manmohan singh: with feeble heart - kristen v. brown

The Looming Threat of Avian Flu

Is Saharan Africa ‘the Next Afghanistan’?

The Lament of Political Music

Manmohan Singh:Strong Mind

with Feeble Heart

Ruminations

6 A House Out of OrderBJP leaders’ eyes are on the party’s top post, not the elections

8 Not Just a Cartographic ExerciseHow the proposed bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh will reverberate

9 Bundles of NervesWhy fuss about Taliban; isn’t it just one of the routes to the caves?

11 Caught in the CrossfireMore efforts are needed to prevent civilian casualties in Sri Lanka

12 A Diplomatic SpatLarger implications of a tiff between France and the Czech Republic

Features

The Political Ticker14 Should Singh be ‘King’ Again?

Can Manmohan Singh be the Congress’s best bet?

The Political Ticker22 The ‘Exceptional’ Election

Will the Bangladesh’s Awami League bring to fruition its promises?

The Medical Scene25 Bird-Brained about the Avian Flu

The Indo-Gangetic plain could be the epicentre of an avian epidemic

Caravan to Tamil Nadu31 Trailing Ghosts

The author tracks her mother’s encounters with a Tamil town

Despatch from Africa34 The Saharan Conundrum

Can Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa be ‘the next Afghanistan’?

The Money Trail44 Invisible Hands

The secret world of the oil fixer

The Arts and Literature

56 On Your ToesA mission to ready India for the Western classical dance

60 The Silence of the MusiciansWhy is there a dearth of protest music in free India?

63 The Fairytales GrimAn arresting picture of contemporary Pakistan

66 The Book Shelf

Vijay Simha

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta

Jawed Naqvi

RS Vasan

Kristen V Brown


Nurul Kabir

Kajal Basu

Mary Bowers

Nicholas Schmidle

Ken Silverstein

Emily Rasmussen

Brian Dwyer

Kristen V Brown

Vol. 1, Issue 7 . March 1-15, 2009A journal of politics & culture

4 The Caravan, March 1-15, 2009

You may have read about it in news reports. Youmay also have seen on television her opponentsraising hue and cry over the amount of money

being spent on its construction. You may have even got afirst person account from a relative in Lucknow. Butnothing would prepare you for the grandeur ofMayawati’s Ambedkar memorial park underconstruction in the capital of Uttar Pradesh.

It’s a pity how the media has failed to depict thequantum of the construction work being done inLucknow. On a recent visit to the city, I had a chance tosneak into the site (which even many Lucknowites maynot have seen yet) to get a glimpse of what lies behind thehuge intimidating, monolithic sandstone walls of thesprawling complex.

‘Awe-inspiring’ would be an understatement. Walkthrough the dome mounted majestic entrance and youwill step into a grand pathway running across thebreadth of the park, flanked by 32 life-size elephants (thesymbol of the Bahujan Samaj Party, or BSP) made ofsandstone on either sides. On the left of the pathwaystands a huge memorial to BR Ambedkar. On the right, asort of replica of St Peter’s Square, Vatican, is coming upwith an arc-shaped corridor built with Greco-romanstyle pillars surrounding a towering pedestal at thecentre of the circle (much like the way the obelisk is atthe centre of St Peter’s Square). There are a few othersquares and plazas in the park adorned with fountainsand flanked by pillars

The Ambedkar memorial is just one of theconstruction sites where Dalit identity is being carved inLucknow. On the airport road is a huge memorial toKanshi Ram, facing which is a grand plaza flauntingstatues of Ambedkar, Kanshi Ram and Uttar PradeshChief Minister Mayawati in the midst of a squareadorned with pillared corridors on three sides, whichcould even compete with the Parthenon in Athens. Andthen there are other smaller monuments and statues ofDalit leaders erected on numerous road crossings, parks,and just about any open space in the city.

At a time when Uttar Pradesh is running a fiscaldeficit of Rs23,298 crore and has the worst report cardon all the major indicators of social and economicdevelopment, the expenditure on symbols of Dalitidentity naturally seems irrational. However, if looked at

from Mayawati’s perspective, the concrete symbols ofDalit identity seem a natural extension of her movement.For her rise to power is not simply a story of aschoolteacher from a low caste breaking the barriers ofsocial mobility to become one of the most powerfulpolitical leaders of the country. More than that, it isabout an entire community coming closer to freedomfrom centuries of oppression at the hands of the so-called upper caste. It is about those who are finallyhoping to gain self-respect and the confidence to standup for their rights.

Throughout her time in power, Mayawati has devisedingenious ways to lend to the growing pride of thiscommunity, such as renaming educational institutes androads and floating social welfare schemes after thenames of Dalit leaders. Mayawati has played her cardswell to mobilise her constituency.

Symbolism has an important role in social andeconomic development. During a time of depression andgloom, people need symbols of pride to allow them toalienate themselves from the drudgery of their daily livesand give them reasons to build self-respect. It is thesame reason why a poor country spend billions in spaceprograms that provides no direct benefit to the people,but gives them a shared sense of joy and pride, when thesame money could have been spent on much neededsocial welfare projects.

The pitfall in investing in projects of symbolic value,however, is that the process itself can sometimes becomeintoxicating with a resultant disregard for the underlyingobjectives. For example, in the Soviet Union, even thesmallest of villages were smeared with iconsrepresenting the might of the communist ideology andthe greatness of Soviet leaders. But after the collapse ofthe Union, those symbols served nothing more than justa grim reminder to the future generations of theemptiness of the rhetorical promises made without anysubstantial base.

Lucknow already looks like a city that indicates thatwhat probably started as a seemingly earnest exercise inimage building has acquired obsessive andmegalomaniac dimensions.

Anant NathManaging Editor

Carving Identity in Stone

From the Editor

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Vijay Simha (Ruminations, p. 6), is aSenior Editor at Tehelka, where hereports from Delhi on politics, policyand other issues that affect life.

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta(Ruminations, p. 8, Features, p. 14), isa Contributing Editor with TheCaravan. He is an independent jour-nalist and educator with over 30 yearsof experience in print, radio, televisionand documentary cinema.

Jawed Naqui (Ruminations, p. 9), isthe India correspondent for Pakistan’sDawn newspaper.

RS Vasan (Ruminations, p. 11), waswith the Indian Navy and Coastguardfor over 34 years. He is head ofStrategy and Security Studies at theCentre for Asian Studies, a Chennai-based think-tank.

Kristen V Brown (Ruminations, p. 12,Literature, p. 63), is an AssistantEditor at The Caravan. She has writ-ten on current events, religion, andculture for The New York Daily News,amNew York and Curve Magazine.

Nurul Kabir (Features, p. 22), is the Editor-in-Chief of The New Age, a daily newspaper in Dhaka,Bangladesh.

Kajal Basu (Features, p. 25), is aContributing Editor at The Caravan.

He is a print and Internet journalistwith a quarter century of experience.

Mary Bowers (Features, p. 31), is a freelance journalist and photogra-pher based in London. She hasworked in Africa, New York and NewDelhi, and has reported for TheGuardian, The Observer, The Timesof India, and Sky News.

Nicholas Schmidle (Features, p. 34), isfellow at the New America Foundationin Washington, DC. His work has beenpublished in The New York TimesMagazine, Slate, The New Republic,The Virginia Quarterly Review, TheWashington Post, Mother Jones andmany others.

Ken Silverstein (Features, p. 44), isthe Washington Editor for Harper’sMagazine. He has also written for TheLos Angeles Times, Mother Jones,Washington Monthly, The Nation,Slate, and Salon.

Emily Rosmussen (The Arts, p. 56), isa Californian educated in classical bal-let, community organising and inter-national relations. She resides in NewDelhi, where, when not writing, sheworks in micro-finance and fair trade.

Brian Dwyer (The Arts, p. 60), is aNew Yorker, journalist and guitaristliving in Delhi. He has written forSPIN Magazine, Jazz.com and Fast Company.

Cover illustration by Biplab Muzibar Rahaman


In Indian politics, moments ofclarity can arrive swiftly. PVNarasimha Rao, former prime

minister and Congress president,had his when his successor as partypresident, Sitaram Kesri, gave him24 hours to quit the leadership ofthe Congress Parliamentary Party in1996. Rao had an eventful tenure asprime minister but when theinevitable came, there was no warn-ing. LK Advani, former deputyprime minister and prime ministeri-al candidate of the Bharatiya JanataParty (BJP) for the 2009 generalelection, seemingly had his some-time in November 2008.

When Advani, BJP presidentRajnath Singh and a clutch of seniorparty colleagues gathered to choosenominees for vacant seats in theRajya Sabha in November, Advaniunexpectedly proposed that formerprime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayeebe nominated to one of the seats.That, explained Advani, would keepVajpayee free from the hurly-burlyof electoral politics in the Rajya Sabha.

Singh, however, pointed out thatVajpayee would still have to physi-cally go and file his nomination tothe Rajya Sabha, and that he coulddo the same for the Lok Sabha elec-tion. All he needed to do was file hisnomination in Lucknow, the capitalof Uttar Pradesh and city Vajpayee

had represented in the Lok Sabhafor five consecutive terms; Vajpayeewould win even without campaign-ing, Singh said. Advani stayed silent.The Rajya Sabha seat was later givento former Uttar Pradesh ministerKusum Rai, a confidante of rebelBJP politician Kalyan Singh. Fromthe meeting, BJP leaders learnt thatAdvani’s writ couldn’t run beyond a point.

The meeting was a sort of admis-sion of the irrelevance of Advani.When Advani’s name was cleared asthe prime ministerial nominee inwinter 2007, the expectation wasthat he would put the BJP back on adecisive course and iron out confu-sion. But that did not happen.

With the general election loom-ing, the pre-eminence of Advani isan important ingredient in the BJP’splan to unseat the Congress. Yet,curiously, the party seems to be inthe middle of a pre-election driftthat is making its supportersincreasingly uneasy. There are prob-lems between top party leaders.There are issues between the BJPand its ideological mentor, theRashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh(RSS). There’s a sense that the BJPis not entirely in support of Advani.There’s also the perception that theparty is more comfortable in theopposition even now. In short, theword-of-mouth is that the party is

not keen on winning this election.Advani is 81 and this is probably

his last shot at the country’s toppolitical job. He’s lived his lifearound the BJP. Yet, he finds thingsa far lot rougher than the timeswhen Vajpayee and he workedtogether. The understanding theyhad is missing between Advani andthe rest of the BJP. Then, there’s theRSS, which has been wary of Advaniafter his praise of Mohammed AliJinnah’s secular instincts during avisit to Pakistan in 2005.

Rajnath Singh uses the uneasebetween the RSS and Advani tomake things more uncomfortablefor him. Advani and Singh, an RSSappointee, rarely hold joint pro-grammes. They have their own circleof people they trust. The few meet-ings between them are official andformal.

Advani had a chance to end allthis by taking Singh head on.Instead, Advani tried to bypass him.It didn’t work and gave the impres-sion that Advani was not fully incommand, triggering scepticism ofthe effectiveness of Advani as themain warhorse in the election. Singhis helped by the enormous powersthe BJP constitution gives to a partypresident. A BJP president cannominate state unit presidents andmembers of the national executive,and appoint central incharges ofstates. This helped Singh positionhimself as the top man.

However, there are negativeimpressions of Singh that go beyondhis perceived nervousness withAdvani. Singh is also seen as uncom-fortable with Gujarat Chief MinisterNarendra Modi and Arun Jaitley.

RuminationsA House Out of Order

The Lok Sabha is not what’s on Bharatiya Janata Party leaders’ mind; it’s the party’s presidency that’s

keeping them busy

The Caravan, March 1-15, 2009 7

Modi’s name began emerging in2007 as a possible BJP president.But Modi was limited to Gujarat bythe state election (in which he ledthe BJP to a convincing win), and asection of the RSS with whom Modi has working issues.

Now, there is far more supportfor Modi within the party – at a timewhen Singh’s tenure as BJP presi-dent ends in November 2009 andthe chances of another term appearremote. At their February 2009national executive meeting inNagpur, BJP leaders were keener onModi than Advani or Singh. This iswhy Modi took centrestage on thelast day of the meeting pitching him-self against the Nehru-Gandhi fami-ly of the Congress party. Inner partysurveys in the BJP suggest that Modihas close to three-fourths support inthe party hierarchy and among party workers.

While Advani appears to havereconciled to a possible fadeout,Singh is still battling. On February19, while campaigning in Ghaziabad,the western Uttar Pradesh suburbwhere Singh is contesting the LokSabha poll, he snapped that the BJPsurvey showing the support forModi was from 2004. Singh said theparty’s defeat in the 2004 generalelection showed how faulty suchsurveys could be.

So there’s a situation in the BJP.Advani is still respected but hisauthority has eroded. Modi is amotivator, but not accepted acrossthe board. And Singh is seen as a bitof a pretender. Nobody is thereforeplaying his cards fully. People arehedging their bets. Talk in the BJP isthat Advani is in a holding operationas the public face of the party untilModi takes over. Since that is notlikely until late 2010, when Modihas indicated he would move toDelhi, there is a perceptible lack ofenthusiasm in the BJP about the2009 Lok Sabha election. Someleaders say, privately, that the partyis preparing for 2011, when itexpects another general election tobe held (this premise is based on thelikelihood of a hung parliament this time).

A section of the BJP believes thatthe BJP-led National DemocraticAlliance (NDA) and the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance(UPA) will have levels of responsesimilar to 2004. This would increasethe chances of a non-BJP, non-Congress government at the Centre.Such an arrangement is not likely tolast long, many BJP leaders think,hence the talk of an election in 2011.

Overall, the BJP is not lookingtoo good for this election. In thesouth, its only chances are in

Karnataka, and probably one seatfrom Andhra Pradesh. In the east,the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) in Orissais considering an 80-20 (in percent-age of seats) alliance this time,meaning the BJP’s seats could behalved from the 60-40 alliance of2004. The BJP is shut out from WestBengal. Some seats may, however,come from the northeast.

In the west, it’s iffy inMaharashtra though the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party (NCP)alliance should logically be on weak-er ground after the Mumbai terroristattack. Gujarat may still be Modi’sturf. That leaves central and northIndia. The BJP is shaky in UttarPradesh, Bihar, Delhi, and Haryana.So, all it can hope for in bulk areMadhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, andPunjab may contribute, but notdeliver wholesale.

All of this is a symptom of the bigproblem the BJP has. It has lost theprocess of constant renewal that itonce had. A combination of ideasand activities, the lifeline of anyparty, is missing.

The Jayaprakash Narayan move-ment in the mid 1970s threw up awhole lot of BJP leaders who rose tothe top. The Ayodhya movement in1992 threw up another bunch. Whenthe BJP came to power in 1998, theprocess of governance should havethrown up a third lot. It didn’t.Advani and Vajpayee have hungaround for too long. The mobilityprocess has been stymied to a largeextent. Instead of a fourth rung, theBJP is still struggling with sortingout the second rung.

So who inherits the baby? Thebets are on a Modi-Jaitley combinerunning the BJP show in the nearfuture. Modi is seen as having thequalities the BJP is looking for: abil-ity to motivate, a no-nonsenseapproach, experience as an adminis-trator, a good record in winningelections, a long RSS background,and the single-mindedness to staythe course.Il

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Jaitley is seen as having the qual-ities to carry people along bothinside the BJP and among allies: arazor sharp mind that can rattle offdemographic and political detailsacross the country, a proven recordat managing and winning electionsthrough strategy, and a crucial legalbackground that helps the BJP witha host of cases.

There are drawbacks, of course.Modi has the Gujarat carnage of2002, while Jaitley is a backroom

boy who doesn’t like to contest elec-tions. Modi is seen as having streaksof megalomania, while Jaitley lacksthe single-mindedness needed forthe top job. But together, a section ofthe BJP thinks, the Modi-Jaitleycombo is a good bet to take on theCongress and a host of smaller butimportant parties. That they mayhave given up the present for thefuture is a sign of how swiftly theBJP is unravelling.

-Vijay Simha

the assembly elections (which willbe conducted simultaneously withthe general elections in April-May).The TDP had, in fact, done a com-plete somersault in October 2008after having opposed the formationof a Telangana state for years.

As a Telangana state is formed,the reverberations of the move willcertainly be felt far beyond the bor-ders of Andhra Pradesh. Manybelieve that it might mark yet anoth-er step towards greater federalism,economic decentralisation and thefulfillment of regional and ethnicaspirations in the world’s largestand most heterogeneous democracy.

Between 1956 and 2000, theboundaries of India’s states had, byand large, been drawn along linguis-tic lines. The formation ofUttaranchal (now Uttarakhand),Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh inNovember 2000 marked a signifi-cant change in this trend, in thatthey were not formed primarily onthe basis of language. While manyargue that smaller states are eco-nomically more viable and easier toadminister, factors such as lan-guage, ethnicity and the need to pre-serve subnational identities areequally important. Even as violentseparatist movements in the sevenstates of northeastern India appearto gain momentum from time totime, the threat of secession in thenorthern states of Punjab andJammu & Kashmir, which borderPakistan, has significantly receded.The external boundary of indepen-dent India has not changed signifi-cantly since they were created morethan 60 years ago.

The roots of the demands for newstates can be traced back to the com-plex and convoluted manner inwhich the states of the Indian Unioncame into being, with history, geog-raphy, language and administrativeconvenience all playing a part indetermining their contours. It seemsamazing today that 565 princelystates had acceded to the IndianUnion after 1947. Before Partition,

formed to look into the issuesrelating to the formation ofTelangana and that his govern-ment had no objection, “in princi-ple”, to a new state being carvedout of Andhra Pradesh. He alsomentioned that sections ofMuslims had reservations aboutthe formation of Telangana stateand wondered whether more thantwo states should be formed out ofthe existing one.

Members of the TelanganaRashtra Samiti (TRS), which hasbeen fighting for a separate state,raised slogans and alleged that theCongress party had “betrayed” theaspirations of the people of theregion on several occasions. TheTRS was the first of the constituentsof the ruling United ProgressiveAlliance to break away from thecoalition in 2006 because it felt thatthe Union government was draggingits feet on forming the new state.

The leading opposition party inAndhra Pradesh, the Telugu DesamParty (TDP) led by N ChandrababuNaidu, and the Left claimed that thechief minister’s statement was amere “ploy” as all major politicalparties in the state had unitedagainst the Congress in the run up to

The largest state in southernIndia is going to be carved upto create the country’s 29th

state in the not-too-distant future.Now that the Congress has formallystated that it is not averse to thebifurcation of Andhra Pradesh, thecreation of landlocked Telangana isjust a matter of time. Before thathappens, though, a number of con-tentious issues will have to be sortedout, notable among them whetherHyderabad would remain the capitalof the two provinces, in the mannerthat Chandigarh is capital of bothPunjab and Haryana. However, inorder to serve as a joint capital ofboth states, Chandigarh was createdas a Union Territory. What is impor-tant is that the formation of aTelangana state could lead to anescalation in demands for the cre-ation of other new states, and per-haps to the setting up of anotherStates’ Reorganisation Commission(SRC) five and a half decades afterthe first one.

On February 12, making a state-ment on the last day of the last ses-sion of the Andhra Pradesh legisla-tive assembly, Chief Minister YSRajasekhara Reddy said that acommittee of legislators would be

Ruminations

Not Just a Cartographic ExerciseThe proposed bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh will rever-

berate in at least five more states where sections aremaking similar demands


the British had exercised their para-mountcy over these states withoutincorporating them into theprovinces of British India.

The state of Andhra Pradesh wasformed in October 1953 followingwidespread unrest, which culminatedin Potti Sriramulu fasting to death.Jawaharlal Nehru’s government even-tually set up the States’ ReorganisationCommission in December that year.The SRC was clear that whereas thelinguistic principle behind state forma-tion could not be ignored, it wouldhave to be balanced with certain otherbroad principles, including the need tostrengthen and preserve the unity ofthe country and aid the implementa-tion of centralised five-year plans, eco-nomic and administrative convenienceand cultural homogeneity.

The formation of Telangana willinevitably lead to a clamour for thecarving of the states of Odagu orCoorg out of Karnataka, Gorkhalandout of West Bengal, Bodoland out ofAssam, Vidharba out ofMaharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh,the country’s most populous state,into three or four separate provinces(which has been endorsed by ChiefMinister Mayawati).

In 1976, political scientist RajniKothari had suggested that Indiashould comprise some 40 states. In1992, another political scientist,Rasheeduddin Khan, argued thatIndia should have 58 states, morethan twice the number then exist-ing. He felt that Uttar Pradeshalone, which accounts for almost afifth of India’s population, shouldbe split into six states.Constitutional expert and formersecretary general of the Lok Sabha,Subhash C Kashyap, also argued forthe creation of “50 to 60 states ofalmost equal size”.

The internal map of India hasbeen drawn and redrawn on anumber of occasions. The linesdividing the states are continuingto change, and it is moot how longthis process could go on. Therehas never been any dearth of indi-

Ruminations

viduals who have confidently pre-dicted that India cannot surviveas a single national entity, andthat it will eventually splinter intoa plethora of nation-states.Although these doomsayers –some would call them realisticBalkanists – have been proved

wrong over and over again, itmight, in fact, be argued thatIndia can survive and prosperonly if it “breaks up”. The UnitedStates has less than a third ofIndia’s population but nearly twiceas many states – 50 against 28.

-Paranjoy Guha Thakurta

From the way the world is con-cerned with the Taliban men-ace, it seems that all other

routes to return to the cave dayshave been safely blocked. This isobviously a fallacy, particularlywhen we know that countlessattempts were made, and more arestill being considered, by the sup-posedly civilised hemisphere todestroy the world many times over.Remember that the two World Wars

were fought way before Muslimzealots arrived on the global centre-stage. The next one, if our luck fails,will be a nuclear one.

Nurtured on the fertile border ofPakistan and Afghanistan, theTaliban are the heirs of the much-

lionised Mujahideen of yore. Howquickly have we forgotten our rootsand thereby theirs? When westopped liking the Mujahideen, wecalled them Jihadis even though theetymological meaning didn’t changewith our shifting prejudices. In anutshell, religious fanaticism in theduplicitous world of high sentenceand underhand diplomacy is notonly good but also desirable, as longas it does not threaten some of the

world’s more powerful nations. Isthat not the lesson to draw from theAnglo-Saxon support for SaudiArabia and its simultaneous rejec-tion of the Iranian revolution? Whatis the worst case scenario if theTaliban do take over Pakistan, as

Illustration by Tanmay Tyagi

Bundles of Nerves Why so much fuss about Taliban, which is just

one of the routes to the caves?


Ruminations

Pakistani President Asif Zardarifears they could? Would there beIslamic law in Pakistan? Is that theworry? But then the Western hemi-sphere had shored up General Zia-ul-Haq of Nizam-e-Mustafa notori-ety in the same Pakistan, and withgreat aplomb. The entire Pakistanarmy was indoctrinated withzealotry in its mission to fightSoviet communism in Afghanistan.If the world can live happily withthe mediaeval laws of SaudiArabia, and if it could engineer outof virtually nothing the fanaticallydriven army of Gen Zia, then whythis current fuss about theTaliban? It’s true that their waysare medieval, but there is so muchmedievalism that is already a corepart of the stable world order.

Is it not true that former USpresident George W Bush, whenhe was governor of Texas, waseager to have a pipeline agree-ment, a proposed link from theCaspian to the Arabian Sea, withthe Taliban mullahs? The deal didnot materialise even thoughTaliban representatives visitedHouston for talks in 1997. Talibanare against sending girls to school,and this is a genuine concern, butan afterthought. Would this havebeen agreeable had the dealworked out?

Additionally, the Taliban andtheir ideological patrons, the AlQaeda, have an axe to grind withthe rulers of Saudi Arabia. The so-called war on terrorism and itsmore widely endorsed notion of aclash of civilisation is really a frat-ricidal standoff between the fami-lies of Osama bin Laden and theroyal house of Saudi Arabia. It iswell known that Osama had want-ed to rule Riyadh with a morerefined version of Wahabiismcalled Salafiism. He would proba-bly chop a few more heads onFridays, that’s all. A clash betweentwo Wahabi rivals can surely notbe representative of a clash ofcivilisations, so how can it depict a

war on terrorism? There is some-thing we are missing here. WithOsama bin Laden in charge, theAmerican oil behemoth in SaudiArabia, which runs as a state with-in a state – Aramco – would bebrought to its knees. That is thedifference between ‘my’ fanaticsand ‘yours’.

If the Taliban do get to rulePakistan, of which there is a veryremote academic possibility, theywill have followed the route ofIran’s Islamic rulers. Imagine thatthe CIA coup against the moderateIranian government of SadeghMosaddegh in 1953 was replicatedin Pakistan by the hanging ofZulfiqar Ali Bhutto in 1977.

