Open magazine TruePDF 18 march 2019

By Rahul Pandita ThE SUSPENSION OF maTTEr Rameshwar Broota and the exploration ThaT chaNGED INDIa Inside the Balakot operation and how it will further strengthen Prime Minister Modi... T

w w w.openthemagazine.com

18 march 2019 / rS 50THE ILLUSION OF UNITY AN ESSAY BY TONI MORRISON

The malleability and universality of

the characters in Little Women remain

fresh 150 years after its publication

By Aditya Mani Jha

NOT PEOPLE LIKE US

Sara’s wish

By Rajeev Masand

82

34

a caLL FOr cONTaINmENT

The next stage in dealing with

a belligerent neighbour

By Maroof Raza

37

BrEaKING ThE haBIT

By launching an air strike on terrorist

camps in Pakistan, India has called

a long-standing Pakistani bluff

By Siddharth Singh

64

ThE FOrEIGNEr’S hOmE

To what do we pay greatest allegiance? Family, language group, country, gender? Religion, race? And if none

of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan, or simply lonely?

By Rahul Pandita

ThE SUSPENSION OF maTTEr

Rameshwar Broota and the exploration

ThaT chaNGED INDIa

Inside the Balakot operation

and how it will further strengthen

Prime Minister Modi

18 march 2019

4

the victory is ours

The Indian military forces should be hailed for their efforts to stand up against Pakistan and terrorism (‘The Fog of War’, March 11th, 2019) One should also give Prime Minister Narendra Modi due credit for India's response after the Pulwama attack It takes courage to do what he did Diplomacy isn't always enough—certainly not with Pakistan, which still refuses to acknowledge

or even tackle terror outfits operating in its territory If someone repeatedly comes

to hurt you, at some point, one has to take a stand or bow down Modi took a stand and refused to bow down And even though the outcome of the strikes remains unclear (whether the Indian Air Force

In the future, one hopes that those who want to create disharmony in our nation will think twice

V SinghMany countries and individ-uals have backed India’s right

to protect its country and citizens Several are also ques-tioning if Pakistan’s claim that terrorists don’t operate

in its territory is true This is because the Pakistani army has given several conflicting statements after the Balakot strikes First, it said that it

was in touch with the JeM militants, then it said there was no JeM in Pakistan at all

So many different statements and such an ardent refusal to acknowledge any of India’s claims can only mean that the country has something to hide If anything, Modi’s plan succeeded in showing how desperate our neighbour is

to back away from any sort of responsibility when it comes

to terrorism

Sahil Maheshwari

the nota franchise

NOTA basically is the stark rejection of all candidates con-testing in an election (‘NOTA Power’, March 11th, 2019) It

is a dissenting vote against those who get tickets only owing to their ability to pay money to a party And while they are willing to spend endlessly on their election campaign, when it comes

to post-election promises, several let their constituen-cies down In this respect, the NOTA option is a great tool for voters who don’t want a corrupt or incapable person

to be elected However, it is a sign of the kind of democracy

we are becoming if people are finding that no candidate is worth their vote

Yusuf Shariff

C letter of the week

Not only have we called Pakistan’s bluff but the air strikes at Balakot have also sent out a strong message to the world that India cannot be taken lightly anymore and we will give a fitting reply to terrorism (‘The Fog

of War’, March 11th, 2019) The Indian Government gave a tough reply to Pakistan, after the Pulwama attack, given the Pakistani government’s refusal to act against terror organisations operating on its soil The Indian Government claims that the air strike managed

to eliminate one of the biggest Jaish-e-Mohammad camps in Pakistan, which if true, then our response is justified and should be celebrated And though Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman was captured

by Pakistan, his return was a victory for us Only a fool will believe that it was a peace gesture by Pakistan and its Prime Minister Imran Khan He did this because the international community was viewing his every move and any attempt to go against the Geneva Convention would have given India the upper hand We should keep up the no-nonsense policy against terror attacks

Germany, Russia, Iran and the US have criticised rorism as well We should count on our economic and strategic partnerships with the global community to put pressure on Pakistan to do away with terrorists

Bal Govind

Editor S Prasannarajan

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18 march 2019

he sceptic enlivens the argument

he makes truth too precious to be wasted

on the big claims of power the sceptic is a refined doubter for whom freedom is not

a set of certainties the sceptic is the dissenter, the instinctive questioner of appearances and attitudes in a democracy, the sceptic prefers a shrug to a nod

post-Balakot, the professional sceptic is at play he is proud to

be the lone doubter in a sea of what he considers to be fairy-tale

peddlers he stands there, bravely resisting all kinds of

insinuations and accusations, as debunker, as the last fighter

against the nationalist mythographer For the post-Balakot

sceptic, it is all (nationalist) sound and (simulated) fury, played

out on over-heated television screens the post-Balakot sceptic is

yet to quote sartre out of context: “i am alone in the midst of these

happy, reasonable voices All these creatures spend their time

explaining, realising happily that they agree with each other in

heaven’s name, why is it so important to think the same things

all together?”

the most audible post-Balakot sceptic is a type, and he is

provoked by another: the post-Balakot let’s-arise nationalist he

thinks his moment has come, finally the nation has arisen,

finally, defying the doubters and doves, and stood up to the

enemy the enemy has always been there, denying the ‘hindu

rashtra’ its very right to exist, but, all the while, it has been let

down by pusillanimous secular

regimes—so goes his lament now

that justice has been done, and the

enemy humiliated and tamed, he feels

at home, and home is not new india but

Mahabharat—and on its soil he sees

those anti-nationalists still questioning

the best intentions of the nation the

post-Balakot let’s-arise nationalist

wants an enemy within and without

Both the types reduce an event that

changed the perception of a state that

pays by its lives to remain secure to a

story of denials, disputes and exclusivist

assertions the professional indian

sceptic who looks appalled by the ‘claims’ of the Government is

a non-believer For him, this Government itself is a fiction, perpetuating a fiction of national glory, and selling a fiction of aerial superheroism the professional indian sceptic—more secular than you, more liberal than you—needs an ecosystem of fiction so that he can be the lone defender of truth it is an historical necessity for him to lose faith in a land without justice,

or to create one, in order to remain the last conscience keeper, the last dissident, the last target to not to believe is to remain the last liberal in a country of zealots

he is aided by the let’s-arise nationalist, suddenly vindicated and rearmed he always wanted an action hero in power, and prime Minister Modi did not play to his script he wanted prime Minister Modi to be as much an action star as candidate Modi was

on the stump five years ago Modi refused to be the dramatic nationalist even as the shirtless of hindutva waited for one Anybody who followed his career after 2002 should know: Modi only follows his own script in the epic action of Balakot, the base

of hindu nationalism saw the Modi of its imagination in time action the let’s-arise nationalist was thrilled his jubilation was in stark contrast to the matter-of-factness with which the foreign secretary announced the strike it didn’t need overselling

real-it didn’t need marketing blreal-itz real-it was too good a piece of action drama to rely on a nationalist ad slogan it doesn’t require promoters and poets it doesn’t require let’s-arise nationalists

it doesn’t deserve the professional doubter who sees this Government as bad fiction either As i said in this space last week, the nauseated Balakot-denier thinks patriotism is a mild form

of jingoism A show of sentimentalism or a sense of solidarity amounts to an abdication of liberal responsibility—and an endorsement of ‘majoritarian hysteria’ it is one thing to be taken aback by the aesthetics of let’s-arise nationalism, it is another to deny an elected government the right to tell the country what it has done to contain extra-territorial terror the self-righteousness

of those who swear by liberal values shows their remoteness from the common decencies of citizenship in a democracy the aesthetics of their dissent is as ungainly as that of the frenzied nationalism they despise

the American political scientist Mark lilla, a disillusioned liberal, has written about how liberalism has become an

evangelical project instead of a political project: ‘evangelism is about speaking truth to power; politics is about seeking power to defend truth.’ his advice to the powerless as well as power-weary liberals is a quote from lincoln: ‘public sentiment is everything With it nothing can fail Against it nothing can succeed.’ the indian liberal wants to save truth from power, and in this struggle, he has nothing to lose but the echo chamber A place where everything said by the ‘nationalist’ Government lacks authenticity so Balakot must be disputed

18 march 2019

6

After weeks of wavering,

the Congress has finally rejected

the supplications of the Aam Admi

Party for an electoral alliance before

the upcoming Lok sabha polls

Paradoxically, for both, their future

proved to be the clincher the

Congress did not want to squander it

further; the AAP wanted to further

secure it Besides, a tie-up in Delhi

would have entailed some sort of

accommodation with the AAP in

Punjab and Haryana, not acceptable

to the Congress’ state units the

Congress reckoned a temporary loss

to the BJP was better than helping

the AAP up another step of success

so that it eventually ends up stealing

the Congress’ entire base in the

national capital the AAP feared

that without the vital Muslim vote,

which would transfer more or less

en bloc to the bigger party better placed

to take on the BJP at the national

level, it would be hard to do well the

Congress, on the other hand, did not

want to repeat the mistake it did when

it backed a minority government of

Arvind kejriwal in 2013 and came to

regret it After the fall of the 49-day

government, in the ensuing elections

the AAP won 67 seats; the BJP, three;

and the Congress, zero for once,

the Congress has preferred to forgo

short-term gain for long-term future,

something which doesn’t come easily

to politicians

A CouPLe of new television

channels recently launched

have had little or no impact thus far

of course, these have created jobs

for some of the experienced and

not-so-experienced tV hands even

genuine well-wishers are

disap-pointed because even among their

own peers nobody seems to have

noticed these channels Concerned,

when one of them asked a promoter,

he promptly shot back, “I haven’t launched the channel for making money…” He fell silent mid-sentence, leaving his acquaintance to finish it for him, “…but to impress my leaders that we have now our own outlet for airing our side of the story.” Amen

tHen tHere Is this news

anchor who goes about lecturing people not to watch tV for the next two-and-a-half months why? to save democracy, apparently But he himself would not go off air during that period and must hold forth nightly on how terrible the Modi Government is why? Because he seems to believe only his journalism

is worth watching while everyone else’s is sheer propaganda such

conceit, such arrogance, Pandeyji?

IronICAL tHey sHouLD seek

evidence of what our fighter jets accomplished in Balakot, a mere 100

km away from Islamabad, while

nearly 60 years later the

Henderson-Brooks Report on the 1962 debacle

remains buried under the top-secret pretence It is another matter the crux

of the report has been available on the web for decades, but successive governments have refused release, saying ‘It is top secret’ As for Balakot,

the number of dead, if any, is not significant that our fighter jets made an aggressive sortie deep into Pakistan’s airspace is If that is lost on those whom Arun Jaitley likes to call the ‘compulsive contrarians’, let us try to help them understand It is said

a man’s home is his castle If so, try entering anyone’s home without his permission, you will be hauled up for trespass Here you have violated the sovereign airspace of your inimical neighbour, dropped explosives, and you still want evidence of ‘what happened?’ Putting them on notice that ‘another Pulwama, and we will come raiding’ is no mean achievement

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind kejriwal for successfully competing with Prime Minister Modi—in fact, even beating him on some days we are referring to the advertising spree launched by the two Delhi may not be even a full-fledged state but what kejriwal has shown is that even with limited resources it is possible

to build one’s brand Advertising his wares—good, bad or indifferent—

through multiple full-page ads in city papers, with his mug shot staring compulsorily at the readers, has now gone on for weeks Leaving nothing to imagination, voters in each colony are told their colony is being improved, courtesy kejriwal with nearly

10 million voters, multiple full-page ads by the messiah of ethical politics can continue for weeks, a win-win situation for kejriwal and media owners who will assure a splash for him in news columns as well

But there could be a small hitch: the election Commission’s Model Code

of Conduct would deny the Delhi chief minister further opportunity to endear himself to voters what a pity! nINDRAPRASTHA

virendra kapoor

18 march 2019

8

In these days of

hypernational-ism, it’s good to occasionally step

back and ask: ‘What is Indian?’ ‘Is the

symphony Orchestra of India (sOI)

Indian?’ ‘Is the music they play Indian?’

and vitally, ‘are these questions really

relevant in the 21st century?’

