India Needs to be Tough on Pakistan

Kanwal Sibal, 

Dean, Centre for International Relations and Diplomacy, VIF

Mentioning toned down expectations from his meeting with his Pakistani counterpart at New York, Shri Manmohan Singh gave an advance signal that nothing substantial would emerge from it.Until almost the last moment, we let uncertainty hang over the decision even to meet, which itself indicated watered down prospects.

Normally, summit meetings serve to boost existing ties and infuse them with new political purpose. They are well prepared with planned positive outcomes. Our troubled relationship with Pakistan makes the management of summit outcomes particularly sensitive. If the circumstances surrounding a planned summit are not propitious and preparatory work has yielded no assurance of notable progress, postponement is preferable. Obama, for instance, cancelled his agreed bilateral summit with Putin just before the September G-20 summit in St Petersburg because continued divergences between the two countries on several issues did not promise success.

Postponing Talks

If the PM’s meeting with Nawaz Sharif had already become controversial because of cease fire violations by Pakistan, the freedom given to extremists like Hafiz Saeed to pursue their anti-Indian crusade, lack of progress on trying those responsible for the Mumbai terror attack and delaying the decision to grant MFN status to India, the advance admission by PM that the New York meeting would be low in results argued strongly in favour of postponement.

The Samba attack immediately before the summit made the case for deferment even stronger. Our position that we will continue talking to Pakistan even if it carries on terror activities against us is not easily comprehensible. We cannot claim zero tolerance of terrorism if we indulge the country sponsoring it against us. By allowing a distinction to be made between state and non-state actors, we have given political room to Pakistan to blame the so-called non-state actors for such activity and distance the Pakistani governmental agencies from it.

Worse, Pakistan no longer admits that even non-state actors are to blame. It pretends they don’t exist and that incidents in India have local origins. Pakistan has feigned ignorance of recent incidents on the LoC and even denied their occurrence. It is unwilling to assume any responsibility for terrorist attacks against India. When pushed, it accuses India of terrorism not only in Balochistan but also in FATA where we are supposedly complicit with the Pakistani Taliban. Nawaz Sharif’s foreign policy Adviser Sartaj Aziz threatens to produce evidence of Indian interference in Balochistan at an appropriate forum, which suggests that Pakistan intends to step up propaganda on this issue in advance of US withdrawal from Afghanistan and create the ground for targeting our consulates in Jalalabad and Kandahar. The Samba incident provided us a timely opportunity to begin reversing our costly policy of delinking dialogue from terror by adjourning the summit to a later date when Nawaz Sharif’s position on terrorism became tangibly aligned with his protestations of friendship with India.

The PM’s reference, in his joint press conference with Obama and his UNGA speech, to Pakistan being the epicenter of terrorism was commendable. The robust affirmation in his UNGA speech that Jammu & Kashmir is an integral part of India and that we will never ever compromise with our territorial integrity was equally praiseworthy. Nawaz Sharif apparently took exception to PM complaining to Obama about Pakistan’s involvement with terrorism, provoking him to compare his conduct allegorically with that of a “village woman”, a slight later denied.

Pak Game

The macho image that Pakistani Muslims have of themselves apart, Nawaz Sharif can hardly cavil at India involving the US as a third party in bilateral India-Pakistan issues, when seeking third party intervention in resolving the Kashmir issue has been the staple of Pakistani foreign policy for decades, not to mention the issue of a strategic balance in South Asia, both to procure more arms from the US and place curbs on India’s nuclear and missile programmes.

Sharif himself tweaked India at New York by asking for UN or third party intervention in investigating the LoC violations, knowing India’s allergy to such interference. He emphasized Kashmir in his UNGA speech in line with his declared intention after assuming power to focus on this issue, even describing Kashmir as the jugular vein of Pakistan. His statement on Kashmir was more expansive than that made by Pakistani leaders in recent years at the UN, which exposes the argument that he needed to pander to domestic lobbies in Pakistan. On terrorism too, in his media interviews, he equated India and Pakistan in terms of answerability for such actions.

Non-State Actors

Indisputably, stabilising the LoC and ending cease fire violations would be essential for resuming India-Pakistan peace talks and hence the agreement at New York that the DGMOs of the two sides will meet and devise mechanisms to restore peace on the LoC. This initiative will produce results only if Pakistan acknowledges the existence and activities of “non-state actors” and its responsibility for controlling them. It should be willing to establish a five kilometre deep anti-infiltration grid on its side to match the Indian disposition so that any hostile movement within this zone is prevented. It should share information on attempts to cross the LoC culled from intercepts. Border meetings even down to brigade level would help to control the sort of destabilising activity on the LoC that the DGMOs have been tasked to do. All this hinges on Pakistan’s sincerity in ending cross border activity, which remains illusory as shown by last week’s infiltration bid in the Keran sector, so soon after New York.

