The Indian-American: A New Political Actor?
By Bhabani Sen Gupta
The award of Padmabhushan to Sant Singh Chatwal, a rich hotelier in the United States, stirred a comic
controversy in the Indian media recently because he had been allegedly involved years before in some shady
business or financial deal. The Indian media is a mulish actor in national politics deriving its strength from the
sacred doctrine of freedom of expression in a democracy. It enjoys a cordial, mutually beneficial relationship
with Government ; ministers, whether at the Centre or in the states, happen to be very sensitive to what they
write about them. In the Chatwal case, the indignation of the media was focused not on Mr Chatwal but on the
Government for honouring an Indian whose hands were not totally clean. However, the media bite did not unduly
hurt anyone; Mr Chatwal seemed to have been merely amused by it.
The Indian diaspora ----the word originally was coined to mean the dispersion of Jews beyond Isreal-----
is large, but not as large as the Chinese. Geographically it is located in the oil-rich Gulf and Arab countries
and in former colonies of the British Empire in Africa and Asia. The money sent home by the diaspora boosts
the economy of the regions in India wherefrom Indians were transported by the British as indentured labour,
often driven by hunger and by imperial will. Large numbers of these immigrants fled countries like South Africa,
Kenya, Zimbawe ( former Rhodesia) when the end of empire transferred power in these countries to the native
people; except in the West Indies, Indian immigrants were not part of the natives. The Indian Government has
a ministry of overseas Indians to look after the interests of the diaspora.
The Indian-Americans are not like any of the many groups of migrants from India. The rulers of Aamerica
did not need labour from India; they had more than enough from the Western hemisphere itself. Indians went to
the United States for higher education or, on a small scale, business or jobs .Indian-Americans are, therefore,
a small ethnic group; immigrants do not exceed two million, but there is also a large number of students and
workers with job-permitting visas, who are not permanent residents or citizens. However, Indians, because of
their high level of education and the upper-to-middle middle class jobs they hold make a tiny but significant
segment of the affluent society. In recent years several thousands have done very well in business in the service
sector. Mr Chatwal happens to be one of them.