One can see an image of theShah of Iran in the Pakistani army,both taking turns to be America’spoliceman in the Gulf and a poten-tial conduit to the Caspianresources. The unexpected fall ofthe mighty Shah put the responsi-bility of securing the Gulf and theCaspian squarely on Pakistan. Butfor that agenda to be achieved,Afghanistan needed to be negotiat-ed first. There was no other routeto the Central Asian resourcesother than via Afghanistan. This iswhat the war on terrorism is all about.

Against this backdrop, we mayregard Gen Pervez Musharraf asthe Shah himself. Both were secu-lar, pro-modernisation andextremely arrogant about theirself-perceived invincibility. TheShah fell after a combination ofsocial classes opposed him, withthe help of the pro-Soviet Tudehparty of Nooruddin Kianoori.There were pro-China Maoists –the Mujahideen-e-Khalq and, ofcourse, the mullahs, followed by alarge number of pro-democracyliberals who rallied against theShah. Does that have an eerieresemblance with the lawyers’movement in Pakistan, which top-pled Musharraf? The lawyers toocommanded support from the Left

to the Right of the spectrum.In this replication of an Iran-

like scenario, President Zardaricould be the holding governmentof Prime Minister Mehdi Bazarganwho followed the Shah. After hisdeal with the Taliban in Swat,Zardari does look more like hisIranian counterpart. Bazargan wasa genial man with friends withinthe Iranian clergy and among theliberal lot. Another liberal whoclaimed even greater proximitywith the mullahs eased him out.That was President Abol HasanBan-Sadr, who now lives in exile inFrance. Can we say that oppositionleader Nawaz Sharif would fit inBan-Sadr’s role well?

Where does India stand? On awider canvass within the Muslimworld, India has shifted its loyal-ties from Iran to Saudi Arabia atsomeone’s behest. The very princi-ples that prompted the sea changewould propel it to support theTaliban if that is what Americanpolicy dictates. In other words,there are no great principlesunderpinning the Indian decisionto oppose the Taliban takeover ofSwat; It is just a convenient pos-turing that would be directed notby New Delhi but by the exigenciesof the White House.

In a manner of speaking theacceptance by Pakistan of the SwatTaliban as an ally is not very differ-ent from the policy of SalwaJudum that Indian states have pur-sued by different names inKashmir, Assam and central India.

The original authors of this pol-icy were the British. So it is divideet impera in a camouflage. NeitherIndia nor the United States hasbeen a great champion of enlight-enment. But the US will go backhome some day on the other side ofthe hemisphere. It is India that hasto worry about the contagion ofmedieval barbarism spreadingamong its own people, regardlessof the religion they pursue.

– Jawed Naqvi

For the last more than two anda half decades, civilians haveborne the bunt of the unabat-

ed war between the LTTE and theSri Lankan Army. The confrontationhas claimed more than 75,000 livesand more civilian casualties areexpected in the ongoing showdown.Treated as second-class citizens intheir own country, as they faceinequalities in language educationand work, an estimated 1.5 millionpeople have taken shelter abroad.

The persecution of Tamil civil-ians by Sri Lankan forces in the1980s had compelled the thenIndian prime minister, RajivGandhi, to use the Indian Air Forceto drop relief supplies to the affectedareas in the island, even at the riskof being branded as an ‘interven-tionist and expansionist neighbour’.The Liberation Tigers of TamilEelam (LTTE) – created, aided andsustained by India – did intervene toprotect Tamil interests in its forma-tive stages by taking on the SriLankan forces, but with the passage

of time it resolutely pursued thedream of a separate state of TamilEelam ruthlessly eliminating thosewho were opposed to its ways.

The Indo-Sri Lanka Accord of1987 to bring about lasting peacefailed miserably due to differenceson its provisions. Driven by its ownagenda, the LTTE engaged theIndian Peace Keeping Force, whichwas compelled to change its roleform being a ‘peace keeper’ to a‘peace enforcer’. The Tamils contin-ued to suffer at the hands of both thegovernment and the Tamil Tigers,now a full-fledged guerilla force.Each family was forced to part withan able member or two dependingon the size of the family to berecruited in the LTTE, which ran itswrit and administered areas underits control. Many families in the1980s and 1990s were driven toIndian shores to escape the harshwar conditions. The influx ofrefugees in Tamil Nadu compelledboth the Centre and the state to setup camps and provide humanitarian


Ruminations

relief. The current number ofrefugees, in camps and otherwise, inIndia is about 130,000. Few whotried to visit their homelandreturned disillusioned. For themajority of them India is their homeaway from home.

The landing of refugees providedlucrative business for fishermen onboth sides. The refugees came inwhen the water level was low nearIndian shores and were left to themercy of the elements until thepatrolling Indian Coast Guard orNavy or other civil boats spottedthem for evacuation to safer shores.There is no count of how many mayhave perished without timely help.The process of screening to preventthe LTTE cadres from infiltratingIndia became stringent after theassassination of Rajiv Gandhi. Theinflux of refugees along with theplight of the internally displacedpersons (IDPs) numbering over a150,000 in the Wanni jungles on theother have caused a human tragedyof immeasurable proportions.

As if the suffering inflicted by thewarring factions was not enough,the devastating effect of theTsunami in Sri Lanka in 2004 com-pounded the sufferings of the peo-ple. The period of relative peace, ifany, was around 2002 when the CFA(ceasefire agreement) was in force.Unfortunately, even that brought lit-tle cheer to the victims, who knewthat such temporary phase of ‘nowar’ did not insulate future genera-tions from misery and denial of dig-nity in their homeland. The CFA wasviolated by both sides with impuni-ty, making it difficult for the monitoring missions to establish thevalidity of claims and counter-claims about encountersand killings.

The LTTE continued to receive aconstant flow of funds from theTamil diaspora who believed thatthe Tamil Tigers would achieve theirobjective. The money came fromdonations, extortion, charity funddiversions, and alleged drug trade.Illustration by Tanmay Tyagi

Caught in the Crossfire Little efforts are being made to prevent civilian

casualties in Sri Lanka’s anti-LTTE war

The post 9/11 investigations in manysuch dealings illustrated unscrupu-lous ways of fund collection by theLTTE, an organisation proscribed in31 countries.

Coming to the present state ofconflict, the LTTE is on a losingwicket and it appears that the endis near. As feared, the civilians arethe worst hit, as they are beingused as dispensable pawns by bothsides in the game of brinkman-ship. Whenever civilians areattacked, all the governmentforces and the Tamil Tigers do islevel allegations against eachother. The army maintains thatthey are exercising utmostrestraint in “safe areas and no firezones”. Even the slow progress inthe overrunning of the LTTE’sdefence line in a shrunken area isbeing attributed to the efforts tominimise collateral damage tocivilians. The charge of using civil-ians as shields is obviously deniedby the LTTE.

On February 11, 2009, MicheleMontas, spokesperson for the UNSecretary General Ban Ki-moon,said, “The Secretary-General reiter-ates the responsibility of the LTTEto allow people to move to whereverthey feel safe and the obligation ofthe government to conduct its mili-tary operations with due regard tothe need to safeguard civilian lives.”Neither the LTTE nor the SriLankan forces seem to be in a moodto listen to any counseling irrespec-tive of where it emanates from.

According to the InternationalCommittee of the Red Cross (ICRC),180 civilians died in the first sixweeks of 2008, and nearly 270 morewere injured in a series of attacks oncivilian buses, railway stations andindividuals in many places.

Toon Vandenhove, the ICRChead in Sri Lanka, said that thenumber of civilians affected by theviolence throughout the country,either by being directly targeted oras bystanders, had reachedappalling levels; “Sadly, many of

the victims have been children ontheir way to or from school.”UNICEF claimed that over 6,000child soldiers were recruitedbetween 2003 and 2008 and it was“extremely alarmed at the highnumber of children being injuredin the fighting”.

In November 2008, AmnestyInternational reported that atleast 10 media employees hadbeen killed in Sri Lanka since2006. Independent groups haveaccused Mahinda Rajapaksa andhis government of foul play tosuppress independent medianotably after the brutal killing ofLasantha, the editor of SundayLeader. BBC said that intimida-tion and violence made Sri Lanka

one of the most difficult countriesin the world to report from.

In India, not a day passes with-out regional parties expressingconcerns over the plight of theTamils to pressure New Delhi tobring about a ceasefire. TheCentre, however, has made it clearthat it has no instrumentality tointervene in another sovereigncountry.

It seems the civilians of theIsland will continue to suffer inthis unrelenting war of attritionuntil both parties heed to saneadvice and come to terms with therequirement to ensure lastingpeace at any cost.

– RS Vasan


Ruminations

Since the Czech Republicassumed presidency of theEuropean Union on January 1,

the relationship between the currentpresidency and the former, belong-ing to the French government, hasdazzled international media with itsstriking resemblance to spattingschoolmates, rather than savvypoliticians.

French President NicolasSarkozy has publicly criticised theCzechs for their slow response tothe financial crisis and alluded totheir inability as such a small nation– and one outside the eurozone – tolead the European Union. TheCzech Republic’s often controver-sial (not to mention eurosceptic)president, Vaclav Klaus, chidedSarkozy in a television debate forwanting to become Europe’s “per-manent chairperson” and to“siphon the EU presidency” whenFrance sought to extend it’s presi-dency in light of the financial crisis.

The remarks may seem harmless,but despite the fact that readingabout world leaders acting like 12-year-old school boys is utterly hilar-ious, the animosity between the twocountries may pose a real threat tothe European Union’s ability tomanage the ever-greying economicsituation and handle issues as acohesive front.

When Sarkozy organised a Gazaceasefire with Egypt, France refusedto admit the Czechs to an emergencysummit meeting in Sharm el Sheikon January 18 – much to the ire ofthe Czechs’ who smooth-talkedChancellor Angela Merkel ofGermany to bring their prime minis-ter, Mirek Topolánek, to Egypt onher plane.

Then, in early February, whileannouncing six billion Euros in stateaid to French auto markers, Sarkozycalled on car manufactures to with-draw auto-making operations fromother, less expensive European

A Diplomatic Spat A trivial quarrel between France and the Czech Republic

can hinder the European Union from tackling the economic meltdown


Ruminations

Union countries – or as Sarkozy putit, “repatriate” jobs. More to thepoint, he specifically mentionedwithdrawing operations from theCzech Republic, which has a sizeableand important auto parts industry.

“This is something that’s verydamaging to both of us,”Topolánek said in response toSarkozy’s comments. In an inter-view with the Czech dailyHospodarske Noviny, the primeminister said that the French pres-ident’s comments were “unbeliev-able”, and that the eurozone’s (the16 nations in the 27-member EUwhich use the Euro) largereconomies were destroying thevery rules they had created toensure financial stability.

In many senses, the CzechPM was right.

After Sarkozy’s comments,Topolánek also told the media that“if somebody wanted to seriouslythreaten ratification of the Lisbontreaty, they couldn’t have picked abetter means or time”. The Lisbontreaty – an article that would amendthe Treaty of the European Union toinclude (among other things) a per-manent, 18-month presidencyinstead of a rotating six-month one– largely favours the Europeantriploid of France, Germany andEngland. The Czech Republic hasnot yet ratified it, and Ireland hasrejected the treaty altogether.

The conflict brings to light thedivisions in the European Unionbetween what some have called theold Europe and the new – mostoften, in other words, between thelarger countries of Western Europe,and the smaller countries, like theCzech Republic, of Central Europe.

Moreover, the spat becomes par-ticularly pronounced – and all themore severe – in a time of economiccrisis, when countries seek first toinsure the economic well-being oftheir own nations, before the good ofthe Union as a whole.

Czech foreign minister KarelSchwarzenberg described the way in

which individual nations areresponding to the economic distressas protectionist: “In a time of eco-nomic crisis, we see atavisticinstincts emerging.”

Schwarzenberg was quick topoint his finger at France in partic-ular, commenting that it was“strange” to see protectionist mea-sures coming “from the people whowere the proudest defenders ofEurope centralisation andEuropean values”.

Some reservations regarding theCzech presidency are understand-able – by France, and the rest of the27-member states. After all, it wasonly in 2005 that President Klauscalled for the union to be“scrapped”, and the nation has rela-tively little experience at the head ofthe diplomatic table.

But Sarkozy’s constant instiga-tion has also made it difficult for theCzechs to assume their position inthe first few months of their six-month presidency. And lately Czechofficials are gunning to assume theresponsibility that’s rightfully theirs.

On February 9, Czech PrimeMinister Topolánek called an emer-gency EU summit to discuss theresponses of individual nations tothe economic crisis, saying thatPresident Sarkozy and his “protec-

tionist” measures drove him to callthe meeting. Topolánek saidSarkozy’s recent suggestion thatFrench auto-makers should with-draw foreign operations violated EUprinciples.

Said Topolánek, “We are offi-cially in charge of the EU now andthus we are going to point out anypolitician’s diversion from the com-mon framework or from theEuropean standpoint, be it Sarkozyor anyone else.”

The country is also pushinghard for President Barack Obamato come to Prague early in Aprilwhen he visits London on his firsttrans-Atlantic trip as president foran April 2 G-20 summit meeting.In Prague, the president wouldmeet with the 27 leaders of theEuropean Union for an EU-USsummit meeting, instead of meet-ing with them at the EU headquar-ters in Brussels, therefore allowingthe Czech Republic to once againassert its reign.

“We’re not a European super-power,” said Alexandr Vondra, theCzech deputy prime minister forEuropean affairs, “but we’re 10 mil-lion people and he can’t just expectus to shut up.”

– Kristen V Brown

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There are few photographs asincongruous and no cama-raderie so seemingly inapro-

pos as that of Prime MinisterManmohan Singh and former USpresident George W Bush smilinglysharing a frame. On the right is anunusually quiet, highly qualified,wimpy politician who is occasionallycapable of being waspish in the faceof opposition to his methodology ofleading the world’s largest democra-cy into the 21st century reckoning;on the left is a garrulous but logo-phobic warmonger with contestableeducation who has led the oldestdemocracy in the world – indeed,the world itself – to the brink ofunprecedented civil and economiccollapse. It was a photo op that tookplace on September 25, 2008, whenSingh had timed his visit to theWhite House to coincide with theexpected congressional ratificationof the India-US civilian nuclear deal.

At the time, Bush’s image neededemergency shoring up and theIndian prime minister provided thestanchions, gushing in his trade-mark boy soprano voice at a WhiteHouse press conference “And thelast four-and-a-half years that I havebeen prime minister, I have been therecipient of your generosity, youraffection, your friendship. It meansa lot to me and to the people ofIndia…. The people of India deeplylove you.”

This, of course, was political pif-fle, improviso bubbly casuistry ofthe kind that Bush routinely handedto the media by the bushel, and

which few thought Singh was capa-ble of. The Indian prime minister isthe epitome of propah. On that occa-sion, though, unusual for a man sounerringly attentive to the sensitivi-ties of his office’s public protocol,Singh had co-opted all of India toexpress a relief, which was largelyhis alone, at having rammed a high-ly controversial deal throughmassed banks of opposition and athaving survived the withdrawal ofsupport to his government by amajor political party exactly threemonths earlier.

That deal, more than the radicalprocess of economic liberalisationthat he helped to blueprint, exaltand implement, will defineManmohan Singh for the rest of hislife. The India-US nuclear deal willhave a half-life, and repercussions,extending far beyond his career asstatesman. As political and defencepundits have pointed out, it will beat least two decades before the con-sequences of the compact begin totell on India. Armistices, deals, pactsand agreements are often defined bywhat the signatories have givenaway in order to get what they want.So, did the prime minister surrenderIndia’s sovereignty or did he put thecountry on the path to cheap andabundant energy and a high chair inthe global concourse?

This question is obviously bestaddressed by waiting for the answer,but India has been paying a price forManmohan Singh’s fealty to the US.Three months after Bush put his sealof approval on the India-US nuclear

deal during Manmohan Singh’s visitto Washington in July 2005, Singhvoted against Iran at theInternational Atomic Energy Agencyboard, costing India hundreds ofmillions of dollars as Tehran retali-ated by reneging on the terms of aliquefied natural gas (LNG) con-tract, forcing New Delhi to buy LNGfrom other suppliers at a much high-er price.

It is in the nature of anythingnuclear to raise issues both immedi-ate and problematically long-term.In short, as politicians on both sidesof the divide agree, Singh won’t bearound to pay for the consequencesif the nuclear deal goes toxic onIndia. Once he had made up hismind to see the deal through,Manmohan Singh was prepared touse both obduracy and flashes ofpetulance, such as his threat in June2008 to resign if the Congress partyfailed to back him and if the LeftFront persisted in what he calledtheir “irrational and reactionary”stance. For all his thoughtfulnessand introversion, Singh showed aside so unbending that theCommunist Party of India (Marxist)had to pull out or fall on its ideolog-ical nose.

It was a facet to the prime minis-ter that India had never seen before,or even thought existed. As media-persons will tell you, they haven’tfound a single standout blemish onhim, and not for lack of trying. Hisonly known eccentricity is that healways and only wears a light blueturban. In October 2006, while hon-

Should Singh be ‘King’ Again? Can 76-year-old Manmohan Singh, convalescing from cardiac repair work and seen as

obstinately pro-US, be the Congress’s best bet for a second term as prime minister?


T h e Po l i t i c a l T i c k e r


from the Delhi School of Economics,where Manmohan Singh taught inearly 1970s. Madan and Singhwould often meet at seminars andother academic functions.

“Dr Manmohan Singh wasextremely civil and courteous withhis colleagues,” said Prof AndreBéteille. “Unlike others at the DelhiSchool of Economics, he was a verypatient listener. I joined the DelhiSchool of Economics as a lecturer insociology in 1959, and Dr Singhjoined 10 years later. He came to meand said he wanted to read some of

my writing. And later he came backand discussed it (the writing).

“In India a person who rises high isoften brought down by his family.Manmohan Singh is unusually giftedwith children who have not shownany inclination to claim precedenceon account of their father.”

Quite the opposite, in fact. His

three daughters by his wifeGursharan Kaur – Upinder Singh,Damandeep Kaur and Amrit Singh –are all very successful careerwomen. Upinder is a Professor ofHistory at the University of Delhiand author of four books, the mostrecent of which challenges theMarxist view of Indian history.Amrit, who studied at Cambridge, isa staff attorney at the American CivilLiberties Union. NotwithstandingManmohan Singh’s declared love ofBush, she has fought for the releaseof thousands of US government

documents related to the conduct ofthe so-called ‘war on terror’ and thewars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and hasco-authored the book, Adminis -tration of Torture: A DocumentaryRecord from Washington to AbuGhraib and Beyond.

Books – and bookishness,according to his critics – define

ouring him with a Doctorate of Law,Prince Philip, the Duke ofEdinburgh and Chancellor ofCambridge University, from whereSingh had done his Master’s, askedthe gathering to look at the colour ofhis turban. In one of his few publiclyjocular moments, Singh revealedthat light blue “is one of myfavourites and is often seen on myhead”. His friends had, in fact, nick-named him “blue turban”. It’s acolour that defines his personality:inoffensive, cleverly disarming, edu-cated and genteel.

“He was very gentle, not aggres-sive at all; he wouldn’t talk toomuch, not even in seminars andother functions where he would beasked to speak; he’d always be veryprecise and to the point… He was agood listener,” recalls TN Madan,honorary professor at the Instituteof Economic Growth, located across


Singh. The only Indian prime minis-ter never to have hit the arduouselection trail or won an election, tak-ing the Rajya Sabha route to parlia-ment in 1991, Singh credits almostall his political growth to books. “Atuniversity I first became consciousof the creative role of politics inshaping human affairs, and I owethat mostly to my teachers, JoanRobinson and Nicholas Kaldor,” heonce said. Robinson is best knownfor her gigantic cliché: “Whateveryou can rightly say about India, theopposite is also true.” And anotheraxiom, which might be at the root ofmany of Singh’s economy-liberalis-ing actions: “The only thing worsethan being exploited by capitalism isnot being exploited by capitalism.”

In fact, Manmohan Singh’s eco-nomic liberalisation programme isbased on the premise that agricul-ture can never be the base for GDPgrowth, an argument that the Left-leaning Robinson would havehated. Then, again, only NewZealand, Australia and Canada havebecome rich – in relative terms –through their reliance on agricul-ture, but they have populations thatwould fit in the palm of India’shand. Singh’s economic growth pos-tulate has often been put through

the wringer, including by NobelPrize winner Amartya Sen.

“Kaldor influenced me evenmore,” said Singh. “I found himpragmatic, scintillating, stimulating.Joan Robinson was a great admirerof what was going on in China, butKaldor used the Keynesian analysisto demonstrate that capitalismcould be made to work.”

As things stand today, theCongress party and its alliesthink that the prime minister’s

brand of capitalism has worked –more or less. If the Congress headsthe next government after theapproaching Lok Sabha elections, asit believes it will, it will needManmohan Singh to lead both partyand country into a period of stability.Of all the Congress politicians in thepicture, it is indisputable that healone has both the intellectual where-withal and the experience to handleboth economy and politics. And thepopular trust: there are few peoplewho do not believe that he has alwaysbeen, at his core, a good and honestman. As Andre Béteille said,“Although he has become India’sprime minister, his basic traits –courtesy, modesty and simplicity oflife style – have not changed.”

This popularity is what ledCongress president Sonia Gandhi tobreak her silence about his candida-cy for prime ministership after thenext elections in her ‘Letter toCongresspersons’ in the February2009 issue of the party mouthpiece,Congress Sandesh. “We look for-ward to his continued leadershipand his inspiration to the youngergeneration particularly,” she wrote.The same month, her son, CongressGeneral Secretary Rahul Gandhi,told reporters, “My prime ministerial candidate for thecoming Lok Sabha elections is Dr Manmohan Singh.”

So that’s settled, then. Not quite:surprisingly, these ringing endorse-ments came soon after ManmohanSingh was discharged from the All-India Institute of Medical Sciencesin New Delhi where he underwent acoronary artery bypass graftsurgery. It was an operation thatwas complicated by the fact thatSingh has a history of a problematicticker: he had a cardiac bypasssurgery in 1990 in the UK, andangioplasty in Delhi in 2004 duringwhich stents were introduced in hisarteries. After 18 years, the graftshad lately started to narrow.His hospitalisation immediatelygave rise to a cacophony of voices,tremulous within the Congress partyand almost obituarial in theOpposition. Could a 76-year-oldman who had gone through whatcardiologists call a ‘redo’ – patch-work on earlier repairs that werefailing – head a new governmentafter the elections, eminently andevidently qualified for the jobthough he might be? Would he beable to take the pressure of dealingwith what many believe might be aneven more fractious coalition thanthe incumbent UPA? With twomedals of superb statesmanship tohis credit, wasn’t it time he graceful-ly called it a day? Should theCongress take his hospitalisationas a sign that it is time for a newleader to spearhead the party

Feature

Dr Manmohan Singh with George W Bush


and, hopefully, the government?The problem here lies not with

Manmohan Singh, who, sources say,would calmly accept any verdict,comfortable in the knowledge thathe doesn’t have to prove himself: hisfive-year tenure has made of India abeast with a bite as big as its bloatedsize. The problem lies in pinpointinghis successor. Singh’s naturalreplacement, Pranab Mukherjee, isin place, with President PratibhaPatil having assigned him additionalcharge of the crucial ministry offinance, which Singh had taken overafter shifting former finance minister P Chidambaram to thehome ministry. But althoughMukherjee is a proven footsoldier,he has more detractors in theCongress than Manmohan Singhcan cobble up in two lifetimes. As forthe other contender, Rahul Gandhi,Congress members consider him, at39, still an understudy and a longway from having learned his ropes.

Meanwhile, some of the otherpartners in the UPA have begunbuilding their case. A day afterRahul Gandhi backed ManmohanSingh’s candidature for prime min-istership, Sharad Pawar of theNationalist Congress Party andMulayam Singh Yadav of theSamajwadi Party let the media knowthat while they had no objection to asecond term by Manmohan Singh,they wouldn’t pass up the primeministership if given a chance. Norwould they oppose each other. InIndia’s political strategising, twominor coalition partners teaming upis the beginning of a cabal.

Meanwhile, sources say thatManmohan Singh’s place in thescheme of things will be made evi-dent by whether he is able to attendthe Second G20 Summit to be heldon April 2 – he has been invited byBritish Prime Minister GordonBrown. If Pranab Mukherjee goes inhis stead, it will mean that Singh isstill on shaky legs.

Manmohan Singh became India’sprime minister not because he was

considered best suited to the job butbecause Congress president SoniaGandhi had a point to make – thatshe didn’t covet power in govern-ment; it was a matter of no conse-quence that neither did Singh.

