A Surge for Myself, for India, and for Iraq--First Blog

Hi...wherever you are...
I think blogging's a blast. For some three wretched decades as an editor and columnist, I've been scribbling editorials, ruminating (the Thesaurus does not find me a better word, or should I say "fussing," instead?) over political correctitude (hah! my coinage, now that I'm free of pedantic and pedagogical fetters), writing, often for the newspaper boss (you know, the Max Beerbohm stereotype, fat, angled, ash-heavy cigar jutting out of a crooked mouth, belly to match, popping waistcoat buttons, monocle--maybe -- poring, sorry, that should read, peering, over my copy (often slavish submissions for salary safety) (see, I told you blogging's a blast-- two back to back brackets already, with an alliteration thrown in just for kicks), or trying to be attractive once again to some reader who has gushed about some previous story, writing, writing the same stuff that bores me to death because I have written it before, trying to sound different with alternative catch phrases, and knowing the audience, the number of readers per issue as per the last figures of the circulation department, male-to-female ratio of readership, youth segment, economic status according to purchasing power, reaction and rating of last cover story versus that of the September issue that beat the hard stories despite being a soft back-of-the-book variety, regionwise demographic profile...I write for them, yaaawwn, I write for them whom I know better than they know me because Marketing and Advertising say so, and their medium is my message. The audience is brightly lit and my stage is in blackness.

Ah Blogworld the blast. We are Crusoes. I shove these notes into a corked bottle and cast them out into the waters to float to unknown shores inhabited by natives and bigots and believers, and atheists and bureaucrats and lovers, spinsters and Femocrats, Wall Street thugs, and Ben Bernanke, Ron Paul and Ralph Nader, and readers who would spew hate and I know you the nonce, and yet reach out in vanity, in act of desperately seeking connectedness in an increasingly voided world where blogs come out of the wombs of the blogger and he cuts the umbilical cords in order to follow the words and thoughts that journey in mixed metaphor in that corked bottle to destinations of the heart and the mind.

Thus speaking of his re-invention, Badhwar repairs his mind and looks at "THE SURGE" in Iraq that George Bush and John McCain, and General Petraeus says has reduced terrorist violence in Iraq. McCain says that we're now winning the war.
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This "winning" business is something that completely foxes me. What in tarnation do the hawks mean by "victory?" Defeating Al Qaeda? But, heck, the Big A is in Afghanistan/Waziristan not Iraq. Defeating the Sunnis? Bludgeoining the Shia's? What does it mean, General P? In Viet Nam it meant defeating the Viet Minh, or the NVA and reversing the Dien Bien Phu debacle that Giapp inflicted on the French, or countering the Tet offensive. No "surge" helped there. The bigger the surge the larger the number of body bags. We know what it meant in the Falklands under Thatcher, or what victory meant after the Normandy invasion blah blah blah...

But in Iraq? Huh? Actually, the success of the "surge" has nothing to do with more soldiers, but rather with strategy. The surge has been in money for this misbegotten American adventure -- more money to pay hush money to Sunni militants. Also, violence has come down because of a change in tactic. Instead of making midnight raids and frightening the population half to death, and engaging in shoot-outs, the strategy has been to gather better intelligence from neighbourhoods and to PROTECT them from violence through vigilant patrolling.

And herein lies a lesson for India and Indian politicians, especially the Hawks in the BJP and other parties who are calling for a "SURGE" in Indian policing activities against terrorist violence. The Indian "surge" would create additional troops, more lethal weapons and draconian curbs on liberty through new legislation. But will it work?

The trouble is that the population on the receiving end of this would be Muslims. Why deny that? But a "surged" war on terror could well turn into a war against the Muslim community just as the war against Khalistani terrorists, sadly, turned into a war against the Sikhs in the 1980's. Sikh militancy was able to recruit converts from among moderates and ordinary people as this perception strengthened.

I have repeatedly warned -- as I did in the early 1980's when I reported from Kashmir -- that when the state is is seen as deliberate oppressor rather than protector of a minority community, the result is anarchy bodering on civil war. Think about it. You may not sympathise with Islam or Qoranic teachings, and you have a right to hold on to your views unless convinced otherwise, but from a PRACTICAL purely realpolitik standpoint what is the alternative to secularism in India? The two nation theory? Even the RSS did not support that. The truth is that more vthan 150 million Muslims live in India. To treatt them as a monolithic Fifth Column, and target "surges" against their youth without adequate due process is to alienate a minority nearly the size of the American population. Can we afford that? Can we afford a situation where every town and bylane has to be policed against violence and anarchy?