segment of America’s affluent society. In recent decades, some of them have done well in service sector
business. Mr Chatwal is one of them.
The Indian-American community is much more important for the upper middle class in India than
to the United States. Power in India---political as well as cultural, and largely social---- resides with the
upper middle class, urban and rural, backed by perhaps the 300 million strong middle classes in the
country, making India one of the three largest middle class nations in the world, along with the United
States and China.
In the following pages we present, for the benefit of readers of this journal, a short but comprehensive
profile of the Indian-American ethnic group in the U.S.
The term, “NRI,” or Nonresident Indian, is now given to Indians who stay abroad, generally in a First World country such as Britain, Canada or the United States, for employment, doing business or engaged in some other vocation such as media, show business or the film industry. An NRI usually lives abroad with, family in most cases, and so the second generation of NRIs is born abroad. An NRI’s stay abroad is usually for an indefinite period of time. Most NRIs are citizens of the country they live in; but there are also those who are permanent resident aliens, continuing Indian citizenship. A small portion lives there on account of temporary posting from the Indian government or a private Indian agency. This profile is of NRIs in the US.
Currently, there are about 2,226,585 people of Indian origin domiciled in the US, with citizenships, as permanent residents or on special professional visas. The population more than doubled between 1990 and 2000, growing at a rate of 16.7% whereas the population of the entire country increased by 7% during the same time. They are now the second largest immigrant population, second only to China, and catching up fast. The three main categories of NRIs in the US are as follows:
The following are the main three categories of NRIs:-
(i) Indian citizens who stay abroad for employment or for carrying on a business or vocation or any other purpose, in circumstances indicating an indefinite period of stay abroad.
(ii) Indian citizens working abroad on assignment with foreign government agencies like United Nations Organization (UNO), including its affiliates, International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank etc.
(iii) Officials of Central and State Government and Public Sector undertaking deputed abroad on temporary assignments or posted to their offices, including Indian diplomat missions, abroad.
The immigration of Indian Americans has taken place in several waves since the first Indian American came to the United States in the 1700s. A major wave of immigration to California from the region of Punjab took place in the first decade of the 20th century. Another significant wave followed in the 1950s which mainly included students and professionals. The elimination of immigration quotas in 1965 spurred successively larger waves of immigrants in the late 1970s and early 1980s. With the technology boom of the 1990s, the largest influx of Indians arrived between 1995 and 2000. This latter group has also caused surge in the application for various immigration benefits including applications for green card.
Several groups have tried to create a unified or dominant voice for the Indian American community in political affairs. Additionally, there are also industry-wide Indian American groupings including the Asian American Hotel Owners Association and the Association of American Physicians of Indian Origin. Despite being heavily religious and having the highest average household income among all ancestry groups in the United States (two traits that usually favor conservatism), Indian Americans tend to be more liberal and tend to vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. Polls before the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election showed Indian Americans favoring Democratic candidate John Kerry over Republican George W. Bush by a 53% to 14% margin (nearly a 4 to 1 ratio), with 30% undecided at the time. Hundreds of thousands of Non Resident Indians (NRIs) in America joined in the election process, contributing their time, talent and resources leading to the Obama victory. Just before the elections in 2008, 42% of Indian Americans supported Obama, compared to 24% supporting John McCain. From across the nation, several groups of NRIs took an active part in the elections. South Asians for Obama (SAFO), one of the many such groups is a grassroots movement that worked hard to mobilize the South Asian American community to help elect Barack Obama as President of the United States. President Barack Obama has appointed 20 Indian-Americans to his administration, another all-time high. However, the Republican party is also trying to attract this community and several prominent conservative activists are of Indian origin. In 2007, Republican Congressman Bobby Jindal became the first United States Governor of Indian descent when he was elected Governor of Louisiana. In total, two Indians served in the US Congress, the first being Dalip Singh Saund (Democrat), and the most recent, Bobby Jindal (Republican); ten have represented State Assemblies; two in local councils. There have also been two mayors, albeit from small towns. Joy Cherian, first Asian head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Rajiv Shah, former Under Secretary of Agriculture for Research, Education, and Economics and current Administrator of USAID. Neel Kashkari, interim Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Stability in the United States Department of the Treasury. Sonal Shah has been a member of the Obama-Biden Transition Project advisory board.
Indian Americans are now very involved in US Policy toward India. There are many Indian American lobbying agencies permanently stationed in Washington D.C. India had always employed lobbying firms on and off, but in 2005, the Indian government made a decision that it needed robust ‘political advocacy’ support in Washington. In 2008 alone, India paid more than 5 million dollars to Washington lobbyists. Sant Singh Chatwal and Swadesh Chatterjee are but two of the lobbyists who are most in the news, the former having been just awarded the Padma Bhushan by the Indian government for his services to improve Indo-US relations.
A case in point would be the historic 5-day trade mission to New Delhi and Mumbai, supported by the Nuclear Energy Institute and the U.S. Department of Commerce and led by Steve Hucik of GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy, with more than 60 senior executives representing more than 30 world-leading commercial nuclear companies, concluded in mid- January last year. The mission was the first commercial nuclear trade mission to visit India since the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) approved India for global commercial nuclear trade. It was also the largest ever mission mounted by the U.S.-India Business Council (USIBC).
The USIBC-NEI Mission arrived in India just months after the opening of India to civilian nuclear trade with the U.S. and the world. This body kept up the pressure on the Bush administration until July 18, 2005 when, during the Washington visit of PM Manmohan Singh, the U.S.-India nuclear deal was finally consummated with the signing, on October 9, 2008, of the U.S.-India 123 Agreement by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee. The inaking of the bilateral 123 Agreement capped a whirl of approvals – from the Indian Government’s successful trust vote on July 20 to unanimous nods by the International Atomic Energy Agency and Nuclear Suppliers Group in September, to a final triumph in the U.S. Congress in early October.
It is, of course, hardly surprising that such a large and highly educated group of people (they have the highest educational qualifications out of all foreign born settlers in the US) would also gainfully employed. 73% are professionally employed with 57% in managerial and/or senior academic positions. Financially, too, Indian Americans are the wealthiest minority, with full time median earnings of $51,000 per annum.
Indian Americans own 50% of all economy lodges and 35% of all hotels in the United States, which have a combined market value of almost $40 billion. (Source: Little India Magazine). In 2002, there were over 223,000 Asian Indian-owned firms in the U.S., employing more than 610,000 workers, and generating more than $88 billion in revenue.
More millionaires were made in the Silicon Valley than anywhere else. They are still being made with new innovations and smart marketing. With technology at its heart, this small area of California, where IT technology took its firm roots ,has a greater population of Indian millionaires than anywhere else. Brains were needed, and the opportunities were boundless. Almost all major technology names of today have Indian technologist or entrepreneur at its heart. USB and SanDisk, for instance – two electronic items used in and with computers – have been partially invented by Indian Americans and carry their names Ajay Bhat for USB and Sanjay Mehrortra ( for SanDisk). Technology was invented, marketed and millionaires were made in a few short years. All this needed resources; technical resources, which were in short supply in US. Hence they turned to India and gave a major impetus to US-India economic relationship.
As the new immigrants arrived, brand name “IIT” became popular. This latter are a bunch of premier technical schools of India, which had adopted, high standards of education and new technologies as its basis. Graduates of these institutions who had immigrated in droves in seventies and eighties became the core of success not only in the Silicon Valley, but everywhere else also. Today a freshly minted IIT graduate commands a better respect in the US technology circles than others. They definitely have carved a niche for themselves.. Three Indian American men have won the Nobel Prize as members of a team.. Hargobind Khorrana won in 1968 for Biochemistry. Subramanyan Chandrasekhar in 1983 for Physics, and . most recently in 2009, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan in Biochemistry.
Along with these scientific, technological, and political achievements, and achievements in commerce, Indian Americans have been steadily publishing books, often to huge public acclaim. In 1988 Bharati Mukherjee was the National Book Critic Circle Award for her anthology of short stories called Middle Men and Other Stories, and Jhumpa Lahiti, in 2007, won the Pulitzer Prize, the most prestigious US prize for literature for her The Interpreter of Maladies.
The following are some of the more notable book publications in the US by Indian American authors:
Suburban Sahibs by Mitra Kalita
Caste and Outcast by Dhan Gopal Mukerji
The Tiger's Daughter by Bharati Mukherjee
Wife by Bharati Mukherjee
Jasmine (novel) by Bharati Mukherjee
Darkness (short stories) by Bharati Mukherjee
The Middleman and Other Stories by Bharati Mukherjee
The Karma of Brown Folk by Vijay Prashad
New Roots in America's Sacred Ground by Khyati Y. Joshi
The Inscrutable Americans by Anurag Mathur
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (winner of 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)
The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Divakaruni
In My Own Country by Dr. Abraham Verghese
The Tennis Partner by Dr. Abraham Verghese
Similarly, there has been a sharp increase in Indian American output in the film industry. Some of them featuring in the last twenty years are:
ABCD (1999)
American Chai (2001)
American Desi (2001)
Americanizing Shelley (2007)
Anokha (2004)
Arya (2005)
Ashes (2005)
Bugaboo (1999)
Carma (2006) - first film to be released on internet pay per view
Chutney Popcorn (1999)
Cosmopolitan (2003)
Green Card Fever (2003)
The Guru (2002)
Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004)
In My Own Country
Indian Cowboy (2007)
It's A Mismatch (2006)
Kissing Cousins (2007)
Mississippi Masala (1991)
Monsoon Wedding (2001)
Dude, Where's the Party? (2003)
Flavors (2003)
Mistress of Spices (2005)
National Lampoon's Van Wilder: The Rise of Taj (2006) (official site)
Rez Bomb (2008) (official site)
The Namesake (2007)
The Other End of the Line (2008)
Trade Offs (2003)
Wedded Bliss? (2002)
Wings of Hope (2001)
Yeh Kahan Aa Gaya Hum (2007)
The last two categories of achievements – publishing and the media – along with the categories of public service shows that NRIs have y thoroughly integrated into the American public life. After all, scientific and technological contributions can be made by staying pretty much isolated from the larger social world. But commenting on the society through creative and artistic means, and being read and accepted by the public, suggests a deeper integration. Contributions to the political arenas, at the local, state and federal levels, mostly by second generation immigrants, also suggest the same.
Indian Americans so far have not excelled in US professional sports, although a second generation Sikh American, Alexi Grewal, won the gold medal for cycling in the Los Angeles Olympic Games in 1984.
Thus, right from the early immigrants, mostly of Punjabi origin, who toiled 19 hours a day on farms and mills in the Northwest, for a meager 18 cents per hour, to the high-tech IT pros swarming an ever-distending Silicon Valley, working the routine, white-collar, eight hour stretch and minting the big bucks, NRI wayfarers have surely come far. What fetches us here as immigrants aren’t just the notion of a utopian First World country anymore. Somewhere beneath all that it embodies - comfortable living, labor egalitarianism, and the whim of a “free life” that dangles precariously- lies the classic, often hackneyed desire to “make the best of both worlds.” Indian parents in the US have often been criticized for wanting their children to “perfectly blend in with the professional life in the US,” and yet remain authentic Indians at heart, marrying other Indians and living Indian values. In what Dr. Prasad calls the “Americanization of the Indian kid,” he writes, “Indian parents order their children to get “A”s in all their subjects in school. Their children, like pet monkeys obey.” (Prashad, 2002). But such phenomena are perhaps inevitable when immigrants try to settle down in a foreign land. As Ranjini Srinivasan has demonstrated, it is precisely America’s promise to immigrants – that if you work hard with the purpose of succeeding professionally, and making something of your life, the US is the place be. The Indians know this, and “go for it.” (Srinivasan, 2009)
WORKS CONSULTED
Brijesh Prashad (2002). The Karma of Brown Folk. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Ranjini Srinivasan (2009). “Chicago Blues.” This blog is an online repertoire of columns in the Indian Express, North American edition. http://chicago-blues.blogspot.com/