For almost a week after theresults of the 14th general electionsbecame known on May 13, 2004, itseemed inevitable that SoniaGandhi would succeed Atal BihariVajpayee of the Bharatiya JanataParty (BJP) as prime minister.Although the BJP was obviouslyunhappy with such a denouement,most of its members realised thatthey had no choice but to accept aperson of ‘foreign origin’ – as theytauntingly put it – as the next headof the Indian government. SushmaSwaraj threatened to shave her head– which symbolises in the SanghParivar the abandonment of materi-al compulsions and desires but not,significantly, of political ambitions– if Sonia were sworn in as primeminister. But Swaraj’s locksremained intact. On May 19, Soniaannounced that she was refusing themost important political position inIndia. She said she would remain ashead of the Congress party andnominated Manmohan Singh asprime minister.

What had already been decided

was that Sonia would not only headthe Congress party and the UnitedProgressive Alliance (UPA) coali-tion but would also be chairpersonof a newly-created body, theNational Advisory Council, whichwould monitor the implementationof a National Common MinimumProgramme (NCMP) to be workedout among the constituents of theUPA and the Left parties that wereproviding crucial ‘outside’ supportto the government. Before theNCMP was finalised, four daysafter the election outcome becameknown and five days before Singhwas sworn in as the new primeminister, on May 17, Indian stockmarket indices collapsed by sixpercent, one of the sharpest single-day falls. The crash occurred afterAB Bardhan of the CommunistParty of India (CPI) and SitaramYechury of the CPI (M) sharplycriticised the NDA government’spolicies of privatisation and disin-vestment and demanded that theMinistry of Disinvestment bewound up. In unusual tandem, for-mer finance minister JaswantSingh and Manmohan Singh cametogether to assuage stock investorsthat their money was safe, warningspeculators against seeking to gainfrom the vacuum between the

Feature

Dr Manmohan Singh with Rahul Gandhi (Left)


departure of one government andthe installation of the next. Theday after Sonia Gandhi declaredher intention to “humbly declinethis post”, the markets rallied,recovering much of the losses ithad incurred on “Black Monday”.As it transpired, after the new gov-ernment was formed, the Ministryof Disinvestment was indeedwound up and made a departmentunder the Ministry of Finance.

Everybody went home lookinggood, even Sushma Swaraj. ButSonia’s decision to abdicate leftManmohan Singh with an image asher rubber stamp. It’s an image thathe has been too courteous to protestbut has been quietly working toamend. His credentials, in any case,have given him an impeccable sheenall his own as India’s most educatedprime minister: a Master’s degreefrom St John’s College, CambridgeUniversity, where he won theWright’s Prize for distinguished per-formance in 1955 and 1957; and a DPhil in 1962 from the University ofOxford’s Nuffield College, with thetopic of his doctorate thesis being“India’s Export Trends andProspects for Self-SustainedGrowth”, which was then publishedby Clarendon Press in Oxford in1964 and was considered “an earlycritique of India’s inward-orientedtrade policy”. Then followed asamba line dance of non-study acco-lades. In 1997, the University ofAlberta presented him with anHonorary Doctor of Laws; OxfordUniversity awarded him an hon-orary Doctor of Civil Law in June2005, an honour that CambridgeUniversity replicated in October2006. And St John’s College andCambridge University named a PhDscholarship after him.

After completing his D Phil,Manmohan Singh worked for insti-tutions like the InternationalMonetary Fund, South Centre andthe UN. During the 1970s, heworked for the foreign trade andfinance ministries. He also taught at

the University of Delhi andJawaharlal Nehru University. From1982-85, he was governor of theReserve Bank of India, and immedi-ately thereafter went on to becomedeputy chairman of the PlanningCommission (1985-87).

“He was not the most brillianteconomist in the place [Delhi Schoolof Economics],” said Andre Béteille.“That distinction has to go toAmartya Sen.” But it is difficult tofault such credentials.

In the years that followed, in theprocess of being transformedfrom an academic-turned-tech-

nocrat into a full-blown politician,he lost some of his squeaky-cleansheen. While his personal reputa-tion for incorruptibility has neverbeen doubted, there is the inevitablepolitical palaver that he turns ablind eye to the weaknesses of oth-ers around him when it suits the exi-gencies of coalition politics.

After having been comfortably inthe shade for four years, Singh final-ly came into his own on July 22,2008, when his government won acrucial, battle-scarred vote of confi-dence in the Lok Sabha. In his ownwords from his speech that day: “Ihave often said that I am a politicianby accident. I have held manydiverse responsibilities. I have beena teacher, I have been an official ofthe government of India, I havebeen a member of this greatest ofParliaments, but I have never for-gotten my life as a young boy in adistant village. Every day that I havebeen Prime Minister of India I havetried to remember that the first tenyears of my life were spent in a vil-lage with no drinking water supply,no electricity, no hospital, no roadsand nothing that we today associatewith modern living. I had to walkmiles to school, I had to study in thedim light of a kerosene oil lamp.This nation gave me the opportunityto ensure that such would not be thelife of our children in the foreseeablefuture…my conscience is clear that

on every day that I have occupiedthis high office, I have tried to fulfilthe dream of that young boy fromthat distant village.”

That dramatic day in parliamentbrought out the best and the worstin him. Singh waved the victory signafter two days of debate and deliber-ations delivered him a larger-than-expected majority (275-256). Hisgovernment survived thanks to thesupport it received from theSamajwadi Party and a bunch ofdefectors – including eight BJPmembers who defied party guide-lines by cross-voting and abstaining.(The BJP later expelled them.)

But the triumphalism that fol-lowed was tainted. The abidingimage that remains of that day wasnot of the prime minister’s exultantV. It was that of one of three BJPmembers of parliament (MPs) slam-ming down two brown and blackleather bags on a table and haulingout and waving fat rubber-wandedwads of currency notes in the Well ofthe House, alleging that SamajwadiParty leader Amar Singh had tried tobribe them to vote in favour of theUPA. In that one event, there was anindisputable numerical victory butalso an implied loss of ethics.Whether the image of the world’slargest democracy was enhanced inthe process depends on where yourpolitical loyalties lie.

In the ensuing commotion, thespeech that the prime minister didnot deliver – which was promptlyplaced on his official website –revealed an uncharacteristicallyaggressive and sarcastic side to him.He first took on the leader of theopposition, the BJP’s Lal KrishnaAdvani, who had “chosen to use allmanner of abusive adjectives todescribe my performance… He hasdescribed me as the weakest primeminister, a nikamma [‘useless’ or‘inefficient’] PM, and of havingdevalued the office of [the] PM. Tofulfil his ambitions, he has made atleast three attempts to topple ourgovernment. But on each occasion

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his astrologers have misled him.This pattern, I am sure, will berepeated today. At his ripe old age, Ido not expect Shri Advani to changehis thinking. But for his sake andIndia’s sake, I urge him at least tochange his astrologers so that hegets more accurate predictions ofthings to come.”

This sort of bellicosity is a raredeparture from civility forManmohan Singh. The rest of hisattack on Advani was a predictablepolitical harangue – that Advani had“slept when the terrorists wereknocking at the doors of ourParliament”, that he had “single-handedly provided the inspirationfor the destruction of the BabriMasjid with all the terrible conse-quences that followed”, and thatthen, to “atone for his sins, he sud-denly decided to visit Pakistan andthere he discovered new virtues inMr Jinnah.” Singh added: “Alas, hisown party and his mentors in theRSS [Rashtriya SwayamsevakSangh] disowned him on this issue.Can our nation approve the conductof a home minister who was sleepingwhile Gujarat was burning leadingto the loss of thousands of innocent lives?”

While he was at it, he also took asword to another thorn in his side:“Our friends in the Left Front shouldponder over the company they areforced to keep because of miscalcu-lations by their general secretary.”He meant Prakash Karat of the CPI(M), who had precipitated the crisisof confidence by withdrawing sup-port to the UPA to protest againstthe India-US nuclear deal.

Singh’s rancour was that of a mantoo long bottled up, a private manliving in a glass house that wouldpermit no retaliation. “All I hadasked our Left colleagues was:please allow us to go through thenegotiating process and I will cometo parliament before operationalis-ing the nuclear agreement,” hisspeech on the website said. “Thissimple courtesy which is essential

for orderly functioning of any gov-ernment worth the name, particu-larly with regard to the conduct offoreign policy, they were not willingto grant me. They wanted a vetoover every single step of negotia-tions which is not acceptable. Theywanted me to behave as their bond-ed slave. The nuclear agreementmay not have been mentioned in theCommon Minimum Programme.However, there was an explicit men-tion of the need to develop closerrelations with the USA but withoutsacrificing our independent foreignpolicy.”

That independent foreign policy,according to critics, had just gonebelly-up. Despite India’s ForeignSecretary Shiv Shankar Menoninsisting that “the rating forPresident Bush is higher in Indiathan in any other country”, he hadno figures to support his statement.Karat later remarked dryly thatManmohan Singh should not haveequated his own friendship withBush with that of the people ofIndia. Singh’s expression of love, infact, surprised many of his col-leagues in the Congress, whorealised that the prime ministermight just have bungled it: the

Muslims in India, who comprise aseventh of the country’s population,expressly do not love Bush.“[Manmohan Singh] just got a bit carried away,” said a Cabinet minister.

Many consider this ‘indiscretion’a blip: Singh, they say, is not thekind to be “carried away,” at leastnot for longer than a day with hisbeloved books.. In October-November 1984, when he was gover-nor of the RBI, he was anguished atthe anti-Sikh communal carnagethat followed Indira Gandhi’s assas-sination, in particular by the incen-diary role that certain Congressleaders played. Singh confided to hisclose friends that nothing on earthwould make him work for theCongress party or any government itheaded. But Singh did not quit hisjob. In fact, in January 1985, he waspromoted as deputy chairman of thePlanning Commission and took tohis responsibilities with relish.Between August 1987 andNovember 1990, Singh was secre-tary general of the SouthCommission, established by formerTanzanian president Julius Nyerere.The organisation was meant to fur-ther a certain amount of equitability

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Cartoon Arts International/ Distributed by The NYT Syndicate


between developed and developingnations. Singh put together theSouth Commission’s report, TheChallenge to the South, which was arending critique of the US-centricpolicies of the World Bank and theIMF. The report provided somealternatives. But when Singhbecame the Indian finance ministera few months later, it was those verypolicies that he made his own.Singh was sent to the Rajya Sabha in1991 from the northeastern state ofAssam after having registered as apermanent resident of the state. Infact, he lived in Delhi. While evenhis detractors – who preferred notto question his honesty – expectedto set the record straight, he took themore expedient route by relocatinghis claimed permanent residencefrom c/o Hemaprabha Saikia (wifeof the then chief minister of Assam,Hiteswar Saikia) to another addressin the same state.

In a questionable assertion,Singh stated that he was a tenant ofHemaprabha Saikia. When the heatbecame uncomfortable, sources say,he changed his ‘permanent address’to House No 3989, Nandan Nagar,Ward No 51, Sarumataria, Dispur,Guwahati (Assam) 781006,although he was born in the villageof Gah in Punjab (now in Chakwaldistrict, Pakistan), migrated toAmritsar after Partition and did hisBachelor’s and Master’s fromPanjab University in 1952 and 1954respectively. (His wife recently toldjournalist Khushwant Singh thatamong the few possessions that sheand her husband own is a small flatin Guwahati.

Former Rajya Sabha memberand journalist Kulip Nayar chal-lenged in the Supreme Court anamendment to the Representationof the People Act, 1951, which allowsany Indian citizen to be elected tothe Rajya Sabha from any state, evenif s/he is not a resident of that state.Until a five-judge Constitutionbench of the Supreme Court of Indiaunanimously upheld the constitu-

tional validity of the amendmentson August 22, 2006, Singh was ontenterhooks.Singh’s first brush with officialdomcame in 1971 when he became eco-nomic adviser to the Ministry ofForeign Trade. That was to be the startof a long innings in government bodiesand international organisations thatlasted two decades. During this phaseof his career, he was chief economicadviser to the finance ministry,finance secretary, governor of theReserve Bank of India, deputy chair-man of the Planning Commission andsecretary general of the SouthCommission. As has often been point-ed out by his supporters, ManmohanSingh is the only person to have heldall the top jobs in the Government ofIndia related to the management of

the country’s economy.So convinced was he of the seri-

ousness of his calling that he wassaid to have particular offence tothen prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’soff-the-cuff remark that the mem-bers of the Planning Commissionwere a “bunch of jokers”. The nig-gling irritability that that remark hadgenerated for years became dust onemorning in June 1991, whenManmohan Singh was informed thathe would be occupying the most spa-cious office in North Block as head ofthe all-powerful ministry of finance.

The country’s economy was thena mess. With hard currency reserveshaving fallen to a low of a fortnight’simport requirements, there was adistinct danger of India defaultingon her external financial obliga-

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Dr Manmohan Singh with BJP’s prime ministerial candidate LK Advani


tions. PV Narasimha Rao, who hadall but retired from active politics,suddenly realised that he would bebecoming prime minister and wentlooking for an economist who couldsave the day for him. His first choicewas Dr IG Patel, who headed theLondon School of Economics, but hedeclined the offer. His second choicewas the good doctor, who agreed.

Until the day that he becamefinance minister in the NarasimhaRao government, Singh had beenseen as an economist who endorsedthe traditional ‘socialist’ policyframework of the Indian govern-ment. He had, after all, been adviserto Indira Gandhi’s government dur-ing her famous garibi hatao years.

So it came as quite a surprisewhen he espoused a sharpRightward shift in India’s economicpolicy regime. The shift was wel-comed by the Indian upper and mid-dle classes. The influential publica-tions Euromoney and Asiamoneygave him awards for FinanceMinister of the Year in 1993 and1994, respectively. In fact, the for-mer finance minister of WestBengal, Ashok Mitra, has claimed inhis book, A Prattler’s Tale: Bengal,Marxism and Governance (2007)that Singh’s appointment as financeminister in the Narasimha Rao gov-ernment was on account ofAmerican pressure.

One of Singh’s first decisions asfinance minister was to sharplydevalue the Indian rupee. He thenpresented a budget which disman-tled much of greasy machinery ofthe infamous licence-control raj thathad vested vast discretionary pow-ers on politicians and bureaucrats inthe management of the Indian econ-omy. He also commenced prepara-tions for the Indian government totake a loan from the IMF.

During his first public press con-ference as finance minister, he wasasked if his government would beable to “roll back” the prices ofessential commodities, as theCongress party had promised in its

election manifesto drafted under thetutelage of Rajiv Gandhi. Singhdemurred, saying that it would notbe possible to bring down prices.Sections in the Congress were up inarms. The National Herald daily,considered a party mouthpiece,wrote a stinging editorial which waswidely quoted in the internationalpress. Singh quickly backtracked.His political career had begun.

Singh, though, has rarely courtedcontroversy. He never publicised thefact that as RBI governor, he hadresisted political pressure to issue abanking licence to a company in theHinduja group and to the controver-sial Middle Eastern Bank of Creditand Commerce International. Theoccasions when he has been in thelimelight for the wrong reasons arefew. When he was finance minister in1992, opposition leaders had attackedhim for remarking that he would notlose sleep because stock-marketswere plunging. This comment came ata time when India’s capital marketswere wracked by a securities scandalinvolving, among others, uber stock-broker Harshad Mehta. Unable toexplain himself, Singh had offered toput in his papers, but Narasimha Raostood by him.

When the Congress lost the gen-eral elections in May 1996, manyCongress members blamed Singh’seconomic policies and programmesfor the defeat. Singh repeated adnauseam that the government had“no choice” but to follow market-friendly policies to lift the economyout of a crisis. He has stood hisground ever since.

If the overarching shadow ofSonia Gandhi brought intodoubt the extent to which

Manmohan Singh would be able towield independent authority, thecomposition of his governmentonly underscored the fact that hisroom for manoeuvre would be lim-ited. The Council of Ministersincluded several members fromsmaller parties with barely a hand-

ful of MPs in the Lok Sabha. Moreimportantly, some of them hadserious criminal charges pendingagainst them, notable among thembeing Mohammad Taslimuddin,MAA Fatmi, Jai Prakash Yadav,Lalu Prasad of the RashtriyaJanata Dal and Shibu Soren of theJharkhand Mukti Morcha.

But Singh’s bonhomie withBush is still seen as a definitivesign that his ‘unsocialist’ policiesare a set pattern, and that not eventhe current anti-capitalist globalsentiment will move him to reworkhis blueprint for India’s progress.The problem for him could lie inthe fact that the new US presidenthas virtually nothing in common,in terms of both domestic and for-eign policy, with his predecessor.Barack Obama might choose toforcefully underline a stipulationto the Hyde Act known as the“Barack Obama Amendment”,which holds that the supply ofnuclear fuel to India should be“commensurate with reasonableoperating requirements”. Thiswould, in turn, mean a validationof those “operating requirements”by the outside world – somethingthat almost all political parties,including his own, took Singh totask for. Obama could choose topinch shut all avenues for India toaugment its ‘strategic reserve’,which is crucial to India’s nuclearprogramme.

But as things stand, only thewildest of wild cards could upsetthe future that the Congress hasplanned for Manmohan Singh. Asenior minister in the governmentsaid, “Manmohan Singh is still byfar the most acceptable person asprime minister of India and,despite their current position onsupporting a non-Congress, non-BJP formation, even theCommunists say they are moreconcerned about policies and pro-grammes and less about individu-als. I would place my bets on himbecoming the next PM.” �

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Bangladesh’s recently held‘exceptional general election’has produced an ‘exceptional’

parliament, and there are some‘exceptional’ political obligations tobe met by the ruling political estab-lishment of Prime Minister SheikhHasina Wajed.

On November 19, 2008, SheikhHasina’s Awami League and theJatiya Party (founded by the mili-tary dictator, Hossain MohammadErshad) agreed to jointly contest theelections held on December 29,2008 under the so-called caretakergovernment. Of the 300 parliamen-tary constituencies, the Jatiya Partycontested 49 seats and the AwamiLeague and a Left wing 14-partycoalition the other 250 seats.Khaleda Zia’s Bangladesh NationalParty (BNP)-led Four-PartyAlliance, which had as partner theIslamist Jamaat-e-Islami and wasriddled with allegations of corrup-tion involving her and her son TareqRahman, suffered its most humiliat-ing defeat in Bangladesh’s history.The consequent ‘Mohajot’ (GrandAlliance) that has emerged has amassive and daunting mandate.

This avalanche election wasexceptional in many ways: first, itwas held under the unlikely aegis ofan illegal government comprised ofa group of anti-political individualscontrolled by the military; second, itwas held more than two years afteran election was due according to theconstitution; third, the national par-liament that the election producedgave the ruling coalition more than a

three-fourths majority in the 300-member House. Sheikh Hasina’sAwami League alone won 230 seats(the Mohajot combine won a total of263 seats) – more than enoughstrength to bring in qualitativechanges in the constitution of thisever-troubled republic.

In the nature of such things, anelectoral victory this exceptionaldoesn’t come with a carte blanche:It immediately obligates the newlyelected leaders to meet a couple ofexceptional aspirations of the vastmajority of the electorate. Theseaspirations are, first, the revival ofthe secular democratic nature of theState by restoring the principles ofits constitution, which were burieddeep by the military putsch of 1975that brutally removed the govern-ment of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman;and, second, the trial and punish-ment of the military leadership thatexercised illegal power in the guiseof the two-year-long Emergencygovernment of Fakhruddin Ahmed,which took charge in January 2007.While the first obligation has to dowith the Awami League’s electoralpledge that, if it was voted to power,it would revitalise the spirit ofBangladesh’s war of independence,the second promise is important toensure that the armed forces neveragain aspire to seize State power,directly or indirectly.

These obligations comprise justtwo among the other challenges thatface the new government, particu-larly given that the primary electionslogan of the Awami League-led

alliance, a political combine of 10heterogeneous parties and groups,was ‘change”. By change, the pressand the public understood thealliance to mean a paradigm shiftfrom the prevailing practices of thegoverning parties. They include, toname a few, abuse of power forparochial and personal interests,amassing of public wealth throughcorruption, politicisation of theadministration, repression of politi-cal opponents, compromising ofnational interests to hegemonic for-eign powers for partisan gain, sup-pression of the dissenting voices, etc.

Besides, reviving the ‘spirit of thewar of liberation’ would entail man-ifesting an almost four-decade-oldnationalism which is in danger ofbeing overtaken by nationalism of amore contemporary kind but whichis still an impetus in many walks oflife. This ‘spirit’, thankfully, is hard-ly ephemeral or vague; rather, it hasbeen sanctified and historicallydefined by more than two decades ofpopular political struggles (between1948 and 1970), leading up to thewar in 1971 and eventually findingexpression in the 1972 constitutionof the Peoples Republic ofBangladesh. The constitution hadmanifested a representative democ-racy of a secular nature, an egalitar-ian economy with equal access of allthe citizens to national resources,the rule of law to ensure social jus-tice and citizens’ right to unrestrained freedom of thoughtand expression.

With regard to the first issue –

The ‘Exceptional’ ElectionWill the ruling Awami League bring to fruition its pre-election promise to revive

Bangladesh’s secular ‘spirit of the liberation war’?

Nurul Kabir

T h e Po l i t i c a l T i c k e r


the secularising of the State and theconstitution – Sheikh Hasina’s gov-ernment is faced with a whopper ofa challenge. When her party hadbeen in power between 1996 and2001, one of its prime electoralpledges had been the realisation ofthe ‘spirit of the liberation war’. Butthat government had failed to evenmove a bill to strike out constitu-tional provisions that relegated tosecond-class citizenry thoseBangladeshis who belonged tofaiths other than Islam. The AwamiLeague’s excuse was that it did nothave the two-thirds majority in par-liament required to change the con-stitution. Two months after the cur-rent elections, with a majority in itspocket, the Awami League has notuttered a single word on the secu-larisation issue.

Although she is today bereft of anexcuse to not do the right thing, or atleast not to promise to do it, herproblem is that she is being pulledby differing political exigencies. Shehas in her coalition GeneralErshad’s Jatiya Party, and he is the

former military dictator who madeIslam the state religion ofBangladesh. It is difficult not to beapprehensive that the Jatiya Partywill oppose the idea of across-the-board secularisation. On the otherhand, Sheikh Hasina also has Left-leaning partners in the coalitionwho have mustered a great deal ofsupport in favour of secularising theconstitution. And she has, of course,her own party’s two-thirds majorityin parliament.

As for the second issue, the mat-ter of comprehensively blocking anyfuture possibility of the military’sinterference with the politicalprocess and the matter of the trialand punishment of the military topbrass for its forcible appropriationof matters of governance, SheikhHasina and some of her senior partycolleagues are reportedly divided onthe issue.

Sheikh Hasina’s waffling on herpromises has a history. In its previ-ous avatar in government, her partyhad promised trial of the ‘war crimi-nals’ who had conducted the geno-

cide in Bangladesh in the run-up toand during its war of liberation in1971 and who had actively collabo-rated with the Pakistani occupationforces. The pledge was soon forgot-ten. On several occasions over thepast two years, she announced pub-licly that her party would “legitimiseall the actions of the military-driven‘caretaker’ government” by ratifyingthem in parliament. She is learningto stick to her stance, strengtheningthe BNP’s allegation that militaryhad a role behind the AwamiLeague’s massive electoral victory.

Fortunately, parliament hasalready adopted a unanimous reso-lution to try the ‘war criminals’.Even the opposition BNP, whichwith 29 seats and 33 percent of thevotes is the second largest party inparliament, has publicly provided‘moral support’ for the trials. Also,some senior Awami League leadershave been publicly asserting thatPresident Iajuddin Ahmed, whoallowed the military leadership tostep in and co-opt governance, mustbe impeached, that the illegal activi-ties of the military-controlled care-taker government of FakhruddinAhmed must be investigated, andthat the military officials who delib-erately maligned and humiliated thepolitical class must be punished.

The government of FakhruddinAhmed had suspended fundamentalrights for almost two years, abusedthe judiciary, intimidated the media,made thousands of illegal arrests,tortured hundreds in custody, con-ducted extrajudicial murders dis-guised as crossfire encounters,destroyed the means of livelihood ofthousands of poor people in thename of recovering public lands,wreaked havoc on national economyand made hundreds of policy deci-sions in clear violation of its consti-tutional mandate.