On its recent tour of the UK,

sOI had 15 Indians in a total of 89

musicians these numbers are usually

held against sOI But do Manchester

United or Chelsea have footballers

from Manchester or Chelsea? and

what about the orchestra often rated

as the world’s best? Of the Berlin

Philharmonic’s 128 musicians, as

many as 50 are of foreign origin and

this in a nation with a long musical

history and many orchestras to choose

from (50-plus symphony orchestras

in Germany and almost as many

chamber and youth orchestras) here’s

another, though somewhat different

example: sir Mohamed Muktar Jama

Farah, the most successful British track

athlete in modern Olympic history,

was born and raised in Mogadishu,

somalia When you want to be the

best, national boundaries become

irrelevant

that’s why when nCPa’s Khushroo

suntook decided to set up sOI, he

agreed with its musical director

Marat Bisengaliev’s insistence that

nationalities were secondary to

musical abilities (Bisengaliev himself

is from Kazakhstan) those of us

who live in Mumbai, and have heard

sOI grow in 12 years into a fine

orchestra, don’t give a hoot (a distinctly

unmusical sound) whether the oboe or

violin or cello is in White, Brown

or Black hands

that belief found enthusiastic

endorsement from British music

critics (not the kindliest of souls)

when sOI recently played in the UK

The Spectator, a bastion of conservatism,

called it ‘a world-class ensemble… it has

character-rich but also refined, with

smoky woodwinds, burnished brass…’

Classical Source said, ‘the concept that

music is (or can be) a universal language was triumphantly demonstrated by this concert… the ‘Overture to Oberon’

was a totally committed performance that demonstrated Weber’s original symphonism allied to his pictorial aural consciousness… [It was] a perfect lead-in to Max Bruch’s G-minor Violin Concerto, in which the soloist was Marat Bisengaliev this was, without question, the finest live performance of this masterpiece I have heard.’ and the

Serenade magazine critic said, ‘here was

a multi-national group of players truly binding together to form a coherent, confident orchestra with a voice all of its own.’

as a nation, we generally look for Western endorsement, especially

in the cultural field where judgements are subjective We, the regular audience of sOI, were always proud

of our orchestra We can now revel

in its triumph and congratulate english critics for their perspicacity in recognising talent, whatever its origins

ReCOrds, they saId, are meant

to be broken (though they stopped saying it when Cds arrived)

and the BMC has done it again a few days ago, the shiv sena-controlled Municipal Corporation cleared 69 civic contracts worth over rs 500 crore within an hour Bring out your calculators and tell me if that beats last year’s record of 97 contracts worth

rs 1,500 crore in 90 minutes

Why this hurry? Why this haste

by the standing Committee to break into a sprint? agreed that projects like cleaning of drains, procurement of linen for hospitals, repairs of roads and schools demand some urgency, but surely contracts also need scrutiny?

Or are corporators (for some reason called civic fathers even when they are mothers) all ramanujans calculating

at the speed of light? the speculation is the election code of conduct will kick

in soon, and contracts will be held up strange: one would think the cleaning

of drains would be even more pressing during elections with all that political muck flying around

On the other hand, you could argue

a few crores wasted here and there is better than not spending anything

at all apparently, only 37 per cent of last year’s budgetary allocation was spent But that was (another) record: the previous year, the figure was

31 per cent Presumably, a municipal corporation budget contains proposals for the improvement of the city and the benefit of its citizens By being too busy with whatever else they do, officials and corporators are depriving us of amenities for which we have already paid Or did you think the unspent

63 per cent will waft its way back into our pockets?

When nIraV MOdI is not

in the news, his bungalow is It’s

a 30,000-sq-ft house on Kihim Beach

in alibaug the local authorities, as

is their wont (or more accurately, their want), failed to notice the construction far exceeded what was approved

now, of course, they have decided—with nudging from the courts—to do something about it, and that is to demolish the whole damn thing

easier said than done: nirav Modi’s bungalow is made of sterner stuff,

so they are having to dynamite the structure to get rid of it a fugitive’s house of cards is stronger than many a bulldozer n

MuMbaI Notebook

Anil Dharker

18 march 2019

10

On January 1st, 2014, when arvind Kejriwal

took oath of office as Chief Minister of Delhi from a

bursting-at-the-seams ramlila Maidan instead of raj

Bhavan with all his typical dramatic flourish, it was

a historic moment for Indian democracy We had a chief

minister who used public transport to work and even to his

swearing-in, let common people feel that now they had rulers

who knew their trials and tribulations of life, and swore by the

ideals of Mahtama Gandhi More than a year after he parted

ways from his mentor anna Hazare and launched a political

outfit, the aam aadmi Party (aaP), following months-long,

largely Delhi-centric campaigns against corruption that

attract-ed national attention regardless, Kejriwal and his enthusiastic

and scholarly associates sold us a dream of a compassionate

government that would live up to Lincoln’s great aphorism of

democracy: for the people, by the people and of the people the

cliché suddenly acquired a new meaning and there was hope

From that hope has come despair of not being able to grow

as rapidly as the party had envisaged the goals were so lofty

that the aaP now suffers from a huge crisis of perception a

likely alliance with the Congress to jointly fight the BJP has

fallen through, adding to the woes of the six-year-old party

after all, in early 2014, the hope of a new beginning wasn’t

only because of the possibility of electing leaders having their

ear to the ground and sensing the

pulse of the common man What

was remarkable about the entry of

the aaP into Indian politics was that

it ushered in a new culture of political

entrepreneurship that didn’t

dis-criminate against new entrants; their

years of experience in politics, family

connections, educational

qualifica-tions—none of that mattered the

aaP made history by lowering the

entry barrier for political aspirants

this was no mean feat considering

that other major parties had set high

entry benchmarks for those

look-ing to become part of the political

process and to make policies and law

the Congress party, India’s oldest

political outfit, had largely become

dynastic, after having grown rapidly under the Mahatma in the thick of the freedom struggle as he experimented with ways to attract world attention to India’s plights and mobilise Indians under one umbrella organisation irrespective of how they behaved in a rigid feudal hierarchy, or thanks to religious affilia-tions to break through to the Congress scheme of things today for a common man is a tough task Within the BJP, too, things are no different since many of the cadres continue to be from the rss nursery, if not from party families In many ways, these two parties reflected Bollywood, India’s biggest film industry head-quartered in Mumbai regional parties, too, have become family enterprises and behave like family-owned enterprises this is fa-mously true of parties such as the DMK in tamil nadu the Left Front parties, for their part, recruit party workers with greater care, after screening cadres meticulously for their loyalty

so, it was no surprise that the aaP came to power in the 2013 December polls in Delhi with much aplomb and offered relief

to the common man because many of the new MLas were from the bottom of the social pyramid with no experience in politics securing 28 seats in the 70-member assembly with conditional support from the Congress, the aaP government did several things that were unthinkable before: reaching out to people over what is to be done, for instance, when it got into a deadlock over the passage of the Jan Lok Pal Bill the aaP called it quits

after 49 days in power Everything about the aaP was a novelty.year 2014 also saw the BJP sweep Lok sabha seats in Delhi and the rest

of the country, winning an absolute majority in the Lok sabha on its own Kejriwal, who contested against Modi from the Varanasi seat lost by a huge margin and was crestfallen yet the anguish was short-lived In 2015, aaP rode to power in Delhi securing

67 out of 70 seats in an emphatic poll triumph

But since then, the aaP has battled with infighting, starting with Kejriwal’s unilateral decision to get rid

of anyone who could be an tual adversary Over time, more and more people from the senior echelons

intellec-Going Alone in Delhi

NOTEBOOK

It is not unlikely that the Congress, which did well in the 2017 municipal election, is looking to improve its tally and hoping

to win back lost glory with the AAP’s sway showing signs of wane

18 march 2019 www.openthemagazine.com 11

left the party complaining of Kejriwal’s dictatorial tendencies,

while he and his team of close associates launched sharp attacks

at the Centre for not allowing them to function standoff with

two lieutenant governors and myriad bureaucrats ensued

Congress insiders say that the talks with the aaP for sharing

seats in Delhi didn’t come to fruition because of most of its

party leaders do not trust Kejriwal, who, not surprisingly, cried

foul and blamed the Congress for having truck with the BJP

after the parleys failed

the Congress was, it is learnt, hoping to make gains in Delhi

in exchange for aligning with the aaP in Punjab and Goa But

the rethink in the Congress camp was prompted by a series of

factors, including how the aaP treated the party despite its

of-fering Kejriwal conditional support in 2013-2014 some senior

leaders of the Congress were also of the view that it would be

imprudent to help the aaP make an impact in Goa as for

Punjab where the aaP is not seen as a party with a difference,

thanks to its association with reportedly subversive entities

in the previous state elections, the Congress thought that any

such realignment would hurt its interests in Punjab

the aaP also has its own fears It is a party that came into

prominence through an anti-corruption agitation against the

Congress It is a party that battered the Congress and ate into

traditional Congress vote banks in Delhi Its focus on education

and healthcare for the poor has won applause, sectors routinely

neglected by the Congress government there are those who feel

these parties, therefore, are essentially incompatible because the

aaP’s growth meant the Congress had to pay a price the aaP

grew by decimating the Congress base in Delhi and damaged

it beyond repair this was why despite fervent calls from other opposition parties, the Congress decided not to align with the aaP in Delhi’s seven Lok sabha seats Many pundits aver it was the aaP’s rejection of a formula—three seats for the aaP, three for the Congress and one for an independent celebrity candidate—that precipitated matters It is not unlikely that the Congress, which did well in the 2017 municipal election, is looking to improve its tally and hoping to win back lost glory with the aaP’s sway showing signs of wane the aaP is also understood to have been ‘inflexible’ about the seats it wanted in Haryana and Punjab

a section of Congress leaders also successfully impressed upon President rahul Gandhi that anti-incumbency against the aaP in Delhi that might play spoilsport in the 2019 elec-tions anxieties about how any such alliance would impinge

on the 2020 assembly elections also prompted the Congress to change its mind, leaders admit

Both the Congress and aaP may have surely gained ally thanks to an alliance because their respective vote banks would have brought out a large chunk of people together against the BJP now that the two parties are going to vie with each other, the BJP is naturally expected to gain For all the slogans of opposition unity, the biggest hurdle for these two parties coming together was clearly their inherent hostilities It

elector-is a melector-issed opportunity for both n

18 march 2019

12

openings

The first time that stanley Wolpert arrived in india was a day after

mahatma Gandhi had been shot dead his first response to the

assassina-tion was one of bewilderment: how could a leader who was so popular and,

in the eyes of many, almost a saintly figure be felled with the cruel bullet of an

assassin? fourteen years later in Nine Hours to Rama, he wrote a fictional

ac-count of the events leading to the evening of January 30th, 1962 it was a racy

account in which superintendent of police Gopal Das is always close on the

heels of Gandhi’s killers in the end, Das is just a few steps away when the fatal

shots are fired Perhaps it was too racy for the Government and was banned

that was not the first time that he faced trouble in south Asia soon

after Jinnah of Pakistan was published in 1984, it was banned in Pakistan

which was at that time under the thumb of Zia-ul-haq Between bans

and criticisms of what he wrote, the historian in Wolpert never lost the

amazement about the countries and leaders he chose to study the same

bewilderment that he experienced when Gandhi was felled was visible in

print when he wrote about the killing of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Zulfi Bhutto

of Pakistan (1993) he wondered where did the crowds that had once cheered

Bhutto disappear when he was hanged on the orders of a military dictator

that gap between the complexities of south Asia and the way he imagined it never left him

almost until he wrote his last book in 2010 India

and Pakistan: Continued Conflict or Cooperation this

was something that made him unpopular among a very varied set of critics who looked at the region in

a clear cut, either or, fashion Perhaps the political vicissitudes of the land left little room for scholars who imagined it otherwise

so it was not surprising that when this historian

of south Asia—who was also a professor emeritus

at the University of California Los Angeles—passed away on 19th february, it took full 12 days for observers in india and Pakistan to notice When social media reported his demise early on march 7th, there was shock that he was gone

the majority of Wolpert’s books was written

in the pre-internet age At that time information flowed slowly via mail and print that was also

a time when historical research was genteel and history writing different from the popular histories that masquerade the real stuff it was also an inter-regnum when research methods were not ruth-lessly dependent on quantitative techniques Above all, it was a time when even if a historian had an opinion, it would at the most tip-toe on some pages and then disappear the age of aggressive history writing, meant to justify this or that government, ruler or personality was still a distant phenomenon

By the time Wolpert stopped writing this malaise was to be found everywhere but with a particular virulence in south Asia where it became difficult

to distinguish historical writing from the subtle polemics that mark political tracts

there was hardly any historical figure of import

in modern south Asia on whom Wolpert did not write: from Gopal Krishna Gokhale to Gandhi to John morley, the colonial secretary of state when Bengal was partitioned in each work, Wolpert was careful to facts and light on opinion Above all, his histories even when they dealt with serious subjects

were fun to read in Jinnah of Pakistan he described

how Jinnah thought he had to respond to Jawaharlal Nehru’s “hindustan Zindabad” on All india radio in 1947: Jinnah’s “Pakistan Zindabad” was delivered in such a clipped accent that some listeners thought he said “Pakistan’s in the bag.” that tit-for-tat has con-tinued ever since Perhaps Wolpert presaged all this much before bombs and bullets became an essential part of that deadly quest for parity n

