Gobind Thukral

OF late there has been a high voltage advertisement campaign by the Congress lead UPA government. It tells the people that the government under the prime ministership of Dr Manmohan Singh has fulfilled all the promises outlined in the Common Minimum Programme. Aam Admi should be happy and support the ruling coalition. The central government does not lack resources to carry this campaign India wide in newspapers and on television screens. Although the Lok Sabha elections are still a year away, the government in the wake of communists withdrawing their support on nuclear deal with America wants to assert that it has fulfilled all the promises and communists have no case against it.

Look one major area of reforms for this so called reformist government. Despite repeated assurances it has totally neglected. In a country where the bulk of the population depends on agriculture and land is the largest single means of sustenance, the UPA made the right kind of promise made in the Common Minimum Programme; “revenue administration will be thoroughly modernised and clear land titles will be established”. A new record-of-rights, for rural and urban areas was to be prepared based on the new survey and state-guaranteed titles to land were to replace the present record-of-rights, in which such ‘title’ is only presumptive.

Much before this the Congress was alive to the problem which farmers and others face at the hands of corrupt revenue officials from patwaris to the revenue commissioners and the revenue ministers, Even before it was included in the UPA government’s CMP, the Congress had identified in its 2003 Shimla Sankalp, “The acceleration of the implementation of land reforms and the initiation of reforms in land laws and record-of-rights to enable the conversion from the present system of presumptive titles to conclusive titles guaranteed by the state”. It formed a core priority “in keeping with its symbol of hope Congress ka hath, garib ke sath”. This was followed by a letter from Mrs. Sonia Gandhi to all Congress chief ministers telling them to place this on top of their governance agenda.

This is indeed an area of darkness that eclipses government’s achievements. Land reforms as is evident in West Bengal where communists have won consistent elections on the support from the peasantry, the Congress could have built a strong base in rural India. Yet from chief ministers to prime minister, everyone is observing intriguing silence.

People were expecting that since the Congress was serious about land reforms, the country’s land revenue system could now be transformed. This could have provided a solid foundation for strong and honest administration and bring to end vast litigation that has ruined millions of families in rural India. Yet absolutely has nothing happened. It is interesting to note that in July 2005 Mrs. Sonia Gandhi, in her capacity as the chairperson of the National Advisory Council wrote yet another letter urging the prime minister. We all know how powerful the top leader of the Congress and prime minister are as when they wished to push through nuclear deal with America despite a majority in the parliament opposing it; they used all fair and foul means to get it through. Why are dithering on this much crucial issue.

Let us look at some extracts from that letter to show how crucial this is for the vast majority of people in this country. Mrs. Gandhi wrote, “A very large percentage of the people in India lives in the rural areas and derive livelihoods, wholly or partially, from land. The compilation and updating of land records is, therefore, a particularly significant measure to instill a sense of security in the farming community and to encourage investments for higher land productivity, especially in the establishment of clear titles to land. Economical access of rural people to land records would be of all-round benefit to the farmers, including easier credit, quicker land conversions and lesser litigation.”

“A scheme for conversion of presumptive titles to land into conclusive titles may be introduced as an integral part of the new centrally sponsored scheme. The records can then be thrown open in the public domain by computerising and Web-enabling them to facilitate anyone wanting to register a complaint or draw the attention of the department to discrepancies in the records. The draft record of rights prepared for final updating may be made open for public inspection and also made available electronically through the information dissemination centers.

“When pending mutations are carried out for the updating of land records, an institutional mechanism should be drawn up for the involvement of the panchayats. In undisputed cases, conclusiveness of the title may be recorded straightaway which will be the basis of guaranteeing title to land.
And she further wrote that after the new scheme has been launched, the Centre could draft a model law to be enacted by the states to impart legal status to the various features of the scheme .”

In India there are certainly people who own no land yet have rights in land and their livelihood depends upon these rights. Tribal areas have special rights. Also our judicial system is groaning under the volume of litigation which it is unable to cope with. Only lawyers and corrupt court officials are happy with the presented outdated system that is the legacy of not only the British, but of the Mughal times. Meanwhile, the land mafia continues to flourish. No one dares clip their wings. We daily read murders, break up families on land issues through the country.