“This parliament has to take nec-essary steps to make sure that themilitary cannot seize state poweranymore in the days to come,” anenraged Mohiuudin Khan Alamgir, a

Sheikh Hasina at the altar of Dhaka’s monument for Bangladesh Language Movement martyrs


Presidium member of the AwamiLeague and a state minister forplanning in Sheikh Hasina’s earlierCabinet, told the House onFebruary 1. All the members of par-liament (MPs) supported him fromthe benches. “I refuse to thankPresident Iajuddin Ahmed as hedisplayed dog-like loyalty to themilitary junta in violation of hisoath. The armed forces are sup-posed to remain accountable to thepresident, or in other words, thepresident is supposed to ensureaccountability of the armed forces.But President Iajuddin failed to hisconstitutionally defined duty,”which had been to block militaryjunta’s imposition of the ‘state ofemergency’ on January 11, 2007.

Alamgir said that he had beenarrested, without any warrant, bythe military-led joint forces inFebruary 2007 “on charge of corrup-tion”, interrogated and blindfoldedby the officers of a military intelli-gence agency, and jailed by a specialspeedy tribunal, better known inDhaka as a “kangaroo court”. Afterhis release more than a year later onbail granted by the high court, hewas voted into parliament in therecent general elections.

Alamgir was not the only seniorpolitical leader to go through themilitary mill. Mohammad AbdulJalil, the Awami League’s septuage-narian general secretary, recentlyinformed parliament that the“question of thanking the presidentsimply does not arise” since he hadpresided over the military-con-trolled government that “took allout efforts to depoliticise our soci-ety”. He demanded impeachmentof the president. Describing hishumiliation and torture at thehands of a military intelligenceagency after his arrest on May 28,2007, Jalil burst into tears on thefloor of parliament. He said that “itis time the nation specificallydefine the jurisdiction of the mili-tary security agency called DGFI(Directorate General of the Field

Intelligence) and obviously itsactivities need to be limited withinthe armed forces”.

Rashed Khan Menon, presidentof the Left-leaning Workers Party,which is a component of the rulingcombine, voiced similar views inparliament on February 8.Observing that the “military intelli-gence agency in question has com-mitted excesses during the two yearsof Emergency rule”, Menon assertedthat “the parliament needs to inves-tigate those excesses in order to stoptheir recurrence once and for all”.

Barrister Moudud Ahmed, a for-mer prime minister (1988-89), vice-president (1989-90) and minister oflaw, justice and parliamentary affairsin Khaleda Zia’s government between2001 and 2006, said in a high courton February 3 that the “nation thistime has to take all necessary steps tomake sure that the armed forces cannever ever intervene in the country’sdemocratic process”.

Moudud Ahmed, currently amember of the BNP’s centralstanding committee, was arrestedby army-led joint forces inJanuary 2007 and released on bailin December 2008. A practicinglawyer, he provided the highcourt, while moving a bail petitionfor a former MP, with vividdescriptions about how he wasarrested illegally and taken whileblindfolded to one of the three

infamous ‘black holes’ run by theDGFI and humiliated, insultedand psychologically tortured bythe “faceless DGFI boys”.

In a television talk-show onFebruary 4, Moudud Ahmed saidthat if parliament ratified the twoyears of Fakhruddin Ahmed’sunconstitutional governance, “it willremain as a very bad precedence,which may inspire the military lead-ership in future to grab power with-out directly appearing in the scenein the future”.

Although the BNP had itselfappointed Iajuddin Ahmed as presi-dent in 2001, on January 25 it pub-licly demanded his parliamentaryimpeachment for his “failure touphold the state’s constitution byway of surrendering to the militaryleadership” The BNP and some topleaders of the Awami League and itspartners have reached a consensuson the impeachment of IajuddinAhmed and some manner of punish-ment to Fakhruddin Ahmed.

Sheikh Hasina often argued inthe distant past that repeatedextra-constitutional interventionsby the army in the politicalprocess distorted the country’sdemocratic polity. So, why is sheintent today on keeping her owncounsel on an issue that is so cen-tral to regaining the ‘spirit’ thatcan set Bangladesh free of theghosts of its past? �

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Former president Iajuddin Ahmed (L) standing alongside new President Zillur Rahman (M)


While the world has beenbusy coping withunprecedented economic

distress, another kind of cata-strophic global enervation has beenquietly re-establishing itself.Recently, Vietnam virtuallydeclared a national emergency asthat old bogey, the avian flu, spreadto nine provinces. An outbreak ofthe H5N1 breed of the virus wasbarely controlled this month inJhapa in Nepal, 500 kilometressoutheast of the capital,Kathmandu. Sikkim declared itselfhit by bird flu in January, after hun-dreds of thousands of birds wereculled in the Northeast inNovember 2008. And West Bengalis on a desperate culling overdriveas the avian flu struck its borderareas with Bangladesh this month.The World Organization for AnimalHealth (OIE) was informed that oneoutbreak, in Harirampur inDakshin Dinajpur district, was ahighly pathogenic avian influenza(HPAI), the deadliest subtypeknown as H5N1.

Late last year, Dr David Nabarro,the senior UN System coordinatorfor avian and human influenza, hadsaid unequivocally that the avian fluvirus had become entrenched in theIndo-Gangetic plain of India andBangladesh. West Bengal’s ministerfor animal resources development,Anisur Rehman, immediately shift-

ed the blame for the flu’s resurgenceto inadequate border controls byneighbouring Bangladesh. It is atired, old refrain, but not entirelyinvalid: the flight path of avian flu,because of the unimpeded nature ofits vector, respects no nationalboundaries. In fact, one of the caus-es of the 2008 outbreak in WestBengal was that avian flu had sweptthrough 29 of the 64 districts inBangladesh, which has a ridiculous-ly lax biomonitoring and medicalsystem and which shares a long andporous border with West Bengal.

There are fears that there couldbe a repeat of the dread of last year,when the culling of more than fourmillion birds in the state led theWorld Health Organization (WHO)to describe it as the worst-ever birdflu outbreak in the world. WHO hasnot taken back its advisory reissuedlast year that India remains themost likely epicentre for a globalavian flu pandemic that could rival,or even outstrip, the 1918 Spanishflu pestilence in the waning monthsof World War I that killed 100 mil-lion people in the United States,Europe and Asia in three uncontrol-lable, convulsive waves. H5N1 wasidentified, in Hong Kong, in 1997.

In certain quarters in WHO, thefears are fed by an awareness ofhow fast the virus can spread inIndia, which has already been soft-ened for a wildfire contagion by

repeated outbreaks, 11 in all sincethe first one in February 2006.According to a Central governmentreport on “Surveillance/Testing ofsamples by HSADL, Bhopal con-cerning Notifiable Avian Influenza(H5 & H7) from 02.02.09 to10.02.09”, of the 6,701 samplestested, only one, from Sikkim, hadbeen found positive for H5N1. A fewdays later, the outbreak occurred inWest Bengal, and every sample sentto the High Security DiseaseDiagnostic Laboratory (HSADL) aweek after the previous round oftests contained the H5N1 strain ofthe avian flu.

What the world medical commu-nity is waiting for – and considersthe eventuality inevitable – is theH5N1 subtype mutating to one thatis capable of human-to-humantransmission. In that case, accord-ing to a new study from theBiodesign Institute in the US whichappeared in the February 2009issue of the highly respectedProceedings of the NationalAcademy of Science, the speed ofspread of an H5N1 human-to-human epidemic would leave that ofthe 1918 virus, source of the mostsevere flu pandemic in recordedhistory, standing in place. The threepandemics of the 20th centuryenswathed the globe in six to ninemonths. The previous one occurredin 1968, and the volume of interna-

Bird-Brained about the Avian Flu

A global H5N1 epidemic is primed to explode, and WHO and the UN believe

that the Indo-Gangetic plain could be its epicentre

Kajal Basu

T h e M e d i c a l S c e n e


FeatureB

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tional air travel has increased expo-nentially.

According to latest WHOreports, H5N1 bird flu has infected407 people in 15 countries andkilled at least 354 since the virusresurfaced in Asia in 2003, withmost occurring in Vietnam andIndonesia. It is no consolation thathardly any deaths have been report-ed from India, a country that hasone of the world’s rustiest specificmortality report mechanisms and ahighly undependable disease moni-toring system. It is enough, a sourcein the HSADL said, that the currentoutbreak is the fourth in WestBengal since 2007. No other affect-ed region in the world has reportedthis frequency.

The problem with tracking thecourse of the disease in India alsolies with the chronic underreportingthat the Indian bureaucracy resortsto while dealing with internationalorganisations. There are very evi-dent discrepancies: as of now, Indiahas reported not a single humandeath due to the avian flu. But aNew York Times report fromFebruary 19, 2006, quoted the dis-trict administrator of Surat in west-ern Gujarat as saying that a poultryfarmer had died there of bird fluand that “local tests” had con-firmed. Even China has had twohuman deaths in 2009, raising thetoll to 25 of 38 people infected withthe H5N1 virus in the country sincethe disease re-emerged in 2003. Inprivate, WHO officials believe thatmuch of South Asia is guilty ofunderplaying the human cost of theavian flu: Pakistan has reported asingle human death, andBangladesh none, despite havingbeen hit hard enough for their poul-try sector to have gone into a down-ward spiral.

Asia’s geography and topographyare interlinked and interdependentas few other regions in the worldare. A team of experts from the UNCrisis Management Centre-AnimalHealth (CMC-AH) that visited

Nepal after the January 2009 out-break is said to have been appre-hensive that the country remainedat high risk because its massivepoultry industry relies mainly onimports from West Bengal andBihar in India, and from China.

As with the initial stages of theAIDS epidemic, the establishmen-tarian calculus, governmental andotherwise, has been working toobfuscate the rate of expansion ofdisease around the world. Victimsare paying a huge tax for the factthat medics and statisticians arestruggling with a very new andlargely untried contrivance of work-ing together. For instance, WHOconfirmed only 30 human deaths in2008, substantially less than the 59recorded the year before and thecrest of 79 recorded in 2006. All ofthis would be cause for hope, exceptthat there is enough medical evi-dence to show that, in the case ofthe avian flu, milder disease withlower fatality probably coincideswith improved transmissibility.

Serologists are also worried thatavian flu, which is gifted with theability to mutate before scientistscan come to grips with extantforms, might meld with the com-mon seasonal influenza virus toproduce a hybrid with no cure in theworks. “That’s increasingly likely,”said a source at the HSADL. “Fluincidences are not going down.Check in the cities and you will seethat people carry flu the year round,not only in winter.” WHO’s target ofthe enhanced utilisation of seasonalinfluenza vaccines in high riskgroups was 50 percent coverage in2006: it didn’t even come close;coverage will be 75 percent for2010, and any hope of approxima-tion has long been buried.

There is also evidence that theefficacy of existing prophylacticsmay be fast losing ground. Recentreports from China say that evensome vaccines made from later-generation H5N2 virus strains havebeen found unable to protect

against H5N1. Last year, scientistsexperimenting with the H5N1strain reported a successfulhybridisation – known as “reas-sortment” – of H5N1 with theH3N2 strain, one of the twoinfluenza viruses that commonlyaffect humans during flu seasons.

In July last year, a leadingmicrobiologist at the Universityof Hong Kong admitted that a

poultry vaccine created to protectchickens in Hong Kong from the H5strain had lost all potency over theprevious seven years. The virus wasmutating away from the Fujianstrain, one of the 15 types of avianflu that it was developed for. Themicrobiologist told Hong Kong cityofficials that all live chickens shouldbe banned from markets beforetransactions of vaccine-immunebirds began.

The flu virus has the frustratingability to mutate quickly and secre-tively, and a hybrid virus couldresult in a radically new pathogenwith no known immunising agents.Currently, the anti-viral known asTamiflu, which is taken before orimmediately after infection, is theonly known protection againstH5N1 – and the first Tamiflu-resis-tant strains have already emerged.

So rapidly does the flu virusmutate that new vaccines have to bedeveloped every year, with world-wide experts getting together at theend of every flu season to predictthe following year’s likely strains.Although computer models areused, serologists have likened thesemeetings to conclaves by fashiongurus who try to decide on the basisof trend prediction which colourand material will sell next season.“Since it’s different from a cartelunanimously deciding what themarket is ready to buy, it’s really ahit and miss affair,” said a source atthe HSADL. “So you can see howdifficult it is to design and massproduce a vaccine for such a virus.”The H5N1 avian flu virus that hit

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West Bengal on January 16, 2008caused poultry losses of Rs350crore. Other losses don’t lend them-selves to even approximate calcula-tion. Most affected countries havedeclared themselves unable to ade-quately compensate farmers forculled poultry, which reduces,among other things, voluntary dis-closure of infection. In India, atleast, veterinary extension servicesare rudimentary. Most outbreaksoccur in the rural areas, wherehome-slaughter is common, andpoverty leads to the consumption ofdiseased birds.

The fallout of the discovery of thevirus in an area goes beyond lossesfrom culling. According to a Centralgovernment advisory on the controland containment of avian influenza,“Some crops such as sugarcane,vegetables etc., were found growingwithin the infected farm premis-es. It is clarified that all standingcrop and agricultural produce onthe infected farm premises arerequired to be destroyed. However,

subsequent produce in the nextcropping cycle from the agriculturallands within the farm premises canbe allowed for consumption.” Notmany farmers in virus-affectedareas can afford to lose standingcrops, and these are clandestinelyboth consumed and sold.

Moreover, poultry farmers inSouth Asia rarely restrict them-selves to rearing chicken; ducks arean added source of income.According to a recent WHO report,“Domestic ducks are now known tobe able to excrete large quantities ofhighly pathogenic virus withoutshowing clinical signs… The factthat domestic ducks can act as a‘silent’ reservoir has removed thewarning signal of a risk, especiallyfor rural farmers and their families,and increased opportunities forunwitting human exposure.”

“We are there only to kill theinfected birds,” said a culler atDinajpur clothed in a white suit thathad seen better days and wearingcotton gloves that would not keep

out the virus, adding that his unit’sbrief did not include testing orculling ducks. “Forget ducks. Wehaven’t been tasked with destroyingthe crop either. Half the time wespend fending off farmers and theirfamilies who try to keep us off theirproperty. I have no idea about whathappens to the crop.” Most poultryfarmers have backyard businesses,and they can scarce afford to losetheir entire brood.

A few days ago in a north Kolkatamarket, a poultry farmer said, whenhe was asked why chicken cominginto the market over the past daysseemed undernourished, “What doyou think? We are all trying toescape the culling and selling ofimmature chicken before the gov-ernment comes around.” Whenasked if he knew that the fowl mightbe infected, he just said, “This isemergency selling before the pricesof chicken fall.”

Officials in West Bengal say thatrepopulation and infiltration havealready started in several districts.

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According to avian flu control andcontainment protocol, an infectedarea should be kept clean of poultryrepopulation for at least threemonths from the date of culling anddisinfection.

Even though South Asiannations are suspected of keeping alid on the human and poultry cost ofthe avian flu, regional and globaleconomics has its own way of deal-ing out attrition. India does not vac-cinate poultry to prevent the onsetof the disease, preferring instead tokill birds once they are infected. Thegovernment considers the cost ofprophylaxis too forbidding, eventhough post facto killings perma-nently impoverish most poultryfarmers and add permanent debt tomoneylenders. But economic pay-back has come in the form of thecountry’s egg exports droppingmore than 70 percent to six billioneggs in 2008. Attrition had begunas early as 2006, when West Asiannations stopped buying Indian eggsfollowing the first reported bird fluin Maharashtra.

While human-to-human H5N1infection is still a phenomenon thatmost governments consider a ‘pos-sibility’ with a low ‘probability’,most scientists involved in its test-ing and mitigation are convincedthat such a mutation is only a mat-ter of time – and not too much time,at that. In fact, it might already beout there: there have been threesuspected cases of human-to-human infection, one each inThailand (2004), Hong Kong (1997)and Indonesia (June 2006). Theproblem, said Professor Dr PrasertAuewarakul of Mahidol University,Thailand, on July 8, is “that theH5N1 virus is adapting each time itinfects a human. Such adaptationsmay lead to the emergence of a virusthat can cause a pandemic.”

It has taken roughly a century toget to this turn — infections in atleast 45 countries in three conti-nents, incidences reported from 24countries in 2008 alone — from the

first identification of bird flu, inItaly. “We have got bird flu now inSoutheast Asia, Central Asia, EasternEurope, and West Africa,” Dr DavidNabarro, the UN’s influenza coordi-nator, said on July 20, 2008.“Compared with eight months ago,this is a major extension of the avianinfluenza epidemic.”

The WHO’s case fatality ratio(CFR) reports are an alarm-ing read. The human H5N1

mortality rate in 2007 was 67 per-cent (59 out of 88 cases). In 2008, itrose to 76 percent (26 out of 34cases). As of June 19, 2008, thetotal avian flu CFR over the yearswas 63 percent (243 deaths from385 cases).

This recent prognosis comescourtesy the UK’s House of LordsIntergovernmental OrganisationsCommittee which, in addition toposting the warning, excoriated theWHO for being “dysfunctional”,largely for having declared precipi-tously in 2007 that India was “freefrom bird flu” even as Manipur wasin its grip in July that year. TheHouse of Lords warning came hardon the heels of news that layinghens at a farm in Banbury inOxfordshire had been found infected with the highly pathogenicH7 strain.

With this recent labwork, thescenario is no longer a worst case,if-it-happens conjecturing: it hasbecome a when-it-happens-what-do-we-do issue. Many nations havedeveloped pandemic plans and arestockpiling antiviral drugs such asRoche’s Tamiflu andGlaxoSmithKline’s Relenza.

But not India. The UK govern-ment, for instance, has booked upto 122 million doses of pandemicflu vaccines from a variety of sup-pliers. In contrast, during theJanuary 2008 outbreak in WestBengal, the state governmentreceived only 36,000 doses of theTamiflu oral antiviral treatment,all meant for cullers and none for

unprotected poultry farmers.Tamiflu is expensive, despite the

fact that Roche has lowered its ratesfor developing countries vulnerableto pandemics. Even at €12 per treat-ment course of 10 capsules or €7per treatment course for the activepharmaceutical ingredient, pur-chasing millions of the doses neces-sary would bankrupt the vastmajority of developing nations.India’s foreign exchange exchequer,however, has never been morerobust, and keeping a vaccine back-up wouldn’t come close to liquidat-ing it.

In fact, the preproduction workfor a vaccine for birds had beencompleted as long back as July2006, a year-and-a-half before theBengal outbreak. The HSADL hadannounced the development of anavian influenza vaccine which used“dead” H5N1 viruses and whichwas, therefore, far more potent than“heterologous” vaccines that usedviruses similar to H5N1. The cost ofeach vaccine, which can be used onbirds both before and after an out-break, worked out to 35 paise,including traders’ profit and cost oftransportation. The Indian Councilof Agricultural Research had pro-vided the Rs800 lakh seed money —but HSADL found no commercialtakers even as the government builta bridge with Roche. As of 2007,HSADL went ahead and preserved100,000 doses on its own, but theBengal outbreak in 2008 was servedwith Roche’s Tamiflu.

Since a single Roche treatmentconsists of taking two tablets dailyfor five days, the 100,000 pills thatRoche sold to the Indian govern-ment in 2006 could have treated amere 1,000 people for 100 days.Although the Indian governmenthas been in talks with Roche for alocal sub-license for the productionof Tamiflu, a pandemic would catchit buff naked. Roche itself says thatit would take six to eight months fora manufacturer starting fromscratch to source raw materials and

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two to three years for the final prod-uct to find a market.

India has no system in place totest its own ducks and geese but itdoes wield a fine sieve for productsfrom other nations. For instance,the Indian Open BadmintonTournament in April 2008 inHyderabad found itself short ofhigh-quality Chinese-made Yonexshuttlecocks: the Indian govern-ment had discontinued the importof the finest-quality goose feathersfrom China after a recent H5N1outbreak there. While there was aremote scientific basis for theIndian government’s reaction, noother badminton tournament inthe world suffered from govern-mental intervention: China’s avianflu monitoring and mitigation sys-tem is said to be very authoritativeand exacting.

While the Indian govern-ment has openly madeknown its desire to act

alone on this issue, the govern-ments of Japan, China and SouthKorea are preparing to tackle anyoutbreak together, putting aside acentury of reciprocal politicalantagonism. They readily acknowl-edge that Asia will probably be theepicentre of a global pandemic andexpecting a single nation to handleit might spell regional economicdoom. The three countries are pre-pared to conduct joint drills todetermine the competency of theirinformation-sharing and quaran-tine measures.

Avian flu has taken such fiercehold in West Bengal because it hasthe highest population density of allIndian states, the governmentmachinery is slothful, segregationzones are highly permeable, biose-curity measures are absent, and theaffected poor – uncertain aboutcompensation for culling and led bythe state government’s own populistleaders – put up a stiff fight againstculling teams.

Adding to the problem, Anisur

Rehman, the minister who blamedBangladesh for the February 2009outbreak, informed the people onJuly 14, 2008 that the West Bengalgovernment had decided not toallow vaccination of birds “as itsefficacy is yet to be proved”. WHOconsiders prophylactic vaccinationof birds the only proven way to pre-vent an outbreak. Influenced by thepoultry lobby and other CommunistParty of India (Marxist) leaders,Rehman also blurted, with no sup-porting evidence, that the vaccinesin birds could harm people who atethem. Neither WHO nor HSADL’stests have reported any such vac-cine crossover contraindications.

An official at the NationalInstitute of Communicable Diseases(NICD) said that the “avian flustory” was far from over. Hereferred to the unequivocal cautionshanded out by Dr Malik Peiris, theSri Lanka born, Hong Kong-basedvirologist who discovered the aetio-logical agent that causes SevereAcute Respiratory Syndrome(SARS) and who is one of the lead-ers of research into H5N1. “If youlook back at all the major emerginginfection problems over the last fewdecades – whether West Nile ormad cow disease or the avian flu orSARS – these were all animalpathogens that jumped to humans,”Peiris said.

Peiris added that the avian fluvirus problem had been “grosslyunderestimated”, and that in H5N1endemic regions, the dimensions ofpoultry infection far exceeded gov-ernmental guesstimates. Poultrysold at markets might not be per-ceived as dying of infection. But this“sleeping” killer would find pur-chase between farm and market.“Once the virus gets in a market,”Peiris said, “it remains there almost forever.”

Researchers themselves, said theNICD official, have never ques-tioned the H5N1 virus’ ability tofind safehouses. Even during thehiatus between 1997 and 2003, a

breather that scientists foundhandy in mapping genomes andexperimenting with vaccines, virol-ogists and researchers continuedtheir surveillance and publishedpapers on their findings, neverdoubting that the virus was skulk-ing around. And they have beenproved right during the 2008-09outbreak.

Complicating India’s problems ispolitical and social obstreperous-ness between its eastern and north-eastern states. The OrissaVeterinary Association (OVA)decided in February last year, forinstance, not to do “ring vaccina-tion” (vaccinating all birds in a 5-10km radius) along the Orissa-WestBengal border, declaring that sinceno infections had been detected inOrissa, culling healthy fowl wouldtransgress the essential principlesof veterinary ethics. The OVA didnot consider the possibility thatinfection could infiltrate from WestBengal into Orissa and undoOrissa’s record of poultry hygiene.

Today, even as Japan holds outpromise of a pan-influenza vaccine– whose human trials will beginonly a few years from now by whichtime, ironically enough, ragingmutation might have rendered itobsolete – the medical communityis said to be holding out hope thatthe new US president will put a stopto some US bio-warfare pro-grammes that seek to exploit theH5N1 virus. During the Bushregime, several US laboratorieswere known to have been creatingand experimenting with novelinfluenza types that could, if theyescaped, start a bushfire pandemic.In one well-known example, US sci-entists recently rejuvenated theextinct 1918-19 Spanish flu, claim-ing that reviving the killer viruswould help the world prepare for aprobable H5N1 pandemic. It’s stillopen season on a virus that scien-tists say could kill more people thanthe AIDS epidemic has, and farmore rapidly. �

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“Inever want to get married,”said 12-year-old Geetha,looking for shooting stars.

We were on the roof in a meteorstorm, staring, agape, at the sky. “I’mgoing to be a nurse, and look afterpeople with no arms and no eyes.” It’sa specific vocation, even for a 12-year-old.

My mother would have approved.And were it not for her sudden deaththree years ago, she would still beprincipal at New Creation BilingualSchool in Tamil Nadu.

I was on her trail.It had been a surprise to me when

my mother announced that, at theage of 61, she was going to India tobecome principal of a school in theobscure Tamil town of Kuilapalayam.Anna Bowers was too old for a mid-life crisis, and too vital to be sufferingfrom dementia. She was a Londonschoolteacher and a single mother.She certainly wasn’t a traveller andhad hardly been abroad save for theodd hop across the English Channelto France.