The State of the Republic
By Bhabani Sen Gupta


When politics is reality TV, profiling a country or a nation gets complicated.
The world community has nearly 200 sovereign national units, but not more than
a quarter of these are privileged to be noted by the international media that make
as well as market images of nations . Dominating the market, the image-making
industry now is a many-splendoured behemoth, spreading out upwards and downwards
but keeping the limelight focused on the centres of power, political, economic, military
and technological. The centres are still what is stubbornly called The West----the United
States, Western Europe, and Britain.
The masters of image-making have divided the nations of the world as it stands
in the first decades of the 21st century into three groups---the developed rich of “The West”, emerging economies of Asia, Latin America and Africa, and poor countries
of these three continents. They are ambivalent about labeling Russia and the Eurasian
states that occupy the vast space of the former Soviet Union. Canada, Australia and New
Zealand belong to the “West”. but not Japan which is seen as Asian.
There is a great deal of concern in the West about the on-going shift in global
global economic power from the West to combination of emerging powers symbolized
by the acronym BRIC----Brazil, Russia, India and China. The combination leaves out
South Africa, but nevertheless stirs fears of a worldwide power polarization between
the West and the Rest!
The Economist, in its issue of February 27 offered its own comparative narrative of the ‘economic power’ of the ‘West” and the East. The narrative noted the
spectacular upsurge of Asia’s economy since the 1990s. Measured by perchasing
power parity (PPP), Asia’s share of the world economy has risen from 18% in 1980
to 34% in 2009. By this gauge, Asian economy “will probably exceed the combined
sum of America’s and Europe’s within four years. In PPP terms, three of the world’s
four largest economies(China, Japan and India) are already in Asia, and Asia has
accounted for half of the world.s GDP growth over the past decade.” In consumer spending accounted for in plain U.S. dollars, the Asian population, though three-fifths
of the world’s, Asia are much behind America, but in capital spending, “Asia is
undoubdtedly the giant. In 2009, 40% of global investment (at market exchange rates)
took place in Asia, as much as in America and Europe combined.” The Economist
also recalled that “Asia accounted for over half of world output for 18 of the past
20 centuries. And its importance will only increase in the coming years.” (emphasis
added).
By all credible accounts, the world economic balance is steadily shifting to
Asia. The principal spectacular Asian actor is of course China whose emergence
is seen by some Western writers as a big threat to Western dominance of the
world. What truly alarms the ruling power elites of the West as well as the captains
of the West’s military-industrial-intellectual complex is the image of a transcontinental
combination of economic and political power of BRIC.
The rise of the West over the last two centuries has been at the cost of the
overwhelming majority of humanity. In terms of human development, BRIC-4
includes the immense landmasses of Asia inhabited by a huge humanity mired in poverty
and squalor for two centuries of the West’s global empires. The long imperium created
a mindset that nourished convictions that the White Man’s global might would remain
alive and well for all time; that any attempt to terminate the imperium must be nipped
in the bud, if necessary with military power. The doctrine of imperial domain derived
its sap from the combined power of the State and the Church, particularly after the
two great seats of power agreed, with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, to a dynamic
détente of peaceful co-existence. Not long thereafter was born, out of European minds,
concepts and ideas of the Modern State .Conflict and war became
the staple of relations between and among the imperial powers. But the aggressive hunt
for commerce and territories, also for slave and enslaved human labour, shifted to the
continents beyond Europe--- across the oceans to America, Asia and Africa.
The 21st century will be witness to the great reverse in world history---the focus
of human development set on the non-Western world. Its leaders---China, India, Russia,
Brazil and others--- are not anti- Western. They aim and ask for cooperation with the
West on terms of equality with an unavoidable emphasis on their own accelerated
development. They have to help themselves to the utmost of their transferable and
exchangeable resources. They must also join their minds to churn out concepts and
theories of a new world order that. in this very century, will replace the Western order
that is sloping into history.
At bilateral as well as quadrilateral summits and other high-level confabs, India,
Russia, China and Brazil now need to inaugurate a large confluence of thinking together
outside governments about how to conceptualise , as well as promote, a truly new global
order in which the West and the Rest can make life together with true equality and full
cooperation. Public knowledge of how each of the four are trying to navigate the gigantic
challenge of blending growth and development so that mass poverty can be conquered
in the next few decades. This has been achieved to a very large extent in China; it has been missed in India which remains the homeland of the planet’s largest mass of poor
people . Rapid social and economic development also needs to be informed with increasing legalization of human rights to the basic demands of democracy---liberty,
dignity and equality.In short, how the social, economic and political development can
move on together on a mass scale and reach aspired targets in a century without
colonies, wars, and hegemonic doctrines and behaviour.
It is a gigantic task waiting leaders of the Non-West. The barriers are many.
Language is a major barrier. Information and communication channels need to be
opened with courage and conviction. The academic and media communities need to be
mobilized to the historic task of creating an inclusive world order which the West
has failed to do. The first steps are still waiting to be taken.////