18 march 2019 www.openthemagazine.com 13

anGLe

doN’t Shoot the MeSSeNger

The PeNtAGoN PAPers is

arguably the seminal point for press

freedom in the democratic world it was

the moment when the media

appropri-ated for itself the right to publish

govern-ment secrets even if it was illegal, so long

as there was self-evident public interest

involved The Papers denoted voluminous

documents of a study on the Vietnam

War commissioned by the Us

govern-ment that said succeeding

establish-ments did not pull out of the war despite

the knowledge that it was unwinnable

The Washington Post published it

know-ing the repercussions the leaker of the

documents, Daniel ellsberg, was charged

under the espionage Act he was accused

of stealing the documents on march 6th,

you saw a parallel in the indian supreme

Court where the Attorney General

ac-cused The Hindu of using stolen papers

related to the rafale deal and hinted at

prosecution under the official secrets Act

the lesson that history should teach

the Government if it enforces the threat is

that of the fate of the parties involved in the

Pentagon Papers ellsberg was acquitted The

Pentagon Papers marked the point when

Washington Post changed from a provincial

paper to a national institution Nixon, who

initiated the action, fell in disgrace later

And after 46 years when a movie called

The Post on the episode received Academy

Award nominations, it was clear who the

heroes and villains had become in popular

culture Criminal proceedings against a

newspaper over a story that merely

ques-tion government decisions in a democracy

is a long-lasting boomerang

the threat of the official secrets Act

is particularly reprehensible because it

is a law made by the British for indians

it ruled over to use it against The Hindu

would signal that the Government looks

at the media as both a subject and an enemy rebelling against them they do have cause in going against the person who leaked the papers but there is not any chance that the paper’s editor, N ram, will reveal who it was to try to force him to do

so under duress would create a swell of outrage, antagonising even media favourable to the government at present

ground-in 2005, a New York Times journalist

Judith miller disobeyed a court order and chose to go to jail rather than revealing her source she only gave the name after the source himself released her from the promise of confidentiality they got the leaker but the principle of protecting the source being absolute was only reinforced

there is nothing in law that protects journalists against revealing sources, only

a moral case which is often questionable

there are drawbacks to a journalism culture that relies on sources in crime journalism, for example, it is an open field for policemen to plant stories against those they have caught, rightly or wrongly, in order to mount a public campaign in politics in recent times, ironically, source-based stories are as much pro-Government

as against But even with all the abilities in the practice, it is the foundation

vulner-on which the media performs its role as a fourth estate to try to test it in the present case would be a lot of risk and very little reward for a government n

‘It isn’t that they

can’t see the solution It’s that they can’t see the problem’

the supreme Court bench, which

is a hearing the Ayodhya land dispute, asked the parties involved

in the suit to consider yet another shot at a mediated settlement it is, however, hard to see how media-tion, as different from arbitration, can be binding And to make it binding would lead to the proposi-tion that only a couple of parties

in the suit represent every single hindu and muslim who is invested

in the dispute on the other hand,

a judicial verdict is based on the principles of law and justice and so

is community-agnostic mediation might be useful in disputes where the issue and parties involved are small recognisable entities, not in something of the scale of Ayodhya where members of two major religions are involved n

“The best way to change

society and the underlying

issues is to channelize

the power of woman in every walk of

life” is a famous adage, oft quoted to

celebrate the spirit of womanhood and

their immense contribution to society

Yet another affirmation is the Chinese

proverb, ‘’Women hold up half the sky’’

symbolising the power, persistence,

courage, truth and pride of women,

inspiring them to step into their calling

and aspire for greatness

On International Women’s Day (March

8), which is all about unity, celebration,

reflection, advocacy and action,

we dwell on the social, economic,

cultural and political achievements of

women It’s a big day for inspiration

and change What better day to herald

the accomplishments of women in the

workplace, with specific emphasis on this year’s theme - ‘Balance for better’ !

A champion of equal opportunity, Bharat Petroleum strongly believes that employees are its most valuable asset and professional growth of its workforce

is critical to sustained business growth

As respect for human rights and dignity is deeply entrenched into the organization’s DNA, ample opportunities are proffered

to empower, energise and enthuse women BPCL continually launches new initiatives, celebrates women’s achievements and encourages women

to shoulder additional responsibilities, aspire for senior positions and eventually break the proverbial glass ceiling ! “I think the key is for women not to set any limits,” said Martina Navratilova Well, the sky is the limit for BPCL women, as they head several critical functions like Internal

Audit, Legal, Employee Satisfaction Enhancement, Hindi as well as HR and Finance roles in various businesses BPCL has also taken progressive steps to promote the development

of women employees through cross functional rotation, exposure to field jobs, gender sensitization sessions and managerial role effectiveness workshops Recognizing the challenges that working women face, most women

in BPCL perform office related roles, with fixed work timings For those who work in plant locations / field roles, care

is taken to ensure that they don’t work

on night shifts or assigned duties at remote work points

BPCL is extremely committed to providing a conducive and woman friendly work environment To highlight the importance accorded to empowerment

BHARAT PETROLEUM EMPOWERS WOMEN

of women, BPCL has conducted

programs on visioning, health /fitness,

interpersonal relationships, effective

parenting with values, role modeling and

disciplining children, life management

skills, women rights, competitions on

rangoli making, collage making, essay

writing, etc and fun sports meets Self

Defence Workshops focus on four critical

elements of self-defence - attitude,

awareness, avoidance and action

Workshops on ‘Empowering Women’

deal with various facets of challenges

and opportunities women face at the

workplace, the dilemmas of work life

balance and their career paths Besides,

walkathons urge women to imbibe good

habits and keep fit, cooking competitions

focus on healthy food, educational

sessions are held on housekeeping,

gardening, and health talks advise them

on how to maintain a stress free life An

unique workshop, ‘Dance Movement

Therapy- Turning into Life’s Rhythm’

channelized feminine energy and creative

expression, making participants feel

comfortable in their own body type and

structure, improve their self-esteem, let

go of physical inhibitions and emotional

barriers, was a great stress buster and

released happy hormones, leading to an

enriched experience

Brand Quiz Baadshah is a flagship

initiative of BPCL which energizes and

unifies the organization The key focus

is knowledge enhancement , developing

employees and channel partners as

Brand Ambassadors and tapping their

latent talent It has been recognized as

Largest Corporate Brand Engagement

Program in Asia Book of records with

12676 participants Women employees

participated in a big way this year and

one women team reached the top 16

finalists

BPC Tarang is the internal radio

program at BPCL with a vision to

energise, engage and entertain

employees A 30 minutes episode is

produced on a daily basis and shared

with over 12000 employees through

website, iconnect and company’s mobile app Through this entertainment medium alongwith music there is knowledge and experience sharing and inspirational messages from leaders to employees across the company Special episodes were released during the week

of International Women’s day where several women leaders were interviewed

to share their views of BPCL as an equal opportunity employer and their first hand experience of women empowerment

BPC’s Got Talent is a talent hunt across the company held on BPC Tarang platform in which over 250 employees participated and a woman employee was adjudged among top three talents

As a good corporate citizen, BPCL has been working conscientiously for the

betterment of weaker sections of society

to achieve sustainability development

BPCL’s women centric projects in its five thrust areas of Education, Water Conservation, Skill Development, Health

& Hygiene and Community Development include Project SAKSHAM, which empowers women teachers and school leaders with required skill sets and inputs on pedagogy; Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) Project which improved the learning level of over one lakh girl students through games and computer education; construction of toilet blocks

in government girl schools in line with Swachha Vidyalaya – Swachha Bharat Abhiyan; provided health services

to rural women to avoid disability;

Skill Development programmes; Ekal Vidyalaya project for supporting one

teacher school for tribal children; Career Edu Connect for career counselling;

‘Kohinoor Scholarship’ for girl students; Project Shakti, which trained women on bakery production, operation, material purchase, order management, banking and cash management, tailoring, goat rearing, ready to eat foods, beauty parlour, organic farming, sericulture etc creating sustainable entrepreneurship and livelihood development of women in tribal communities

A Women’s Cell was constituted in

1998, the provisions of Sexual Harassment

of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013 have been implemented and Internal Complaints Committees (ICC) have been constituted BPCL also has an Employee Satisfaction Enhancement department where professional help is available for redressal of any sensitive issues

Women play a critical role in our societies, be it culturally, socially, politically or economically The time has come to acknowledge that a woman who is well educated, competent, hardworking, enjoys freedom and financial independence, takes decisions, manages people, handles critical situations and balances home, family and kids is an invaluable asset to the company As Jennifer Christie, VP American Express averred, “We believe our ability to leverage our gender differences in the workplace will help us to continue to drive collaboration and inspire innovation.” Women who have utilized the transformative energy that lives within them can serve as role models to others

to improve their morale and make them aspire to achieve more As Mother Teresa observed, “I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples.”

Let us all join hands to support and encourage women, who maintain a picture of poise, strength and grace and is also a dreamer, an achiever and

a winner ! Let’s toast the phenomenal woman of today ! <

AV E N U E S

18 march 2019

16

In the past, I have talked about problems with the

Census definition of urbanisation there is no need to

revisit that everywhere in the world, urbanisation is

correlated with economic development as India

de-velops, India will urbanise, more and more In 2019, data

from Census 2011 are already dated nevertheless, for

some-thing like urbanisation, that’s the best we have according to

Census 2011, 31 per cent of India’s population lives in

urban areas that’s still low by cross-country standards In

east asia, depending on the country, par for the course will

be 50 per cent In Latin america, it will be 75 per cent

thirty-one per cent of the population amounts to 377 million here

is a quote from a 2014 Un Report: ‘Between 2014 and 2050,

the urban areas are expected to grow by 404 million people

in India.’ In 2014, the base urban population in India was 410

million, not 377 million hence, in 2050, we are talking about

814 million urban Indians a megacity is one with a

popula-tion of more than 10 million From that same report, ‘Four of

India’s cities namely ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai, and

hyderabad with currently 5 to 10 million inhabitants are

projected to become megacities in the coming years, for a

total of seven megacities projected in the country by 2030.’

think of the population in our urban agglomerations in

2030: 36 million in Delhi, 28 million in Mumbai, 19 million

in Kolkata, 15 million in Bengaluru, 14 million in Chennai,

13 million in hyderabad, 11 million in ahmedabad, 9 million

in surat, 8 million in pune so that you have a benchmark for

comparison, let me give you the 2011 Census figures of

population in these urban agglomerations: Delhi, 16 million;

Mumbai, 18 million; Kolkata, 14 million; Bengaluru,

8 million; Chennai, 9 million; hyderabad, 8 million;

ahmedabad, 6 million; surat, 5 million; and pune, 5 million

this is the kind of explosion in numbers we need to plan for

there is an impression India has been urbanising fairly

fast in the last decade or so purely statistically, that’s not

quite true Indeed, between the two Censuses of 2001 and

2011, India added more people to urban areas than to

rural areas But the annual exponential rate of growth

between these two years was 2.76 per cent the rates were

far higher (in excess of 3.5 per cent) in 1950s or 1970s and

in excess of 3 per cent in 1980s It is just that rates of isation slowed in 1990s, but picked up between 2001 and

urban-2011 Understandably, there has been variation in rates at which different towns have been growing, masked in that overall 2.76 per cent figure For instance, between 2001 and

2011, which towns/cities grew at rates exceeding 3 per cent? the answer is hyderabad, Bengaluru, ahmedabad, surat, Indore, Coimbatore, Kochi, nashik, Vijayawada and Rajkot Unless you are exceptionally well aware, you might not have guessed this another report surfaced recently, by Oxford economics It tried to figure out which will be the fastest growing cities in the world between 2019 and 2035, based on GDp (or its counterpart) for those cities Computing a city’s GDp is easier said than done subject to that, this study found that the top 10 fastest growing cities in the world will all be in India these are surat, agra, Bengaluru, hyderabad, nagpur, tirupur, Rajkot, tiruchirapalli, Chennai and Vijayawada Ignore caveats about the methodology, the substance of the argument will not change again, unless you are exception-ally well aware, you might not have picked these cities the point is that we need to plan for this kind of growth

there is a problem in this planning process, a point flagged in the course of Census 2011, in the difference between a statutory town and a census town a statutory town has a municipality, corporation, cantonment board or notified town area committee In other words, we know who

is responsible for urban governance in that town a census town has (a) a minimum population of 5,000; (b) at least 75 per cent of the male working population is engaged in non-agricultural pursuits; and (c) the population density is at least

400 per sq km But because of time lags in decision-making, it hasn’t yet become a statutory town stated indelicately, we do not know who is responsible for urban governance in a cen-sus town the number of towns increased from 5,161 in 2001

to 7,935 in 2011 But almost all of this increase (2,532) was cause of census towns, not statutory towns a census town is the kind of agglomeration one witnesses around a statutory town—peri-urban, and even rural If one has an impression