We were right in not agreeing this time to a joint statement after both premiers met. If this signals a more hard-headed approach to Pakistan in the future, it would merit general approbation.

Social Media: Freedom Yes, License No

K G Suresh, 

Senior Fellow & Editor, VIF

The recent expose about Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot allegedly buying ‘Likes’ for his official Facebook page in Istanbul, the ‘Twitter’ war between the ruling Congress and the main Opposition BJP and an outrageous tweet by Congress leader Shakeel Ahmed virtually defending the terrorist outfit ‘Indian Mujahideen’ have once again brought the spotlight back on the role of social media.

The events also saw the social media directly or indirectly setting the agenda for the mainstream media and thereby reviving the debate on the relationship between the two, particularly in a developing country like India.

According to a joint study by market research firm IMRB International and the Internet and Mobile Association of India, India currently has nearly 20 million Twitter users. Facebook has also reported that its Monthly Active Users in the country doubled to 78 million in Q1 2013.

With a burgeoning number of users joining the online community world wide, the importance of social media is significant - not only for the purpose of connecting with the people we know and befriending strangers but also for the purpose of disseminating information thereby informing, influencing, moulding and building mass opinions.

The Anna Movement against corruption in India exemplified the power of social media. While critics claim that the anti-graft crusade was a television generated movement, the fact remains that a large number of youth who joined the campaign across the country were deeply influenced by the social media, although aided and abetted by the visual media.

We have witnessed the use of social media technology during the widespread unrest in the Middle East – Libya, Syria, Egypt and Bahrain.

In fact, the experiences in Egypt and Tunisia have prompted the Syrian Government to maintain a strong surveillance on the use of new media technologies. The Chinese and Pakistanis have often restricted access to social media on political and cultural grounds.

In India too, the Central Government has made futile attempts to censor social media but have backtracked following huge hue and cry.

In neighbouring Nepal, the importance of these informal channels was recognised after the February 2005 takeover by the then King Gyanendra, when almost all the formal channels of information were blocked and only a few online media and blogs remained to share information with the public.

It is not only during unrest and rebellions that the social media has come handy. They have proved to be immensely invaluable during natural catastrophes and even emergency situations like the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai.

However, what’s more interesting is the emergence of social media not only as a crucial source of information for the mainstream media but also as a key competitor in the race for breaking news.

It is said that Twitter users posted the message about the death of singer Whitney Houston twenty-seven minutes before the mainstream media broke the news.

According to the Telegraph, tweets were posted at a rate of around 70 tweets every five seconds during the Mumbai terror attacks. Blogs and social networking sites were abuzz with news, photo, audio-visual and eyewitness accounts as the events unfolded.

Back home, in India, we have had former UN Under Secretary General and Minister of State for External Affairs, Shashi Tharoor, who lost his first job in the council of Ministers following a series of tweets revealing juicy information about the goings on in the highly lucrative Indian Premier League. The young, media savvy author and columnist was not the only loser in the episode. His friend and now wife Sunanda Pushkar lost her stakes (sweat equity) in the Kochi team, IPL wizard Lalit Modi lost his job and Kerala lost its only IPL team.

The episode provided lot of masala to the mainstream media. So did the tweets of actor director Farah Khan on the SRK-Sirish Kunder spat. The tweets of film stars and starlets often grab media headlines.

Instead of calling the media to air their enlightened views, on subjects ranging from tooth aches to child births, the celebrities, including the Big B and SRK, have taken to the social media to reach out to their fans, hit out at their rivals and remain in news.

The politicos have also joined the bandwagon, with the BJP leaders taking the lead. If Gujarat Chief Minister and Leader of BJP’s Poll Campaign Committee Narendra Modi is among the celebs with huge twitter following, Leader of Opposition Sushma Swaraj’s tweets keep the party beat correspondents updated with the latest in the party and parliament while veteran leader L K Advani has shocked and surprised many within and outside the party with his blogs on issues ranging from media to Modi and films to foreign policy. Digvijay Singh and ManishTiwari lead the Congress offensive on the social media.

Lauding the role of social media, particularly in cornering senior journalists Barkha Dutt and Vir Sanghvi in the wake of the Nira Radia tapes, even as mainstream media remained a mute spectator, columnist Sachin Kalbag wrote in the Mail Today, “ Online media in India rarely, if ever, gets its due. But it is social media, with its ability to become, as a senior journalist put it, a lynch mob that is something that media professionals would do well to remember. It is debatable whether a "lynch mob" or a "mass movement" would describe the phenomenon. It does not matter, really, because social media has well and truly arrived in India.

A series of projects funded by the Australian Research Council, UNESCO, UNDP and other international non-government organisations have been undertaken to enlist new media to help poverty alleviation in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Indonesia.