Resuing Democracy in Pakistan

Resuing Democracy in Pakistan

By Bhabani Sen Gupta

A ballistic missile of hope burst off at the Supreme Court in Islamabad, on Thursday, December 17, when the full Bench of 17 justices declared unvalid and violative of the Constitution the presidential ordinance known as NRO .The ordinance laid out the basis of the political compromise of 2007 between General Musharaff and Benazir Bhutto for restoration of civilian rule in Pakistan. It was a victory for the millions of Pakistanis who have espoused the cause of democracy but have been denied their cherished political system by the military. The Army, helped and backed by captains of the bureaucracy, has ruled Pakistan for half of the sixtytwo years of the sovereign republic born of the partition of Britain’s Indian empire. Man creates history even as history creates man. The credit for the great boost democracy and the rule of law received on that sunlit December morning goes, of course, to the millions of Pakistanis who kept the flame of democracy alive and flickering even during long sunless spans of military rule. There are, however, two outstanding individuals who laminate the great event of December 17 which may make another military takeover much more difficult than the three Army coups of 1958, 1977 and 1996. One of them if Iftikar Choudhry, chief justice of Pakistan, whose determined fight for an independent judiciary and his final victory have installed him as perhaps the brightest icon of the country’s struggle for democracvy. Chief Justice Choudhury ‘s historic role found rich consummation in his ability to carry the entire Bench with him to deliver the great judgment on December 17. The other luminous icon of democracy in Pakistan is the 87-year old Mubashir Hasan, of Lahore, who filed the petition at the Supreme Court challenging the legality of the National Reconciliation Ordinance and mobilized a team of competent lawyers, headed by Abdul Latif Pirzada, also of Lahore, to plead successfully for the historic verdict. I am just one of the multitude of admorers of Mubashir Hasan whom I met in Lahore first in 1984 and with whom I was able to build a close rapport through the 1990s and down to the early years of the current decade. Mubashir is, for me, a shining symbol of the bravely persistent struggle of Pakistanis for democracy and the Rights of Man( in Pakistan. For me, Mubashir is the symbol of the many qualities of the Pakistani that I have admired and written about--- warmth of heart, r great ability to love and laugh, readiness to reciprocate affection, kindness and loyalty. It was an overwhelming emotional moment for me when, a few months back, I met Mobashir at a book launching event in New Delhi. I went to the meet as soon as I found his name in the morning newspapers as one of the speakers. Five minutes before the appointed Time I saw him enter the auditorium at the Nehru Memorial Library ---an annex to the building some 500 metres to the south of Rashtrapati Bhavan, the president’s palace, designed for the British viceroy by Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens .He was almost exactly the man I stayed with in Lahore in 2000, my last trip to Pakistan. The same tall, slim, smiling. We sat together. The next day I met him for a couple of hours at the ranglow on Curzon Lane, where lives Saida, member of India.s Planning Commission, an erudite, engaging, gracefully non-aging lady who gave up her Canadian citizenship to live and work in India. I knew that the Pakistan People’s Party was born in 1969 at Mubashir’s house in Lahore and that he was finance minister in the First cabinet of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. I also knew that he did not agree with JAB’s handling of the turn of events that ended with the separation of East Pakistan from Pakistan and its incarnation as Bangladesh. Mubashir had told me that he stayed on with ZAB mainly because among the political leaders of Pakistan he alone was committed to the urban and rural poor and the lower middle classes. On one of my visits to Lahore, Mubashir took me around the city’s sprawling slums where lived the poor, and I saw how people of these urban slums loved and respected him. Mubashir used to enlighten me about the inner dynamics of the republic of Pakistan, tell me about the emotional traumas the Pakistanis had gone through, and about the basic contradictions of Pakistani society. He would often talk about the “bleeding sense of betrayal” the people of Pakistan fekt at the three military coups, how the politicians had let down the people, and how convinced he was that the great hiatus between democracy and military dictatorship was the basic fault line of the State and Society of Pakistan. Few Pakistani personalities are known to Indians except in the narrow restricted context of nationalism and religion, and the mutually exclusive relationship between what Kuldip Nayar appropriately described as distant neighours. A recent break in the clogged claustrophobia that inhibits neghbourliness in South Asia was an op-ed page article printed in The Hindu of December 21 written by its correspondent in Islamabad, Ms Nirupama Subramaniam on the Supreme Court drama that ended up with the invalidation of the misbegotten National Reconciliation Ordinance . It is probably the only profile published in the Indian Press of Dr Mubashir Hasan who petitioned the Supreme Court Against the NRO. Rao interviewed Mubashir and her article was wore the headline :” A Long and Mostly Lonely Battle for Reordering Pakistan.” Rao quoted Mubashir as telling her that while he shared the happiness of people of Pakistan and of many other countries with the historic Supreme Court verdict, he knew the political system well enough to doubt if it would lead to a genuine reordering of the country. “The people of Pakistan are extremely happy, so I am happy too,” she quoted Mubashir telling her. “But since I know the reality, I do not entertain the hope that this will stop the state of Pakistan from falling apart.” Mubashir hurried to explain that he believed that when corruption became the System, the state fell apart. Mubashir Hasan is a civil engineer earning his Ph.D from Columbia University. His own life is an example for the people of Pakistan who, in their own way. Have been fighting their battles for democracy and a humane social and economic order. He belongs, as I also do, to the generation in the subcontinent that witnessed the end of the Empire, and the lauuching of our respective republics. However, our political systems carry a lot of the dirt and filth that gathered in the huge belly pf the Empire. India has done relatively well because of its democratic political process built on institutional foundations. It was Pakistan’s misfortune that it lacked strong political institutions and leadership . From the start, power was usurped by the bureaucracy. And even in the 1950s the ruling bureaucracy joined arms with the Army to lord it over the political parties and their leaders. If Mubashir Hasan were a student of history and take a deep look at political history of nations and peoples, he would perhaps be less pessimistic and share the popular jubilation of the Supreme Court verdict of December 21. The nations of Europe took more than a century, fought countless wars including two WQorld Wars in 25 years, while enriching themselves from their worldwide empires before they attained the mature stability of the last sixty years. Besides---and this is a matter of supreme importance--- the Europeans slit themselves into a cluster of countries with small populations compared with the countries of Asia. When Asia changes, half of humanity changes. Even after losing its eastern wing, Pakistan is home to over 168 million people ---the second largest Muslim country in the world after Indonesia--- while Germany and France, the two most populous countries of the continent of Europe, have only 82 and 64 million people .