18 march 2019 www.openthemagazine.com 17

of chaotic urbanisation, this is largely because of this

phenomenon the governance structure is non-existent, or

rural there is also the seventh schedule Water supply,

sani-tation, city transport, land-use patterns are on the state List

there is also the twelfth schedule, added in 1992 under

article 243W of the Constitution perhaps I should quote

article 243W ‘subject to the provisions of this Constitution,

the Legislature of a state may, by law, endow (a) the

Municipalities with such powers and authority as may be

necessary to enable them to function as institutions of

self-government and such law may contain provisions for the

de-volution of powers and responsibilities upon Municipalities,

subject to such conditions as may be specified therein, with

respect to (i) the preparation

of plans for economic

devel-opment and social justice; (ii)

the performance of functions

and the implementation of

schemes as may be entrusted

to them including those in

re-lation to the matters listed in

the twelfth schedule; (b) the

Committees with such

pow-ers and authority as may be

necessary to enable them to

carry out the responsibilities

conferred upon them

includ-ing those in relation to the

matters listed in the twelfth

schedule.’ notice the use of

the word ‘may’, not ‘shall’

that twelfth schedule has 18

items: ‘Urban planning including town planning; Regulation

of land-use and construction of buildings; planning for

eco-nomic and social development; Roads and bridges; Water

supply for domestic, industrial and commercial purposes;

public health, sanitation conservancy and solid waste

man-agement; Fire services; Urban forestry, protection of the

envi-ronment and promotion of ecological aspects; safeguarding

the interests of weaker sections of society,

including the handicapped and mentally retarded; slum

im-provement and upgradation; Urban poverty alleviation;

provision of urban amenities and facilities such as parks,

gar-dens, playgrounds; promotion of cultural, educational and

aesthetic aspects; Burials and burial grounds; cremations,

cremation grounds; and electric crematoriums; Cattle

pounds; prevention of cruelty to animals; Vital statistics

including registration of births and deaths; public amenities

including street lighting, parking lots, bus stops and public

conveniences; and Regulation of slaughterhouses and

tanneries.’ But all subject to the ‘may’

Urban local bodies (ULBs) lacked finances and

capaci-ty therefore, in 2005, there was an attempt to incentivise

states to introduce urban reforms this was done through

Jawaharlal nehru national Urban Renewal Mission (JnnURM) there were 23 specific reforms (that list need not

be given) that were meant to be addressed seventy per cent

of JnnURM expenditure was for 65 per cent large or tant cities, known as mission cities JnnURM did increase investments in urban infrastructure, but not as much as was hoped far plus, smaller cities got ignored there were varia-tions among states too states like andhra pradesh, Gujarat, himachal pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, tamil nadu and telangana introduced a lot of urban reforms, across the different heads several states from the north east lagged, and so did a state like Jharkhand then came the 14th Finance Commission not only did it increase untied devo-

impor-lution to states from 32 per cent to 42 per cent, the 14th Finance Commission also recommended grants (basic grant and performance grant)

to ULBs there were/are rate schemes for urban hous-ing, slum rehabilitation, wa-ter supply and sanitation, urban transport and pover-

sepa-ty alleviation, but let’s stick to the big picture

In that big picture, since

2015, one should mention the three mega schemes: smart Cities Mission, atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban transformation (aMRUt) and housing for all Let’s start with aMRUt and let’s first understand what the minis-try says ‘the Government of India has launched… aMRUt with the aim of providing basic civic amenities like water supply, sewerage, urban transport, parks as to improve the quality of life for all especially the poor and the disadvan-taged.…the purpose of ‘aMRUt’ mission is to (i) ensure that every household has access to a tap with assured supply of water and a sewerage connection (ii) increase the amenity value of cities by developing greenery and well maintained open spaces e.g parks and (iii) reduce pollution by switch-ing to public transport or constructing facilities for non-mo-torized transport e.g walking and cycling… the Mission covers 500 cities that includes all cities and towns with a population of over one lakh with notified Municipalities… total outlay for aMRUt is Rs 50,000 crores for five years from FY 2015-16 to FY 2019-20 and the Mission and is being operated as Central sponsored scheme the project fund is divided among states/Uts in an equitable formula in which 50:50 weightage is being given to the urban population of each state/Ut and number of statutory towns.’ so the suc-cess depends quite a bit on the states We will continue in the next column n

Saurabh Singh

18 march 2019

18

n February 14th, 2019, a suicide attacker associated with Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) drove an laden vehicle into a bus transiting Central reserve Police Force (CrPF) jawans in a convoy in Pulwama, Jammu and Kashmir at least 40 jawans perished in that attack It was the first time that JeM had used suicide attacks since the December 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament in new Delhi, which brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war Given that JeM—like the Lashkar-e-tayyaba (Let)—is a well-behaved and obedient proxy of the deep state, there can

explosives-be little doubt that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate played a direct role in the attack While the exact details of India’s response remain disputed, India claimed that in the early hours of February 26th, it dispatched

12 Mirage fighter aircraft across the Line of Control (LoC) and into the airspace of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to attack a training facility sociated with JeM in balakot those jets returned unscathed Indian media, citing figures leaked by the Government, claimed the base was destroyed and some 300 people killed Virtually all of these details have been disputed by Indian and international media alike.Pakistan, while risibly denying that it has any evidence of JeM culpability, claimed that its air forces rallied to drive the Indian planes out of its airspace, causing them to drop their ordnance prematurely and causing no damage Incidentally, a recording of a

as-preacher ostensibly tied to JeM conceded an attack (hamla) took place but asserted no casualties Despite asserting that no damage

occurred, Pakistan dispatched fighter aircraft—likely american-made F-16s—to target purportedly ‘non-military targets’, across the LoC India sent out MiG 21 bisons after which a dog fight ensued after various claims and counter-claims, it now seems clear that Pakistan shot down a MiG 21 and captured its pilot, Wing Commander abhinandan Varthaman, who was returned after considerable delay on March 1st India, in turn, shot down a Pakistani jet which crashed on Pakistan’s side of the LoC the fate of that pilot is unclear: Indian sources claim he was lynched by Pakistanis who mistook him for an Indian pilot while Pakistani sources deny this claim without offering alternative explanations

While the return of Varthaman provided an off-ramp for the crisis to begin de-escalating, many questions remain What motivated the Pakistani attack and what made Pakistan expect it could get away with murder this time? Similarly, what motivated Pakistan to escalate tensions by inducting air power? now that the crisis may be receding, what lessons did Pakistan learn?

Pakistani Goals at Pulwama

I have argued elsewhere that the attack at Pulwama had several distal and one likely proximal objective at the most general level

of abstraction, since Pakistan is obsessed with changing maps but has an army that cannot win the wars it starts and nuclear ons it cannot use without courting its own destruction, Pakistan uses terrorist proxies under the security of its nuclear umbrella to demonstrate that it is able to challenge India More specifically, Pakistan has been worried as both al-Qaeda Indian Subcontinent

weap-Hard lessons from Pulwama to Balakot and beyond

Pakistani Hubris and american cuPidity

open essay

by c cHristine Fair

o

18 march 2019 www.openthemagazine.com 19

(aQIS) and Islamic State (IS) have sought to hijack its project

in Kashmir both aQIS and IS have mocked Indian Muslims

within and without Kashmir for their pusillanimity and failure

to resist the rising tide of hindu nationalism, the revivified

interest in rebuilding the ram Mandir at ayodhya and failure

to insist upon rebuilding the babri Masjid which was destroyed

by hindu fundamentalists in 1992 both organisations have

chastised Indian Muslims for their parochialism and lack of

interest in larger problems of the ummah (community) While

both aQIS and IS have largely failed to draw large numbers of

recruits in Kashmir, this attack was likely aimed to help reclaim

the initiative in Kashmir the selection of a local Kashmiri boy,

adil ahmad Dar, for this operation seemed well-placed to

refo-cus the attention of Kashmiris upon the ISI-led struggle equally

notable, Dar recorded a pre-attack video in which he criticised

northern Kashmiris for shirking from the fight

In addition to these distal causes, there is one proximate

cause that likely explains the timing of the attack: a desire to

in-fluence India’s elections While it may seem counter-intuitive

(the Pakistani deep state prefers a Modi win) for the simple

rea-son that Modi and his hindutva supporters embody the very

threats that Pakistanis have long imbibed With Modi at the

helm, the Pakistani army can continue arguing that its handed role in running the country and hogging its resources

heavy-is necessary additionally, Pakheavy-istan heavy-is confronting some fairly serious domestic challenges and a strong enemy next door has traditionally helped the deep state justify violence when needed and to encourage elements fighting the state to put down its arms Observers may recall that after the november

2008 attacks in Mumbai, the Pakistani taliban leaders, lah Mehsud and Maulvi Fazlullah, declared a ceasefire and Pakistani army officials called them both “Pakistani patriots”.the internal challenges that the army is wrestling with include opposition to the so-called China Pakistan economic Corridor, a simmering baloch insurgency and a rising tide of Pashtun mobilisation against the deep state under the umbrella

baitul-of the Pashtun tahafuz Movement (PtM) PtM activists have been non-violently campaigning against human rights abuses

of the Pakistan army, which have long focused upon Pashtuns One of the slogans protestors raise particularly disquiets the

deep state: ‘Yeh jo dehshatgardi hai, is ke picche vardi hai (the men

in uniform are behind this terrorism).’ the slogan summarises Pashtun beliefs that the deep state has created the terrorist menace in Pakistan but Pashtuns have been made the scapegoat

Pakistan has once again absconded from any meaningful

consequences of using terrorism at Pulwama or escalating

the conflict there is no meaningful discussion of the us

declaring Pakistan to be a state sPonsor of terror

saurabh sinGh

18 march 2019

20

and are at the receiving end of the army’s brutality so that it can

show the uS and others that it is seriously confronting terrorists

at home, for which it had been handsomely compensated until

the trump administration ended such payments

While the deep state can kill baloch—who comprise about

5 per cent of Pakistan’s population—with impunity and

intimi-date any critics of this policy with violence, it cannot so easily

kill its way out of its problems with Pashtuns For one thing,

Pashtuns are about 15 per cent of the population—and form

the largest minority in Pakistan—but they may account for as

much as 40 per cent of the Pakistan army Moreover, Pashtuns

along with Punjabis have formed the ruling condominium

since the late 1950s when Muhajjirs, who migrated from

north-ern India, began to decline politically the deep state needs to

manage its Pashtun problem and having a menacing leader at

the helm in India helps It should be noted that Modi has not

imposed such crippling costs upon Pakistan for its use of

terror-ism as a tool of foreign policy that may exceed the benefits of

Modi’s continued tenure

Grounds for imPunity

Given that a far less audacious attack at uri precipitated a

cross-border raid by Indian forces in 2016, why would Pakistan

think it would escape consequences after Pulwama? as is

well-known, the uS President Donald trump has made it clear that

he wants out of afghanistan trump obsesses over fulfilling

campaign promises no matter how foolish, ill-informed or

dangerous they may be he sees this as a key reason for why

he has a solid 35 per cent of voters who support him no matter

what other dubious things he does —whether cavorting with

porn stars while his wife is nursing his child or monetising

the White house trump has dispatched Zalmay Khalilzad

to work out some means by which trump can succeed these

negotiations between the uS and the taliban rely heavily on

Pakistan to persuade their proxies to co-operate notably, they

have excluded the afghan government trump’s calculus is

crude If he wins the 2020 election, it doesn’t matter what

hap-pens in afghanistan If he loses in 2020, it still does not matter

for him what happens in afghanistan

Given the centrality of Pakistan to trump’s scheme, Pakistan

likely expected the uS to caution India to stand down after

Pulwama It is also likely that Pakistan felt that its importance

to trump’s exit strategy in afghanistan would afford it cover to escalate to air strikes on India’s side of the LoC evidence for these suspicions is offered by the remonstrations of the Pakistani am-bassador to Washington DC, asad Khan, who complained that

uS Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s response to India’s airstrike was “construed and understood as an endorsement of the Indian position, and that is what emboldened them even more”

what did Pakistan learn?