Tall, wiry but elegant, she had ahuge bonnet of curly brown hairwhich made her visible wherever shewent. She wore huge silver rings onlong elegant fingers and carried awaft of perfume wherever she went.Her eyes often flashed with wryhumour but could as easily switch tostern, fear-inducing indignation in aclassroom of rowdy, inner-cityLondon children.

Three years after her death, anennui-stricken, thumb-twiddlingjournalist in London, I opened myemail inbox to find an advertisement

for a three-month job with The Timesof India. I applied, and promptlyforgot about it. Two weeks later, I wasgiven a month to pack up mybelongings – and my mother’s diary– and fly to New Delhi.

“God has sent a heavenly missileinto my life and blown it all to bits,” mymother wrote. “There are many timesin India when I will be on my own andfeeling alone. I can deal with that.”

I wondered if I could. I wasfollowing her through the crater, andfeeling just as solitary.

A series of coincidences hadcatapulted my mother into spendingthe last year of her life running NewCreation School. My sister Laura,who had been working in slums inGujarat, had gone travelling andstumbled across the small schoolnear the village of Kuilapalayam.She’d been in the local shop when shecaught the overtones of a Britishcouple’s conversation. The wife’smother was ill, and they needed toreturn home. But there was no hopeof finding a replacement. Theyneeded someone with extensive headteaching experience and who wasalso willing to leave her life backhome. Laura tapped them on theshoulder. “I’ll send you my mother,”she said, and hopped to the nearestInternet café in time to write an emailhome. “Go!” it said, “And rememberwho sent you.”

Now my mother had sent me, andI arrived in a taxi.

The school consisted of ascattering of small concreteclassrooms. In three dimensions andfive senses, the place still held the

strange mythology of objects onlyseen in photographs. The humidityhere was my mother’s, the smell ofrecently cleared monsoon rain ongrass, the enormous insectsbumbling by. I suddenly feltenveloped in her, like the last hug I’dso longed for after her death. Here,she held me.

I remembered my own dailypreparation for school. My motherpacked me off with a lunchbox andchided me for breaking the backs ofmy shoes down when I wrenchedthem on to avoid tying the laces. Sheignored my squeals as she tiedribbons around eye-poppingly tightfrench plaits in my hair.

Here in New Creation, thoseberibboned plaits were on the headsof hundreds of little girls,disappearing around the corners ofclassroom buildings, others buried inbooks written in Tamil and English,one younger child on each side asthey read aloud to each other. Theywore little purple and green checkeduniforms, by far the smartest clothesthey owned. The boys were perfectlyattired in little shirts and trousers,the girls in summer dresses similar tothe ones I wore with long white socksto my West London primary school,more than 5,000 miles away. I smiledto myself.

A peek inside classrooms showedmulticoloured decorations lovinglycoloured in and labelled: parts of thebody. Wobbly hands drawn aroundand rendered with crayon, alphabetsdecorated with apples and books andcows and ducks. It was my mother’sclassroom in London, relocated:

Trailing GhostsThe author tracks her mother’s encounters with a Tamil town

Mary Bowers

C a r a v a n t o Ta m i l N a d u


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there, the same brightly colouredlabels in her round, bright primaryschool teacher’s handwriting, drawnon red and green and blue sugarpaper, and cut out in the shape ofclouds. Poetry on the walls, whichhad not space to show bare plaster –perhaps the only poetry her Londonchildren had read, but words theyabsorbed with enthusiasm. Here inIndia, little work folders werelabelled ‘Priya’, ‘Tarundeep’,‘Rakesh’; not ‘Daniel’, ‘Eugene’,‘Hannah’. The round English vowelswere replaced with the curlicuedletters of the Tamil language.

A 10-minute walk toKuilapalayam after the school day,and all of a sudden the children’sother world loomed into view. Acollection of ramshackle huts madeup the little estates where the daystudents lived. Outside, a stick-thinmother raked the mud, a small babytied to her back with a grubby rag, itshead lolling behind her. She couldn’thave been more than 25-years-old,

but her weary gait suggestedotherwise. The huge green palms andlush cashew trees that grew aroundthe village seemed to ignore thesesettlements. They came in textures ofstick and slush, and various shades ofbrown. But from behind the hutshurtled little purple and greenfigures, having somehow spotted usearlier on arrival. They jumped uponto the walls, brandishing sticksthey had been play-fighting with,demanding that I take their pictures.They jumped and shouted, full ofenergy. Looking behind at the tired,bony woman with the baby, Iwondered if any of these childrenbelonged to her.

Some of these children were onlywashed at school. Their parents weresometimes abusive. At best somechildren were neglected, and at worstthey suffered physical harm.

Back at school, they were all givenmedical care, including Poliovaccinations. A brand new building,recently given as a one-off gift by a

Western donor, had been polisheduntil it shone in the sunlight, makingit slippery for the bare feetunderneath. It was there that thechildren received their midday mealand their snacks, piles of rice soakedin yellow daal, scooped up eagerly bytiny sticky fingers. For some, it wasthe only food they would eat.

I was staying in what had been mymother’s room. A mug of sweetcoconut water was waiting inside.Outside, huge flying beetles buzzedoutside the screen door, and inside,the dim hard beds were covered withvibrant, patterned sheets. I entered inthe middle of a power cut and theceiling fan was slowing gently to ahalt as I felt around for candles andmatches. The room was sparse, theshower cold. I thought back to ourLondon house, crammed withcushions and gold and redfurnishings. My mother’s love ofdecoration was a long-running familyjoke. I thought back to her diary.

“Lights continually flicker or go out

The handiwork of New Creation’s students


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due to faulty wiring, plugs, or the ever-present power-cuts,” she wrote. “Thefew needles of water descending fromthe shower are lukewarm. But theseare trifles. The things that bring realcomfort are in the place.”

I was disturbed by a call to dinner.The kitchen was a riot of activity as 12children from the school, who lived in-house, banged on pots and queued upwith big tin plates to receive Everest-mounds of rice. Gingerly, I picked aseat among them. They were gabblingin perfect English. An open workbook,discarded in the middle of homework,showed the evidence of their Tamilclasses. Fourteen-year-old Dinegardecided to demonstrate the newsentences he’d learned in Spanish. Theothers pointed enthusiastically to amap of the world they were painting inprimary colours on the facing wall.One boy, his arm in plaster, was beingteased by the others for having‘believed he could fly.’ When he wasolder, he wanted to be an astronaut.

The next day, I was shown aroundthe classrooms, the new computersuite, the special needs department,the new kitchens, and the plot that hadbeen set out for the new library.Everything had moved on.

When my mother died, I thoughtthe world would stop; she was theessential component to making it turn.I had been shocked as the normalcy oflife callously continued: the people onthe bus who looked as if nothing hadhappened, doing their shopping, goingto work, playing with their children inthe park. I wanted to jump up anddown and scream and stop them. Didthey not know that she was gone?

Today, the new principal,Shankar, showed me to thewoodwork department where twoboys were finishing some woodentoys. Children at New Creation whodo not show a natural academicaptitude are taught practical skills:cookery, carpentry and masonry.Shankar explained that their skillswould then be highly in demand innearby Auroville and Pondicherry.

He called for one of the boys in

Tamil. Obediently, he put downhis file and appeared.

“Who do you think this is?” Shankarasked him, pointing at me. The boycocked his head and looked quizzicallyin my direction. “She looks like Anna,”he replied, a smile of recognitionlighting his face.

I thought back to my mother’sdiary. “In raising children on my own,God taught me a great deal about whatit means to be a mother,” she wrote. “It

may be what He has made me ‘good at’,even over and above teaching.”

I knew from that moment in theworkshop what had brought mymother to India. When she couldn’t bemother to me, or my sisters, anylonger, she had come to be a mother toa school of children. And I also knewthat the world had to go on withouther. Without the world moving on –without them ceasing to need you –children would never grow up.

India, I realised, prepared mymother to leave the world. “There isa grasp on realty here,” she wrote.“An acceptance of the fragility ofthe one life, and the certainty ofdeath, some unspokenunderstanding that there is morebeyond our need for high

achievement, that there is a pastand a future as important as themoment, and that we are not totake ourselves so very seriously.”

The following morning, I was upearly to catch a taxi into Pondicherry.But already a hundred or so smallchildren were gathered in the diningarea, legs crossed, backs straight asthey sat to attention in little lines. Icrept past the assembly, but Shankarsoon caught me, and I was called tothe front. I remembered watching mymother’s assemblies from the back ofthe gym: a Bible story, a hymn withactions for the little ones, and alwaysa tale that left the older onescollapsed in laughter and rowdy fortheir first lesson. Today, 200 eyespeered at me curiously.

“Does anyone know who this is?”asked Shankar in Tamil, courteouslyturning behind to translate for theirmonolingual visitor. The boarders’hands punched the air eagerly; theothers looked confused. I wasn’tsurprised. But then a small hand shotup. “She looks like Anna,” came avoice, and suddenly the silence andcomposure was broken as the olderones flapped their arms and turned toeach other in amazement. I wastaking in what she had not lived tosee: these children, a couple of feettaller, many words moreknowledgeable, many experiencesolder, but still remembering themother we shared.

Geetha had decided exactly howher plans were going to come tofruition. She was going to grow wings,she said, and fly to London where shewould be a successful (andpresumably single) woman. She’sgoing to have a big house and own lotsof books. Apart from the wing-growth, and maybe the singledomtoo, it all seemed totally plausible forher: the little girl wearing a jinglinganklets and a bindi, who was bornunder a thatched roof in a Tamilvillage. Suddenly she saw a shootingstar, shrieked, and collapsed ingiggles. Perhaps she was her mother’sdaughter, too. �

Students in uniform


In the months after 9/11,American forces in Afghanistanbombed the Taliban and, in

vain, hunted for Osama bin Laden,while in Washington counter-terror-ism experts worried about “the nextAfghanistan,” a safe haven whereterrorists would train, test theirweapons and organize attacks on theUnited States. These discussionsproduced a double-barrelled nation-al-security strategy that dominatedPresident George W Bush’s tenure.The first element of the strategy was

to identify and eliminate terroristnetworks that already existed. Thesecond was to prevent new networksfrom flourishing by promoting open,democratic societies that, the think-ing went, would be less susceptibleto Al Qaeda’s message than closedones. Hard and soft power would bebrought to bear on all the potentialAfghanistans, while Afghanistanitself would be kept from regressing.

The list of candidates for the nextAfghanistan was long. Just aboutevery Muslim-majority country, or

even those with sizable Muslimminorities, was considered suspect.Intelligence analysts fixed theirattention on remote islands and jun-gles in the Philippines andIndonesia and on the rugged moun-tains of Pakistan’s tribal areas.Africa emerged as one of the great-est areas of concern, and the Sahel, ascrubby band of ungoverned terrainstraddling Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa, proved especiallytroublesome. An Islamist govern-ment in Sudan was host to bin

The Saharan ConundrumWill Mauritania become ‘the next Afghanistan’?

Nicholas Schmidle

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Laden for five years during the1990s. In Algeria, an Islamist insur-gency ultimately commanded by theSalafist Group for Preaching andCombat, better known by its Frenchacronym, GSPC, was entering itssecond bloody decade. And inMauritania only 3.5 million peopleoccupied an area the size of Texasand New Mexico combined, makingit — despite decades of oppressivemilitary rule — one of the least-con-trolled parts of the world.

The Sahel soon became a labora-tory for the United States to test itspolicies in the “global war on terror.”In 2002, the State Departmentstarted the Pan-Sahel Initiative, acounter-terrorism program thatinvolved working with local mili-taries in Mali, Niger, Chad andMauritania. In 2005, the program,in partnership with the UnitedStates Agency for InternationalDevelopment and the Pentagon,expanded under a new name toNigeria, Senegal, Morocco, Algeriaand Tunisia. Special Forces opera-tives remain in some of the coun-tries year-round to train localarmies at battling insurgencies andrebellions and to prevent bin Ladenand his allies from expanding intothe region.

Things haven’t quite goneaccording to plan. Rebels stillthreaten to overrun the capital ofChad, and in Sudan the violence inDarfur became worse. Meanwhile,Al Qaeda established sanctuaries inthe Sahel, and in 2006 it acquired aNorth African franchise. Terroristattacks in the region increased inboth number and lethality.

Almost since the war on terrorbegan, the Bush administration hasbeen criticized for lecturing theIraqis and the Iranians aboutdemocracy while supporting author-itarian regimes in Egypt, SaudiArabia and Pakistan. Despite anavowed national-security strategythat prized both democratic valuesand killing terrorists, the emphasisalmost always fell on the latter. But

in some places at least, the admin-istration’s approach to counter-ter-rorism has undergone significantchanges. As the terrorist threatappeared to change its nature, cer-tain administration policy makersresponded with a level of nuancerarely associated with George W Bush.

Nowhere was this shift more evi-dent than in Mauritania, where,last summer, a military coup top-pled a democratically elected gov-ernment. The generals justified thecoup on security grounds. TheUnited States responded by sus-pending its military aid even as thejunta highlighted the threat it facedfrom Al Qaeda. A month after thecoup, militants claiming to be asso-ciated with Al Qaeda ambushed amilitary convoy in northernMauritania and killed 12 soldiers.Was the United States putting itscommitment to democracy aheadof its commitment to fighting ter-rorists? Or was the war on terrorchanging, with the United States nolonger seeing every jihadist fran-chise as an existential threat?

“I have always thought thatdemocracy was our best anti-terrorweapon,” Mark Boulware, theAmerican ambassador toMauritania, told me when I met himin Washington last fall. Boulwarearrived in Mauritania at an oppor-tune time. In April 2007, Sidi OuldCheikh Abdallahi became presidentafter the country’s first transparentelection. Cooperation with theUnited States on security issuesimmediately resumed, ending a two-year hiatus that followed a coup in2005. With Abdallahi’s presidency,the Bush administration’s two dom-inant priorities, fighting terrorismand promoting democracy,appeared to dovetail perfectly.

Deputy Secretary of State JohnNegroponte flew to Nouakchott, thecapital of Mauritania, forAbdallahi’s inauguration ceremony.Months later, Bush invitedAbdallahi to an intimate discussion

among emerging democracies dur-ing the United Nations GeneralAssembly meeting. Washington wel-comed Mauritania into itsThreshold Program, an anteroom tofull membership in the MillenniumChallenge Account — the flagship ofthe Bush administration’s approachto development aid, where fundsbecame available only after coun-tries achieved a certain score on arange of good-government indexes.

The democratic movement inMauritania did not last long. LastAugust, Abdallahi’s generals over-threw him after he tried to firethem. The American partnershipwith Mauritania promptly col-lapsed. A high-tech American sur-veillance plane, which had beenbased in Mauritania to fly over thenorthern part of the country,searching for Al Qaeda trainingcamps, was removed, as were the 80or so Army and Marine SpecialForces troops that were training acounter-terrorism unit. TheThreshold Program funds dried up,and Mauritania’s chances for mem-bership in the MillenniumChallenge Account disappeared.

“We were using Mauritania as anexample of how countries shouldmove forward with elections,” DellDailey, the State Department’scounter-terrorism coordinator, toldme. Dailey served more than threedecades in the army’s shadowyworld of Special Operations, eventu-ally leading such operations in Iraqand Afghanistan before joining theState Department in the summer of2007. Dailey said the Americanmessage was simple: “When youhold elections, there are certain ben-efits, like assistance in security andlaw enforcement and economicdevelopment. The three pillars oftrying to defeat terrorism and builda good society are development,good governance and security. InMauritania, they were moving inthat direction. The coup wasextremely disappointing.”

The junta tried to convince the


world otherwise, claiming thatAbdallahi had been weak on terror-ism. The new leaders said that, bylegalizing an Islamist party andmeeting with moderate Islamists torequest help in challenging thegrowing militant Salafist movementin the country, Abdallahi paved theway for a string of terrorist attacksin Mauritania over the past twoyears. The military’s charges wereignored by Washington, however.

To this day, Washington consid-ers Abdallahi the legitimate presi-dent of Mauritania. Two capitalscoexist: one in Nouakchott, whereGen. Mohamed Ould Abdel Azizoccupies the presidential palace;and one in Abdallahi’s hometown,Lemden, where he lives in internalexile. (On the anniversary ofMauritania’s independence day,Bush sent Abdallahi a congratulato-ry letter there.) Even the vocabular-ies used in the two capitals are dif-

ferent: Abdallahi and his supportersslip the words “democracy” and“election” into every sentence, whilethe junta talks about “terrorism”and “Al Qaeda” at every turn.

Now, the junta waits forPresident Barack Obama to givethe country a fresh look. “We hopethat your new president, a youngman with the interests of Africa inmind, will be more understandingof our situation,” Mohamed OuldMoine, the minister of communi-cation, told me.

When not pushing democracy,the Bush administration focused onfinding and killing terrorists.Missiles from Predator drones werefired at militants in Iraq,Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia andYemen. In the Sahel, counter-terror-ism officials faced people like SidiOuld Sidna, a young Mauritanianwho had a strange career as a footsoldier in an Al Qaeda affiliate.

Sidna’s story demonstrates bothhow America’s jihadist adversarieshave become more complicated thanthe Bush administration first envi-sioned and how, in the end, somefigures on the administration’scounter-terrorism team fashionedan unexpected response.

Late last year, I spoke to a num-ber of sources in Mauritania and theUnited States, both inside and out-side of government, about counter-terrorism operations in the regionand the activities of Al Qaeda associ-ates there like Sidna. Many couldnot identify themselves in printbecause of the nature of their work,but from these interviews I was ableto piece together a picture ofjihadism in this part of the world.

Sidna grew up in a poor neigh-bourhood of Nouakchott calledToujanine. When I went there oneevening in December, I found kidsplaying soccer at dusk in a wide dirt

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road. Goats rummaged throughtrash that filled a ditch about fivefeet from the front door of Sidna’shome. According to friends, neigh-bours and relatives, Sidna had a rep-utation as a scrappy kid. “Sidi wasn’ta thief, because thieves rob you andrun,” one childhood friend told me.“Sidi took your watch or your T-shirtright in front of you.” By his mid-teens, Sidna was smoking hashish,drinking wine and hanging out withan older crowd. He liked to danceand earned the nickname Lambada.Besides robbing people, he also stolecars. Friends and law-enforcementauthorities claim that he wasinvolved in multiple rapes.

But his conscience apparentlycaught up with him by his late teens.He joined a friend at a mahadra —an Islamic seminary — outsideNouakchott. He spent severalmonths there and, like many restlessyoung men in the region, grew fondof listening to jihadist audio record-ings, particularly those of AbuMusab al-Zarqawi, the leader ofIraq’s Al Qaeda franchise, that circu-lated around the mahadra.

“Why Zarqawi?” I asked the friendwho took Sidna to the mahadra.“What made his sermons appealing?”

“Everyone in the Muslim worldwants to see American tanks blownup and their troops killed,” he said.“But bin Laden and Zarqawi werethe only ones actually doing it. Sidnaadmired them for that.”

Sidna returned home toToujanine a changed, yet no mel-lower, person. As part of hisZarqawi-fueled indoctrination, headopted the ideology of takfir, orexcommunication, which someextremists use to justify violenceagainst nonbelievers. He began con-verting some of his fellow gangmembers into militant Salafists.Sidna ordered his sisters to covertheir heads, patrolled the neigh-bourhood for unmarried coupleswalking together and spent longhours arguing with his father, a Sufi,during which times he called him aninfidel. He told his younger brotherthat he wanted to wage jihad againstthe Americans. Then Sidna headedoff to a training camp.

In the spring of 2006, Sidna trav-elled to a camp in northern Mali runby the G.S.P.C., the notoriousAlgerian-Salafi group. He prayedthat those running the camp wouldsend him to Iraq to fight againstAmericans. The invasion of

Afghanistan, followed by the one inIraq, attracted young men from allover North Africa eager to wagejihad against the United States.Fernando Reinares, the director of aprogram on global terrorism atElcano Royal Institute in Madrid,says GSPC camps served as one ofthe main conduits of foreign fightersinto Iraq. “They recruited individu-als at the local level, trained themand then sent them to Iraq,” he said.European police reported a growingnumber of GSPC cells in majorcities. In 2002, authorities in Italyclaimed to have disrupted a GSPCplot in Bologna to bomb the Basilicaof San Petronio, which has a 15th-century fresco of the ProphetMuhammad being tormented bydemons in hell.

Sidna was disappointed when hereached the camp. The GSPC was inthe midst of an overhaul. He foundthat the group was no longer lookingfor able-bodied young men to dis-patch to Iraq, in part because ofAmerican pressure on North Africanleaders to clamp down on the migra-tion of jihadists to Iraq. But it wasalso by choice. Now the GSPC had anew mission, to recruit non-Algerian militants to spread jihad

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south of Algeria.Sidna fit into the group’s plans

perfectly. The GSPC’s financescouldn’t keep pace with its ambi-tions, however. So G.S.P.C. leadersreached out to Zarqawi, who, untilhe was killed by American forces inIraq in June 2006, enjoyed not onlyname recognition but also a seem-ingly endless pile of money. WithZarqawi as matchmaker, the GSPCcourted Al Qaeda itself. Afterlengthy negotiations, bin Laden’sdeputy, the Egyptian doctor Aymanal-Zawahiri, announced the “blessedunion” between the GSPC and AlQaeda on Sept. 11, 2006. Hedeclared that the merger would be“a bone in the throat of Americanand French crusaders.” Monthslater, the GSPC proclaimed its newname: Al Qaeda in the IslamicMaghreb, or AQIM.

AQIM immediately set its sightson Mauritania. Not only was thecountry mostly vacant space andtherefore a potential site for trainingcamps, but as a close ally of theUnited States and one of only threeArab League states to maintain fulldiplomatic relations with Israel, itpresented an easy propaganda tar-get. The GSPC had already sentKhaddim Ould Semane, a

Mauritanian militant, back toNouakchott with instructions toestablish a cell. Semane named hisgroup Al-Ansar Allah al-Murabitun,the Army of Allah in the Lands ofMurabitun. (Murabitun was the11th-century Islamic empire inNorth Africa.) He would eventuallybecome a leader of AQIM inMauritania. Sidna was sent back toNouakchott with orders to stay onthe lookout for possible targets.Sidna returned to Mauritania feelingfrustrated, according to his youngerbrother, whom I spoke to inDecember. Sidna knew how to shoota gun (having served a year in theMauritanian army), had an exten-sive background in theft and showedthe vigour of a fundamentalist. Butif he wanted to be part of Al Qaeda,he would have to earn the privilege.

Eight months after Abdallahi’selection established Mauritania’sdemocratic credentials and won itnew support in the West, Sidnastruck. On Christmas Eve 2007,Sidna, now 21, and two accomplicesdecided to stalk five French touristsjust outside the town of Aleg, 150miles east of Nouakchott. TheFrench were picnicking in the shadeof a tree around lunchtime when,authorities charge, Sidna or one of

his accomplices opened fire with aKalashnikov and killed four of them.The militants hopped into hired carsand escaped. After a three-weekmanhunt, through Senegal, Gambiaand finally Guinea-Bissau, Frenchintelligence agents arrested them.

On the day of his extradition toMauritania, Sidna looked more likea club kid than a terrorist: bluejeans, brown leather jacket, clean-shaven. As he strutted past a batteryof cameramen while walking towardthe tan DC-3 waiting to fly him backto Nouakchott, he stared into onecamera and said, “Guinea-Bissauwill pay dearly for mistreatingGod’s warriors.” The tape played on Mauritanian television and radio for days.

Sidna escaped from prison threemonths later. He hid in a two-storyvilla that had been rented bySemane in an upscale neighbour-hood of Nouakchott. It was paintedyellow with a white railing thatwrapped around the upstairsporch. Inside, a handful of terror-ists had amassed weapons, explo-sives and suicide belts. The daybefore Sidna arrived, they stole acar and parked it in the garage.(They didn’t know it, but the carwas being used by Mauritania’s

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ambassador to the United States.)Days after Sidna’s jailbreak, the

police responded to a tip and encir-cled the yellow house. The militantsshot and killed one policeman,sparking an intense gun battle thatpockmarked the villa. The sound ofautomatic weapons resoundedthrough Nouakchott’s usually placidstreets. After 15 minutes, the terror-ists piled into the ambassador’s car.Sidna filled ammunition clips in thebackseat while Semane drove andothers sat on the ledges of the openwindows. As the garage dooropened, the car burst out, brokethrough the police cordon and raceddown the dirt roads. A terrorist was shot and fell out of a car window. But Sidna, once again, had disappeared.

Police arrested him three weekslater. On the day he was broughtbefore the court, Sidna taunted thejudge, shouting, “Our martyrs are inheaven, yours are in hell.”