Afghan Worries

During the recent visit to New Delhi of Richard Halbrooke, president Obama’s special AfPak envoy, India raised a pointed question: which is the more important thrust of Obama’s new Afghan strategy---the surge of 30,000 more troops or the beginning of the pull out from Afghanistan in 2011? The Indian interlocutor, M.K. Narayan wanted to know if the pullout would depend on success of the surge? Whetter the surge or the pullout was the more important escutcheon of Obama’s Afghan strategy. Halbrooke avoided a straight answer. Indeed, the meeting, coming after a fairly long time since his previous one, was seen in New Delhi as typical of the several dilemmas of Obama’s AfPak strategy. Obama apparently wants to draw the curtains on George Bush’s two wars --- the Irak and Afghan wars---before he seeks a second term in the White House in November 2012. If he can put an end of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, he will be the first American president since World War II without an American war somewhere in the globe, aptly described by an American author as ‘war in the time of peace.’ New Delhi keeps a sharp vigil on the operational unfolding of Obama’s AfPak strategy. The president has recognized that without the active and willing cooperation of Pakistan, his own war in Afghanistan cannot open up paths of peace in Afghanistan. He will now recognize the refusal of the Pakistan Army to wage war on militant Islam within Pakistan at a more-than perfunctory level. The Pakistan Army has engaged Islamic militants to be flushed out in the FATA and Balochistan regions with ‘success’. There are as many Taliban Groups in Pakistan as you like to see. There is no single Taliban party in Pakistan. The Taliban that Zia-ul Haque created when he was Pakistan’s second military dictator was designed to deliver Afghanistan as the Pakistan Army’s strategic depth in the event of war with India in the post-Bangladesh period. Obama.s AfPak strategy has virtually conceded the Pakistan Army’s strategic depth commitment to Afghanistan. In New Delhi’s perception, the Obama administration’s look for ‘good Talibans’ in the PakAfghan expanse of geopolitics implies recognition of the “strategic depth’ policy followed by Islamabad since Pakistan’s loss of its Eastern /Wing in 1971-72. @010 is expected to witness the emergence of a new political persona in the AfPak space wearing the face of ‘good Taliban’.In 2011, Obama expects to start the process of pulling out from Afghanistan. He will seek and obtain tacit approval of Russia and China as both share ‘soft’ borders with Afghanistan and would prefer to see ‘soft Islam’ reign in Afghanistan under joint US-Pakistan patronage to a takeover by hard-line Taliban zealots of the 1980s composed more of Pakistnis than Afghans. Mullah Omar himself