With the return of Varthaman and the resulting winding down

of the crisis, Pakistan has likely learnt a worrying set of lessons First and foremost, Pakistan has once again absconded from any meaningful consequences of using terrorism at Pulwama

or escalating the conflict there is no meaningful discussion of the uS declaring Pakistan to be a state sponsor of terror or any other kinds of punitive measures Whether or not India suc-ceeds in getting Masood azhar, the leader of JeM, designated at the united nations will be an important move but not one that will be a game changer Second, coverage in papers of record

such as the New York Times and the Washington Post repeated the

tired false equivalence that equated India—the victim—with Pakistan—the perpetrator editorials and assessments of West-ern commentators applauded Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan for his speech which they deemed ‘conciliatory’ despite the fact that it was anything but Similarly, editorials calling for

a ‘resolution of Kashmir’, all of which demonstrate an ished understanding of history, also rewarded Pakistan because they seemed to imply that Pakistan has defensible equities in Kashmir when, of course, it does not

impover-Finally, and the most worrisome of all, there is little appetite

in India to know what the Government intended to do and what it succeeded in doing Indian citizens who are asking these questions are being dismissed as anti-national while non-Indians asking these questions are being dismissed as Pakistan apologists or worse While accepting whatever account is offered—irrespective of the various competing claims—may seem politically loyal, it is not actually helpful to India’s overall ability to handle the beast on its border Worse, while everyone expects Pakistan and its press to promulgate rank fictions, the international community does have higher expectations of India Most importantly, the Pakistani deep state does know what happened It can assess whether Pulwama was worth it in the end and, as I’ve argued, it likely has concluded this already but if India did not live up to the maximalist claims about the assault on balakot, when there is another attack, Indians will demand an ever-more robust response which India may not be able to deliver this dynamic may force India’s hands in ways that are not only counter-productive but may catalyse a conflict that India cannot control this is something that genuine patriots should be very worried about

C Christine Fair is the author of In their Own Words:

understanding the Lashkar-e-tayyaba and

Fighting to the end: the Pakistan army’s Way of War

open essay

while it may seem

counter-intuitive, Pakistan

Prefers a modi win for the

simPle reason that modi and

his hindutva suPPorters

embody the very threats that

Pakistanis have long imbibed

While we tend to turn to

space as a new frontier

with excitement, we must

not forget that ocean

exploration is still not complete on our

Home Planet We need to continue to

explore our ocean not just to estimate

its harness able resources but also to

completely learn about its exact role in

sustaining Life on Earth

What’s more - the ocean is changing

- and to know its exact role, is to know

how the Earth will change too in the

future In fact, even day-to-day changes

affect the lives of those who live off the

sea

The study of the ocean i.e

oceanography, put its roots down in India

at the culmination of the International Indian Ocean Expedition (1962-65) with the birth of the National Institute of Oceanography in Goa in 1966 While there still remains a lot to explore, since then, we have also progressed a long way in terms of ocean science and technology and the need of the hour s

to translate this progress into benefits for the public at large - The Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services, Hyderabad is mandated to do just that- and has successfully provided useful services since its establishment

in February 1999 It started with the flagship Potential Fishing Zone Advisory Service, followed by other now well-recognized services including Ocean

State Forecasts and the Tsunami Early Warnings (operational since October 2007)

The Potential Fishing Zone Advisories help the fishers to obtain a good catch with lower commitment of time & resources It is generated with two types

of information extracted from images recorded by satellites This information includes temperature zoning that identifies lines of moderately warm/cool areas where the fish aggregate Additionally, the chlorophyll present in micro-algae or phytoplankton (which

is the cornerstone of the marine food chain), is also used to identify potential zones as they represent the areas of high food availability Together, this

Indian National Centre For Ocean Information Services, Hyderabad

(Ministry of Earth Sciences)

AV E N U E S

information is used to construct special

maps and tables to guide the fishers to

the zones with good catch

The service has been tested by

third-party studies and it is demonstrated that

while the overall catch may be similar,

while using the advisories, fishers save

on enormous amounts of diesel and time

which directly translates to increased

profits A study by the National Council

for Applied Economic Research, New

Delhi (NCAER) estimated that the

benefit due to the usage of INCOIS

PFZ advisories is Rs 34,000 to 50,000

crores The study also projected that

the benefit due to this service can be as

high as 2.04% of the Indian GDP While

the service is remarkably successful,

now close to reaching up to 7 lakh direct subscribers and additional non-direct subscribers, INCOIS has, on request from fisherfolk, further boosted this service to include advisories about specific species One such species is Yellow Fin Tuna Being a predator, this species prefers clear water to sight its prey Clear water is also easily identified from satellite images and this additional information is used to identify Potential Tuna Fishing Zones INCOIS is now working to target other commercial species

Fishers can access maps, tables and voice audio information a whole day in

advance through numerous forms of communication including SMS, mobile apps, web apps, Electronic Display Boards (EDBs) at fish landing locations, local radio, newspaper and television etc

Ocean State Forecasts (OSF) from INCOIS provide a suite of products and tools useful to fishermen, Navy, Coast Guard, shipping industry, oil and gas industry, ports & harbours, tourism departments, coastal residents etc

as all of them would like to know, in advance, how the sea would behave when they conduct their activities there

The service boosts the safety of users who have access to this information 5-7 days in advance, letting them know which areas of ocean are unsafe in

terms of how high the waves will be, how strong the currents would be, etc Such information is customised for various types of users, highlighting the most important details specific to each group

During periods of incoming cyclones, INCOIS works jointly with the India Meteorological Department to provide alerts and warnings about oceanic conditions including the information

on the coastal areas that might get inundated due to the storm surge and high waves

Other services like the Search and Rescue Aid Tool (SARAT) and the Online

Oil Spill Advisory, specially developed for the use of Indian Coast Guard and other maritime enforcement agencies, help in locating missing objects at sea and tracking oil spills

The Ocean State Forecast services and products are generated using mathematical/numerical models and the forecasts are constantly checked against actual observations from instruments that are deployed along the Indian coastline as well as over the open ocean NCAER has estimated that overall economic benefits due to the OSF service (i.e cumulative benefits realised by Indian Navy, India Coast Guard, value addition of oil and gas exploration) exceed Rs 3.7 trillion.The Tsunami Warning Service has

received world-wide recognition through

the Inter-governmental Oceanographic

Commission of UNESCO In October,

2012, IOC/UNESCO designated the

Indian Tsunami Early Warning Centre

as a Regional Tsunami Warning Service

provider for all 25 countries on the Indian

Ocean Rim The tsunami early warning

system consists of a network of seismic

stations to detect earthquakes, a network

of tsunami buoys and sea level gauges

to detect tsunami waves and capable

numerical models that can accurately

estimate tsunami wave generation and

propagation This system is efficient in

detecting earthquakes anywhere in the

world oceans in less than 10 minutes

and providing tsunami early warnings in

less than 20 minutes of the occurrence

of an earthquake

The system has received accolades

for its no-failure record and for its

performance during minor/major

earthquake events in the Indian Ocean

during the past years

Both Ocean State Forecasts and

Tsunami warnings are accessible

through same modes of communication

as the Potential Fishing Zone advisories

In fact, Electronic Display Boards (EDB)

installed by INCOIS all along the coast

are capable of being activated to sound

a 3 km-wide siren as part of Tsunami warnings

INCOIS constantly fine-tunes, improves and enhances its services through advanced research, observations and mathematical modelling

For observing the ocean, INCOIS not only utlilizes conventional platforms such

as buoys and ship-board observations, but also autonomous robotic platforms like Argo floats, Lagrangian floats and gliders Argo floats penetrate the deep water of the ocean around 2 km and provide information on the changing structure of temperature, salinity, oxygen content, etc and transmit this data to INCOIS via satellites at pre-determined time intervals, usually every 10th day There are more than

4000 such floats in the global ocean and INCOIS has deployed around 459 floats so far in the Indian Ocean INCOIS serves as the Regional and National Argo data centre In fact, INCOIS is recognized by the International Ocean Data Exchange as Responsible National Ocean Data Centre INCOIS acquires ocean information from satellites, observational instruments, platforms etc and processes that data to prepare useful data products for scientific studies and other purposes

In its 20 years of service, INCOIS has developed expertise and a special niche in Operational Oceanography and the International Training Centre for Operational Oceanography (ITCOocean) established on its campus has received notable recognition from the global community In November 2017, the General Conference of UNESCO decided to establish ITCOocean as

a Category -2 Centre of UNESCO ITCOocean organizes national and international-level short-term training courses every year aiming to strengthen the expertise in the field in India as well

as in other countries, especially in the Indian Ocean Rim countries, Small Island States and Africa

INCOIS coordinates and participates

in several international collaborative programmes It serves as a node

to coordinate the ongoing second International Indian Ocean Expedition,

a collaborative effort of 28 countries coordinated by IOC/UNESCO, Scientific Committee for Ocean Research (SCOR)

of International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) and Indian Ocean Global Ocean Observing System (IOGOOS).With its growing prominence and expertise, the institute also has its own vibrant Ph.D programme

AV E N U E S

The Ministry of Earth Sciences

(MoES) was formed in 2006

by bringing all the agencies of

meteorological and ocean development

activities under one umbrella,

recognizing the importance of strong

coupling among various components

of the Earth, viz atmosphere, ocean,

cryosphere and geosphere

MoES is mandated to provide the

nation with the best possible services

in forecasting the monsoons and other weather/climate parameters, ocean state, earthquakes, tsunamis and other phenomena related to earth systems, for the public safety and socio-economic benefits The Ministry also deals with science and technology for exploration and exploitation of ocean resources (living and non-living)

in a sustainable way, and play a nodal role for Antarctic/Arctic/Himalayas and Southern Ocean research

MoES deals with four branches

of Earth System Sciences, viz (i) Ocean Science and Technology, (ii) Atmospheric and Climate Science, (iii) Geosciences and Seismology and (iv) Polar Science and Cryosphere MoES holistically addresses all the aspects relating the Earth System Science for providing weather, climate, ocean, coastal state, hydrological and seismological services The services provided by the ministry are being effectively used by different agencies and state governments for saving human lives and minimizing damages due to natural disasters.<

Ministry of Earth Sciences

Government of India

Following are missions through which the Ministry is

providing services to the nation:

1 Weather, Climate and Hydromet Services

=Weather forecasts, advisories, warnings, Monsoon and

Climate prediction,

2 Ocean Services

=Fishery advisories, ocean state forecasts, Tsunami warnings

3 Ocean Resources, Survey and Technology Development

=Non-living resources- Water, Energy and Minerals

=Living resources, mapping, ocean biodiversity

=Survey and Exploration of EEZ, Continental Shelf

4 Seismological Services

=Earthquake Detection and information, Geosciences research

5 Polar Science

=Scientific exploration of the three poles and linkages to Climate

The Ministry has the following organizations under its administrative control through which the services listed herewith are being rendered to the country:

1 India Meteorological Department

(IMD, New Delhi)

2 National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF,

erstwhile ICMAM Chennai

9 National Centre for Earth Science Studies (NCESS,

Thiruvananthapuram)

10 National Centre for Seismology

(NCS, New Delhi)

Illustration by Saurabh Singh

18 march 2019 www.openthemagazine.com 27

n February 24th, 10 days after the Pulwama suicide attack that killed more than 40 CrPF men and two days before the pre-dawn air strike by the Indian air Force (IaF) on the balakot camp of the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) deep inside Pakistan, narendra Modi sat staring into the distance with a dead- pan expression when his national security advisor ajit doval walked in to

7 Lok Kalyan Marg, the official residence of the Prime Minister of India doval immediately told the Prime Minister that the IaF has a “perfect” plan the two went into a huddle and shortly thereafter, Modi summoned IaF Chief

bs dhanoa to his home “We can do a precision-targeted air strike on the JeM camp at balakot and return in seven minutes flat,” the IaF chief said in a

inside the balakot operation and how it will further strengthen prime minister modi

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28

measured tone as the Prime Minister and doval listened

that meeting was destined to change Indian strategy

re-garding Pakistan forever so did the seven-minute aerial

of-fensive on a country that allegedly shelters the JeM, the

terror-outfit which claimed responsibility for the Valentine’s day

suicide attack in Pulwama, Kashmir

before dhanoa left, the Prime Minister insisted on what he

thought was quintessential to the surprise IaF attack: there

should be no casualty on the Indian side the retaliation had to

be on a greater scale than the 2016 uri surgical strike, yet not big

enough to give Pakistan a Pr advantage on the global stage to play

the victim card and undermine India’s image as a responsible

democracy In short, punishment should be delivered unerringly

to Pakistan, which houses and promotes JeM It had to be lethal

but not “life-threatening” for Pakistan that was not all, the Prime

Minister said before the operation is carried out, Indian forces had

to be fully prepared and ready to hit the ground running

Within hours, the three wings of the armed forces agreed to

meet the ‘requirements’ and Modi gave the green signal

the Prime Minister stayed awake on the intervening night

of February 25th and February 26th and went to bed only after

doval told him that the fighter pilots of 20 Mirage 2000s had

returned safely after carrying out the attack on a JeM camp at

balakot in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, home of Pakistan’s Prime