The Algerian leader of AQIMlater said that Sidna and his com-panions were “connected” with hisgroup, although the murder in Aleg,at least, seemed to bear Sidna’s per-sonal stamp more than that of AlQaeda or its North African fran-chise. “This is the shape of the futurefor Al Qaeda — free agents layingclaim to the mantle of ideologicalcoherence, all of which goes underthe name of Al Qaeda,” said MikeMcGovern, a professor at YaleUniversity and former West Africadirector for the International CrisisGroup, an independent research andadvocacy group.

Are legions of these “free agent”jihadis, operating loosely in thename of Al Qaeda, more worrying orless worrying than a centralized AlQaeda? Western intelligence agen-cies no longer agree on the nature ofthe threat. The Europeans generallyconsider AQIM a far greater dangerthan do the Americans. This pastfall, Germany’s intelligence servicestated publicly that AQIM hadestablished training camps in the

desert of northeastern Mauritania,in addition to those already presentin Algeria and Mali. But when Iasked one American counter-terror-ism official about the claim, he snig-gered. “What are we calling a train-ing camp?” he said. “Guys shootingsmall firearms? That happens at thelocal skeet range. A training campsuggests a level of organisationalstructure that I don’t think is there.”

In the early years after 9/11,scare-mongering about Al Qaedadominated counter-terrorism analy-sis in the United States. Almost any-one who partook in violence withinthe general confines of the Islamicworld was tagged as a potentialmember of Al Qaeda, regardless of whom or what they were fighting for.

But political and religious vio-lence in the Sahel usually hadnothing to do with militias fight-ing for Shariah or bidding to joinAl Qaeda. More often than not, thefighting involved long-runningterritorial disputes; ethnic, clan or

tribal quibbles like those constant-ly plaguing Chad; and Muslimsfighting Muslims, seen most vivid-ly in Darfur. It is difficult to isolateand identify the extent to whichIslam does or doesn’t play intoeach instance of violence in theMuslim world.

There is little question that AQIMis composed of anti-AmericanIslamic militants, but some regionalexperts stress that this doesn’t meanthey take orders or receive moneyfrom bin Laden — or pose a seriousthreat to American security. What, ifany, are the entitlements of mem-bership in the Al Qaeda franchise? Iasked Dell Dailey, the counter-ter-rorism coordinator at the StateDepartment, what the GSPC gainedby changing its name to AQIM. Hetold me that when AQIM membersjoined with Al Qaeda they received a“burst of money, maybe a couple ofhundred thousand dollars, thatallowed them to knock out a fewearly suicide bombings with a strongAl Qaeda flavour.” The string of

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lethal attacks included explosionsaimed at government buildings andnaval barracks, and the bombing ofa United Nations building in Algeriathat killed more than 40 people,including, for the first time, a largenumber of foreigners. Dailey added,“Once they jumped on the AQ name,they showed an internationalistchoice of targets that GSPC just had-n’t done before.”

Once they had spent the initialinfusion of money, however, AQIMreverted to its former ways. Thesemethods included car theft, credit-card fraud, smuggling and kidnap-ping. Jean-Luc Marret, a fellow atthe Foundation for StrategicResearch in Paris who is also affiliat-ed with Johns Hopkins University’sCenter for Transatlantic Relations,said that AQIM’s fund-raising “isnot about Saudi banking and globalIslamic NGO’s, but small, encrustedcells, trabendo (contraband) andpetty smuggling.”

Dell Dailey said that AQIM’s

impulse to indulge in criminalactivities is partly born out of thefact that they “can’t connect to thecentral branch anymore,” whichaffects personnel and finances. Notonly are “raw recruits” like Sidnaless able to get to Iraq orAfghanistan, but as an organisa-tion, Dailey told me, Al Qaeda ismore constrained now. “They can’tmove, communicate, recruit andpost money as successfully as theycould in the early days after 9/11,”he said. “We have given Al Qaedatoo much credit from 9/11 onwards.We have embellished them morethan they deserve.”

But just because aspiring mili-tants in Algeria, Morocco orMauritania might find it tougher tobuy a plane ticket to Amman andslip across the border into Iraq does-n’t mean their grievances have dis-appeared. With, in the words of oneAmerican military official, “thedemand signal [for jihadists] waydown in Iraq,” there appears to be a

reverse migration of North Africanfighters coming home to join AQIM.A result has been an injection offree-agent militants into the Sahelwith crisscrossing loyalties, and noone is sure who is in command.There are even rumours of splitsamong the AQIM leadership. “TheAQIM folks in northern Mali are nota monolithic group,” the official,who is a specialist in North Africa,told me. “Are the Mauritanians partof AQIM? The debate remains unre-solved. Some of them are takingorders directly from AQIM. Somehave gone to the camps and thenwent back to Mauritania to starttheir own franchise. And there’ssome home-grown factor. InMauritania you see all of it.”

In early September, a monthafter the coup, top Mauritanianarmy officials learned that five vehi-cles carrying AQIM fighters hadcrossed from northern Mali intoMauritania and were racing acrossthe desert toward Zouerate, an iron-mining town about 500 miles northof Nouakchott. Zouerate is the heartof Mauritania’s economy. Ironaccounts for almost half of thenation’s exports. Any disruption inZouerate’s daily routine could crip-ple the country. A hastily organizedgovernment patrol — composed offour light-brown Land Cruisers, 19soldiers, an officer, a civilian guideand two .50-caliber mountedmachine guns — headed into thedesert to take on the militants.

“Al Qaeda wants to destabilizeour country,” Col. Mohamed OuldEl Hadi, Mauritania’s director ofnational security, told me lastmonth in his office in Nouakchott.It has had considerable successalready. Even though AQIM’sattacks have been less grand in scalethan the bombing of the UnitedNations building in Algiers inDecember 2007, its Mauritanianoperations have proved more debil-itating. The murder of the fourFrench tourists in late 2007, fol-lowed by a gun assault on the Israeli

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Embassy in Nouakchott in early2008, dealt a devastating blow tothe tourism industry. Not twoweeks after the French touristswere killed, organizers of theannual Paris-Dakar Rally, whoseroute normally covers a consider-able stretch of Mauritania, can-celled the race. (The 2009 rallyrelocated to South America.) Someestimate that the number oftourists who visit Mauritania isdown by half.

No one in the patrol sent fromZouerate had received Americancounter-terrorism training, and theysoon went from hunters to hunted.Shortly after dark, they discovered aline of fresh tire tracks in the sand —made by AQIM fighters, who hadcamped on a dune in the distance.The patrol motored up the trackswhile the militants watched the

headlights bounce over the dunes.The militants waited as the lightsgrew brighter and the whine of theengines of the Land Cruisers grewlouder. The lead vehicle had justclimbed into view when AQIMopened fire.

Initial reports suggested thatAQIM had kidnapped the soldiers.Hoping to stop the terrorists beforethey returned to their sanctuary innorthern Mali, the Mauritanianmilitary asked the United States forhelp. The Americans refused, reaf-firming the position that the juntashould restore Abdallahi first.

Two days after the ambush, whilethe US Embassy was still refusing toassist the ruling junta and the searchfor the missing soldiers continued,AQIM issued a communiqué. Thegroup boasted of a “new attack in thecity of Zouerate in northern

Mauritania against those who obeythe Jews.” The communiqué went on,“By God’s grace, the brigades ofMujahideen set an ambush for thearmy of unbelief and apostasy thatmanaged to take 12 soldiers prisoner,including a commander by the rankof captain . . . while the rest of Allah’senemies escaped, fleeing their failureand defeat.” The next day, aMauritanian official told me, asearch-and-rescue team moved to anarea where vultures were circlingoverhead and found 12 bloated,naked corpses, lined up side by side.Three of them were booby-trappedwith dynamite. All but one wasbeheaded.

At the end of its second term, theBush administration’s strategy forthe war on terror remained within theframework in which the war was firstconceived — destroy terrorist networks

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and promote democracy — but themanner in which those principles wereput into effect had clearly changed.Even someone like Dell Dailey, whowas deeply involved for years in fight-ing terrorists with traditional militarytactics, had come to reject the idea ofembracing a military government inMauritania just because of the pres-ence of an Al Qaeda affiliate inside thecountry. In its final year, the Bushadministration seemed to understandthat, in places like Pakistan, it had cre-ated legions of enemies with itsunflinching support for PresidentPervez Musharraf. It hoped to avoiddoing the same thing in Mauritania,even as the junta, like Musharraf,decried the former civilian leaders ascorrupt and weak on terrorism.

The Obama administration iscontinuing the recalibration ofcounter-terrorism. President

Obama has promised to close themilitary prison at GuantánamoBay, and Adm. Mike Mullen, thechairman of the Joint Chiefs ofStaff, recently cautioned againstthe militarisation of foreign policy.“Armed forces may not always bethe best choice to take the lead,” hesaid during a speech inWashington in January, addinglater that “we need to reallocateroles and resources in a way thatplaces our military as an equalamong many in government.”Similar themes have been echoedlately by the secretary of defence,Robert Gates, and others engagedin counter-terrorism policy. Thecoup by the Mauritanian junta mayhave been badly timed. Part of thenew strategic thinking inWashington involves being lessoptimistic about the power of mili-

taries to solve political problems.The war against Al Qaeda will

undoubtedly continue, but a morenuanced analysis of Al Qaeda hasled to a more nuanced approach tocombating terrorism and a recon-sideration of how the strategy thatguided the war on terror in its earlyyears should be put into effect.This is partly a result of new think-ing in Washington and, accordingto security officials, partially aresult of bin Laden’s questionablebusiness model: the franchise.“Where GSPC was, to where AQIMis today, I just don’t see the mergeras a force multiplier for them,” asenior defence official familiar withSpecial Operations told me. The waron terror isbeing reconceived, andthe result may not look very muchlike a w at all. �

[© (2009) The New York Times News Service]

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On a cold, damp night lastNovember, a Mercedes sedanlooped through the semicir-

cular drive of the St. James Paris, acentury-old chateau-style hotelacross the Seine from the EiffelTower. As the car rolled to a halt atthe hotel’s main entrance, a well-tai-lored trim man named Ely Calilwalked unhurriedly out the lobbydoor and down wide stone steps, talk-ing into an earpiece that was connect-ed, through a thin black wire, to a tinycell phone tucked in the closed palmof one hand. The driver stepped fromthe car and opened the door for Calil,who interrupted his conversation togive the driver instructions. He spokein a voice a little above a whisper,perhaps just a touch softer than hisnormal cool, flat tone. The driverreturned to his seat and steered thecar out through the granite-pillaredentryway and onto Avenue Bugeaud.

Calil had flown to Paris earlier thatday from London, where he resides.Born in Nigeria in 1945 to a promi-nent family of Lebanese origin, Calilbelongs to a small group of middle-men, a few dozen at most, who quiet-ly grease the wheels of the globalenergy business, brokering transac-tions between oil companies and gov-ernments. The oil business operateson the basis of discreet payments,transfers, and backroom deals—notnecessarily illegal— arranged by fix-ers like Calil. He has funnelled moneyto African dictators to obtain conces-sions for oil companies, traded oilfrom Russia following the collapse ofthe Soviet Union, and advised presi-

dents and exiled political leaders.Along the way, he has not onlyamassed an immense personal for-tune but has established a web ofpolitical ties stretching from Africato the Middle East to the UnitedStates. “He’s built a very effectivenetwork of contacts and allegiancesand loyalties through money andallowances,” a former senior CIAofficial who has worked with Caliltold me, not without admiration.“It’s sort of like The Godfather. Oneday he’ll come to ask for a favour,and you’ll have to comply.”

That night in Paris, Calil’s destina-tion was Spring, a popular restaurantin the ninth arrondissement thatoffers a set four-course menu to six-teen diners nightly. Awaiting us at acorner table was Friedhelm Eronat, aclose friend and sometime businesspartner of Calil’s who is equally reclu-sive and press-averse. Like Calil, he isone of the world’s leading oil fixers,having grown rich brokering deals forMobil (before it merged with Exxon)in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Nigeria;more recently he has done businessin Argentina, Brazil, and China. Untillast year, Eronat lived just down theroad from Calil in a Victorian man-sion in London’s Chelsea neighbour-hood. But after an acrimonious sepa-ration, and pending divorce, he nowspends most of his time in Genevaand Paris, where he lives in an apart-ment near the St James.

Eronat was waiting at Spring withtwo Russian models, one tall andblonde in a dark dress and knee-length black boots, and the other with

dark hair and porcelain skin andwearing jeans. Eronat was born inGermany but moved with his motherto Louisiana when he was a youngboy. Tall and hefty, he looks quite abit younger than his fifty-five years,and was dressed casually in light-brown corduroys and a tan pullover.Eronat studied petroleum engineer-ing at Louisiana State University inthe 1970s and got a job as an engineerafter graduating, then went to workfor an oil-trading firm before branch-ing out on his own. Eronat met Calilin the early 1980s, in Nigeria. “Elywas the man to see,” Eronat recalled,after sampling a red wine and thenordering several bottles for the table.

“Back then,” he added, “it was avery small club, and we all knew oneanother. You did business by gentle-man’s agreement. When you calledand said you had a cargo of crude,you confirmed the price and detailsover the phone. If your word wasn’thonoured, you were finished.” Foryears, Calil and Eronat attended thetwice-a-year meetings of OPEC oilministers, and the two men havepartnered together numerous times,though “we never had anything inwriting, Friedhelm and I, not once,”Calil said of their dealings. One par-ticularly profitable stretch involvedexporting oil from Russia in the earlypost-Soviet days. Calil recounted thatthey had met many of the country’sfuture oligarchs “when they werewearing funny suits and selling shoesand cigarette lighters.”

With the global financial marketsnow in crisis, the two men spoke of

Invisible HandsThe secret world of the oil fixer

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some old comrades who had fallen onhard times. “They’re all selling theiryachts,” Eronat said with a grim look.One friend, an Uzbek named Sascha,“had $44 billion, and now he’s downto a billion.”

“It happens,” Calil deadpanned.The waiter brought a bouillabaisse,small plates of scallops in a trufflesauce, and veal loin with poachedpear. Everyone agreed the food wasdelicious, but there were complaintsabout the “presentation.” Calil andEronat, serious gourmets, seemedparticularly dismayed. The two mendecided to head to the famousbrasserie L’Ami Louis for a propermeal. (This would include more wine,a plate of potatoes baked with dollopsof goose fat and topped with shavedgarlic, foie gras and toast and corni-chons, scallops, and snails in butterand garlic.) For years, L’Ami Louiswas a sort of headquarters for theirmutual operations, and they remi-nisced about a dinner there in themid-1990s when they hosted four-teen well-connected Russians. “It wasjust them and the two of us,” Eronatrecalled while we were still at Spring.“We ordered a bottle of wine andthen another and another”—hemimed guzzling directly from thebottle—“until the waiter just broughta case of wine and put it on theground next to our table.” It was anextraordinarily expensive meal, thetwo men recalled, but well worth it, inthat it played an important role inadvancing their Russia business.

Before dessert was served, Calilasked for the check and called L’AmiLouis from his cell phone. “You don’task for a table, you just say you’recoming,” he said as he hung up.

The next morning, when I satdown for coffee with Calil andEronat at the St James, Eronat

was reading the InternationalHerald Tribune. He folded the paper,pushed it my way, and pointed to astory: Spain’s government was hesi-tating to allow the Russian companyLukoil to buy a controlling stake in

Repsol YPF, Spain’s largest oil firm.“Oil is not a commodity,” Eronat said.“It’s a political weapon.”

Oil, first and foremost, is a $2 tril-lion international industry, and mostof this annual haul is extracted fromunder undeveloped nations. As DickCheney put it when he was CEO ofHalliburton, “The good Lord didn’tsee fit to put oil and gas only wherethere are democratically electedregimes friendly to the UnitedStates.” Sometimes, a company willreach out to rulers of oil-rich stateson its own, negotiating and strikingdeals with them through officialemissaries. More often, though, acompany will instead work throughmen like Calil and Eronat: indepen-dent fixers, whose job it is to knowthe leaders and other governmentofficials for whom oil serves as bothpiggybank and “political weapon.”

A fixer can open doors for his cor-porate clients, arranging introduc-tions to the various potentates heknows. He can help companies navi-gate the local bureaucracy, or providethe lay of the land with political andeconomic intelligence, or point toimportant people or companies thatshould be courted or hired in order tocurry favour. And, in some cases, thefixer can feed money to those inpower, in payoffs that often would be

illegal under the stringent Americanand European anti-bribery laws.Edward Chow, a former Chevronexecutive who spent more than threedecades in the oil business, describedto me the logic by which fixers thrive.With the US anti-corruption laws, heexplained, “There is no grey zone.The lines are drawn very strictly. Onthe other hand, executives of oil com-panies are sent overseas to makedeals, and they are measured by per-formance: you either make the dealor you don’t. So you’re supposed to beclean but you’re also supposed to cre-ate business. That leads to a tension,and a temptation to use middlemen.Let him do whatever he needs to do;I’m not part of it and don’t wantto know.”

Although bribery and other pay-offs have undeniably been part ofthe fixers’ trade, the best are farmore than bagmen to dictators.“There’s a real art to acting as anagent, and the role differs fromcountry to country,” Robin Bhatty,an energy industry analyst, told me.“In most of the world, business isdone on a personal basis. The bestway of getting something done isfinding someone who knows some-one who you want to know, and youuse them to make introductions.”(“Just the same way you’re calling

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OPEC headquarters


me now,” he added, after I askedhim to put me in touch with someenergy-industry officials I was hop-ing to interview.) Because oil fixersplay such an important and sensitiverole, they can accumulate extraordi-nary power with heads of state, whooften bestow on them the title ofpresidential adviser and grant themuse of a diplomatic passport.“Trading in weapons is trading insovereignty,” says Philippe Vasset,editor of the Paris-based newsletterAfrica Energy Intelligence. “If youdon’t have them, you can’t defendyour borders. It’s the same with oil,which gives you the liberty to runyour ships and planes and tanks,and your economy. If you don’t haveit, you can’t run your country.”

Besides Calil and Eronat, key bro-kers of recent decades have includedMarc Rich, the controversial Clintonpardon recipient who founded whatis now the oil-trading firm Glencoreand, in the 1970s, pioneered thepractice of oil-for-commoditiestrades; John Deuss, who once ownedhis own tanker fleet and who duringthe 1980s smuggled vast quantitiesof oil to South Africa’s apartheidregime, then under an internationaltrade embargo; Hany Salaam, aLebanese middleman who madenumerous deals for OccidentalPetroleum Corporation during thedays of Armand Hammer, its formerchairman; and Oscar Wyatt, aHouston oilman and corporateraider who was jailed in 2007 in con-nection with the U.N. oil-for-foodscandal. In the African oil market,two major players have been SamuelDossou-Aworet, a long-time oil andfinancial adviser to Gabon’s presi-dent, Omar Bongo; and GilbertChagoury, another Lebanese whowas especially close to Nigerian rulerSani Abacha. “There used to be aboutforty people who ran the oil tradingbusiness,” Eronat told me. “Theworld got bigger, especially when theoil market boomed and the hedgefunds came in, but it’s still a prettysmall group of people.”

At breakfast, Calil and Eronatspoke about another fixer, a mutualfriend of theirs named James Giffen.A New York business consultant,Giffen is facing charges in anAmerican court over allegations thathe funnelled more than $78 millionto Nursultan Nazarbayev, the presi-dent of Kazakhstan. The moneyallegedly came from fees paid toGiffen by American oil companiesthat subsequently won stakes inKazakh oil fields. Giffen also gaveNazarbayev and his wife gifts,including his-and-hers snowmobilesand hundreds of thousands of dol-lars’ worth of jewellery. “Oil fieldsare a battleground,” said Eronat. “IfJim had not been involved, other[non- American] firms would havegotten the contracts, and the loser would have been the US government.”

Calil, who had recently visitedGiffen in New York, concurred. “Jimnever worked for the CIA, but hecontinuously informed the CIA,” hesaid, a line of argument that Giffenhas advanced in court and that clear-ly has some merit. “He was neverdiscouraged and in fact was encour-aged to have that relationship withNazarbayev. You don’t take him tocourt—you give him a medal.”“Americans want their gasolinecheap,” Calil added. “But it’s not pos-sible without cutting a few corners.”

Iwas able to see some of a fixer’swork firsthand last summer,when Calil brought me along to a

meeting with a New York hedge fundwhose offices overlooked ParkAvenue just south of Grand Centralstation. Calil and a few of his associ-ates gathered around a conferencetable with the fund’s two bosses,whose names I agreed to withhold.One was American, neatly groomedand dressed, with the personality ofan accountant; the other wasAustrian, and he did most of the talk-ing. The Austrian wore blue jeans anda white dress shirt with a few buttonsundone, and his hair was wild likeEinstein’s. Eccentric, arrogant, andutterly obnoxious—all traits that nodoubt served him well in directingthe hedge fund—he was flying off toSt Tropez the next day for a dentalappointment.

The Austrian began the meetingby telling Calil and his associates a lit-tle bit about the fund. He explainedhow (no doubt for tax purposes) thefirm’s myriad assets were “ring-fenced” in Panama, Luxembourg,and the British Virgin Islands, withseparate contracts to operate eachproperty. Its holdings included a bootfactory in China and 150,000hectares of Brazilian rainforest, hesaid, though when I asked him wherethe property in Brazil was he had noidea. The fund also had bought two

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defunct oil refineries, and theseacquisitions were to be the subjectof the day’s meeting. Because therefineries were quite old and couldprocess only very dirty crude, fewcountries would allow them tooperate today. When the fund tookover the refineries, it believed ithad buyers who would reassemblethem elsewhere, but the deals fellthrough.

Now both of the refineries werecrated up, and in one case the hedgefund had a contract requiring thatthe refinery be removed in a matterof months. The fund had hundredsof millions of dollars tied up in thesetwo refineries, so they were callingon Ely Calil for his expertise inunloading them.

As he and the Austrian discussedthe problem, a curious negotiationbegan to take place. The latter tookgreat pains to stress how trifling thismatter was to him; if Calil couldhelp, then great, his tone implied,but otherwise he had many ways toresolve the situation. Calil clearlysaw through this pose but did hisadmirable best to remain polite.

“Perhaps it’s just my fatalism,” hebegan, “but it’s not going to be easyto sell the refineries.” He pointedout that few countries today couldpossibly accept refineries so nox-ious. Angola had potential, he said,

but the country was so corrupt andits bureaucracy so complicated that adeal would be hard to strike. Nigeriawas, in theory, another option, butagain the politics were complex.“You’d need to find a state governorto support the project, and it’s possi-ble that that could be arranged, butyou also already have all the turmoilin the Delta region,” which added, hesaid, an additional political complication.

The Austrian insisted that healready had a number of possibilitiesin play, and that he even had a“process” whereby he was evaluatingthose possibilities. He mentionedPakistan in particular: “We have gov-ernment support in Pakistan. Theycan change the government threetimes, I don’t care. For me this newguy is better than the last one.” Buthe acknowledged that a refinery therewould be in constant danger of hav-ing its profits seized by the unstablegovernment. “You have 170,000starving people, and you don’t wantthem all running to Islamabad,” hesaid. “If you have an economic crisisand food prices are climbing, the gov-ernment might step in and say to theowner, ‘You can only take a two per-cent profit.’ Maybe even for a fewyears you’d have to take no profit as a‘contribution’ to the country.”

“Through your process and myfatalism,” Calil replied, “we’vereached the same conclusion.” Ofcourse the hedge fund didn’t reallyhave an easy option in Pakistan, oranywhere else, and so it needed hishelp—for which he could command asteep price. Calil laid out a rough planfor how he might place at least one ofthe refineries. He had identified apotential spot in Lebanon, in the portcity of Tripoli. An old refinery therehad been shut down about thirtyyears ago; it was fed from a pipelinethat originated in Kirkuk and ranthrough Syria. Now that the Iraqigovernment wanted to ship oil fromKirkuk again, Calil went on, Lebanonmight be persuaded to site a refineryin the same spot.

Of course, the hedge fund wouldneed political support; but fortu-nately, Calil said, he knew theLebanese energy minister, and alsohad political contacts in Syria andIraq. The fund would also needpetroleum engineers to work at theTripoli site, but Calil had just such ateam at the ready, a group of twenty-three Bosnian Muslims with whomhe’d worked before on a project inChina. As mosque-going Muslims,he pointed out, they were less likelyto be shot at or kidnapped in Tripoli.It was agreed that within the month,Calil would take a delegation fromthe fund to Lebanon for meetingswith the relevant players.