Although each initiative is adapted to local circumstances, the common objective is to give local communities the skills to set up their own independent and community-based media resources to address issues that are important to these communities. Such issues might include health, education or politics, and the media used range from local radio stations to new media forms such as websites.

Finding a Voice: Making technological change socially effective and culturally empowering is one of the leading projects in the programme.. Taking a participatory approach to research, aiming to empower people through finding their own voice, the project looks at using old and new media technologies to reduce poverty in poor communities in terms of people's participation. This is achieved by assessing people's capacity to participate in various activities such as self expression and freedom of speech.

Of late, Government departments in India too have taken to the social media to reach out to the new generations. One of the success stories in this regard has been Census 2011.

According to Zee Research Group (ZRG), Census 2011, a service from the Census Commission of India under the Union Home Ministry, has been one of the best offering of the Government on the social networking media. Census 2011 was logged on 24x7 on Facebook with live updates, comments and responses from the department.

The office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India thought of the Facebook idea soon after it released the momentous Census 2011 findings. The result has been more than satisfying.

According to Registrar General and Commissioner of Census 2011, Dr C Chandramouli, “This initiative really helped to connect with the people. The responses of the people have been overwhelming. People have been very inquisitive and thoughtful throughout and have been actively participating and commenting on our regular updates.” He is not averse to criticism and looks forward to some constructive suggestions to engage the public better.

Several other Ministries and departments including the Ministry of External Affairs too have joined the bandwagon.

With India emerging as a leading Facebook market, the anxiety of the Government to reach out to GenX is understandable. A Tata Consultancy ‘GenY Survey 2011-2012’ of nearly 12,300 high school students across 12 Indian cities found that 85 percent of the students use Facebook.

Interestingly, Socialogue, a survey on social media trends and behaviour, revealed that 56 percent of Indians would prefer giving up television than giving up social networking sites. It revealed that nearly 37 per cent of people prefer a large network of friends as compared to close friends.

A study earlier this year by Mumbai's Iris Knowledge Foundation and the Internet and Mobile Association of India claimed that 78 million Facebook users will "wield a tremendous influence" over 160 Lok Sabha seats in the upcoming general elections. In these so-called "high impact" constituencies, Facebook users constitute either 10% of the total vote, or command greater numbers than the margin of victory in the 2009 election.

However, there are also equally significant statistics that do not support such findings and are also worrisome as far as social media is concerned. Although India ranked third this year in the number of active users next only to China and US, yet the overall Internet penetration in the country is a mere 11 per cent.

India on last count had 120 million active Internet users, up from 81 million users in 2010. Of the 10 top countries on active number of users, India is at the bottom in regard to levels of penetration achieved as against China with a penetration rate of 40 per cent and an active user base of 511 Million. China is followed by United States with 240 million users.

The social media has also become a platform for propagating separatism, communal hatred and vulgarity. Morphed photos of the Muslim-Buddhist violence in Myanmar were extensively used to force hundreds of people belonging to the North East to flee the southern metropolis of Bangalore.

Unsubstantiated reports and gossip are often passed on as genuine information and unlike mainstream media, which has stringent filtration mechanisms in place, many of these fly by the night websites post fiction as facts, throwing to winds journalistic norms such as accuracy and objectivity. Blackmailing has become a norm in the absence of any monitoring or regulatory system. Sensationalism is the only criterion and page hits the only yardstick.

Kashmiri and Sikh separatists are aggressively exploiting the platform to provoke and lure the youth to their ranks whereas the so-called Internet Hindus are hitting back with vengeance. The depth to which the discourse have fallen is appalling. Nicknames such as ‘feku’ and ‘pappu’ have been given to leaders of national political parties by their ideological opponents taking the political debate to an all time low.

The negative impact of the growing influence of social media is also causing concern to sociologists and educationists.

According to ‘Global Youth Online Behaviour Survey’ conducted by Microsoft, India ranked third in the list of 25 countries where 53 percent of the surveyed children aged between eight and 17 admitted that they were victims of cyber bullying.

Even as they are increasingly coming to terms with social media or citizen journalism as a major source of information, leading mainstream media journalists feel that the impact of social media has been overestimated.

Asserting that mere information is not journalism, Richard Sambrook, the former director of the BBC Global News Division, says one gets a lot of things, when one opens up Twitter in the morning, but not journalism.

“Journalism needs discipline, analysis, explanation and context. It is still a profession”, says Sambrook. According to him, the value that gets added with journalism is judgment, analysis and explanation - and that makes the difference.

While the impact of social media should not be underestimated and rather harnessed effectively for nation building, it is important to ensure that anti-social and anti-national elements don’t get away scot-free under the garb of freedom of speech and expression.

Social media will have to be made accountable to the society and the nation at large. It is too powerful a tool to be allowed to flourish and demolish societal and national interests in splendid isolation.

