil-backed loan to Russian state-owned energy majors shows how much Beijing’s industrial and economic planning are still predicated on fossil fuels.

Chinese officialdom is hailing the Siberian oil deal for “improving the nation’s energy-imports structure”, a reference to the fact that 80% of China’s energy supplies have until now come from the volatile Middle East and distant Africa. As a stable neighbour with whom China has already settled territorial border disputes, energy-endowed Russia is a natural choice to invest in for the sake of steady crude oil imports.

For a while, Japan competed with China to bag Siberian oil from Russia, but Beijing stole a march over Tokyo by speedily laying on the table the financial aid that the Kremlin wanted. Today, the Eastern Siberian Oil Pipeline (ESPO) pumps a far higher volume of crude into China compared to Japan, which has lagged in offering lucrative infrastructure advances and investments despite repeated Russian urging. Budget-strapped and deflationary Japan is today unable to compete in any bidding wars over energy with a China that has accumulated the world’s most enviable foreign exchange reserve chest. Moreover, Japan’s unresolved Pacific island disputes with Russia have recently re-emerged as political irritants.

It is in Russia’s economic interests that Japan and South Korea also buy maximum possible oil from Siberia the way China is beginning to. Moscow has adopted a long-term market diversification strategy—termed the ‘energy window to Asia’—in a bid to wean itself away from overdependence on European customers. The parallel growth of the eastern Siberian routes to Asia is a deliberate attempt on the part of Russia to correct its previous heavy leaning on the western Siberian pipeline network that is geared towards eastern and central Europe.

While both buyers and sellers rationally wish to have options in order to maximise their respective benefits and bargaining power, the geostrategic implications of the new Sino-Russian pipeline are no less significant in the international political realm. The Chinese state-run Xinhua news agency has made no bones about the fact that the latest milestone “would not only increase the crude trade, but also improve mutual trust between China and Russia, laying an economic foundation for the two countries’ strategic partnership”.

In the last decade, Russia and China have aligned to counterbalance the US in Central Asia, East Asia and across major international institutions. The two swallowed considerable nationalistic pride to finalise a territorial concession of 67 square miles in 2008 by Russia to China against the backdrop of a ‘new Cold War’ with the US under George W Bush.

US-Russia relations have undergone a softening under the Barack Obama administration, but the structural dynamic of still-shifting global power distribution is such that Russia and China are taking stabs at the dollar’s hegemony and opposing American objectives on keynote problems like North Korea.

The Siberian pipeline plays into a complex mix of ‘multi-vectoral’ foreign policies being pursued by China, Russia and the US itself. In a multipolar world, no great power can be assured of security and prosperity through one stable alliance or preferential business arrangements with just one peer. The diplomatic dance floor today is more akin to the Cuban Rueda di Casino, where multiple couples keep exchanging partners, rather than the classic two-partner Tango. In uncertainty, one hedges bets and the oil consequentially flows along zigzag paths.

The author is vice-dean of the Jindal School of International Affairs

Raising multipolar stakes

Raja Karthikeya, Jan 4, 2011, 12.00am IST



It is rare for any nation to host the heads of five of the world's most powerful nations - US, Russia, UK, France and China - within the span of a single year, pointed out Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the end of 2010. Indeed, the slow transformation in India's relations with the world's most powerful nations is fast becoming apparent. India's foreign policy may be embarking on a new journey more in line with the demands of the age.

To understand the policy-in-the-making, it's first worth asking why India occupies a larger-than-life place in the international arena today, leading these major powers to it. Is it the scale of India's economy? Brazil, after all, has a larger economy yet garners a fraction of the newsprint. Is it India's democratic credentials? Unlikely. China's rise and its courting by the West have made democracy an overrated currency for influence. India's large and young population may have something to do with the attention, but it's still only a part of the answer.

Attention stems from the fact that India is following a new paradigm of power: "stakeholder power". In replacing historically accepted concepts of power based on economic strength (as typified today by the EU), military strength (such as Russia) or economic-military strength (the US and increasingly China), stakeholder power is rewriting the rules of the game. Such is India's footprint on so many transnational challenges - from climate change to pandemics to the international trade regime - that no table deciding on them would be complete without its presence. "Stakeholder power" may even explain India's rise far better than geopolitics ever will. India's and the world's growing awareness of this fact is expanding its presence in global governance structures, as seen in the endorsements for its bid for the UN Security Council in 2010.

How a nation wields stakeholder power and how it turns its footprint in the world into political influence determine how long it remains in the reckoning. Over the past decade, India has used its stakeholder power to reconfigure its relations with major powers. With the US it has turned a primarily trade-driven relationship into a strategic partnership. With Britain, it is trying to turn what was little more than a historical, cultural and people-to-people relationship into one based more on trade and economics with incrementally stronger security ties. With France, it is attempting to turn a nascent defence relationship since the 1980s into one based on trade. With Russia, as India saw aspects such as trade wither after the Soviet Union's fall, it has tried to manage a broad-based partnership's transformation into one based more on defence and strategic cooperation.

With China, the relationship has been the most complex and fluid. It's no secret the India-China relationship is so complex and rivalry so exaggerated by observers, that it will take a long time to overcome mutual distrust. India's broad strategy has been to foster closer economic linkages and capitalise on opportunities for teamwork at international platforms such as WTO and climate change talks. It believes it is commonsensical to not allow areas of common interest to be held hostage by issues of strategic rivalry. There is even an expectation that progress in these "softer areas" will create the sense of trust required to solve larger issues of strategic competition.

These strategic moves towards the major powers did not always happen by design or insulated from history. Events such as the fall of the Soviet Union, 9/11 and the global financial crisis were all inflexion points shaping these relationships. Over the decades, as the Cold War ebbed and flowed and finally unravelled, India's non-alignment stance struggled to keep pace. At times, it even seemed isolationist to external observers.

Looking ahead, India's intent is clear. It is turning "non-alignment" on its head. Without sacrificing the fundamental principle of not entering blocs or alliances, it is increasingly weaving closer ties with all the poles of the international system. Witness US-India security and strategic cooperation and one could mistake India as on its way to becoming a US ally. Studying India's collaboration with Russia in sensitive defence areas, one could be forgiven for reading a "bloc" into the relationship.

Such observations may have some part of truth in them taken together, but are wholly untrue seen individually. Without ritual, India is in the process of defining a doctrine of what may be called "omni-alignment". This term goes beyond the platitudes of "friendship with all nations" spouted to conceal diplomatic tensions. Omni-alignment is a conscious effort to identify the most relevant powers for the next half-century and to cultivate strong bilateral ties with each of them.

Some may wonder if this policy is practical or even feasible especially as it has the potential of creating suspicions about India's inclinations. In reality, so long as India's stakeholder power continues to rise, suspicions will be of little consequence. As long as a major international crisis that arrays coalitions of nations against each other does not erupt, omni-alignment may be a sensible strategy. As long as India is able to adequately gauge the next inflexion point in world politics, omni-alignment may even help it best weather the crisis that follows.

A nascent endeavour in Indian foreign policy, omni-alignment is well-suited to leverage India's stakeholder power. Ultimately, India's response to events over the new decade will determine whether this becomes a doctrine and an article of faith.

The writer is a foreign policy researcher.


Read more: Raising multipolar stakes - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/opinion/edit-page/Raising-multipolar-stakes/articleshow/7212159.cms#ixzz1A4p1u9ue