Nuclear

The Obama Administration has stood by the civil nuclear deal between India and the US negotiated and finalized in 2008 in the second term Of the presidency of George W. Bush. However, the Democratic Party Is less enthusiastic about the deal that was the Republican Party which wanted to restore the nuclear power industry in the United States. Hilary Clinton, during her visit to New Delhi, assured the Indian government of president Obama’s decision not to revisit the deal which Passed both chambers of Congress in December 2008. However, the Obama administration has asked the Indian government to limit, by legislation, liabilities U.S. companies might be required or expected to meet if there were an accident in any of the nuclear power projects built by them. The Manmohan Singh government finds this a hard job. The U.S. will not operationalise the nuclear deal until parliament has passed the limited liability bill that is still to be drafted. The recent anniversary of the Union Carbide factory explosion in Bhopal in which hundreds were killed or suffered radiation. And the pittance paid by the US company to compensate the victims made it more difficult for the government to adopt legislation legally limiting liabilities of companies building civil nuclear reactors in India. The non-proliferation lobby in the U.S. which has a much larger constituency in the Democratic party than in the Republican party will use the situation to obstruction operalisation of the civil nuclear agreement. Pakistan is miffed by the U.S. refusal to offer it a civil nuclear Deal similar to the Indo-US deal. China has registered its opposition citing the argument that the deal would encourage proliferation, and making it difficult to prevent North Korea from openly going nuclear and also arguing that, with the Indo-US deal coming into operation, it would be all the more difficult for the U.S. to keep Iran short of defiant proliferation. Russia and France, the two powers which will probably the principal sources pf Indian imports of civil nuclear projects and/or technologies will benefit from the kind of legislation the U.S. has asked India to undertake. The CPI-M and its Left allies which opposed the nuclear deal With the US are happy with the embarrassment of the Manmohan Singh government. The CPI-M withdrew support to the first UPA Government but could not bring it down nor stop the relentless pursuit of the deal by prime minister Manmohan Singh since 2005. Singh adopted a foreign policy posture that please George Bush--- such as voting against Iran at the UN security council as well as nuclear nonproliferation agency. The nuclear deal, to Singh’s comfort, received overwhelming support from the media. Singh told Sonia Gandhi, who constitutes the ‘high command’ of the ruling Congress party at the Centre, that he would resign if parliament Voted against the nuclear deal which is the most prominent signature Of his leadership of the Congress-led govern