Minister Imran Khan

India also decided that the statements had to be sober, pithy

and yet, crystal clear bureaucrats were put into action Foreign

secretary Vijay Gokhale told the media that the pre-dawn air

strike by the IaF inflicted “significant damage” on the fidayeen

factory run by the JeM

s IndIa exPeCted, the next day, Pakistan

launched aerial attacks on Indian military targets

along the Line of Control (LoC) the ensuing

mid-air dogfight saw an IaF mid-air warrior in a MiG-21

bi-son take on a far superior Pakistani F-16 during the

sortie, Wing Commander abhinandan Varthaman, who manned

the MiG-21, had to eject himself to safety after his aircraft was hit

he landed on Pakistani territory and was captured and paraded

on a tV channel in gross violation of the Geneva Convention

On March 3rd, Modi chaired a high-level meeting of the

Cabinet Committee on security in new delhi attended by top

ministers from the defence, foreign affairs, finance and home

ministries, as well as doval the meeting was meant to assess

the military preparedness of the armed forces amid simmering

tensions between the two countries It would also reaffirm the

Modi Government’s determination to give a carte blanche to the

military to retaliate against any aggression made by Pakistan

inside Indian territory It was the first time since the Indo-Pak

war of 1971 that any Indian Prime Minister has displayed such

a resolve to take on Pakistan instead of buckling down in the

face of repeated terror strikes engineered by non-state players

such as Lashkar-e-taiba (Let) and JeM

this shift in strategy, senior officials aver, forced a rethink on the Pakistani deep state as luck would have it, the international community sensed India’s new confidence and put pressure

on Islamabad to take tangible measures to rein in terror groups operating out of its territory It was for a reason that Imran Khan stood up in parliament and announced the release of abhinan-dan Varthaman “as a peace gesture”

In the days following the balakot air strikes, Modi fused to budge from his position, which he had stated pub-licly after Pulwama: the time for talks with Pakistan was long over India meant business and would take every ac-tion necessary to isolate and terror-shame Pakistan on the global stage India also lost no time in pointing out that un-der the Geneva Convention, given that India had launched

re-a “non-militre-ary, pre-emptive” strike in bre-alre-akot, Islre-amre-abre-ad was obliged to release Varthaman within 60 hours the tell-ing message from the Indian Government had gone home to Islamabad: any further terror attacks on our soil will invite retaliation besides, Pakistan also had to face intense pressure mounted by countries such as the us, France, saudi arabia, Iran, the uae, the uK and others who goaded Islamabad

to agree to take verifiable action on terror groups operating from its soil even China, a friend to Pakistan, asked Khan

view to CNN’s Christiane amanpour admitted that JeM Chief

Masood azhar was in Pakistan but was too ill to move outside his house While Pakistan denied that azhar’s brother-in-law was killed in the air strike, by March 5th it was busy putting out news of a crackdown on various terror outfits and the pre-ventive custody of 44 of its leaders within Pakistan including hamad azhar, the Maulana’s brother

such a Pakistani response was inevitable France was ing to pass a resolution in the un declaring Masood azhar a global terrorist Following the Pulwama attack, the Modi Gov-ernment had withdrawn the Most Favoured nation status to Pakistan, hiked duty on goods from Pakistan to 200 per cent, initiated steps to restrict Islamabad’s hopes of aid by approach-ing the Financial action task Force, and planned ways to force Pakistan to dilute its war on India using proxies In fact, within days, India proved to the world that despite the nuclear thresh-old of the two nations, there was still space to mount pressure

prepar-on Islamabad and inflict telling costs prepar-on the Pakistani state prepar-on the terror issue

Omar abdullah, former chief minister of J&K, in his first reaction to the Foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale’s press confer-

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ence on the pre-dawn action, dubbed it a ‘totally new ballgame’

‘We’ve entered a whole new paradigm with the balakot air

strike the post-uri strike was to avenge our losses, balakot was

a ‘preemptive strike to prevent an imminent JeM attack’ totally

new ballgame,’ he tweeted abdullah added that the attack on

balakot was ‘hugely embarrassing for Pakistan’ ‘regardless

of what the other side may claim was or wasn’t hit, the planes

crossed over, dropped their payload & flew back completely

unscathed,’ he wrote

true, planning for a radical shift in India’s strategy on

Pakistan had been on the cards for a while at home, the

oppo-sition continued to lash out at Modi for ‘lapses’ during the 2016

terror attacks in Pathankot and uri, for his ‘inability’ to avenge

the loss of lives among security forces and for his ‘naive’ policy

regarding Pakistan and Jammu & Kashmir there was also

acute awareness of the concerns of the international

commu-nity on a military conflagration between India and Pakistan,

two nuclear power nations being drawn to the edge of war these concerns were already translating into calls from world leaders to both the Indian and the Pakistani prime ministers, urging restraint and caution India’s options for retaliating to the Pakistani army/IsI-engineered terrorism on Indian soil,

on the face of it, still appeared constrained and limited but the Modi Government was determined to identify, plan and successfully execute a plan that would send out a warning to the Pakistan army and the IsI Clearly, that plan had to avoid nuclear confrontation while proving to the world that pres-sure could be mounted on Islamabad on every front to hold

it accountable

Pakistan’s military-terror complex has been fighting a gerous and surreptitious asymmetrical war against India for decades in a bid to weaken the country diplomatic, financial, se-curity and political responses had to be worked simultaneously.Modi began his diplomatic efforts almost immediately

modi refused to budge from his position: the time for talks with pakistan was long over,

india now meant business

Narendra Modi addresses a rally at Gandhi Maidan in Patna on March 4

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30

after Pulwama—liaising with international capitals and laying

out case before them simultaneously, he made it clear to the

armed forces that he refused to be bogged down by the threat of

consequences he wanted results In the very first meeting with

the service chiefs after the Pulwama massacre, the Prime

Min-ister asserted that Pulwama would not go unpunished While

flagging off the Vande bharat semi-high speed train to Varanasi

from delhi, Modi declared in his first reaction to the Pulwama

massacre, “the blood of our people is boiling … Pakistan cannot

weaken India through such acts and will have to pay a heavy

price… I have given the security forces complete freedom, a free

hand to deal with the situation… this act of terror will not go

unpunished.” It was clear then that his reaction would be swift

From February 15th, the Prime Minister did not go into any

details on how the “free hand” would translate or when, despite

attending public functions, until the three chiefs of the armed

forces signalled their readiness to execute the balakot operation

and came up with a detailed plan of action

For India, the decision to target Pakistan was supremely

dif-ficult for both political and diplomatic reasons Modi was aware

that should anything go wrong and should there be any loss to

the security personnel involved in the operation, the goodwill

earned by him in the aftermath of the uri surgical strike would

vanish overnight the opposition parties had already begun

taunting him within hours of the Pulwama attack and, despite

a public promise that they would not politicise the

develop-ment and would lend full support to the Governdevelop-ment, resorted

to ratcheting up their anti-Modi sloganeering in the run-up to

the General election Congress spokesman randeep singh

sur-jewala went on air to demand that the Prime Minister avenge

the sacrifice of jawans

aVInG Learnt FrOM the surgical strike at

uri, the first thing that Pakistan did was ramp

up security on the border to thwart any surprise

from India diplomatically, the Government

appeared to have little elbow room to act tough

against Pakistan It came at a time when Pakistan was back

in a position to exploit the advantage that comes from being

a very crucial real estate for the geo-strategic plans of nations

like the us the trump administration is keen to call back us

soldiers from afghanistan and that is not possible until Pakistan

nudges its proxies in the taliban to the negotiating table russia,

would have gone with China to act as a counterweight to the us

diplomatically, it was not the right time—the circumstances

and factors made the task of retaliation a very tough

proposi-tion Identifying a pre-emptive, non-military retaliatory strike

within Pakistani airspace, part of an extensive planning process,

was tougher still

against this backdrop, the Pakistani establishment believed

that Modi would stick to the traditional template and refrain

from taking any major retaliatory action, given international

concern over the two nuclear powers locking horns ously at the edge of a full-blown war Many of them would ad-mit their mistakes later Writing on the options before Modi,

danger-columnist swaminathan aiyar wrote in The Times of India,

‘the terrorist attack at Pulwama, killing 40 soldiers, provides narendra Modi a huge but risky chance to portray himself as the toughest politician in India atal bihari Vajpayee’s victory

in the 1999 Kargil war helped him win the next general tion Can Modi use Pulwama to do the same? he must avoid military action, which could backfire badly Far wiser would

elec-be new forms of political theatre, similar to his ‘surgical strikes’

in 2016, in retaliation for the attack on our armed forces at uri that satisfied the public demand for action without risking dangerous escalation into an all-out war.’

Very few analysts expected that Modi would take such a risk, politically and otherwise, to give the green signal to strike targets inside a nuclear power analysts now maintain that the new paradigm has sent a strong message that every future at-tempt to pursue jihad under the nuclear shield would further weaken the Pakistani state

the air strikes in balakot were, undeniably, confirmation

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18 march 2019 www.openthemagazine.com 31

of the fact that the current dispensation in new delhi has a

muscular policy towards any provocation by Pakistan the

Government has established a new benchmark that the LoC is

no longer sacrosanct and can be crossed by India in the face of

any new terror attacks On March 4th, Modi hit back at the

op-position’s persistent questioning of his motives with his “chun

chun ke badla lete hain” (we avenge every single attack and make

them pay) comment at Gandhi Maidan in Patna

Finance Minister arun Jaitley, who was among the first to

launch a sharp attack on the opposition, and especially at the

reaction of former Prime Minister Manmohan singh, wrote on

his blog that the Congress-led uPa had run a ‘terrible’

Govern-ment and an even ‘more terrible’ opposition While singh had

sought to elevate himself to the status of a neutral third party,

he had nonetheless raised doubts over India’s right to defend its

sovereignty “I was most disappointed with a brief but highly

objectionable statement of former PM Manmohan singh,” said

Jaitley singh had said that he was disturbed with the “mad rush

of mutual self-destruction” by the two nations, implying that

Modi’s decision was as much a rogue act as Pakistan’s and that of

its military-terror complex that had inflicted so many cuts and

wounds on India over the decades

On the evening of February 26th, Modi fielded the foreign secretary, rather than the three armed services chiefs or mili-tary officials, to detail the action taken by the air force Officials

Open spoke to contend that it was a calculated move to assert

both globally and locally the contention of “non-military, emptive action” against terror which would be in agreement with international convention on the lines of the us strike on abbottabad to target Osama bin Laden in Pakistani territory soon after, Finance Minister Jaitley justified India’s action in self-defence stating, “If the us could carry out operations using navy seaLs in abbottabad to kill Osama bin Laden in 2011, so can India.”

pre-he seLF-deFenCe narrative was soon echoed

at key capitals around the globe the us, France, the uae, saudi arabia, Iran and russia, defended India’s right to self-defence Iran, among all of these nations, had lost several of its revolutionary guards

to a horrific terror act emanating from Pakistani soil recently Following Pulwama, doval had talked to the us national secu-rity advisor John bolton on February 15th the two had agreed,

at the time, that Pakistan should be held accountable, under

un resolutions, to remove all hurdles to designate JeM leader Masood azhar a global terrorist bolton had also backed India’s right to self-defence against cross-border terrorism and offered help in booking the terror outfit’s architects Post-balakot, doval also spoke with the us secretary of state Mike Pompeo saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin salman al saud also had a chat with Modi and offered support to India

things were tougher on the domestic front as national security has hardly been an attractive slogan in Indian elec-tions historically unless, of course, when India went into a full-fledged war with Pakistan and liberated bangladesh in 1971.For obvious reasons, the opposition was unwilling to give the Prime Minister any credit for what transpired in the af-termath of Pulwama they went on punching holes in every gain that the country appeared to have made on the global stage in isolating Pakistan and exposing it for nurturing terror factories that punctured India at will over the last few decades

tV channels in Pakistan went to town with the combined opposition statement that demanded that Modi should “not politicise” the balakot air strikes Worse, they questioned the Government’s claims of damage inflicted in the operation Jaitley urged the opposition to “grow up” instead of obstinately seeking to score a self-goal for the country Congress leader digvijay singh, meanwhile, demanded that the Government release video proof of the damage inflicted, on the lines of what was done by the us after the abbottabad Operation to take out Osama bin Laden in 2011 Others like Mamata ba-nerjee, West bengal Chief Minister, chose to put their weight behind the Congress on this after a prestigious australian

government has established a new dynamic that the line of control

is no longer sacrosanct and can be crossed by india in the face

of any fresh attack by pakistan-sponsored terror groups

Indian Air Force officials display remains of an exploded missile fired by the Pakistani F-16 in Rajouri district, Jammu