Later that day, after we left themeeting, Calil talked a little moreabout this deal, and how he hap-pened to be so well situated to helpthe hedge fund out of its dilemma.“A friend of mine became energyminister in Lebanon — a goodfriend,” he recalled. “I said to him,‘Congratulations. What sort ofenergy opportunities are there inLebanon?’ We were just chatting.He mentioned that they hoped toget the Iraqi oil pipeline reopened,that that would solve a lot of eco-nomic problems. Just knowingthat they are looking at that refin-ery: that knowledge is wealth initself. You have that knowledge inyour head. You also know thatSyria imports so much andLebanon imports so much, andthat the Syrians are talking to theIraqis about opening the pipeline.All that knowledge provides a the-oretical solution.”

He added: “You also need con-nections to deliver the solution—toinfluence the president, the primeminister, the relevant ministers.That is about relationships. If youdon’t know the person directly, youknow his cousin or someone close tohis cousin.” In this case, I askedhim, how big a problem would it beto get the political support?

“As big as I want it to be,” he replied.

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Afixer’s business demands dis-cretion. “If you go and blababout your contacts and talk

about being a friend of the president,the next thing you know the presi-dent doesn’t want to be your friend,”one middleman told me. Calil, for hispart, has avoided publicity for mostof his thirty-five-year career.Although he is said to be one of thewealthiest men in Britain, and is aregular on the London club circuit,his name has rarely surfaced in thepress; for decades, the only photo-graph newspapers could find toaccompany articles about him was asnapshot from his 1972 wedding tothe American tobacco heiressFrances Condon, the first of his three wives.

During the past few years, though,Calil has become the subject ofintense and unflattering press scruti-ny. In 2004, a group of about fivedozen mercenaries were arrested inZimbabwe, where they were buyingweapons. The men allegedly were enroute to effect a coup in Equatorial

Guinea, a tiny African country head-ed by one of the world’s worst rulers,Brigadier General Teodoro Obiang.The regime subsequently claimed theplot had been financed by Calil inhopes of installing Severo Moto, anexiled political leader.

The accusations were neverproven, and Calil still vociferouslydenies he had any role in the affair.Calil acknowledges being a friend andfinancial supporter of Moto and hav-ing introduced him to Simon Mann, aformer SAS officer who remains injail in Equatorial Guinea for allegedlyhaving led the plot. But Calil insistshe knew nothing about a coup; by hisaccount, Mann was offering only toprovide military protection for Motoso he could return to EquatorialGuinea. Obiang has brought suitagainst Calil over the coup in variouscountries, including Lebanon andZimbabwe, and has never won acourt victory. In Britain, a judge ruledthat Obiang could not even bring suitfor lack of evidence. “It would havebeen great fun,” Calil told me. “He

accused me of causing him mentaltrauma, and he would have beenforced to come to court for a mentalexam. He has tried every angle andopportunity, and lost each time.” Headded: “You had an African dictatorand some mercenaries and a shadyArab. It makes for a great novel, butthe part of it that wasn’t a novel wastested in court and proven to bewrong. The press has reported apack of lies.”

My acquaintance with Calil beganin 2002, when I received a call fromVictoria Butler, a public-relationsspecialist who was helping SeveroMoto meet with government officialsand journalists. At the time, I waswriting frequently about the Obiangregime, and so I went to see Moto atButler’s town house on Capitol Hill.He had already met with a number ofBush Administration officials andmembers of Congress, and heexpressed a naive optimism that theadministration might eventually turnagainst Obiang because of his undeni-ably appalling human-rights record.

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A general view of the Baiji oil refinery


As Moto and I chatted on a sofa,another man sat nearby in an arm-chair and scrolled through his emailson a BlackBerry. When Butler leftthe room to get coffee, I asked theman who he was. It was Ely Calil,who told me that he and a number ofother “businessmen” had sponsoredMoto’s trip and had retained Butlerthrough a P.R. office. I had neverheard of Calil, and searches turnedup little outside of a few Europeanoil-industry publications. His namehad briefly surfaced in a briberyscandal in France, where reportsalleged that he funnelled money toNigeria’s Sani Abacha on behalf ofElf Aquitaine, a French oil company(which since has been bought by itsFrench competitor Total).

Since that first meeting six yearsago, Calil and I have become unlikelyfriends. My family and I get togetherwith him when he comes toWashington, and on a number ofoccasions I’ve visited him in Londonat Sloane House, the Chelsea estatehe owned. Perched behind gates ofwhite stone, the estate was staffed tothe hilt with servants and tastefullystocked with antique furniture,leather-bound books, and numerousbusts of Napoleon, Calil’s hero. One

Sunday afternoon in 2003, I sat withhim in his study and listened to himtake phone calls, his patter seamless-ly switching from Arabic to Frenchto English and back again. Therewas a Libyan official who told Calilthat Muammar Qaddafi wanted tohost a future World Cup soccertournament in Tripoli, and washoping to establish his bona fidesin the meantime by sponsoring amini-tournament.

Could Calil help arrange for theSenegalese national team to takepart? A call to an official in Senegalfollowed; as did a conversation witha well-connected friend in Lebanonabout a brewing political crisisthere. Several visitors dropped by,including a pencil-thin and dourman from Glencore who grew moredour still when I was introduced as ajournalist.

Calil was born in the Nigeriantown of Kano, where hisLebanese parents settled in

the 1920s. George Calil had pros-pered in Africa through a small busi-ness empire that was based on thecultivation of peanuts (for consump-tion and groundnut oil) but alsoincluded aluminium and small man-

ufacturing. At an early age, Ely wassent to Lebanon and was privatelyeducated there and in Europe. Afterhis father died of stomach cancer in1966, Ely — who has five sistersand a younger brother — was cho-sen to return to Nigeria andrestructure the family business. Heestablished close connections withgovernment officials, becomingespecially friendly with the trans-portation minister.

At the time, Nigeria was lookingfor a firm to help its hajj pilgrims getto Mecca; during one meeting theminister asked Calil if he knew any-one at Lebanon’s Middle EastAirlines. “The joke of it was that mybrother-in-law’s sister was going outwith a guy who was high up in theMEA hierarchy,” he said. “She latermarried him. So I went to Beirut andmet his boss, who was very interest-ed. ‘Do you really know the minister?’he wanted to know. He made a hugeproposal, and at the end Middle EastAirlines got a lot of business andNigeria was able to transport out itshajj pilgrims in style. We had beenmaking a few hundred thousand dol-lars here and there, but on this dealalone I made a few million dollars. Ithought: ‘Screw crushing peanuts to

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An oil refinery in Basra’s South Rumalia oilfield


make oil.’ This was as easy as puttingtwo people together who neededeach other.”

After the first OPEC ‘oil shock’ of1973, Calil became seriously involvedin the petroleum business, first trad-ing oil and then obtaining conces-sions and reselling them. Within fiveyears, oil had become the largest sec-tor of his business. Calil’s influenceand wealth soared after the Nigeriangeneral Ibrahim Babangida assumedpower in a 1985 coup. When I askedCalil about his relationship withBabangida, who still is a power bro-ker in Nigeria, he acknowledged thatthey were close friends. “I took hiskids on holidays and to stay with mein London,” he said. “He saw me as asound independent adviser, not asycophant. He asked me to handle alot of back-channel communications,and he sent me out as an adviser toother African governments.” ButBabangida was forced out in the faceof popular protests in 1993, andceded power to a civilian govern-ment. Three months later, SaniAbacha took power; his regimeearned worldwide condemnation byhanging an activist named Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other democracycampaigners. Base Petroleum, a firmof Calil’s that owned several oil con-cessions in Nigeria, paid Washingtonlobbyist Robert Cabelly nearly$400,000 between mid-1996 andearly 1997 to lobby the ClintonAdministration on Abacha’s behalf.

Following the election in 1999 ofOlusegun Obasanjo, who had beenjailed for speaking out against thehuman-rights abuses and corruptionof the Abacha regime, Calil’s influ-ence in Nigeria waned. (In power,Obasanjo headed a government thatproved pervasively corrupt itself.)But by then, his scope of operationshad expanded enormously. Hebecame a confidant to Denis SassouNguesso, who had taken power in a1997 civil war in the nearby Republicof the Congo. “Calil became the coun-try’s main oil adviser,” said PhilippeVasset, of Africa Energy Intelligence.

“All the traders courted him in orderto get contracts.”

Calil served as a personal adviserto Senegalese President AbdoulayeWade, who won office in 2000. Calilbefriended Wade when the latter wasliving in exile in Paris. He providedWade with an apartment, introducedhim to French government officials,and generally promoted him in polit-ical and media circles. Wade’s base ofoperations while in exile was at theParis offices of Saga Petroleum, asmall Norwegian firm run by a friendof Calil’s.

Calil also became the chief oiladviser to Idriss Deby, a warlord whohad seized power (and still holds it)in Chad. He was tasked with recruit-ing oil companies to develop projectsin that country, and he himself, inconjunction with Eronat, landed ahuge exploration concession thereroughly the size of Texas. In 2003,the two men sold a major stake in theconcession to China in a deal sealed,according to a report in the EveningStandard of London, at a celebratorybanquet thrown at Eronat’s estate inChelsea. “You’d have an African headof state who would want advice—they all wanted oil to happen in theircountry,” Calil explained. “Of courseyou offered the advice pro bono, butyou used that to build your network.They’d say, ‘Look at this piece of landand see if it’s worth anything.’ And

you’d go to Exxon and get them inter-ested and you’d sell them a part andyou’d keep the juiciest part of theconcession for yourself. Everyonewas happy. The president was happybecause Exxon was now exploring foroil, Exxon was happy, and you hadthe heart of the concession. If youhadn’t been there as the catalyst, thething wouldn’t have happened. Youmight call it abusing my role. I call itcreating entrepreneurial wealth, andI created a lot of wealth.”

Africa has remained the mainfocus of Calil’s operations, but he nowdoes business around the globe. Inaddition to operations in Russia andthe Middle East, he owned aHouston-based firm called Nautilus,which obtained oil and gas conces-sions in South America and CentralAsia. He sold Nautilus to OceanEnergy, which subsequently wasbought by Devon Energy, now thelargest US-based independent oil andgas producer. Calil also won a gasconcession in Brazil, which he latersold to Enron. “When buying andselling oil concessions, you’re depen-dent on your skills and knowledge,but you’re also very much dependenton the goodwill of the local govern-ment, from presidents to ministers,”Calil told me. “You end up building apolitical network to a) build up thebusiness and b) protect it.”

Calil’s social and political net-

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works are astonishing in scope. InBritain, his friends include LordJeffrey Archer, the writer and formerdeputy chairman of the ConservativeParty; Lord Peter Mandelson, a keyfigure in the British Labour Party andcurrently secretary of state for busi-ness, enterprise, and regulatoryreform; the Syrian-born billionaireWafic Said, who made his fortune inSaudi construction deals and oncehelped broker a mammoth sale ofBritish warplanes to Riyadh; andRobin Birley, an ardent conservativewho in 1998 helped coordinate a PRcampaign on behalf of Chile’sAugusto Pinochet and even arrangedhis stay at the Wentworth Estate out-side London. Birley describes Calil as“ambitious and restless,” a manalways in search of a big project. “It’snot so much the money—he wants tobuild something on an imperialscale,” Birley told me. “He’s not justan average businessman who buysand sells. He’s more a Roman than aCarthaginian in that sense. He’s a

seriously clever man.”When I travelled to Sudan in

2004, Calil supplied me with a cell-phone number for one of the coun-try’s most senior intelligence officials.In Lebanon, I dined with Calil at themountainside estate of NaylaMoawad, a government minister andpowerful Christian politician. Calil isa close friend of Mohammad al-Saleh, the brother-in-law of KingAbdullah II of Jordan. “He has theability to get things done, just aboutanywhere,” said the former CIA offi-cial of his post-agency business deal-ings with Calil. “We once needed ananswer to a question in Syria, whichis a very tough place to work. One ofhis associates talked his way into thedeputy foreign minister’s office andgot us the information we were look-ing for.”

In the United States, Calil hasrelationships with both major politi-cal parties, and contacts at the StateDepartment and the CIA. “Theminute you get anywhere in the oil

business, the US system becomesinterested,” Calil told me. “Theembassy invites you over and theattaché wants to know what you’redoing, and it builds from there.People tell you that you should meetsomeone, whether to impress you orplease you or use you, and then itbecomes a chain. There’s nothingsensitive about knowing people; it’s atalent, at the end of the day.”

Fixers have always served anessential function in the oilbusiness. The first to work on

an international scale was CalousteGulbenkian, a stateless ArmenianTurk whose father was a banker and amajor kerosene importer into theOttoman Empire.

Known as “Mr. Five Percent” andthe “Talleyrand of oil diplomacy,”Calouste studied mining engineeringat King’s College in London and upongraduation in 1887 was sent by hisfather to the Caspian port city ofBaku to learn the oil trade. The young

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Mustard Oil Refinery in Cairo


Gulbenkian wrote a series of scholar-ly articles that piqued the interest ofthe Ottoman department of mines.Officials there asked Gulbenkian todraw up a report on oil resources, andhe pointed to several areas of greatpotential in the region. “Thus beganCalouste Gulbenkian’s lifelong devo-tion to Mesopotamian oil, to whichhe would apply himself with extra-ordinary dedication and tenacityover six decades,” Daniel Yerginrecounts in his definitive history ofoil, The Prize.

Gulbenkian’s fantastic success asan oil broker depended on hisknowledge of the region and his cosyrelationships— with Turkish offi-cials, on the one hand, and withEuropean and American oilmen onthe other. In 1898, two years after heand his family fled the Armeniangenocide, the Ottoman governmentappointed him financial adviser toits Paris and London embassies. In1902, he obtained British citizen-ship, cementing his connection withthe most powerful player in the par-titioning of the Middle East. In 1912,Gulbenkian helped broker a dealthat led to the creation of theTurkish Petroleum Company, whichwas established to exploit MiddleEastern oil fields. The joint owners,which included Royal Dutch Shell,the National Bank of Turkey, andvarious German and Britishinvestors, granted him a five percentnon-voting share in the new compa-ny —hence Gulbenkian’s nickname.

Sixteen years later, Gulbenkiandrew the map that defined a coop-erative agreement among theFrench, Dutch, British, andAmericans—their governments andcompanies—to extract oil from theformer Ottoman territories. This“Red Line Agreement” earned himthe bulk of his fortune, and his suc-cess established the model of theindependent, cash-dispensing oilfixer. The modus operandi was sim-ple and straightforward: the fixertook money from a company seek-ing an energy concession, kept one

part for himself, and funnelled therest into a Swiss bank accountbelonging to foreign officials whoawarded the concession.

When the officials got theirmoney, the fixer’s sponsor got itscontract. “For years you could notoperate in many oil-producingcountries without an agent, espe-cially in the Middle East,” WillyOlsen, a former senior executive atNorway’s Statoil, told me. “If youhad the wrong agent, one withoutthe right connections, you were notrelevant at all.”

Today, fixers still play a vital rolefor oil companies in their dealingswith heads of state and other govern-ment officials who, in the delicatephrasing of Laurent Ruseckas, aninternational energy analyst inLondon, “don’t know how to com-mercialise their power.” But althoughstraightforward cash bribes are stillemployed, the means of payoff havebecome more complex. Partly this isfor legal reasons. The United Statespassed the Foreign Corrupt PracticesAct in 1977, which outlawed briberyabroad. The Organisation forEconomic Cooperation andDevelopment passed similar rules in1997; until then, many Europeancountries allowed their firms todeduct bribes on corporate income-tax statements.

With the heightened legal risk, the

greater public scrutiny of interna-tional business, and the more sophis-ticated government methods of mon-itoring bank transfers, payoffs nowtake a multitude of forms. Indeed,while as opaque as before and servingthe same purpose, modern-day pay-offs are not always illegal. “I spent 99percent of my time trying to figureout ways to not technically violate theFCPA,” a former Mobil executive inAngola once told me.

The federal indictment of JimGiffen, Calil’s friend, alleges thatPresident Nazarbayev assigned himto negotiate deals with foreign oilcompanies seeking to invest inKazakhstan after the country’s inde-pendence in 1991. Giffen accompa-nied the Kazakh leader toWashington for meetings withAmerican officials and, in 1998, evenassembled a team of political consul-tants to lobby the US government onNazarbayev’s behalf. The team,which sought to win approval for abogus presidential election held byNazarbayev and to sanitise hishuman rights record, included MarkSiegel, a former executive director ofthe Democratic National Committee,and Michael Deaver, a former deputychief of staff to President Reagan.Giffen has not specifically deniedfunnelling money to Nazarbayev, buthe claims his role and actions werefully known by the US government. A

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filing from his lawyers claimed thatGiffen’s acts might seem unusual, butthat “imposing American domesticconceptions of honest services on allthe world’s governments” would“wreak havoc” on the workings ofinternational law.

In 2002, Calil himself was arrest-ed by French police and briefly jailedin connection with the payments ofenormous commissions to SaniAbacha by a subsidiary of ElfAquitaine. During a judicial investi-gation, Philippe Jaffré, who was thenElf’s CEO, confirmed that the pay-ments were made. “The Nigerian oilfields were extraordinarily prof-itable,” he said. “There was no otherway to reach a friendly agreement.”Jaffré said, however, that Calil andtwo other Lebanese intermediaries—Chagoury and Samir Traboulsi — “apparently received more moneythan foreseen.” By Jaffré’s account,the three split $70 million amongthem for their role in moving thefunds.

Despite a lengthy investigation,Calil was never formally charged inthe affair (though a number of Elfexecutives were sent to jail for

embezzling millions of dollars fromthe company). In discussing the casewith me, he acknowledged havingreceived commissions from Elf inorder to funnel payments to Abacha,saying: “From a strictly legal stand-point, there was nothing strictly ille-gal about it. It has become illegalnow. The commissions I took fromthe French companies were sanc-tioned by the French Ministry ofFinance. They had to declare thecommissions on their taxes. If it’swrong, then arrest the minister offinance. Why are you arresting me?Was it legal? Yes. Was it moral? Idon’t know. But business isn’t aboutnot making money. I’m not a philoso-pher, but the law is there to be tested.If you’re on the wrong side youshould be sanctioned, and if you’renot you should be left alone.”

In recent years, the global energybusiness has changed in waysthat have reduced somewhat the

clout of the middleman. Followingthe expansion of anti-bribery laws, anumber of companies and fixers havebeen tried for their illegal payoffs toforeign officials. Baker Hughes, an

oil-services company, recently paid a$33 million fine after admitting ithad bribed officials in Angola, Russia,and other countries. A top executiveat Halliburton pleaded guilty to mak-ing vast payments, in conjunctionwith three other international firms,to win a multibillion-dollar natural-gas-plant contract in Nigeria.Willbros Group, another oil-servicescompany, was found to have paid offnumerous foreign officials to winoverseas deals, in one case delivering$1 million in a suitcase. Such judg-ments have made companies morewary of fixers and more eager to findother means of securing political sup-port. One especially popular tech-nique has been to partner with a localcompany that is owned by a presi-dent, or oil minister, or some othertop official who needs to be appeased.

Oil-rich states have grown a bitmore sophisticated, too, further less-ening the utility of middlemen. Whenthe Soviet Union collapsed in theearly 1990s, such newly formed oilproducers as Kazakhstan andAzerbaijan had no experience what-soever with international business.Russia was hardly better off, and so

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OPEC’s oil ministers pose with Algerian President Bouteflika


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fixers like Calil and Eronat were ableto get in early and serve as importantoil exporters from the country.

In West Africa, after decades ofpoverty, deficient education, andrepressive rule, many governmentswere staffed entirely by untrainedapparatchiks who had no idea how tointeract in the business arena. Butduring the 2000s, year after year ofever-rising oil prices prompted manyoil nations to become savvier abouttheir resources and more inclined todeal with corporations directly.

Fixers remain a permanent pres-ence in the oil markets, however,and for good reason. Even withprices dropping in the current slow-down, a worldwide scramble for oilis still under way, with the UnitedStates and China as the two majorcompetitors. Companies are alwayslooking for an advantage, and oftenthe right fixer can be the means togain it. “There’s no way one compa-ny can act clean, especially if you’reworrying about what the Chineseand Koreans are going to do,”Edward Chow, the former Chevronexecutive, told me. “And to be fair, ifyou’re working for a Chinese orIndian oil company and you’re try-ing to get into a country or regionwhere the Americans or British orFrench have been forever, how doyou think you’re going to get in?”Furthermore, oil companies todaytend to be capital-rich but opportu-nity-poor: they have plenty ofmoney, but there are fewer fieldsand concessions available, andmuch of what’s out there is con-trolled by national oil companies. Sothe stakes are higher and the des-peration to get in is greater. “Thefundamental drivers behind the useof fixers is so strong that it’s hard toimagine the practice is going to goaway,” Chow said.

Calil agrees, in characteristicallyblunt terms. “There’s no way to dobusiness in the Third World withoutenriching government leaders,” hetold me. “You used to give a dictator asuitcase of dollars; now you give a tip

on your stock shares, or buy a hous-ing estate from his uncle or motherfor ten times its worth.” Because ofthis inevitability, Calil sees the West’sstrict anti-bribery laws as fundamen-tally misguided. “If you want to endcorruption, you have to become thepoliceman of the world, and put inprison—in America— the Obiangsand Dos Santoses and the Qaddafis,”he said. “But the businessman has nochoice but to do what those guyswant. He’s between the devil and thedeep blue sea. The Chinese are com-ing to Africa and promising 25 per-cent for concessions. So what do youdo: say the US government doesn’tapprove? The Chinese will give youthe finger.” He added: “No one looksforward to paying bribes. It’s no joke,and it’s coming out of [the fixer’s]pocket, not yours or Uncle Sam’s. Butif you have to do it, you have to do it.”

So whenever oil business is con-ducted around the world, it’s quitecommon to find middlemen at theheart of the deal—even if most oftheir operations are significantlymore limited in scope than werethose of the old guard. InEquatorial Guinea, a former topElf executive named Jean- PaulDriot now has an exclusive agree-ment to market the government’sshare of its international produc-

tion through his company, StagEnergy. In the Republic of theCongo, another Frenchman, Jean-Yves Ollivier, helps companiesnavigate the bureaucracy there.London-based Mohammed Ajami,brother of the prominent Lebanesewriter Fouad Ajami, helps compa-nies looking for business in Libya,thanks to his close relationshipwith the country’s intelligencechief, Musa Kusa.

Calil himself is still a majoroperator in the oil business, but healso has diversified into a broaderrange of industries. He told me thathe spends more and more of histime “managing my investments.”One of his most promising invest-ments is a company called GreenHoldings, which is in the emergingfield of carbon trading: buying therights to pollute from cleaner busi-nesses and selling them to dirtierones. The firm has struck deals inChina and India, and Calil has trav-elled regularly to both nations onthe company’s behalf, hoping toestablish business ties and buildpolitical support. It is an ironicturn indeed that Ely Calil, whogrew so rich off the excesses of thecarbon era, should now stand toprofit still more from the longstruggle to clean them up. �



With a cushioned lightnessthat only a practised balletdancer could muster,

Sanjay Khatri steps gently onto the ballof his foot before lightly placing his heelto the floor. A senior ballet student andteacher for the India Fernando BalletCompany, Khatri demonstrates acombination of delicate ballet walks forhis young students.

“If you go like this,” he suddenlystiffens his body and drops his dancerpoise, crashing his heels to the floor,“is there any difference between aballerina and a person on the road?No.” Without proper placement andgrace, the steps become insignificant.“You have to be different,” hedeclares, to an international army offour-foot tall ballerinas clad in pinkleotards and accompanying chiffonskirts at the American EmbassySchool in Chanakyapuri, Delhi. In thisbasic direction to his young pupils,Khatri has touched upon a criticalissue at the heart of Western classicalballet in India.

Western classical ballet, or‘Russian Ballet’ as it is often referredto throughout India, is distant fromthe classical Indian danceunderstanding of the term ‘ballet’ –commonly understood to meansimply a story told throughmovement. India is rife with thelatter, a country abundant in arts andtraditional cultures that have apreponderance to be intertwined andcoexist in everyday life, as well as onthe stage. The former is exceedinglysparse, excepting the occasionaltouring company from a former

Soviet Block country, an intermittentcorporate event looking to accenttheir product, and a few disparateorganisations where classical ballet isnot only alive, but revered.

At the India Fernando BalletCompany (IFBC), advanced dancers’backs and foreheads glisten witheffort as they port de bras their arms,develope and fouette their legswrapped in knitted warmers, andstruggle to maintain a soft epaule-ment with their heads. Every effort,every bead of sweat is spent makingthe demanding steps appear effortlessand as an extension of the pianomusic that is blaring from the smallboombox on a school desk in the cor-ner. Ballet instructor FernandoAguilera, wearing a wrap-aroundsweater fitted tightly to his torso andan elastic band around his foreheadand blonde locks, throws open thestudio door to release the steamy airthat has been building throughout theBarre warm-up. The dancers carry onwith an elaborate stretching routineof backbends and sidebends, splitsand penches, limbering up beforebeginning the Centre Floor portion ofthe class that contains more demand-ing pirhouette, adagio and grandejete combinations.