The entire structure of land administration in India and with it the relations based on property could have been transformed by this one single measure. If Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh had taken even five percent care of what he has done for the nuclear deal, could have been a hero. He risked the very survival of his government on the nuclear issue. There was no such threat because of this progressive measure. This is one more unblemished example of what politicians say when they are out of power and what they do when they are in power.

Land prices are skyrocketing on daily basis all across the country, land titles are disputed all around and courts are full of litigants and the police have trouble all around. Yet the tattered record-of-rights system is considered sacrosanct by the powers that be. We are witnessing islands of affluence that continue to grow at the cost of the peasants who suffer misery and in silence. Who listens to them? Officials entrusted with the task of maintaining the present system are not equipped to face this formidable challenge. The state guaranteeing land titles goes beyond rights to prime properties; it also embraces entitlements based on the community’s rights to assets. This betrayal of the people of India is now being silently buried.

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US: Vested Interests Drive New Pakistan Policy

Gareth Porter for IPS

THE George W. Bush administration's decision to launch commando raids and step up missiles strikes against Taliban and al Qaeda figures in the tribal areas of Pakistan followed what appears to have been the most contentious policy process over the use of force in Bush's eight-year presidency.

That decision has stirred such strong opposition from the Pakistani military and government that it is now being revisited. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, arrived in Pakistan Tuesday for the second time in three weeks, and U.S. officials and sources just told Reuters that any future raids would be approved on a mission-by-mission basis by a top U.S. administration official.

The policy was the result of strong pressure from the U.S. command in Afghanistan and lobbying by the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and the CIA's operations directorate (DO), both of which had direct institutional interests in operations that coincided with their mandate.

State Department and some Pentagon officials had managed to delay the proposed military escalation in Pakistan for a year by arguing that it would be based on nearly nonexistent intelligence and would only increase support for the Islamic extremists in that country.

But officials of SOCOM and the CIA prevailed in the end, apparently because Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney believed they could not afford to be seen as doing nothing about bin Laden and al Qaeda in the administration's final months.

SOCOM had a strong institutional interest in a major new operation in Pakistan.

The Army's Delta Force and Navy SEALS had been allowed by the Pakistani military to accompany its forces on raids in the tribal area in 2002 and 2003 but not to operate on their own. And even that extremely limited role was ended by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in 2003, which frustrated SOCOM officials.

Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whose antagonism toward the CIA was legendary, had wanted SOCOM to take over the hunt for bin Laden. And in 2006, SOCOM's Joint Special Operations Command branch in Afghanistan pressed Rumsfeld to approve a commando operation in Pakistan aimed at capturing a high-ranking al Qaeda operative.

SOCOM had the support of the U.S. command in Afghanistan, which was arguing that the war in Afghanistan could not be won as long as the Taliban had a safe haven in Pakistan from which to launch attacks. The top U.S. commander, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, worked with SOCOM and DO officers in Afghanistan to assemble the evidence of Pakistan's cooperation with the Taliban. .

Despite concerns that such an operation could cause a massive reaction in Pakistan against the U.S. war on al Qaeda, Rumsfeld gave in to the pressure in early November 2006 and approved the operation, according to an account in the New York Times Jun. 30. But within days, Rumsfeld was out as defence secretary, and the operation was put on hold.

Nevertheless Bush and Cheney, who had been repeating that Musharraf had things under control in the frontier area, soon realised that they would be politically vulnerable to charges that they weren't doing anything about bin Laden.

The July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was the signal for the CIA's DO to step up its own lobbying for control over a Pakistan operation, based on the Afghan model -- CIA officers training and arming a local militia while identifying targets for strikes from the air.

In a Washington Post column only two weeks after the NIE's conclusions were made public, David Ignatius quoted former CIA official Hank Crumpton, who had run the CIA operation in Afghanistan after the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks, on the proposed DO operation: "We either do it now, or we do it after the next attack."

That either-or logic and the sense of political vulnerability in the White House was the key advantage of the advocates of a new war in Pakistan. Last November, the New York Times reported that the Defence Department had drafted an order based on the SOCOM proposal for training of local tribal forces and for new authority for "covert" commando operations in Pakistan's frontier provinces.

But the previous experience with missile strikes against al Qaeda targets using predator drones and the facts on the ground provided plenty of ammunition to those who opposed the escalation. It showed that the proposed actions would have little or no impact on either the Taliban or al Qaeda in Pakistan, and would bring destabilising political blowback.