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institution claimed that not much damage appeared to have

been inflicted based on conventional satellite images the

attacks on the Modi Government implied that the

establish-ment had fabricated the extent of damage to capitalise on this

politically in the run-up to the General election to that

ex-tent, it implied, the stated objective of the Modi Government

had not been achieved One senior Congress leader, salman

Khurshid, went to the extent of tweeting that Wing

Com-mander abhinandan Varthaman had earned his wings

dur-ing the uPa rule in new delhi

On March 5th, air Chief dhanoa emphasised in a press

conference that the IaF fighters had released a payload of

1,000 kg on the target Putting a number to those killed in the

strike, however, was the job of the political establishment, he

said On March 5th, home Minister rajnath singh reiterated

that 200 terrorists were killed at balakot Commenting on

the questions over the numbers dead in the balakot attack,

former national security advisor shiv shankar Menon said

in an interview to a news channel, “the numbers are really

immaterial, whether it is 300 or 50 dead I’m concerned with

the outcomes.” Menon added that the point was that the IaF

was able to successfully conduct the air strikes on the JeM

camp at balakot and in doing so, sent out a strong message of

warning against further terror strikes by Pakistan however,

it had to be followed up consistently by multiple overt and covert measures on the political, diplomatic, financial and other fronts, he stressed

he POLItICaL attaCK On narendra Modi is being carried out along predictable lines In the af-termath of the surgical strike following the terror attack at uri, a section of Modi’s critics had begun voicing doubts over the success of the operation however, the Modi Government resisted the urge to use visuals

of the surgical strike in the run up to the uttar Pradesh elections

in 2017 Post-balakot, he is setting the agenda not just for the upcoming elections, but for the future of India’s national secu-

rity On March 5th, Modi said at a public rally: “Na rukenge, na

jhukenge” (we won’t stop, we won’t bend) and, “My opponents

are busy striking at me I believe in striking only at terrorists who harm this country.” this election will not only revolve around Modi but will focus on his performance

the balakot air strike fits in with the slogan that the Prime Minister had himself spelt out at Gorakhpur in eastern uttar

Pradesh recently: ‘Namumkin toh mumkin hai’ (the impossible

is now possible) that, by all insider accounts, is likely to be

up-graded to ‘Modi hai toh mumkin hai’ (Modi makes it possible) n

confidence and put pressure on islamabad it was for a reason that imran khan announced the release of varthaman “as a peace gesture”

Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman meets Abhinandan Varthaman in Delhi on March 2

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hose who question the truth behind the indian Air Force’s spectacular air strikes on terror camps deep inside Pakistan are unable to explain why Pakistan’s re-actions were filled with confusion and contradictory statements—

like they were after the us raid on Abbottabad—including that of their Prime Minister imran Khan;

the sheer audacity of the indian air strikes had especially left Pakistan’s brass hats stunned the in-

action by india against several Pakistan-sponsored terror strikes

over the past three decades—with the exception of the

com-mando raids cross the Line of Control (LoC) in 2016, that came

to be known as ‘surgical strikes’—had lulled Pakistan’s military

establishment into believing that ‘war was not an option’ for

india, since it could escalate into a nuclear confrontation But

india’s air strike has blown a hole through the Pakistani article

of faith: that their nuclear arsenal was a protective shield against

all their adventurism on indian soil

in hindsight, there is reason to believe that Delhi’s reluctance

to respond with military force either after the

Jaish-e-Moham-mad attack on the indian Parliament in December 2001 and the

massive military mobilisation thereafter or the Lashkar-e-taiba

attack on Mumbai in november 2008 had further emboldened

Pakistan’s military hawks even during the Kargil conflict (1999),

the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had drawn the line

for the armed forces to respect the sanctity of the LoC But

Paki-stan has repeatedly shown it doesn’t deify the LoC had Vajpayee

(in 2001) and Manmohan singh (in 2008) given our armed forces

permission to respond on the lines that Modi did recently after

the Pulwama attack in February, with at least air strikes on

Paki-stan’s terror machinery in the Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (since

all of Jammu and Kashmir, including PoK, is legally indian ritory), Pakistan would have had to rethink its strategy of using terrorism as an extension of its foreign policy

ter-And though india’s ‘strategic restraint’ then did get new Delhi universal applause, we also lost many more indian lives in the bargain this inimical guarantee of india’s reluctance to cross the self-imposed restriction gave immunity to the Pakistani ‘deep state’ that continued to bleed india But the indian air strikes

on Balakot have changed that narrative forever it has pierced through Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella, which had been used to push terrorists into india and use their so-called Jihadi soldiers

to keep india on the back foot while the Pakistani armed forces strutted about their country as the ‘guardians of the state’ their blackmail had held out for three decades even after thousands of Kashmiris and indian soldiers had become victims of Pakistan’s

‘proxy war’ to wrest the Kashmir Valley away from india.with the air strikes on Balakot india also has at least two other firsts to its credit it is perhaps the first time a nuclear-armed country has resorted to the use of air power at targets

in the territory of another nuclear-armed country the other

is the downing of a Pakistani F-16 fighter jet by a vintage 1960s model MiG-21 fighter this has stunned the west and the us arms lobbies that want to push india into a deal to buy upgraded F-16s hence, their silence or denials about the F-16 being used

by Pakistan a day after the indian air strikes, as a face-saving attack on indian military brigade headquarters near the LoC india’s swift response to the Pakistani air armada led to the F-16 being shot down in aerial combat Pakistani denials are both to save its face at home and to pacify the us, which ap-parently needs to give permission for the use of its equipment against another us-friendly country the question india might want to ask itself is against which all countries could it use the

$15 billion worth of military arms and platforms that new Delhi has recently bought from the us?

The next stage in dealing with a belligerent neighbour

By Maroof raza

A CAll for ContAinment

t

Cover Story

The Day afTer

18 march 2019 www.openthemagazine.com 35

what makes Pakistan even more nervous is what india could

do now—hence their excessive use of drones to keep a watch

on indian troop movements along the border—since the

in-dian military briefing where the missile parts of the F-16 were

displayed india has made it known that its forces are ready for

all responses beyond the LoC with mechanised forces (that is,

tanks and armoured fighting vehicles) and the indian navy is

prepared to respond at various levels too it may be noted that

with a nuclear-powered submarine, india’s nuclear triad is now

in place, and it gives Pakistan little room for manoeuvre But

un-like india, Pakistan’s options are limited and predictable the

Pakistan Army has repeatedly followed virtually the same plans

every time they envisage the use of irregular forces—a model

fine-tuned by General Ayub Khan first in the 1960s—before they

launch regular troops, all led by their army officers, into india,

with an aim to wrest the Kashmir Valley from india they did so

in the 1947 and 1965 wars and again during the Kargil conflict

And they’ve done the same all these years in J&K in the hope that

the ground will be readied for their regular troops to roll in

in the mid-1980s, Pakistan’s military establishment led by

General Zia-ul-haq had concluded that it was impossible for

Pak-istan to win a conventional war against india or even to liberate

parts of Kashmir to fulfil their long-standing ambition to avenge

their humiliation, following the fall of Dhaka and the large-scale

surrender of the Pakistan Army in 1971 the only other way

Pakistan could ‘do a Bangladesh’ on india was to go beyond the

established military narrative of fighting a conventional war like

in 1965 and 1971 this was a plan Zia named ‘op-topac’, unveiled

by him just before he passed away it has become the basis of

Pakistan’s longest-running military operation in J&K it aims at

the annexation of the Valley through an insurgency, alienation

of the locals and their radicalisation, backed finally by a military

invasion the strategy of the Pakistan military establishment

is to bleed india through cross-border terrorism, and by telling

india and its leadership that if india’s military response did push

Pakistan into a corner, then Pakistan wouldn’t hesitate to use all

its nuclear bombs in recent years, this claim has included the

threats of the use of tactical nuclear weapons—that cover a

lim-ited area of a few kilometres—if indian troops were to advance

deep into Punjab, their strategic heartland and the home of most

of Pakistan’s generals and its army

But india knows that Pakistan’s generals are anything but

stupid, and so, they wouldn’t blow themselves up the essence

of nuclear weapons is their ability to deter conflict and the

chest-thumping assertions by Pakistani politicians that they

have an equaliser against a bigger and superior indian military

shows they are ill-informed studies and war gaming over the

past decades (in think-tanks abroad) have confirmed that the

military brass of both india and Pakistan are most unlikely to

even consider the use of their nuclear arsenal at the height of a

military confrontation, as the Kargil conflict had shown

More-over, war is an expensive option and the Pakistani brass knows

that the cost to them would be unbearable while the Kargil

option and the pakistani brass knoWs that the cost to them Would be unbearable While the kargil conflict had cost an

estimated rs 5,000 crore

a Week, a current War Would cost each side about

rs 6,000 crore a day

18 march 2019

36

conflict had cost an estimated Rs 5,000 crore a week, a current

war would cost each side about Rs 6,000 crore (roughly $1

bil-lion) a day thus a week-long military campaign would wipe

out all that there is in Pakistan’s foreign exchange reserves For

india, such a cost to finally put Pakistan’s generals out of the

terror business still might just be worth it

however, for Pakistan the annexation of Kashmir through

any means remains its long-standing ambition, not only as an

article of faith and a binding adhesive for a country that is so

deeply rooted and doctored in anti-india narratives, nothing

short of the absorption of the Kashmir Valley will be acceptable

to its public now But more than Kashmiris, it is the waters of

the indus and its tributaries that were always coveted by

Paki-stan’s policymakers Pakistan is hugely dependent on the waters

of the indus river system and recognising this vulnerability,

Jawaharlal nehru had signed a heavily one-sided indus

wa-ters treaty with President Ayub Khan of Pakistan in september

1960 it gives Pakistan 80 per cent of the waters of indus and

its rivers, though it still complains of being squeezed by india,

which strangely hasn’t even effectively used the 20 per cent of its

waters that are its due But now, following the Pulwama attack,

the indian Government has finally announced its intentions to

at least do that, hoping this might put pressure on Pakistan to

mend its ways the waters of the indus and its rivers however

are not just needed by Pakistan but also by China, which now

has begun building huge dams on the indus in the PoK

China’s strategic goal is to be, eventually, the most

power-ful country in the world, or at least on a par with the us And

the one way it intends to achieve that is through increasing the

production of microchips that already control everything from

mobile phones, pacemakers to geostationary satellites to

pro-duce these in abundance, China needs enormous amounts of

water—a 30-cm silicon wafer requires almost 10,000 litres of fresh water—and that China plans to get from the huge dams

it is now building on the indus in the PoK as part of the Pakistan economic Corridor (CPeC), that is China’s strategic gateway via the PoK and Pakistan into west Asia and Africa Also, China occupies over 25 per cent of the territory of J&K and thus has been party to the dispute over Kashmir no wonder then that Beijing still gives islamabad the necessary diplomatic support, especially in the un

China-But the assumption that China would come out in port of Pakistan militarily, if india were to respond with more military action—after having exhausted all other diplomatic, economic and geopolitical options—is misplaced, even though China has made major investments in Pakistan through the CPeC and in the Gwadar port, plus in a few large dams on the indus in the northern areas of the PoK China has always been careful not to go against the vast tide of global opinion beyond

sup-a point, unless its own sup-agendsup-a is chsup-allenged, sup-as in the south China sea no wonder it has now given its consent to a broad unsC admonishment of Pakistan and its terror apparatus Also,

in the past China did not intervene in Pakistan’s favour either during the 1965 and 1971 wars or during the Kargil conflict, and may not do so now either even then, india’s long-term counter-terrorism strategy must build in diplomatic and trade measures

to penalise China, which enjoys trade benefits in india.But neither indian air strikes nor pressure such as the threat

of pulling out of the indus waters treaty will be able to diately discipline Pakistan islamabad’s weakest point is its current economic plight and it is looking for bailouts from the international Monetary Fund, despite grants from China, saudi Arabia and the united Arab emirates, all of whom enjoy leverage over Pakistan China and saudi Arabia have strong ties with Pakistan’s military establishment, the main culprit

imme-in creatimme-ing, nurturimme-ing and sponsorimme-ing terrorism agaimme-inst imme-dia, as also in Afghanistan and iran thus to clip their wings,

in-an indiin-an diplomatic drive against Pakistin-an must seek to stall any aid to this rogue state and convince the world to tighten the noose around Pakistan’s generals and check their vested interests in their country and abroad, like in the us and uAe unless that is done with sufficient vigour, Pakistan’s generals, like Myanmar’s, will continue to prosper, while their country

slides deeper and deeper into a dark hole And india alone cannot do that even if it resorts to another set of air strikes n