We have avoided this horrible situation-- we should all remember Partition as a civil war, one of the worst scourges ever to hit humankind -- largely because our founding fathers were far-sighted enough to seek political accommodation with Muslims (read security) who had chosen to stay behind and make this country their home, and because a large portion of Muslims in India are not Arabised, they are among the most liberal in the world, given often to Sufi leanings -- the mystical union between Vedanta and Islam -- (in fact, the Muslim Begums of Awadh kept alive the tradition of Hanuman worship), and who reveled in the cultural fusion and shastriya sangeet that is the soul of Hindustan.

From a purely administrative point of view, perhaps, as I say in the October 2008 issue of Gfiles, India's first magazine(www.gfilesindia.com) that focuses on good governance and critical issues of reformation that confront our bureaucracy, India does need a "surge" to counter terrorism, but a surge of another sort. As Editor of this new magazine, here's what I wrote:

All hell is breaking loose in Indian cities. We watch with helpless horror as motorcyclists hurl hand grenades in flower markets and plant bombs and crude explosive devices, almost at will, in bazaars, lanes, and transportation systems. Theories about the perpetrators fly fast and furious. Intelligence agencies and local police departments vie with each other to name the masterminds, lay out elaborate plots and grand designs, speculate about international terror groups, claim victories in shootouts, pontificate on conspiracy theories, and boast about having “finally cracked” the ring.

The media, too, flits from one theory to another, politicians harangue the public about speedy death sentences, harsher laws, minority appeasement and minority insecurities and persecution. But the truth is, no one really knows for sure what is really going on. This editorial is not to support or to debunk any theory or point of view. Its focus is on a severe dislocation of governance that directly impacts on the gathering of information on the basis of which any administration or government in power provides security to all citizens.

Unlike the US where the new Homeland Security bureaucracy was created to anticipate and prevent terror attacks through careful vigilance, monitoring and counter-intelligence post 9/11, India has not even begun to grapple with the subject of modernizing and equipping our services to deal with terror notwithstanding the Parliament attack and the ghastly incidents that have followed with rapid-fire regularity.

RAW, the Intelligence Bureau, Central Bureau of Investigations, urban police departments – created for administrative and policing chores with specific mandates – are simply not equipped or capable of dealing with urban terrorism. Encounters and confessions in police custody are not the answer. The critical elements are intelligence and prevention. And, believe it or not, the spirit behind the creation of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) and Indian Poliice Service(IPS) – did create the right conditions for the achievement of these twin goals.

At the pure administrative level, the prevention of terror is a grassroots governance phenomenon. In the last couple of decades this has just about vanished as district bureaucrats and policemen have been forced to neglect their real duties and perform tasks assigned to them by power hungry politicians. In the old days, the District Magistrate, the Superintendant of Police roamed their districts on foot, in jeeps, on horseback. They camped for nights at villages. Their headquarters were open durbars for grievance redressal. They were men and women of the people.

Because they were trusted by ordinary folk in whose interests they slogged day and night they received valuable information. They knew where dacoits would be hiding. They would personally be aware of “bad characters” and bigots and people planning communal violence. They could persuade village elders to take steps to rein in the “badmaashes.” There was a huge two way communication – this is real intelligence – that could help prevent clashes, prevent violent incidents, and above all, lead to the arrest of the real culprits.

Arresting the real culprits is what gives law enforcement the credibility it needs to win the confidence of people and receive valuable intelligence. Arrest the wrong man, and you create enemies out of people who would be your friends and informants.

That is what has happened in India. Intelligence that leads to prevention of violence has dried up because the bureaucracy has moved away from the common man. The common man sees the bureaucrat as an enemy who serves the political master rather than the interests of the needy. This is particularly true in cities. As India urbanizes rapidly, there is an almost total disconnect between city administrations and mohallas and colonies. The police has not been modernized to interact with the huge socio-economic problems and disruptions of the traditional patterns of life and breakup of families that accompanies the mushrooming of cities.

Dealing with urban terrorism certainly requires a strong hand. But the hand can only be strengthened when governmental and police organizations are modernized, reconstituted and decentralized into the neighborhoods where real people live in order to feel and to deal with their insecurities and grievances. That would be the first concrete step against terror. Band aid reactions will not work.