Monthly Archives: August 2018

A fiery startto the day

A fierce debate ensued between West Bengal MP Mahua Moitra and RSS activist Desh Ratan Nigam during the first panel discussion of the second day of the literature festival. Moderated by former BBC anchor Mark Tully, the session began with the question: What is the difference between nationalism and patriotism? “Nationalism is when we try to create an artificial enemy, an unseen dark force we are all supposed to hate. Patriotism is an innate love for the country, which is almost an instinct,” said Moitra. To this, Nigam retorted that Moitra’s definitions were western concepts. On the sidelights of this discussion, Tully said he believed balance was essential to keep up the spirit of the Indian ethos. Donning a secular tie, one with logos of all major religions of the world, he said, “it is regrettable that India should discriminate against one religion in the manner it has done with the CAB.”

Almost all sectors including government and private are under the threat of cyber attack and the only way to protect your data is to restrict the amount of sharing on cyberspace. The panellists during a discussion on ‘Spymasters and Cyber Intelligence in War and Peace’ echoed this sentiment. KC Verma, former director of RAW, said a cyber attack will become the source of maximum damage done to any nation during war in the future. Former cabinet secretariat additional secretary Jayadeva Ranade said cyber intelligence had added new dimensions to espionage and also added to the vulnerability of data.

Correction

Mr RK Kaushik is a serving Punjab IAS officer, not as rendered in a report in HT on December 14.

HT Correspondent

chandigarh@hindustantimes.com

Chandigarh : On Day 2 of the third Military Literature Festival being held at the Lake Club, when a Class 9 student Mansha got emotional as she watched a presentation showing pictures of martyred soldiers. Beaming with pride, the teary-eyed 14-year-old said, “My father, Lieutenant Colonel Manish Sharma, had fought the Kargil war in 1999.”

It was at the clarion theatre that author Rachna Bisht Rawat showed the presentation displaying rare images of martyred Indian soldiers who lost their lives during the India-Pakistan war in 1999.

Rawat, a journalist with more than 20 years of experience, has authored five books based on the Indian Army to date.

During the course of the presentation, 23-year-old Jasdeep Singh, a college student, read out the last letter written by martyr Jayant Thapar to his family –“These are the real heroes. It takes a lot of courage to write a letter to one’s family knowing that it is the last one he ever would. It is these heroes who motivate me to join the Indian Army,” Singh said.

Meanwhile, 20-year-old Rohit Singh said he was moved by the presentation.

Divyam Sharma, 23, and Rachit Gupta, 22, who also watched the archival display, said, “The presentation fuelled our passion about joining the Indian Army. We want to fight alongside our soldiers at the borders.”

Srishti Jaswal

srishti.jaswal@htlive.com

Chandigarh : If we claim that we can get the Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK) back, it is a false claim, said strategic affairs expert Maroof Raza during a session organised on the second day of the Military Literature Festival at Lake Club, Sector 1, Chandigarh, on Saturday.

Raza was discussing his and TV producer Iqbal Chand Malhotra’s book, ‘Kashmir’s Untold Story: Declassified’, with Major General Jagatbir Singh (retd), Hindustan Times executive editor Ramesh Vinayak and Brigadier Pradeep Sharma (retd) during the session.

The discussion was structured around the future of the Union territory of Jammu and Kashmir concerning external factors like Pakistan and China and internal factors like insurgency and unrest in Kashmir.

Listing public discontent, funding, weaponry and rough terrains as factors responsible for the insurgency in the Valley, Raza said, “Since 1990, there have been three instances where the military had control over the insurgency, however, bureaucrats had no plans, so precious time was lost. If the government solves the problem in Kashmir, there will be no problem of Kashmir.”

To this, Vinayak added that there is a need for opening up the political space in Kashmir to bring normalcy in the Valley.

While Maj Gen Singh also shared his insights overKashmir regarding its strategic location and its relationship with China, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Ramachandra Guha

On January 26 2006, TheNew York Times ran a story headlined “India Everywhere in the Alps”. The story began: “Delhi swept into Davos on Wednesday, with an extravagant public relations campaign by India intended to promote the country as the world’s next economic superstar, and as a democratic alternative to China for the affections of foreign investors.There were few places one could go, on this first day of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting here, without seeing, hearing, drinking, or tasting something Indian. The organizers call the campaign ‘India Everywhere’ and they appear to mean it literally.”