Maroof Raza is consulting editor, strategic affairs,

at times now and an author

could do noW, hence their excessive use of drones to keep

a Watch on indian troop movements along the border

Jaba village in Pakistan’s Balakot after the Indian air strike

Cover Story

The Day afTer

rEuTErS

arly on the morning of February 26th India launched an air strike against

a camp of Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), the terrorist organisation responsible for

a suicide bombing against a tary convoy in Pulwama in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) the aerial attack on the camp, at Balakot in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, demolished more than a bunch of buildings a part

paramili-of collateral damage occurred in what is probably the most

arcane branch of political science—theories of nuclear

behav-iour these theories try to explain why and under what

circum-stances countries resort to nuclear weapons

Before Balakot

In the case of India and Pakistan conventional nuclear wisdom

has evolved at a rapid pace since the summer of 1998, when

both new Delhi and Islamabad carried out nuclear tests then,

in a somewhat triumphant mood, the Indian nuclear

establish-ment declared that conventional wars were history in South

asia armed with nuclear weapons both neighbours could get

on with solving pressing problems including poverty Just about

a year later, the two countries would fight their fourth

conven-tional war, this time under the shadow of nuclear weapons

Unlike optimistic South asian nuclear warriors, this

possibil-ity had been presaged much earlier in the depths of the Cold

War the ungainly expression ‘stability-instability paradox’,

conjectured that two nuclear-armed rivals, secure in the belief that neither will use the ultimate weapon, confidently go about unleashing violence at the conventional level

to non-nuclear warriors—basically ordinary people—this was another example of the circular logic that accompanied nuclear weapons—if nuclear weapons were meant to rule out conventional wars, what was to be made of the ‘stability-instability paradox’ that ruled out nuclear conflagration but brought conventional wars back into picture? If one sets aside the intellectual gymnastics involved, the answer is simple Conventional wars of the kind seen during the 20th centu-ry—for example India and Pakistan in 1971, the US in Korea

or the bloodbath of the World War II kind—were not feasible anymore What was possible were aggressive encounters at lower levels of violence—shorter in duration, limited to a small geographic area—in contrast to a war as understood in its con-ventional meaning

It was one of those twists of history that this understanding

of what nuclear weapons made impossible and what they dered possible was almost tailor-made for the conflict between India and Pakistan here were two nuclear-armed neighbours who had just fought a war—Kargil 1999—and had a long-stand-ing and bitter conflict over territory each claimed to be its own: J&K Pakistan’s solution to wrest Kashmir from India rested on

ren-a two-pronged strren-ategy one, unleren-ash terrorists bred on its soil in Kashmir and two, foment unrest in Indian territory using those terrorists With the exception of a few years, early this century when cross-border terrorist flows pared to a trickle, Pakistan

By launching an air strike on terrorist camps in Pakistan,

India has called a long-standing Pakistani bluff

By SIddharth SIngh

breaking the habit

18 march 2019

38

has kept the pot boiling these two decades

an essential requirement for doing this was to impress

on India that any aggressive steps to counter terrorism—for

example, launching pre-emptive attacks on Pakistani soil—

would be met with a nuclear riposte on the face of it, this is an

unbelievable assertion It comes close to saying something like

‘throw a stone at me and I’ll throw a nuke at you’ even more

unbelievably, India continued to believe this for almost two

decades to give one example, in the Kargil war Indian fighter

pilots were told not to cross the line of Control (loC) in J&K

as this was considered a sensitive threshold It is not clear on

what basis this assertion was made Perhaps, it was part of the

‘nuclear learning’ that made the Indian leadership of the time

cautious What was caution for India was, however, another

matter for Pakistan—it made immense sense for Islamabad to

assert a ‘nuclear limit’ that was as low as possible It claimed an

exceptionally low threshold for a very long time

this was the phase during which India ‘absorbed’ the costs of

terrorism in terms of losses to human life, financial uncertainty

and a general loss of confidence in doing anything about it this

state of mind has been captured memorably by former foreign

secretary Shivshankar Menon in his book Choices: Inside the

Making of India’s Foreign Policy (2016) ‘India’s immediate

po-litical objective must recognize that this is a long conflict that

cannot be solved—that it is protracted and intractable this

is an idea that most Indians are reluctant to accept and some

find intolerable, but it is nonetheless gaining ground in India

Given the situation in Pakistan, the institutional interest of

the Pakistan army, and the radicalization (or talibanization)

of Pakistani society, I do not think that any other conclusion

would be prudent,’ he writes

shifting gears

In these years, India has absorbed plenty of losses from

terror-ism In J&K in particular, the spate of terrorist attacks picked up

after 2015, leading to a cascading effect of violence and

counter-violence It is not just the number of security personnel and

ci-vilian deaths that are a cause of concern but the damage per

encounter in terms of troops killed, damage to civilian property

and ordinary persons killed that has made terrorism a costly

affair In addition to the ‘ordinary statistics’ of death that get

buried, it is the big attacks against the army and paramilitary

forces like the Central reserve Police Force (CrPF) that gained

notoriety this time In october 2016, 19 soldiers were killed in

an attack on an army base in Uri two years later, the Pulwama

attack led to the death of at least 40 CrPF men

Unlike the past, however, both attacks met with a

stronger-than-expected Indian response While the details of these

op-erations remain controversial, some things are clear Uri led to

a rare ground incursion into Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK)

and Pulwama led to a strike in Pakistani territory Both amount

to a significant ratcheting up of military operations against

Pakistan Both have generated a degree of disbelief among

schol-ars It has also led to a hunt for explanations

this has proved to be a difficult quest—if India was sidered hemmed in due to a lack of viable military options against Pakistan’s nuclear threats, how does one explain Uri and Balakot?

con-not surprisingly, instead of addressing India’s changing thresholds and the possible changes in its security calculus, these deviations are now being explained in terms of the coun-try’s domestic politics

one explanation latched upon by virtually the who’s who of the nuclear theory world is based on what are called ‘audience costs’ the idea dates to a 1994 study by James Fearon, a Stanford University scholar who specialises in the origins of war Fearon looked at eyeball-to-eyeball confrontations between countries and built a theory that predicted which countries would back down and which ones would escalate all the way to war the idea is straightforward—if a country mobilises its army in re-sponse to a crisis situation, it can back down after some time, escalate further or attack the enemy country In case it decides to back away from military action, it generates what Fearon calls audience costs: ‘these costs arise from the action of domestic audiences concerned with whether the leadership is successful

or unsuccessful at foreign policy.’ If these costs are high, a ‘lock in’ is produced whereby there is no option left except to escalate tensions or attack otherwise, the leader suffers politically at

Cover Story

The Day afTer

Illustration by Saurabh Singh

18 march 2019 www.openthemagazine.com 39

the hands of voters—in case the country is a democracy—or

in other ways in case of a non-democracy

Going by this theory, Prime Minister narendra Modi ‘locked

in’ soon after the Uri attack when he promised retribution he

had no option but to go for the surgical strikes Similarly, in the

case of Pulwama, he was left with no option but to order a strike

against terrorist facilities in Pakistan

It is a plausible theory but one that has little empirical or

his-torical support Confrontations between India and Pakistan are

not new In the wake of the attack on Parliament in December

2001, the atal Bihari Vajpayee Government ordered a massive

mobilisation of troops on the border after five months, India

backed away without firing a single shot at Pakistan If audience

costs were indeed an issue, Vajpayee should have escalated

fur-ther or launched an attack on Pakistan Instead he backed down

his Government was defeated in the 2004 General election

but security issues were literally not there on the election

agenda that year

In somewhat different circumstances, India did nothing

after the november 2008 Mumbai attacks that were known to

have been planned and launched from Pakistani soil this was a

different case, as India had not mobilised or escalated militarily

in any way But once again, these attacks were hardly an issue

in the 2009 assembly elections in Maharashtra or the General

election that year Both were won by the Congress party, which

was in power when the Mumbai attacks occurred

“I am not convinced about the audience costs argument,” says rajesh rajagopalan, a professor of international relations

at Jawaharlal nehru University “Governments cannot fully culate such costs and there are not only domestic costs but also international audience costs as well,” he adds the international costs arise when the ‘world’ watches a country that has ambi-tions of becoming a regional if not great power but is unable

cal-to defend its people from terrorist attacks In the current bout

of theorising, there has been no accounting for international audience costs, an equally plausible source of escalation as India has now a much more visible presence in various fora across the world in comparison to, say, 2002 or even 2008

Perhaps much of this sort of accounting has to do with the perception of Modi as a strong leader who does not back away from taking ‘tough’ steps on national security issues But this is

at best, a perception—no leader, however powerful his image may be, is likely to abandon rational calculations before launch-ing an offensive operation against a nuclear-armed neighbour the trouble with theories that look at India’s new-found asser-tiveness is that they wholly discard the rational calculations of costs and benefits in the decision-making process

aS InDIa FInally overcome its cal fears about Pakistan’s potential use of nuclear weapons? that is another question that few schol-ars are willing to address without resorting to ex-planations based on domestic politics

psychologi-“I am not fully convinced that we are there but I think we are getting there,” says rajagopalan when asked about India’s nuclear fears “I hope the next time we will carry out a more sustained campaign now that we have done this twice, there will be greater confidence to carry out operations,” he adds.there are plenty of questions about India’s assertive mili-tary posture there is plenty of speculation about fighter jets downed, types of aircraft and missiles used, the damage—or lack of it—to terrorist infrastructure and the number of terror-ists killed this is akin to missing the forest for the trees the real questions are about what has changed between 2002 and now that made India take recourse to military options—what made new Delhi call Pakistan’s bluff? Did it have anything to

do with learning over this time or was it about confidence that

it lacked earlier? there are virtually no theories to look at this situation to be sure, there is plenty in the game theory literature that models such situations but there are no specific theories or studies that look at these sudden changes

at the moment, there are plenty of doubts about the efficacy

of Indian actions on the one hand, and warmongering on the other Both are extreme positions Perhaps a better explanation

is that India finds itself on a knife-edge military equilibrium where under-confidence and over-confidence confront it on either side It is a fine equilibrium that requires continued focus

on learning and discarding of noise n

overcome its psychological fears aBout pakistan’s potential use

of nuclear weapons? that is

a question that few are willing

to address without resorting to explanations Based on

domestic politics

H

2 JULY 2018

42

AV E N U E S

India has the third largest higher

education system in the world, after

the US and China, according to the

World Bank The higher education system

in India has grown in a remarkable way,

particularly in the post-independence

period and the Universities have always

been a paramount player in a global

system increasingly driven by knowledge,

information and ideas

It’s obvious that we live in a time

when knowledge is ever more vital to

our societies and economies, in a world

of rapidly circulating capital and people

and of revolutionary communication

technologies In such a time,we see that

knowledge is replacing other resources as

the main driver of economic growth, and

education has increasingly become the

foundation for individual prosperity and

social mobility In fact, in the last decade

alone, access to higher education has

improved as more IITs, IIMs and central

and state-level universities have been

established However, one must notice

that this proliferation has also raised

concerns about an imbalance between

excellence and inclusion

Several universities still have many

issues of concern at present, like financing

and management including access,

equity and relevance, reorientation of

programmes by laying emphasis on health

consciousness, values and ethics and

quality of higher education together with

the assessment of institutions and their

accreditation These issues are important

for the country, as it is now engaged in the

use of higher education as a powerful tool

to build a knowledge-based information society of the 21st Century Recognizing the above fact, the Universities have started to perform multiple roles, like creating new knowledge, acquiring new capabilities and producing an intelligent human resource pool, through challenging teaching, research and extension activities

so as to balance both the need and the demand Let’s take a deeper look at some of these Indian Universities and how they’re shaping the students for a better future in the country

In most of the Indian Universities today,

we see a massive change in the way they function They’re continuously integrating different subjects and collaborating with different companies to bring the best for their students Let’s just take a look at the study of humanities, it’s witnessing a massive change not just in India but across the world While subjects like comic books, films, and fashion history are legitimate and widespread in other countries from the 1980s, the same field is now slowly picking

up in India, with a special focus on helping students find a job in these new fields

There is drastic difference in the offerings

of these Universities for the students In India, a student can now pursue a course

in comedy even if he/she doesn’t want

to be a stand-up comedian because the curriculum only focuses on how comedy

is a tool for communication which will empower the student to use the skill in any job, he/she takes up in the future Students can also now enhance their analytical skills watching award-winning scary movies that might prepare them to critique other

forms of culture at a media house or film studio Over the last few years, we have witnessed several universities expanding the scope of their humanities courses with seemingly niche subjects that they hope will add value to the future of their students For example, Professor Jayashankar Telangana State Agricultural University (PJTSAU) is making efforts to standardize the usage of agricultural drones which will have a huge job potential in the State According to the PJTAU officials, the university is currently engaged in research

on the usage of agricultural drones, which will give opportunities to the students with science backgrounds to undergo the proposed certification course and offer agricultural drone services as self-employment in the districts of Telegana.Also, in an age where reskilling has become a necessity and looming challenge, the Technology Universities too are leaving

no stone unturned for their students Many Universities are approaching institutes such

as the International School of Engineering (INSOFE) in Hyderabad, to take their offerings as part of their curriculum which can help their students make a complete transformation into a data scientist and gain specific competencies in data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence INSOFE has a full-fledged department of Career Development and Placements, which has been helping companies hire the right talent and their students the right jobs According to their reports, in the last

10 months, 440+ different companies have interviewed their students with an average of around 7 interviews per day

HIGHER EDUCATION IN INDIA & THE ROLE OF UNIVERSITIES IN SHAPING

THE FUTURE OF STUDENTS

H I G H E R E D U C A T I O N S P E C I A L