OBAMA'S CHINA VISIT

OBAMA’s CHINA VISIT

By Bhabani Sen Gupta


The templates of the world order created by the industrial revolution in Europe have begun to shake. The birthpangs of a new world order are disorienting many actors across the planet. What is known as South and South-East Asia was, until the mid-20th century, colonies of the European powers. The end of empires gave birth to the groups of sovereign countries which now comprise SE and South Asia. India is the largest single
country in the two regions. Mainly because of the partition of India into India and Pakistan, India’s influence remained limited in the post-colonial world.
However, Europe declined, and the United States of America emerged as the leader of the post-European world order. Now, in the 21st century, this U.S.-dominated world order is changing under the pressure of China emerging as a mammoth economic power. The templates of the “Western” world order, which, for the power elite in India, implies, in effect, the Anglo-Saxon world order, are shaking. The ‘awesome economic growth of China’, ( words used in a New York Times report on Obama’s visit to China, the rise of India as a significant economic heavyweight, the relative ease with which Asian countries have broken out of the global economic and financial crisis, the rise of Russia and Brazil as significant aspirants to economic and political height are tell-tale signs of the global economic and political order slipping out of the leadership grip of the Anglo-Saxon( or ‘Western’, club. The corporate media in India, and its political patrons ---- a large segment of the top bureaucracy, the top military brass serving and retired but not unemployed, upper crust of the business houses, a very good portion of the political class including the Congress party, and a majority of academic intellectuals--- have taken a dim view of Barak Obama’s failure to affirm the superiority of U.S.-Western zeitgeist in his transactions with the leaders of China. on democracy, human rights, currency issues,and Tibet. . Rather, the U.S. president seemed to be anxious to build a U.S.-China G2 forum to deal with global issues and problems. No recent world event has engaged the minds of the power elite in India, both within and outside the government, as worrisomely as has Obama’s China visit and the immediate, short-term and medium-term consequences thereof. The corporate media in India is, at times openly, otherwise opaquely, pro-West, more precisely pro-AangloSaxon,___which means American ‘hard power’ softened by seasoning of ‘soft’ British diplomacy,. This disposition is shared by most of the top bureaucracy including the executives of the vast public sector of the economy. And no doubt by the upper crust of the military. This large power elite, assembled primarily in New Delhi, was literally taken aback by what it saw
as Obama’s ‘gift’ to China of a stake in South Asia, regarded by it as
India’s sphere of influence. The Times of India, the largest-circulated English daily in India, and also the most avidly anti-China, suggested that Obama “bowed” to China by giving it “a larger role” in South Asia, and said that “new equations” between
Washington and Beijing “cast a shadow on Manmohan’s US visit” next week.
The PM0 issued immediate instructions forbidding any official, including ministers, to make public comment on Obama’s China visit. After a meeting with the PM, the foreign minister, M. Krishna, issued a terse statement, through the ministry’s spokesman, saying that “a third party role” in India-Pakistan transactions “cannot
be envisaged.” The PMO immediately set out a serious effort to find out whether the relevant 74-word portion in the joint statement issued at the end of Obama’s visit was an American idea or was accepted by the US president at China’s behest. It seemed that the initiative was American. India is not likely to welcome a Sino-American G-2 leadership of world affairs, The concept is unmistakenly American. It was endorsed
Earlier this year by no less a man than by Zbignuiew Brzeznzki, president Carter’s national security adviser. India is comfortable with the G-20 forum which has almost an equal membership from Europe and Asia. G-20 has definitely overtaken
the rubric of G-50 which was the first “Western” digitization of a changing world order to replace the one ushered at the end of World War II that did
not wrap up a peace treaty but gifted the international community an entirely new torrid confection: the Cold War. The Cold War lost its raison d’etre when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Americans claimed that the “soft war” of containment did the
USSR in. Containment was indeed a major factor, but perhaps a greater
Cause of the Soviet collapse was the Brezhnev Doctrine of logistrical support to whatever “Marxist” regimes were set up by whichever brand of
Marxist pretenders anywhere in the world----there were about 35 of them
in the 1980s including the Saur revolution regime in Afghanistan to save
which the Soviets had to send a ‘limited’ army of 100,000 soldiers and
failed to secure it from the U.S.-backed Taliban invasion.
To cap it all, a cold war broke out between the USSR and the People’s
Republic of China, two communist giants who joined together to strike a mortal blow at the long-entertained myth of ‘proletariat internationalism.’
Now, some 20 years after the end of the Soviet brand of a world socialist order, China has scaled tremendous heights in economic power
to claim to be seated at the high table of global leadership with the “West.”
Unlike the USSR, it is not an equal of the U.S. in nuclear and hydrogen weapons, but it is the banker to the United States, and is poised to equal
and then overtake America in wealth. China has rescued the American economy from a depression worse than that of the 1930s. China alone seems
to have the power to lend generously to scores of governments in Africa,
Asia and Latin America keeping so many of them afloat in difficult times.
China alone has shown that it is possible for a long-laggard nation of 1.3
billion people to redeem itself by sheer hard work, iron will to grow and
develop, build a huge mass of poor, impoverished, long-exploited people
into a dynamic humanity of rising living standards and modern social and
economic infrastructure in the incredibly short span of sixty years!
China strides in a world that has shrunk into a global habitat in
which nations need each other to keep the planet afloat. The United States
was on top of the world when China was reborn as the People’s Republic.
Americans have overspent their resources and are now reaping the bitter
harvest of the follies of their leaders. The U.S. has over 300 military bases
across the world, maintains the world’s most expensive military machine,
has hardly spent a year since 1945 without fighting a war somewhere in
the third world, often more than one at the same time, and have invited
its own decline. When Barak Obama came down from the Great Wall of China
and looked around his honest unlined face glowed with a sense of wonder
at a civilization five thousand years old, with a historical continuity unachieved by any other nation and people in history. His own countrymen failed to appreciate the majesty of history that Seemed to have moved their President. They wanted him to hector the leaders of China on what the Chinese people had “lost” under communist
rule--- freedom of speech and association, right to political diversity, blessings of Democracy. They lamented that their President did not rebule
his hosts for denying Tibet and Xinxiang “real autonomy”, that he had
postponed meeting the Dalai Lama until after his China visit.
In Britain, inheritors of the lost empire on which the sun once did not
Set, tried their best to keep up the sangfroid with only the minimum of gasps and yelps. For The Economist, it was Obama’s ‘Asian adventure’
with results dubious at best.The Europeans were less alarmed. They had
achieved something almost of equal importance as China’s. The European
Union united 27 countries of a continent that was the mother of wars for
Centuries including the two World Wars of the 20th. Britain’s magisterial
stature was derived from its ability to exploit Europe’s divisions and conflicts to its own advantage. The Union of Europe has rendered another
world war almost impossible to happen.
Indeed, war and peace in the world of the 21st century will be determined by relations between the United States and China. They fought
In Korea in the 1950s, and a cold war for the next 20-30 years over Taiwan
and learned the need to treat each other with circumspection and respect.
Obama’s visit to China was a culmination of a long process of incremental
mutual understanding that the centre of gravity in the strategic global dynamics had shifted from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and that the issues
of world war or peace would now be determined by dynamics of relations
between the U.S, and China. This of course does not mean that India’s importance in global affairs has shrunk. India and the European Union are the two other principal actors in the current constellation of power in the world. It is imperative for India
and China to live in peace and cooperation to advance the cause of the
countless millions of humanity inhabiting Asia and Africa. And the
addition of Russia to the two Asian giants creates a formidable, indeed
unassailable template for stability, peace and prosperity of the bulk of
the earth’s population as well as geography.
India and China need each other to build a better life of one-third
of humanity. This is one of the stern imperatives of the 21st century that
journalists often fail to appreciate. Gone are the days when regional conflicts
and tensions could be resolved in geopolitical enclaves exclusive of one
another. And here even India’s ministry of external affairs failed to resist
the pressure of the country’s corporate media which saw in Obama’s China
visit as a give-away by America to China at India’s cost.
The United States needs China’s cooperation to douse the war
in Afghanistan and to resolve the Afghan-Pakistan cocundrum.
Obama asked for China’s help and was probably assured that
He would get it. Obama needs Pakistan to move a good number
of its troops from the eastern to the western fronts to fight the Taliban
in Pakistan and help Kabul to get the better of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The Pakistan Army has already asked the United States a quid for quo ----
pressure on India to reopen the negotiations for settling the Kashmir
issue. Obama has apparently asked the Chinese leaders to help persuade the Pakistan Army as well as the bureaucracy to relent on
both demands. If China can persuade Pakistan to relent, it
will be in India’s interest , not against India. And probably China
will try to help in only because it would want to insulate Xinxiang,
a neighbour of Afghanistan with a shared border, from Islamic
insurgency in Pakistan and Afghanistan./////

AFPAK OR PAKAF? OBAMA’s DILEMMA
By Bhabani Sen Gupta
A long, searing debate has been going on at the White House
in Washington DC on what should be president Barak Obama’s next
strategy in Afghanistan. Vice-president Joe Biden asked at one of
the sessions how much was America spending on Afghanistan and
Pakistan.The answer came as $ 65 billion and $ 2.25 billion. “Well,”
drawled the prolix vice-president, “ by my calculations, that’s 30-to-1
ratio in favour of Afghanistan.” Pausing a few moments of silence
among the select group of national security advisers, Biden asked
a question. “Al-Qaeda is almost all in Pakistan, and Pakistan had nuclear
weapons. And yet for every dollar we are spending in Pakistan, we’re
spending $ 30 in Afghanistan. Does that make strategic sense?”
The debate may consume the rest of the month of October, may extend to November.