The following week, in Bangalore, I met an entrepreneur-friend just back from this meeting on a Swiss hillside of the great and the good, the wealthy and the well-connected. His face shining with excitement, he told me: “We have finally dehyphenated India from Pakistan, and bracketed it with China instead. Because of us, Indo-Pak has now become Chindia!”

I appreciated my friend’s enthusiasm, but sought to set it in context. While entrepreneurs like him deserved credit, I said, the Indian political class deserved even more. Our country was now being taken seriously abroad because of its economic rise, but also because of its democratic credentials. Indeed, the publicity-blitz in Davos presented India as the “World’s Fastest Growing Free-Market Democracy”. Unlike China, we claimed, India promoted cultural pluralism and democratic dissent. This brought us closer in spirit to the countries of Europe and North America, whose investments we now hoped to attract and whose friendship we now sought to cultivate.

The contributions of Indian industry to the country’s rise were undeniable, I told my friend, but they were enabled by our political leaders. Successive prime ministers — from PV Narasimha Rao through AB Vajpayee to Manmohan Singh — had broken with the license-quota-permit Raj of the Nehruvian era, allowing freer rein to market forces, which led to impressive rates of economic growth. After the end of the Cold War had made non-alignment redundant, Rao, Vajpayee and Singh all promoted strong ties with the West, and particularly with its most powerful country, the United States, also the main market for our vibrant information technology industry. Notably, these prime ministers had done this while reiterating — rather than abandoning — India’s credentials as a democratic and multicultural society. Indeed, among the showpiece events at that Davos conference was a talk by the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen on his new book, significantly entitled, The Argumentative Indian.

I now recall this conversation of 2006 with a certain sadness. For 13 years on, India has emphatically been dehypenated from China, and just as emphatically been rehyphenated with Pakistan. One reason is the slowdown in the economy; another the shrinking of democratic space in an increasingly authoritarian regime. We are no longer so fast growing, and we are no longer so freedom-loving either.

Future historians may come to recognise August 5, 2019 as the day on which our political leaders decisively turned their back on the ideals of the Republic‘s founders. The abolition of India’s only Muslim-majority state, and the massive show of force that accompanied it, were acts that were at once dramatic and draconian. However, the undermining of our pluralist traditions has been underway for some time now. Since May 2014, the many incidents of lynchings of innocent Muslims, the increasing salience of godmen and gurus in our public life, the characterisation by senior ministers of immigrants as “termites”, all pointed to a fundamental shift underway in our country’s political system.

The Constitution of India sought to define citizenship on the basis of shared values — individual freedom, gender and caste equality, cultural pluralism, states’ rights. Now, however, we are being asked to see ourselves as, above all, a “Hindu” country — as a nation defined by the interests, aspirations, prejudices and paranoias of its majority religion. Naturally, this leads non-Indians to see us in these terms as well; as being, as it were, a Hindu counterpart to Muslim Pakistan. This process was well underway before August 5, 2019 — but what happened on that day deepened and consolidated it.

When, back in the early years of this century, we sought to separate ourselves from Pakistan, the government of the day found an indispensable ally in the Indian entrepreneurial class. It was companies such as WIPRO, TCS and Infosys that presented an image of the innovative, outward-looking and productive Indian to the world. It was not just that these companies created jobs, wealth, and investment opportunities; it was that those who represented these companies abroad spoke the language of civility and reason, befriending and inspiring trust among entrepreneurs, politicians, and journalists of other countries.

Now, however, as we find ourselves rehyphenated with Pakistan, the government of the day has found a crucial ally in the Indian television industry. Several channels present an image of the narrow-minded and insecure Indian to the world. It is not just that these channels ignore real issues like joblessness, agrarian distress and institutional decay while seeking to demonise Pakistan and our own Opposition parties; it is that they do so in vituperative language, provoking dismay and despair among their own compatriots.

Since May 2014, there has been a rapid fall in India’s standing in the world — from being seen with China as an emerging global power to being coupled with Pakistan as an insular, inward-looking nation plagued by authoritarianism and religious bigotry. Anyone with any understanding of global affairs could sense that this fall was underway well before August 5, 2019. And yet our government went ahead and did what it did on that day.

The passing last week of the nakedly communal Citizenship (Amendment) Bill will further encourage the world to see us as a nation driven by religious bigotry and sectarian prejudice. The rehyphenation of India with Pakistan will now proceed even more rapidly. This may be welcomed and cheered on by select television channels. But it should worry the rest of us.

Ramachandra Guha is the author of

Gandhi: The Years That Changed The World

The views expressed are personal