In January 2006, the CIA had launched a missile strike on a residential compound in Damadola, near the Afghan border, on the basis of erroneous intelligence that Ayman al-Zawahiri would be there. The destruction killed as many 25 people, according to local residents interviewed by The Telegraph, including 14 members of one family.

Some 8,000 tribesmen in the Damadola area protested the killing, and in Karachi tens of thousands more rallied against the United States, shouting "Death to America!"

Musharraf later claimed that the dead included four high-ranking al Qaeda officials, including al-Zawahiri's son-in-law. The Washington Post's Craig Whitlock reported last week, however, that U.S. and Pakistani officials now admit that only local villagers were killed in the strike.

It was well known within the counter-terrorism community that the U.S. search for al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan was severely limited by the absence of actionable intelligence. For years, the U.S. military had depended almost entirely on Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, despite its well-established ties with the Taliban and even al Qaeda.

One of the counter-terrorism officials without a direct organisational stake in the issue, State Department counterterrorism chief Gen. Dell L. Dailey, bluntly summed up the situation to reporters last January. "We don't have enough information about what's going on there," he said. "Not on al Qaeda, not on foreign fighters, not on the Taliban."

A senior U.S. official quoted by the Post last February was even more scathing on that subject, saying "Even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and then."

Meanwhile, the Pakistani military, reacting to the U.S. aim of a more aggressive U.S. military role in the tribal areas, repeatedly rejected the U.S. military proposal for training Frontier Corps units.

The U.S. command in Afghanistan and SOCOM increased the pressure for escalation early last summer by enlisting visiting members of Congress in support of the plan. Texas Republican Congressmen Michael McCaul, who had visited Afghanistan and Pakistan, declared on his return that was "imperative that U.S. forces be allowed to pursue the Taliban and al Qaeda in tribal areas inside Pakistan."

In late July, according to The Times of London, Bush signed a secret national security presidential directive (NSPD) which authorised operations by special operations forces without the permission of Pakistan.

The Bush decision ignored the disconnect between the aims of the new war and the realities on the ground in Pakistan. Commando raids and missile strikes against mid-level or low-level Taliban or al Qaeda operatives, carried out in a sea of angry Pashtuns, will not stem the flow of fighters from Pakistan into Afghanistan or weaken al Qaeda. But they will certainly provoke reactions from the tribal population that can tilt the affected areas even further toward the Islamic radicals.

At least some military leaders without an institutional interest in the outcome understood that the proposed escalation was likely to backfire. One senior military officer told the Los Angeles Times last month that he had been forced by the "fragility of the current government in Islamabad," to ask whether "you do more long-term harm if you act very, very aggressively militarily".

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006. [Courtesy IPS]

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Russia challenges America in American backyard

Dr Sawraj Singh writes from Washington

RUSSIA continues to challenge America’s status as the only super power in the World. This time it has brought the challenge in the American backyard. Russia has brought its war ships to Venezuela. The Russian Naval fleet consists of the nuclear carrier “Peter the Great”, and submarine destroyer Admiral Chebaynenko and two other supporting ships. Russia has already sent its bombers to Venezuela. Two submarines carrying nuclear missiles will also be there.

Many People think that this is Russia’s “Tit for Tat Response” to the American ships sent to the Black Sea near Georgia. The Russian ships will be traveling 15,000 miles. They passed the straight of Gibraltar and the Mediterranean Sea, very close to the American ships there. Russia wants to send a very strong message to America that it is going to challenge the American domination anywhere and everywhere in the World.

In 1962, America forced Russia to take out its missiles from Cuba. However, Russia is now discussing with Cuba regarding developing a space station there. Russia is also sending its ships to Syria. All these measures may be intended to pay back the American for its installation of missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Russian army lacked funding. There was no money to put gas in the planes or ships. Once a mighty army, the Soviet army quickly degenerated. Now, thanks to the oil prices, the Russian economy has bounced back.. the Russian army is becoming a big force capable of challenging the American and the NATO forces anywhere in the World.

At present, Russia has a big advantage. The American and the NATO forces are bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan and are facing an almost certain defeat. America can not afford to open another front. The War in Afghanistan has a very good chance of spilling over to Pakistan. Pakistan, a very important ally in the war against terrorism is ready to switch sides. General Kayani may tilt Pakistan towards China.