President Barack Obama inherited two wars from George W.Bush.
He was not elected to the White House to win the first war Bush had started
-----America invaded Afghanistan way back in 2001! His campaign promise to the American people was to end the war in Iraq; he did not promise to win the war in Afghanistan but to bear with it.. His commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, has asked for 40-60,000 more troops and years of warfare without anything like a victory. The General has publicly confessed that America cannot expect to win the war in Afghanistan. And he has also confessed that the longer he stays in Afghanistan, the less he understands the country., The Economist, inheritor of the imperial ethos of the Raj, felt let down by Obama’s “dithering” in October when he took his time to determine changes in Afghan strategy/.The Economist praised Gordon Brown, British prime minister, for offering 500 more men to fight in Afghanistan. The offer , however, was hedged by several conditions.. Brown could not afford to forget that the British from India had invaded Afghanistan twice, facing defeat both times, but succeeding in dividing the largest ethnic group in the multi\ethnic, multi-lingual population, the Pushtuns, thereby depriving Afghanistan of the principal ingredient of political stability. Neither Brown nor The Economist nor indeed most of the nations of the world want America to get defeated in Afghanistan.
What is needed is an Obama strategy to pull out of Afghanistan. Obama will be better advised to ask the UN to find a settlement of the Afghan conflict or even NATO plus a few chosen neighbours of Afghanistan like Iran, Pakistan, China and Russia.
Obama, in his election campaign, called this war “the right war” ( the “wrong war” was in Iraq) because Afghanistan was seen asthe haven and the largest nest of Taliban, the jihadi offspring of fundamentalist Islam.
That perception seems to be changing at the White House Situation Room. Not
only has the Afghan war cost America $ 65 billion; it has lost support of most of
America’s Coalition of the Willing, and it has no support among a majority of the
American voters who will vote soon in the first Congressional election since Obama
took the White House.
. Osama bin Laden sounded softer than in the past when he addressed
the invading powers from his unknown hideout on the eighth anniversary of 9/11 to tell them that they should quit the war they could hardly win.” You are waging a hopeless and losing war,” Turning to his own followers, said this fugitive man of darkness, “The time has come to liberate ourselves from fear and the ideological terrorism of neoconservatives.” It could have meant fear to negotiate or fear to fight.
In London, the Middle East correspondent of The Independent, Robert Fisk was
moved by the Al Zazzera video to comment that “Obama and Osama are at least participating in the same narrative For the U.S. president’s critics-indeed for many critics of the West’s military occupation of Afghanistan—are beginning to speak in the same language as Obama’s (and their) greatest enemy.”
Much of the marathon debate at the Situation Room in the White House revolves
around crucial questions about how Al Qaeda and Taliban relate to one another. Are they two different phenomena, each with its own sociology and political objectives?Or are that two faces of one single body of violent, resurgent, fundamentalist Islam committed to turning the entire space ofAfghan-Pakistan into an armed Islamic fortress? The perceptions the Obama administration inherited from that of

George Bush was the apocalyptic vision of a single fanatic Islamic monster

challenging America to nothing short of a civilisational war across undefined battlefronts ; the “war” that was carried to the American homeland on 9/11 must be fought on as many fronts as the Enemy chose to strike from. The American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and of Iraq in 2003 locked two fundamentalist belligerent gospels in a mutually mortal combat.
Humanity demands that the new American president shakes off this terribly
jaundiced vision. From the little narrow windows that have been allowed to open on
the secret Situation Room debate, it seems that two major schools of thought have begun to emerge. One, led by Biden, sees the Taliban in Afghanistan as the country’s own political movement inevitably wearing Islamic masks because the country, battered by 3O years of warfare lacks institutional frames with which to build political parties.
There is indeed an Al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan, but it is a small one, perhaps about 100 dedicated jihadis; Al Qaeda does not drive Taliban in Afghanistan.
But it does so in Pakistan where the Army, cuddled, armed, indoctrinated, financed, and armoured by America, granted it a safe haven in the huge, rugged, tribal borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistsn. Pakistan was created by M.A. Jinnah as a secular republic for the Muslim minority of the British Indian empire. It was midwifed by the Raj in clumsy, desperate haste in 1947. In a mere ten years, it
was usurped by the Army and in another ten given Islamic trappings, until General
Zia-ul Huq, a darling of Washington, proclaimed an Islamic Republic. General Zia
also created Taliban and endowed it with the role of throwing out the Soviet-backed
Saur Revolutionary regime in Afghanistan and proclaim an Islamic regime in Kabul
that would be bound to Pakistan to fight India from a strategic depth. All this military- strategic thinking and planning had the open or implied support or approval of the United States. Obama is now engaged in a thorough review of the inherited wisdom or folly that the Taliban, because it is led by Islamic cleriks trained in Madrasas is a threat to the national security of the United States. As of November 24, when this analysis is being written, it seems that the president and his advisers as well as cabinet colleagues have reached a consensus that the Taliban, as long as it operates only in Afghanistan without Al Qaeda leadership as well as infiltration, it is not a security threat to America, and it can be brought into a network of negotiations leading to a political understanding. The United States can then focus entirely on Al Qaeda which has now dug its toes in the borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and built a compact with Pakistan Taliban . The combination constitutes a formidable Islamic terrorist force, the largest in the world, very well armed for guerrilla warfare of long duration, and seemingly well-supplied with financial and other resources.
If separation of Afghan Taliban from the Al Qaeda-Taliban joint front
in Pakistan informs Obama’s new military-political, that is, strategic thrust
at the end of the debate in the White House, it will mark the end of the short-lived
strategic AFPAK concept of Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special envoy` for the
South Asian front of American diplo-military thrusts.
A new strategic concept will emerge. Americans may be prompted to call
it PAKAF strategy. But it will fall far short of an adequate intellectual under-
standing of the problem. Pakistan has been all these years a major American asset
in the Cold War and even in the 16 years that have glided by since 1991. Will
the friendship endure if the U.S. puts enough pressure on Pakistan to incapacitate, if not kill, the monster the Army itself created and nurtured with America’s tacit
approval and loud economic and military support?END