This ballet studio-cum-school-room scene at the British School inChanakyapuri, Delhi, could be a snap-shot from anywhere in the world.Full-length mirrors grace the wallsand conditioned ballet bodies aredressed in leotards and tights and lay-ered with various knit and wovenwarm-ups. The precise counting of

music marked by sharp claps res-onates throughout the room and thevoice of Aguilera rings out counts inSpanish, defines ballet terms in theirclassic French form and gives direc-tion to students in Hindi and English.At one glance it is easy to see thedancers come from a broad, interna-tional makeup beyond India alone,and their dancing styles reflect thesame, some exemplifying the softermovements akin to the French style,others with strong muscled motionsof the legs familiar to Italian orRussian training, while still othersdemonstrate sharper and faster foot-work, a trademark of America’sBalanchine technique. The IFBC stu-dio is a meeting ground for dancersfrom various regions of the world whohave found themselves in India, andwho are looking to maintain theirtechnique and passion for dance,while simultaneously acting as a spacefor new introductions to aspiringyoung dancers. It is here that balletdancers are trained and big dreamsdeveloped, begging the question: IsIndia ready for its own culture of thecenturies-old tradition of Westernclassical ballet?

Not according to Vanessa Mirza, acontemporary dancer from Kolkatawho is currently studying at theGraduate School of Choreography,Taipei National University of the ArtsDance College in Taiwan. “The balletscene in India is still very, verypremature,” she laments. Mirza’ssentiments are not solely her owneither, as the question regardingIndia’s preparedness for the

On Your ToesDanseurs and ballerinas on a mission to ready India for the centuries-old

tradition of Western classical dance

Emily Rosmussen

Dance


centuries-old art form, now practisedin countries as diverse as China,America, Cuba, Mexico, andAustralia, is echoed by urban India’sthree primary providers of classicalballet education: Tushna Dallas ofThe School of Classical Ballet andWestern Dance in Mumbai, FernandoAguilera of the IFBC in Delhi, andYana Lewis of the Yana Lewis DanceCompany (YLDC) in Bengaluru.

According to these proponents ofballet, there are large sectors ofIndia’s population who do not knowwhat classical ballet is.Simultaneously, the vast majority

who are aware of its existence know itonly as a dance form from Russia.Following the printing of an IFBCadvertisement in a local newspaper,IFBC’s Manager Mohd Rafi recallsreceiving numerous inquiries asking,“What is this ballet?” There wasconfusion between ballet dancing andbelly dancing (a western term for thetraditional Arab dance form) on thepart of many, while the Indianclassical understanding of the term‘ballet’ as compared to the Westernclassical understanding of the termonly served to increase bewilderment.When the International Gold Councilhosted their December 2008 fashion

show at the Emporio Mall in VasantVihar, they searched extensivelythroughout Delhi to find classicalballet dancers for their event. Afternumerous enquiries, the organisersreceived plenty of offers for bellydancers, but local knowledge of balletdancers remained elusive.

With the introduction of Barbie’s12 Dancing Princess dolls to India,fashioned after dancers at the NewYork City Ballet, little girls aredreaming of dancing on their toes andwearing pink chiffon, while the influxand popularity of Western danceforms from around the turn of the

century have been instrumental inraising awareness of foreign dancetechniques, particularly Ashley Lobo’swidespread jazz dance studios and therevolution of Latin social dances, suchas Salsa. The demand for westerndance in India’s urban centres is onthe rise, as greater awareness ofWestern dance forms and thecountry’s desire for new and differentstyles, apart from its own richtradition of dance, have spurredinterest. But the development of athriving culture of domestic balletremains to be seen, despite desire anddetermination on the part of India’sballet proponents and rising demand

for Western dance forms. Whileawareness of classical ballet, access totraining, and cultural barriers posechallenges to this development,primary providers of ballet educationin the country unanimously cite thelack of domestic patronage of the artform as their main hurdle.

In contrast, the Indian Council ofCultural Relations (ICCR) and theMinistry of Culture of the RussianFederation brought Russia’s BolshoiBallet to Delhi in December 2008,where they performed to a packed SiriFort Auditorium. The Gala Medleymarked the conclusion of the ‘Year of

Russia’ in India, with 2009 to be the‘Festival of India’ in Russia. Beyondthe Indo-Russia cultural exchangeprograms sponsored by thegovernment, private interest andpatronage of ‘Russian Ballet’ is alsopresent, with Uzbekistan’s NavoiBolshoi Ballet tour across India’surban centres in January 2009 as themost recent example; supported byKingfisher Airlines, APTDC, TravelMasters India Pvt Ltd, the ICCR, DrReddy’s Labs and ShankaranandaKalkshetra.

Thus, there appears to be a robustculture of urban theatre-goers whoappreciate classical ballet as a foreign

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The finale performance at Tushna Dallas’ studios in Mumbai


art form, as well as private andgovernment players who aresupporting and promoting foreignballet in India, despite domesticballet’s struggle for recognition andpatronage. According to some, thiscrowd is more interested in the socialprestige that goes along with foreignballet and being seen at the theatrethan they are in the actualperformance. Ballet students fromIFBC who were in attendanceobserved that the packed auditoriumat the beginning of the eveningquickly dwindled and nearly half ofthe audience disappeared by the timethe lights came on in the house.

Vanessa Mirza believes that inKolkata, “the idea of ballet iscommon,” due to Russian Balletperformances that graced the cityduring the British rule. Despiteinterest in the occasional workshop orballet course for body conditioningand the acquisition of grace and poise,Mirza acknowledges that a separationexists between appreciation ofclassical ballet as an art formperformed by foreigners, and thepursuit of classical ballet by Indiandancers. The former is to be admiredand respected, while the latter islargely unfeasible, due to lack ofinfrastructure, access to training, andto no small extent, culturaldifferences. “In Kolkata, [classicalballet] is something beautiful, lovelybut unreachable,” she says. “Peoplelove to watch… but it seems like somemagic art that is out of reach.”

Limited infrastructure and accessto ballet training across Indiaprovides a significant hurdle for eventhe most enthusiastic of balletaspirants. However, with two formalballet companies established since theturn of the century – IFBC (2008)and YLDC (2002) – India is makingstrides in providing opportunities foryoung dancers to learn proper ballettechnique with real professionalprospects on the horizon.

“You tell me. This is beautiful? Orthis is beautiful?” asks Sanjay Khatri,as he demonstrates two versions of

port de bras (carriage of the arms) tohis young pupils. “The first one!” afew eager students chime with confi-dence. Khatri proceeds to lead ayoung dancer through the combina-tion, holding her hand and gentlydirecting her steps and proper port debra. The others twiddle with hair, pullat skirts and put their fingers in theirears, their hands on their hips andchat with friends in front or behindthem in line, waiting for their turn towalk like ballerinas.

“It is my dream to see ballet stu-dios in India.” Khatri confesses afterhis class of young pupils has dispersedfor the day. The 25-year old, who fellinto ballet by “accident” through hisinterest in Bollywood dance, has sac-rificed dreams of a high-profile mod-elling career to focus solely on ballet.He believes that if he can teach balletand create dancers in India, he cansay with pride, “I did something.”Khatri supports himself by teachingthe young international students ofIFBC, as well as students recruited tohis newly co-founded company, TheNijinsky Ballet School (2008), whoseranks are solely of Indian origin, asthe classes run in private schools inSouth Delhi that are outside the diplo-mat circuit. The remainder of Khatri’stime is spent perfecting his own tech-nique in IFBC’s advanced classes, anddeveloping himself as an artist

through rehearsals for the bi-annualperformances of the company. Khatriadmits that there is a common beliefamong his peers that a student musttravel abroad to gain a thorough edu-cation in dance and to seek profes-sional career opportunities. Despitethis, he is content to remain in Indiawhere he can not only continue todevelop his own artistry, but where hecan also play an instrumental role inthe adoption and development of bal-let culture in India.

Beyond the challenge of access,there are cultural and social barriersto the general acceptance of youngIndian boys and girls learning andperforming Western classical ballet.The most commonly cited issue is thetraditional tutu and tights worn byfemale ballet dancers in performance.This costume is specific to classicalballet in order to show the line of thelegs and feet of dancers, and is polesapart from a vast majority oftraditional Indian dance costumesthat leave little of the body revealed.In reference to the classic tutu and itsacceptance by his Indian students andtheir families, Fernando Aguileraconfesses, “You are training thechildren and you are training theparents.” He has experienced apositive progression toward greaterunderstanding of the art form in Indiaover the years, as many of his young

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At Max Mueller Bhavan in Kolkata, ballet shoes are not available.


students come from parents whowant their children to dance becausethey were denied the sameopportunity growing up.

Tushna Dallas had her ownstruggle against social andcultural restraints in order to

follow her dreams in ballet more than60 years ago. At just four years of age,Dallas saw the Ice Capades in theUnited States and told her motherconfidently, “This is what I’m going todo.” The reply was, “You can’t do thisbecause we don’t have any ice inIndia.” A short time later she cameacross ballet and was delighted to findsomething that looked just like the IceCapades of her dreams, but withoutthe necessary ice that India lacked.However, “dance was looked upon asinferior,” she recalls. “It’s not what agood girl would do.” Dallas finallystood up to her parents’ will justbefore college and followed her dreaminto the world of classical ballet bystudying to become a teacher. Nowshe is an Associate of the RoyalAcademy of Dance, London, holds anadvanced certificate with distinctionfor teaching, and is a Fellow of theImperial Society of Teachers ofDancing (ISTD) in the UK.

Establishing a local culture ofclassical ballet in India, beyond theRussian Ballet spectacle, is aunanimous desire between Lewis,Dallas and Aguilera, a process thatinvolves not only raising awarenessand acceptance of ballet across thevast Indian population, but alsobuilding domestic infrastructure andsupport. The three organisations theyrepresent make up a small, yet vibrantcommunity of balletomanes who areas serious about their ballet as theyare about spreading it across India.Armed with a group of youngerdancers and teachers who are equallycommitted to sharing their knowledgeof ballet with their country, peoplelike Sanjay Khatri and KhooshooDallas, Tushna’s daughter and fellowteacher, it appears the movement hasbeen set in motion. However, as

Dallas laments, “When we are tryingto sow the seeds of ballet, we are notgetting any encouragement.” Not oneof their organisations has receiveddomestic patronage apart from theoccasional donation by a parent of aforeign student.

For Dallas, the lack of fundingmeans her dancers are solelymotivated by the internationalcertificates they receive when theypass a yearly Royal Academy of Dance(RAD) exam. Alternatively, Lewisfurthered her own mandate to giveback to the country that gave her a 20-year yoga practice by starting a trust toraise money for her students’ trainingand professional development. For thepast 10 years, Lewis has employed hertraining from the Imperial Society ofTeacher’s of Dancing (ISTD) and hernearly 45 years of experience teachingand dancing in London to share herknowledge of Western dance withstudents in India.

Aguilera, hailing from BuenosAires, Argentina, and founder ofIFBC and co-founder of NBS, has hisown approach. At 9:30 pm on aFriday evening, he is coaching youngmale students trying to perfect theirtours en l’aire in the IFBC studio.Again and again they launchthemselves into the air, desperate tocomplete a second rotation in the airbefore landing in a perfect fifthposition, with both feet turned out tothe side and palms open inpresentation to their imaginaryaudience. The floor shakes andshudders with their efforts. “If there isno tour en l’aire, there is no balletdancer,” Aguilera motivates hisstudents, as he walks from one to thenext, tweaking an arm here, stretchinga leg there. “Bien. Now I go home.”Aguilera’s dedication to his students’development frequently manifestsitself in an additional 60 minutes ormore of instruction, beyond thescheduled 90-minute sessions.

“I want India to have a balletcompany,” he professes with a smile,“as I had.” He is referring to the ISAColon Theatre Company and School

in Argentina, where he trained andthen danced professionally for eightyears. Aguilera’s dream to build aprofessional ballet company ofinternational repute, replete withsalaried dancers, a piano, and apianist for live accompaniment inclasses, is nothing if not ambitious.However, he believes it is just amatter of time, and Aguilera is in nohurry. The strength and breadth ofhis company is gradually building, asare his multinational contacts hehopes will be patrons in the nearfuture, suggesting a day when hewon’t have to reach into his ownpocket for the lakhs needed to fundthe bi-annual performances of IFBC.He is convinced that eventually thecompany will be sustainable withouthis personal patronage and willflourish under domestic andmultinational support. For the timebeing, he is content to be patient andwait for the culture of ballet to slowlytake root in India and for prospectivepatrons to take notice.

At 65, Dallas’ energy to continueseeking a ballet godfather orgodmother to support her studentsis waning, but her daughter is farfrom exhausted. Khooshoo Dallashas ambitions to reach out to allstudents with a desire to learnballet, and to create a companythrough funding from donors. Bornand raised in Mumbai and trained inthe UK at the RAD like her mother,Khooshoo’s aspirations to bring thesame level of ballet to India as herforeign counterparts in Bengaluruand Delhi exemplifies the bur -geoning, home-grown developmentof classical ballet in India. Adomestic culture of this centuries-old tradition may be premature inthe eyes of many Indians, but withthe strong leadership of a few andthe passion of the youth, it is takingroot regardless. “I think everybody is in love with the idea of ballet,”romanticises Dallas. It is now up tothe next generation of ballet proponents in India to turn that loveofan idea into a love of the reality. �

The Arts


When Gautam Ghosh looksback on his career as a musi-cian and reflects on perhaps

his greatest show of Indian patriotism,he sees a march of Bosnian refugees:the slow marches of an oppressed peo-ple and the children born on themarching trail. He’s mired, then, by thememory of his grandfather, a refugeeof Partition. It’s no wonder that his actof patriotism, composing the song“Fifty-fifty” for the 50th anniversary ofIndia’s Independence, was viewed bysome as an act of disgrace. Or was itseen as a threat?

Ghosh finished “Fifty-fifty” in timefor its release on August 14, 1997 a daybefore India was to celebrate its 50th

year of Independence. He beganreceiving a flurry of phone calls,mostly from people he’d never met,thanking him for writing a songabout truth and not turning a blindeye to it. The song, which features achorus of voices repeating each line,paints Delhi simply:

What is happening every dayThe common people have no sayPolicemen, don’t look the other wayThe politicians have all gone astrayJust weeks after the song’s release

and success, in early September, hewas contacted by Times FM, the sta-tion that had been playing the song,and told that if he didn’t agree to havehis song withdrawn from all airplayand promotion, his music career wouldbe over indefinitely. To this day, Ghoshhas no written record that his song wasbanned, but maintains that politicallycharged music is in dire straits in India

– government is its natural enemy anda brute opponent.

“Fifty” was Ghosh’s first instance ofsocio-political commentary, nearly twodecades after he’d begun composingsongs, because “it took me quite awhile to get into that sensitivity zone.”His lyricism, while blunt, is not intend-ed as anything other than a statementof facts.

“It’s a historical evaluation of thetimes I was born in. So I’m aware ofthat particular history. Whether it wasgood history, bad history, I am notcommenting. It is history. It is behindus. But that history is being repeated.What the f*** have we learned? So thatboils down to outbursts and outrage,”said Ghosh.

Though Ghosh, 46, admits he issomewhat separated from modernmainstream music, he can say thatmuch of the music that comes fromBollywood is intentionally aboutlighter fare, even the songs about crick-et. Political music has always been,Ghosh added, an underground or un-mainstream movement.

When he arrived in Delhi fromCalcutta (now Kolkata) in 1972, therewas hardly anyone living on the streets.Nowadays he is sickened by the factthat in music he hears nothing of thepopulations of homeless that havegrown and are visible on every Delhicorner.

“There is no action in present daysong. Have you heard anything about[homeless population]? Unfortunately,no.”

But as Ghosh has found, sometimesa song’s impact is lasting when it isn’tbeing heard at all, as in the case of

“Fifty”. Despite all the opposition to thesong, Ghosh in 2001 was asked by theUK’s Department of Social Justice toact as an ambassador to the UK; heattributes the song to his recognition.His tour included several perfor-mances, and meetings with politiciansand human rights activists. Whereasmusicians suppressed by home gov-ernments 40 years ago would be isolat-ed, in present day Ghosh was wel-comed as a voice for change.

There was a sense in the late 1960sthat the technique of music as a politi-cal tool was spreading worldwide, anddoing so at a much quicker rate thanglobalisation would naturally proceed;the idea of protest music as a powerthat reaches a large mass of peoplespreads through quicker, rapidly devel-oping communication lines, most sig-nificantly television. Citizens across theworld were witnessing scenes of theVietnam War and the Cold War orholding protest to the images and ideasabsent from television.

Guitarist Susmit Bose, whohastermed his music ‘Urban Folk’, wasa founding portion of a musical move-ment in India that was an appendageof the New York City folk movement inthe early 1960s. He developed the trou-badour style that used an acoustic gui-tar, a harmonica and most important-ly, audience participation.

Bose believed he was choosing a lifethat deviated from the norm but stillhaving similar experiences – griev-ances – that most Indians had. In anessay entitled ‘Talking Through Songs’,Bose described his feelings upon hear-ing Western protest music:

“I, as part of the English educated,

The Silence of the Musicians Why is there a dearth of protest music in free India?

Brian Dwyer

Mus i c


book-reading, exposed, Indianbrigade, was mesmerised by the poetryand song of Pete Seeger and Bob Dylanwhose lyrics and balladeer style foundechoes several thousand miles away ina land mass that was yawning itself outof an old civilisation into nationhoodeven as it was taking its age-old musicinto the heart of rockland to break themutual impasse forever. I began to feelthe need to sing like never before and Iwanted to sing for India as she wasslowly and steadily girding her loins tojoin the rat race of modernity anddevelopment. I decided to lend myskills to the global justice movement.”

The idea of protest music was, ofcourse, not a new idea in the 20th cen-tury – music as an anti-establishmentvoice is evident in almost any civilisa-tion in one form or another. Whatsome may mistakenly attribute to akind of collective unconscious was theformation of improving global commu-nication. It’s no coincidence, in otherwords, that leftwing music protestmovements were strong at some pointin the 1960s as reactions to political

strife in countries like Russia, Israel(during the 1967 war especially), Cubaand Puerto Rico.

The roots of punk music, a moreaggressive form of protest song,formed in the mid-to-late 1970s as areaction to plummeting employmentrates and a housing collapse thatangered the UK youth; a similar move-ment developed in Germany, calledDeutschpunk, at the same time out ofthe droning Cold War and risingunemployment rates, which reached ahead at the issue of the division ofBerlin.

In his time at an English universityin the late 1960s, Bose became awareof the powerful movements that werebeing led by artists like Pete Seeger andBob Dylan, artists who, with theiracoustic guitars and a sense that lyri-cism was primary, embraced an ideol-ogy that the musician was the voice ofone of one thousand, not someone whowas performing in front of one thou-sand. He began performing Seeger’ssongs as a way to rally students.

“The 70s was a global era in terms

of music,” said Bose. “In fact, we hadthe first taste of globalisation. It wasn’tthe same globalisation as we come tounderstand it now, which is so marketdriven. That globalisation was humandriven. It was man-to-man.”

“The decade of the 60s and 70sreally mattered! Or so I felt as I, anIndian, could subliminally sense thewaves of disillusionment of the Westtowards post-industrial materialism,even as those waves were wetting ourfeet on the shores of the subcontinent,”wrote Bose.

Perhaps most important to India’s20th century socio-political musicscene was the creative collectiveshaped during the Quit IndiaMovement in 1942 surrounding WorldWar II. The Indian Peoples TheatreAssociation (IPTA) was an organisa-tion that spread social responsibilitythrough any artistic medium, be it the-atre, film, painting or music. The groupgained power around its tight-knitbonds, but its power of influence fadedafter Independence. Still the sensibili-ty IPTA instilled in the next generation

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Susmin Bose, on the right, playing the songs of the Bauls of Bengal.


of artists laid the tracks of Indianactivist music that developed in the late 1960s.

In a recent performance onFebruary 22 at Delhi’s Siri Fort, Boseperformed 12th century Bengali songs;he traces the roots of Indian socio-political music far back before the 20thcentury as something that has alwaysbeen prevalent in Indians. He admiresthe Bengali music he selected for itsawareness of the potential impact ofconsumerism and environmentalism.Though as someone who plays music,partially, to spread awareness and ulti-mately change, Bose must play to theappropriate audience, as he typicallydoes with a style of collective singingand audience participation (a stylewhich is often found in music aboutsocio-political change).

“My target is basically the peoplehere in India who can make that differ-ence,” said Bose, who performs most ofhis songs in English. “And it’s unfortu-nate that it’s only the English-speakingpeople who can, if they really want,make a difference in this country.”

For Bose, the modern rock move-ment in India is a genre that hasn’tcome of age yet, hasn’t developed.Much of the problem, he feels, is thateven though rock is fundamentally a“genre of social change”, in India it isan adaptation of Western sentimental-ity that is still widely misunderstood bythe most fluent English-speakingIndian.

When he hears the songs hisnephews write, he can only hear thesongs of American musician KurtCobain of Nirvana. But with culturalbarriers in language, what Bose calls“Indian intonation”, the Americanstyle that Indians are adopting is with-out the perspective of the musiciansplaying those songs. “I think we andthis generation have to get away fromthe Jack Daniels syndrome. Because ofthis, nobody writes their own songs,”said Bose.

The youth are not the generation toblame, cautioned Bose. He turns aneye on his own generation in hopesthat their generation will turn an eye

on themselves. There is a divide nowthat did not exist 30 years ago; the fam-ily’s wealth used to be evident in thelifestyle of the wife, but now that somewives make more than their husbands,the parents are pooling their wealthinto the child while not educating themabout the pitfalls.

“We are stacking the kids up with alot of money, with a lot of false values,and a very high-fueled consumeristattitude towards life,” said Bose.

And with this, the division amongthe different languages – English-speaking rulers and the common man – grows.

Thankfully, Bose is optimistic thatthe professional and creative ethicsthat influence rock music in India arecyclical, meaning that given the properawareness, musicians will regain thekind of human-to-human globalizationthat functioned in socio-political musicin the 1960s and 1970s. His mostrecent project is an album called Rockfor Life, where he assembled sevenbands from Northeast India to com-pose songs spreading awareness aboutHIV/AIDS.

There is, however, a growing trendof musical protest that does not fol-low the traditional structure of a songlike “Fifty” or a technique like Bose’shomegrown sing-alongs. The con-temporary solution, in an age ofinstant global connection, is throughelectronic media.

While Bose concerns himself withthe spread of information from oneIndian to the next, the role of musicalambassador, similar to Ghosh’s UKtrip, is an increasingly potent tool inthe spread of word from Indian tonon-Indian. Composer AR Rahmanwas enlisted by the Stop TBPartnership, an NGO, as its firstGlobal Ambassador, a venture that initself lacked music altogether. Still,the idea of celebrity, especially in thehands of someone as notoriouslyglobally conscious in his early career,is invaluable and immeasurable interms of press coverage – suddenly acause develops an entirely fresh audi-ence through music as a credential.

For a band like Indian Ocean,among India’s most popular nation-ally, there is proof that mainstreammusic can survive accompanied by apolitical sensibility. Even beyond lyri-cism, projects like their scoring of the2005 movie Black Friday, whichmixed haunting tones with lyrics(written by Piyush Mishra, not amember) about the tension that ledto the Bombay riots (December 1992and January 1993). The band’s song‘Bandeh’ reached number two on themusic charts.

In the context of a film, messagesagainst violence and based on histor-ical facts are framed as being truthfuland not overbearing – in this way,projects like a film can create some-times more freedom than is toleratedby the average listener. In that sense,the idea of spreading socio-politicalmusings through music is in manyways done contemporarily throughanother medium, like film or televi-sion, or is viewed by contemporarymusicians as something larger thanwhat can be contained in one song’slyrics. It is not a way to trick the lis-tener, but instead an admission thatfor a listener to comprehend thegravity of the issues at hand in India,there must be something more sub-stantial than three minutes of educa-tion.

As Gautam Ghosh prepares torelease his fourth solo album, simplytitled ‘4’, he’s revised his approach tobring change. He hopes to createsomething larger that extendsbeyond one song and hopes that hecan influence other voices to speakfor him.

“I’m using the album concept as avehicle, not the songs, because lan-guage to me has failed,” said Ghosh.“Sometimes I wonder if democracy isanother form of mafia.”

With his music, he hopes to add afourth pillar to the Pillars ofDemocracy:

Of the PeopleBy the PeopleFor the Peopleand now, With the People �

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