India’s Compass on Terror is Faulty

Kanwal Sibal 

(Member, VIF Advisory Board)

Afzal Guru’s hanging shows the ineptness with which our political system deals with the grave problem of terrorism.The biggest challenge to our security, and indeed that of countries all over the world that are caught in the cross currents of religious extremism, is terrorism.

Traditional military threats can be assessed on the basis of the size of the armed forces, equipment and logistics available to the adversary. A militarily weak country would normally hesitate to attack a stronger one as defeat is never honourable and the price could be loss of territory. A casus belli has to be established to negate any charge of unprovoked aggression; the laws of war are applicable. The international community can intervene through the UN or otherwise against a state resorting to military aggression.

Challenge

Terrorism has a different logic. It is asymmetric warfare by non-state actors outside any law. The numbers involved are small and the targets are unsuspecting and unprepared individuals in the street, in public transport, hotels or restaurants or peaceful public spaces. Suicide bombers and car bombs can cause substantial casualties indiscriminately. Shadowy groups with leaders in hiding orchestrate these attacks. The involvement of state institutions through groups nurtured by them is on the basis of the practiced art of deniability. The international community cannot even agree on the definition of terrorism. The extraordinary challenge that terrorism poses to societies has to be dealt with exceptional levels of alertness, discipline, training of personnel, technical capacity, policing and organisational response.

India’s problem with externally supported terrorism is amongst the severest that any country faces. Our next door neighbour has been long using terrorism as an instrument of state policy. Even if some countries like Libya were accused of supporting terrorism, the acts imputed to them were not so blatant, wide-spread and persistent as those of Pakistan-based terrorists against India. North Korea has been accused of sporadic terrorist acts and Iran has supposedly targetted political opponents abroad and supported terrorist groups attacking Israel, but the Israeli-Arab confrontation has no parallel with the reasons for Pakistan’s animosity towards India and North Korea and Iran have no territorial claims that they seek to advance through terrorism. Pakistan supports terrorism to destabilize India, to make governance in Kashmir as difficult as possible, to nourish separatism there, to cause a communal divide in India. It is also a consequence of the deepening Islamisation of its society.

To meet the enormity of such a threat India needs political consensus and cohesion within the country. We have, instead, political bickering and confused thinking in the civil society and sections of the media. Afzal Guru was sentenced to death by the Supreme Court, his review petition was rejected by the same court and yet the government took well over 6 years to decide on his mercy petition. To claim that this delay was not political in character is being disingenuous. Because the delay was motivated by political considerations, the decision to hang him is being inevitably attributed to political calculations. Action against terrorists should not be vitiated by competition between government and the opposition for political or electoral advantage. With those responsible for killing Rajiv Gandhi and Beant Singh escaping hanging so far, the question of selective decisions arises. Sections of our mainstream press consider it appropriate to present Afzal Guru as a victim of the Indian judicial and political system rather than a brutal terrorist deserving condign punishment.

Travesty

The dictum “better late than never” would have provided adequate social catharsis if the delay in hanging was actually for reasons beyond government’s control. If some members of the National Advisory Council could plead with the President to save Kasab- a Pakistani who personally killed hapless, innocent Indians- from the gallows, one can imagine the resistance within the system to hang Afzal Guru. If the milk of human kindness flows within our society for terrorists like Kasab, who were actually waging a proxy war by Pakistan against us, it is hard to imagine how we can steel our will and hone our organizational responses to combat terrorism zealously.

Blunder

We have voluntarily confused the debate over Pakistan’s culpability for terrorism against us by declaring that both countries are victims of terrorism. We have damaged our case further by not resisting Pakistan’s attempts to equate the Mumbai terror attack with the attack on the Samjhauta Express. By playing up of disclosures about terrorist attacks by right wing Hindu extremists we are bracketting Pakistani abetted terrorist attacks in India and local acts of terrorism that have nothing to do with Pakistani territory. The previous Home Minister blurred the focus on externally supported terrorism by highlighting domestic religious extremism. His successor has scored a self-goal by speaking of Hindu terrorism and RSS/BJP run training camps. The External Affairs Minister, whose words have more echo outside because of his position, has endorsed the Home Minister’s accusation, no doubt adding to the confusion abroad about the ground realities.

There is no parallel between the highly deplorable but isolated terrorist activity of vengeful Hindus and the terrorist industry in Pakistan and the Islamic world sustained by oil wealth and pernicious religious thinking. There are no NGOs or Hindu preachers in India publicly advocating religious violence against Pakistan on the basis of religious texts. There is no state support for such activities. If we think our domestic jockeying for political advantage can be insulated from the external dimension of the terrorist threat facing us, we are committing a costly error. We let the Kashmiri separatists, who are de facto political accomplices of the terrorists, travel to Pakistan to meet even the Army and ISI chiefs there without reaction. Our compass on terrorism is faulty.