The signing of the nuclear treaty between America and India will leave no choice for Pakistan. Pakistan has to sign a similar treaty with China. India, for all practical purposes, has joined America in anti China, anti Islamic and anti Russia alliance.

India is bound to face very serious consequences of this alliance. India’s neighboring countries have started tilting towards China. The latest example in Nepal, Nepal is moving away from an exclusive relationship with India to a more balanced relationship with India and China. There is a strong anti Indian sentiment among the Maoists in Nepal, many of them believe that India subjected Nepal to unequal treaties.

If the pro American leadership in Pakistan falls and there is rise of anti American and anti western Islamic fundamentalist forces, that can prove extremely dangerous for India.

Another problem India is going to face is that the Indian army's heavy weaponry comes from Russia. When Russia starts perceiving India as an American ally, it can make things difficult for India by showing its support to china and the Islamic countries. The Indian army may face a serious challenge in trying to find replacement for its heavy weaponry. India may also loose Russia’s support in the United Nations, particularly on the issue of Kashmir. It was the Russian veto which helped India to keep Kashmir. The traditional American and Russian roles may be reversed in the Indian subcontinent, the Indian army may have the American weapons and the Pakistan’s army ends up with the Russian weapons.

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West unable to stop growing unity of the Third World

Dr. Sawraj Singh

THE recent developments in Africa, South America and Asia show that the traditional western policy of “Divide and Rule”, is not working anymore. The Third World continues to show more unity, whether it is Zimbabwe in Africa, Bolivia in South America or Nepal and India in Asia.

In Zimbabwe, the western countries have failed to dislodge Mugabe and incite a civil war between the Zanu and the MDC. In spite of the massive propaganda campaign by the Western media, the Zanu and the MDC have been able to reach a compromise in power sharing. Robert Mugabe and his rival Morgan Tsvangirai were able to reach the historic power sharing deal today, Monday 15th September 2008 in Harare.

According to this deal, Robert Mugabe will remain the President of the country and Morgan Tsvangirai will become the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe. Mugabe will remain the head of the army but the Police will come under the control of Tsvangirai. There will be 31 members of the cabinet 16 will come from the MDC and 15 will come from the Zanu PF. In a clear indication that the Western countries are not happy to see Zimbabwe united, the U.S. and the European union have declared that they are not going to lift the sanctions enforced on Zimbabwe. However, the African countries see the deal as a great show of the African unity. Mbeki the President of South Africa worked very hard to close the deal.

In an emergency summit of the UNASUR (Union of South American Nations) in Santiago Chile, the nine Presidents condemned last week’s political violence in Bolivia and gave full backing to President Evo Morales of Bolivia. President Morales has blamed America for the unrest and has expelled the American ambassador from Bolivia. In a statement, the UNASUR has offered full and firm support for the constitutional government of President Evo Morales, whose mandate was ratified by a big majority. A warning was also given that any government formed following an illegal removal of President Morales would not be recognized as legitimate.

Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela, said that the unrest in Bolivia was a conspiracy directed by the U.S. Empire, comparing it to the 1973 CIA backed coup, which ousted Chile’s President Salvador Allende. In this coup led by General Pinochet, thousands were killed, including Dr. Allende, who died fighting the Generals army. Pinochet was later tried for his crimes.

The rise of Maoism in Nepal is a very significant development. Prime Minister Prachanda is now visiting India. It appears that the West will like to see India standing up against China. However, the rise of Maoism in Nepal is bound to be a setback for the Western plans. The geographical location of Nepal is very important. It is located between India and China. During the last fifty years Nepal has followed policies, which were subservient to India. However, after installation of the present government, Nepal wants to peruse independent policies, Prachanda has made it clear during his current visit that Nepal wants to review the treaties signed with India, including the India-Nepal friendship treaty. These treaties are perceived by Nepal as unequal and one sided. Nepal will like to revise the treaties so that they can become more equal and bilateral. Ultimately Nepal will like to become a buffer state between India and China rather than be aligned with India. This is bound to change the balance of power in South Asia in favor of China as compared to the West.

South Asia as a whole will tilt more towards the rest of Asia. India has mostly followed policies which can be considered pro Western and less in line with the rest of Asia. India will come under increasing pressure from other countries in the region to change its pro western policies.
[Sawraj Singh, M.D. FICS, Chairman Washington State Network for Human Rights]

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